Revelation in Flannery O\'Connor\'s Short Story \"Revelation,\"

Revelation

In Flannery O'Connor's short story "Revelation," the characters of Mrs. Turpin and Mary Grace. Though Mrs. Turpin is ostensibly the main character of the story, Mary Grace plays such a crucial, oppositional role to Mrs. Turpin that one may compare and contrast the two characters. In particular, examining the crucial differences and continuities between Mrs. Turpin and Mary Grace helps to demonstrate how Mary serves as a kind of representation of Mrs. Turpin prior to whatever life experiences helped to form her bigoted and shallow worldview, and thus free from the assumptions and ideological blinders Mrs. Turpin seemingly cannot escape from.

The central feature linking Mrs. Turpin and Mary Grace are their size and appearance. Mrs. Turpin, "who was very large," uses her size as a means of controlling others, but she is apparently unaware of the way in which Mary Grace uses her appearance to control and influence Mrs. Turpin (O'Connor 191). Mary Grace is also large, but Mrs. Turpin focuses mostly on her face, imagining that "it was the ugliest face Mrs., Turpin had ever seen," so whereas Mrs. Turpin enjoys Mary' mother's eyes because "on the lady they sparkled pleasantly," she believes that "in the girl's seared face they appeared alternately to smolder and to blaze" (O'Connor 196, 201). This is important because until Mary Grace attacks, Mrs. Turpin does not regard the girl as any kind of threat or opponent, assuming that their age difference places Mrs. Turpin in position of greater social power. In reality, however, Mrs. Turpin only maintains this assumption because she is rattled by Mary, who looks "as if she had know and disliked [Mrs. Turpin} all her life -- all of Mrs. Turpin's life, it seemed too, not just all the girl's life" (O'Connor 201). This similarity is crucial because it demonstrates how Mary can serve as Mrs. Turpin's equal and antagonist; where Mrs. Turpin uses her weight and girth to overpower and dominate people, thus reinforcing her condescending, presumptuous attitude Mary Grace use her physical appearance in order to unsettle Mrs. Turpin, establishing a kind of dominance that will reach its peak in their physical altercation. This is because Mary Grace's appearance sets her up to simultaneously be an equal to Mrs. Turpin and an opposite, because although they both have similar, undesirable physical features and belong to the same social class, they are diametrically opposed in terms of their attitude toward other people.

Aside from their similar appearances and social status, Mrs. Turpin and Mary Grace could not be more different, and the story uses these differences in order to comically demonstrate how awful Mrs. Turpin really is. Just before Mary Grace attacks Mrs. Turpin, the adults are discussing her as if she were not in the room, and a much younger child. Her mother says "I know a girl," referring to her own daughter, "who has parents who would give her anything, a little brother who loves her dearly, who is getting a good education, who wears the best clothes, but who can never say a kind word to anyone, who never smiles, who just criticizes and complains all day long" (O'Connor 205). Mrs. Turpin responds by saying that "If it's one thing I am […] it's grateful," but she does not realize that the majority of her thoughts and speech up until this point has been criticism and complaining, because as she does this criticism from a position of power, it seems entirely natural to her (O'Connor 205). Mary Grace, on the other hand, has remained silently reading, and only engages with the other characters when Mrs. Turpin makes particularly offensive or condescending statements. The criticisms leveled at Mary are actually more suitably deployed against Mrs. Turpin, so that Mary's assault may almost be seen as the paddling Claud suggests, as Mrs. Turpin much more than Mary needs to have her attitude corrected (O'Connor 205).