"Revelation" is a Southern Gothic short story by author Flannery O'Connor about the delivery and effect of a revelation to a sinfully proud, self-righteous, middle-aged, middle class, rural, white Southern woman that her confidence in her own Christian salvation is an error. The protagonist receives divine grace by accepting God's judgment that she is unfit for salvation (like a baptized hog), by learning that the prospect for her eventual redemption improves after she receives a vision of Particular Judgment, where she observes the souls of people she detests are the first to ascend to Heaven and those of people like herself who "always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right" are last to ascend and experience purgation by fire on the way up.
The work was written during the last year of the author's life, a time she knew she was dying from her fourteen-year battle with lupus. O'Connor worked on revisions of "Revelation" while hospitalized, hiding drafts under her pillow. She checked into the hospital and signed a letter to a close friend as "Mrs. Turpin", the story's protagonist. Some scholars believe the author was demonstrating that the character's racism was a mirror or projection of her own character.
Publication history "Revelation" was first published in the Spring 1964 issue of The Sewanee Review. The author was notified shortly before her death in August 1964 that her work won the O. Henry Award first prize for 1965, and the story was subsequently reprinted in Prize Stories 1965: The O. Henry Awards published that year. It was her third O'Henry Award first prize.
Sally Fitzgerald, a long-time friend of the author and wife of Robert Fitzgerald, noted that "Revelation" was one of the stories she undertook in the last year of her life and that it "may be seen as summings-up of all she had been trying to do in her work." Publisher Robert Giroux, who was working with the author on the short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge during 1964, recalled that he knew he was "working with a dying writer" and that the drafting of "Revelation" was "kind of a horror story because she was so anxious to get the last story" into the collection. The work was included in Everything That Rises Must Converge published after her death in 1965. The story was also included in her short story collection The Complete Stories that was published in 1971 and won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1972.
Characters Flannery O'Connor said her craft involved realization of a "prophetic vision" where the "prophecy" is "a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up". The story's characters are one of the "near things" and one of the "far things" brought up close is the religious theme of salvation for which the former includes O'Connor's trademark "scrupulous anthropological attention" to the characterization of and interactions between characters. The characters in "Revelation" belong to the range of Southern racial and social classes of O'Connor's time. The critic, writer, and professor Hilton Als used "Revelation" to demonstrate the author's "most profound gift ... her ability to describe impartially the bourgeoisie she was born into, to depict with humor and without judgment her rapidly crumbling social order."
Literature professor and O'Connor scholar Karl Martin wrote that, "O'Connor's fiction is closely related to, and informed by, her systematic study of the role of the prophet in culture, and her fiction exhibits prophetic tendencies in accordance with the writing of not only the significant theologians of prophecy whose works she read and often reviewed but also the writings of later theologians.", including Claude Tresmontant's A Study of Hebrew Thought, Bruce Vawter's The Conscience of Israel, and Gustave Weigel's Modern God. With its focus on the actions of a prophet and the effects of her prophetic message, "Revelation" can be viewed as a literal realization of O'Connor's prophetic vision that most fully and maturely expresses her prophetic imagination.
The Turpins The Turpins are a white, Southern married farming couple who own their land and home. They work their farm with the help of black workers, growing cotton and raising hogs, chickens, and cattle. While not wealthy, Mrs. Ruby Turpin, the story's protagonist, is so satisfied with her life that she thanks Jesus for being blessed for all her possessions and not "making" her black or "white trash". The Turpins live alone, and it is not clear whether they ever had children.
Ruby Turpin The story's protagonist, Mrs. Ruby Turpin, is a "fat", "stout" forty-seven-year-old woman with "massive shoulders" and considers herself overweight at 180 pounds and thinks her ideal weight is 125. "Massive shoulders", "stout", and high weight are used by farmers to characterize a big hog raised for the livestock market, and she has other hog-like characteristics: small black eyes and smooth skin except for wrinkles around her eyes. Mrs. Turpin has an unquestionable faith in God. She also believes that she has received God's grace for salvation prior to the start of "Revelation" as her singing to a gospel hymn line, "And wona these days I know I'll we-ear a crown" reflects her unquestioned confidence in her election for an eternal life with God and is proud of it. (The line is from the gospel song "When I Looked Up And He Looked Down" with lyrics for a singer who is certain she will be saved and go to Heaven.) With her belief in predestination, she has been indoctrinated by a church tied to Reformed Protestantism and has been saved because she has been baptized. (In accordance with Reformed baptismal theology, the baptized have been made one with Christ's person.) Mrs. Turpin's belief in her salvation has made her righteous, which expresses itself as malignant actions and beliefs that the Roman Catholic church would declare to be sins. While Mrs. Turpin believes she has been cleansed of sin, she is crushed by the message, received as a revelation of divine judgment, that she is an old wart hog from Hell by Mary Grace. Since Mrs. Turpin judges people based on their piggishness – her perception of physical or moral filth, the revelation was consistent with Jesus' warning about hyprocrisy in : "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you."
Using Mrs. Turpin as an example, Matthew Day characterizes the author's portrayal of conformity with Southern manners as a contributor to her moral corruption:
In a doctor's waiting room, gospel songs ironically trigger Mrs. Turpin's especially harsh damning judgments, as one song triggers her habit for judging people based on their shoes, and after another song, she blames a poor white mother's laziness as the cause for her sick boy's inability to eat. She disparages all of the people she perceives to have lower social status than herself, as she considers their souls predetermined for damnation, so she has no interest in the troubles of sick people in the waiting room, let alone having any compassion for them. Within the vision from the hogpen, the protagonist sees the corrupt Southern virtues of feminine gracious living (that are practiced in lieu of Christian virtues) being burned away.
Characterization of Mrs. Turpin in the role of the Pharisee in the "Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican" was formally identified by scholars in the early 1970s. In the parable, Jesus tells of a Pharisee in a temple, used as an example of a person confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, who prays to thank God he is not like thieves, rogues, adulterers, or the tax collector present a distance away, and further testifies in the prayer that he exceeds the requirements of performing some customs required by Jewish Law. Mrs. Turpin thanks Jesus in the waiting room for "making everything the way it is" including not being "made" a poor white or black person. In the parable, the Publican declares himself a sinner and asks Jesus for forgiveness. Jesus says that the Publican returned home justified before God while the Pharisee did not, and concluded, "For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted." The allusion foreshadows the protagonist's experience in the story, and also highlights the divine disapproval of inappropriate use of prayer, affirms doubt about the prospect for Ruby Turpin's salvation, and the waiting room's likeness as a temple. Pharisees, like Mrs. Turpin, believed in the after-life and predestination.
Claud Turpin The injury of Claud, Mrs. Turpin's husband, from being kicked in the leg by a cow, is the reason for the couple's appearance at a doctor's waiting room, that serves as a place where characters of the story examine and judge each other. Claud is "florid and bald and sturdy, somewhat shorter than Mrs. Turpin" and seems to be "accustomed to doing what she [Ruby] told him to do" and most of his actions in the story are directed by his wife. He never hears his wife being told "Go back to hell where you come from, you old wart hog" since he was writhing in pain from his injury being kicked by his wife's assailant, and Mrs. Turpin never tells him full details of the attack. In the doctor's waiting room he is mostly quiet except to crack an extremely wicked racist joke.
Black characters Flannery O'Connor understood that what she called "the race problem" was more than the establishment of equal rights – that the relationships between black and white people would require pervasive changes in individual relationships: "The South has to evolve a way of life in which the two races can live together with mutual forbearance." The use of "a-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin" to characterize human behavior in "Revelation" is used to identify threats to individual privacy and violations of the Southern code of manners aimed to protect it. O'Connor is famously stated in a 1963 interview:
By "charity", O'Connor refers to the Catholic theological virtue which is defined as the "love [of] God above all things for His own sake, and [love of] our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God", i.e., to "cherish" both God and neighbors. No white character in the story views black people charitably, as hatred for black people was only a matter of manners: Mrs. Turpin believes black people find themselves so detestable that they want to "go to New York and marry white folks and improve their color" and her husband's wicked joke is her comment stripped of its "good disposition"; and the "white-trashy" mother says loving black people (which Mrs. Turpin claims she does as it is necessary for them to work for you) was one of two things she never was ever going to do.
The Turpins' workers