"Revelation" and "Parker's Back"

In this story about a woman who is abruptly knocked off her high horse, O’Connor illustrates, once again, one individual’s path to revelation-about herself and the world she so openly judges.

An incredibly controlling and self-righteous woman, Mrs. Turpin embodies those who pompously consider their existence to be beneficent to those who are “beneath them”. She not only views herself as a very respectable, kind, charitable, virtuous woman, but feels she is entitled to judge everyone else. O’Connor immediately begins her story with Mrs. Turpin’s shallow observations of the waiting room. She evaluates “the well-dressed lady”, “the ugly girl”, and “the trashy mother” (194), and deems them all beneath her status in her system of classification.

She analyses her life from an entirely superficial point of view, concerned only with the “classes of people” (195), and thankful to God for making her herself, and not “a nigger or white-trash” (195). It is obvious that her acts of “kindness” are insincere. Her pity for others who she considers to be beneath her is driven by a sanctimonious view of herself. Even her habit of bringing the black workers water at the end of the day is out of necessity to keep them loyal: “I sure am sick of buttering up them niggers, but you got to love me if you want em to work for you” (196).

Her revelation comes when she is, for once in her life, judged just as harshly as she judges others. And she does not like it. The girl’s harsh words, “go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog” (207), relentlessly eat away at her mind. A devout Christian who consistently talks to God (mostly about her thankfulness for being born white and privileged), Mrs. Turpin is finally hearing back from him. She recognizes that the girl’s attack on her is a message sent by God. “She was looking at her as if she had known her all of her life”(201), “The girl’s eyes seemed lit all of a sudden with a peculiar light” (197): O’Connor implies that something of a higher power, some spiritual force, is guiding this young woman, and to Mrs. Turpin that is God. She does not understand why she of all people is being given this message, for she has done no wrong in her opinion: “Why me?...There’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to” (215). She even states that the message could have been justly given to the other trash in the waiting room (210). But it is precisely because of this thinking that she is being given this message. When she asks God “Who do you think you are?” (216), she finally begins to comprehend who she actually is. O’Connor paints two opposing images: Mrs. Turpin’s initial dream of all the classes of people “being ridden off to be put in a gas oven” (196), and her final vision of the procession of all types of people into heaven, their virtues being “burned away” (218).

The image of a sunset at the moment of revelation is one that O’Connor has used before. In “a Temple of the Holy Ghost”, the child observes the setting sun like a “Host drenched in blood” (CP 69). In both of these short stories, O’Connor is depicting an individual’s revelation about themselves, their judgmental attitudes, and their arrogance. The allegory of the setting sun is therefore one of unity and mortal connection.

Another common theme of hers is the college graduate. Sometimes this figure is offering grace or invoking revelation, other times it is the one in need of epiphany. Julian, in “Everything that Rises Must Converge”, and Hulga, in “Good Country People”, both come to a harsh realization that they are not above the uneducated, traditional folk that surround them. However, in “Revelation”, the college student, or “ugly girl” as Mrs. Turpin calls her, is the one who brings forth the main character’s epiphany. This girl is also very similar to O’Connor’s character Hulga. Not only is she uncannily reminiscent of Hulga’s sour disposition and unfortunate physical appearance, they share the irony of having uplifting names, Grace and Joy. And it is grace indeed that Mary Grace unintentionally gives Mrs. Turpin. Through her vicious attack, she opens the door to revelation and introduces a new perspective-on both herself and others.

I think that O’Connor is pointing towards a tropological epiphany in “Revelation”. If we step back and look at the story in it’s entirety, her biblical undertones and religious emphases are metaphorical for a broader moral truth-that racism, classism, and self-important judgment are not only contradictory to a Christian lifestyle, but hurtful and morally corrupt.

The revelation in “Parker’s Back” was not as easily recognizable-at least not for me. Like the slow-building epiphany Parker feels as a child upon seeing the tattooed man, the message O’Connor imparts in this story is one that gradually unfolds and has no clear, initial impact; it is an overall feeling that overtakes the reader, as opposed to a sudden epiphany.

It is reasonable to say this story is of an incarnational nature. “She is trying to embody the mystery of the incaranation in a tattoo on a man’s back” (Ragen14). Parker tries to fill a void in his life, a dissatisfaction he feels, by covering his body in tattoos. But this therapeutic act is somewhat selfish and vain: “He had no desire for one anywhere he could not readily see it himself” (225). However, I do not think O’Connor is completely dismissing the tattoos as an incarnation, but rather identifying Parker’s failure to understand what it is he is longing for, and an inability to grasp what it is the tattoos truly embody. Ragen states “He still touches His people’s lives through material signs…the sacramental theology of the church encourages the writer to see with an anagogical vision, since it finds in physical things signs for participation in the Divine life” (20). Read Ragen’s chapter “The Burning Bush and the Illustrated man” in A Wreck on the Road to Damascus: Innocence, Guilt and Conversion in Flannery Connor for an analysis of Parker as the grotesque embodiment of the incomplete man-an unfulfilled soul-and the tattoo as an incarnation/salvation.