ChristinaJen+OConnor

Christina Jen Dr. Laura Nicosia ENGL 337-01 18 April 2010 “Who Do You Think You Are?”: Meeting Lunatics and Swindlers In Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation” and “Good Country People,” characters such as Mrs. Turpin and Hulga (Joy) Hopewell experience significant moments that compel them to question their own sense of identity. In such instants of epiphany, O’Connor shows how the lines of social and religious identities blur. The intersection of class and religion overturns the usual definitions of the terms themselves and tumbles characters into places of greater uncertainty, but also of greater self-awareness.

For Mrs. Turpin, the experience of social and spiritual awareness descends in the form of the hog. While sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, Mrs. Turpin obsesses over seeing herself as a respectable human being. Her imaginary struggles with Jesus over her choice of social identity always end in “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one” (491). Her almost paranoid fear of becoming unrespectable, or “trashy,” translates itself into a speech to purify the pig. In justifying her own lifestyle, she declares to the “white-trash woman,” “Our hogs are not dirty and they don’t stink … They’re cleaner than some children I’ve seen” (493). Interestingly enough, in spite of her strong defense of the neat, respectable hog, Mrs. Turpin reels back in horror when Mary Grace confronts her with the words, “you old wart hog” (500). Her visceral response shows perhaps that the white-trash woman’s denunciation of hogs—and Claud’s racially-charged joke about “white-faced niggers”—are closer to the truth than she may care to acknowledge (496). No matter what beautiful phrases she uses to describe the hog, it is still a hog—“[a]-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin” (494, 596).

Thus, the cleanliness Mrs. Turpin imposes on hogs, whether it is Claud’s hosing or the concrete pig parlor, seems an artificial construction; the hogs’ feet, unnaturally enough, “never touch the ground” (493). This artificiality that blocks self-awareness is even more apparent in the case of Hulga. A self-proclaimed atheist, Hulga relies on her artificial leg to express independence as well as disdain for her mother’s social and religious conformity: “[Hulga] could walk without making the awful noise but she made it—Mrs. Hopewell was certain—because it was ugly-sounding” (275). Hulga’s barn encounter with Bible-selling Manley Pointer, however, strips her of the artificial leg, landing her not only in a state of physical dependency, but more importantly, in a state of spiritual helplessness in the face of immorality and greed.

By constructing the artificial, then, O’Connor creates the too-familiar dichotomy of appearance and reality, but she adds a religious twist at the same time by destroying the artificial, thereby shattering the dichotomy and inflicting necessary suffering on her characters. As Mrs. Turpin’s revelation next to the hog pen indicates, she too—like the hog—cannot disguise her nature in neat respectability. Mary Grace’s painful blow and insult cause her to reevaluate herself not as a “Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman” but as an “old wart hog from hell” (502, 505). As in the case of Hulga, artificial constructions of class distinctions and religious observances in Mrs. Turpin’s vision are removed on Judgment Day:

… those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right…. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. (508)

The vision evokes the Biblical passage 1 Corinthians 3:11-13, in which Paul warns Christians that the work they do “will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man's work.” O’Connor, however, writes her Biblical allusion in a strangely ironic way: those “companies of white-trash,” “bands of black niggers,” and “battalions of freaks and lunatics”—whose work seems far inferior in quality to church-goers like Mrs. Turpin—are nevertheless those “souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah” first (508-09). In an act of violence, Mary Grace has taught Mrs. Turpin that God’s grace is not for the social and religious snob, but for those who need it.

If Mrs. Turpin’s moment of epiphany is a shattering of her morality complex, Hulga’s is a shattering of her amorality complex—therefore, O’Connor’s two female characters serve as flip sides to each other. Hulga declares confidently to Pointer, “I don’t have illusions. I’m one of those people who see //through// to nothing” (287). When Pointer desires to see where her “wooden leg joins on,” she is not shocked by the “obscenity of the suggestion,” because “education had removed the last traces of [shame] as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer” (288). Despite her degrees, however, Hulga’s sense of morality is inevitable. She views her amorality, for example, in Christian terms: “In my economy … I’m saved and you are damned but I told you I didn’t believe in God” and “We are all damned … but some of us have taken off our blindfold and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation” (288); Pointer, too, believes nothing but says “I know where I’m going!” (290). Hulga’s outburst of “Give me my leg!” at the end demonstrates her belief in something rather than nothing: a sense of right and wrong, a sense of good (and bad) country people. She accuses Pointer of “say[ing] one thing and do[ing] another,” but she herself becomes guilty to her own accusation (290). In Pointer’s departing remark, not only is Hulga made to confront the real presence of morality, but also the negation of her class and personal uniqueness: “you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” (291). Far from making her “different” from “anybody else,” her education has merely placed her on the same level as a country swindler (288).

The question that confronts Hulga in her moment of self-recognition is the same question Mrs. Turpin raises against God: “Who do you think you are?” (507). By meeting the uglier classes of society, the lunatic or the swindler, Mrs. Turpin and Hulga learn to recast their own social and religious identities. Through their experiences, O’Connor shows that the spiritual truths of grace and morality topple class distinctions and boundaries. Her objective for her characters, however, seems not to be moral reform, but rather a deeper self-awareness of the human condition. Mrs. Freeman, annoying as she may appear in her nosiness, evinces that she has learned such self-awareness, perhaps at the expense of other people, as she comments wisely, “Some people are more alike than others” (282). For O’Connor, people are complicated beings, never to be explained in simple black-and-white social and moral terms, and the resulting sense of uncertainty bathes Mrs. Freeman’s final words in “Good Country People”: ‘Some can’t be that simple,’ she said. ‘I know I never could’” (291).

Work Cited O’Connor, Flannery. //The Complete Stories//. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1971. Print.