Jesus, Stab Me in the Heart! Flannery O’Connor at 100

“Revelation” holds an exalted place among the stories of Flannery O’Connor. Ralph Wood calls it “her finest story.”[1] Joyce Carol Oates believes that what O’Connor achieves in the story is “extraordinary” and that the story concludes with O’Connor’s most powerful revelation.[2] Irving Howe values it as her crowning achievement and finds it “intolerable” that an author of such a work should have died at the age of thirty-nine.[3]

O’Connor’s terminal lupus had caused her physical condition to deteriorate greatly in 1963, which resulted in her repeated visits to the doctor office. Observing the people there triggered her remembrance of an episode in the life of Maryat Lee. Lee had told O’Connor that when she was a student at Wellesley she had thrown a book ostensibly at a boy. The boy, however, ducked and the book hit a teacher that Lee despised in the face. The teacher surmised that the incident had been no accident.[4]

In “Revelation,” Ruby Turpin and her husband, Claud, are in the doctor office waiting for the doctor’s to see Claud’s hurt leg. Ruby, described by O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins as “one of those country women . . . who just sort of springs to life; you can’t hold them down or shut their mouths,”[5] is physically a large woman whose presence fills the entire room. Also waiting is a Wellesley student, Mary Grace, who becomes so enraged with Ruby’s comments that she throws a book that hits Ruby in the face. O’Connor told Betty Hester, “I wasn’t thinking of Mary Grace as the Devil but then the whole story just sort of happened—though it took me about eight weeks to write it. It was one of those rare ones in which every gesture gave me great pleasure in the writing.”[6]

Still, O’Connor was apprehensive whether her editor, Catherine Carver, would like the story or not. On Christmas day O’Connor wrote Hester with Carver’s verdict. “Yes mam I heard from C. Carver . . . . She thought it one of my most powerful stories and probably my blackest. Found Ruby evil. Found end vision to confirm same.”[7] O’Connor thought the opposite. The story was one of her lightest, and she had crafted the protagonist, Ruby Turbin, to be “funny and innocent and big, one of those country women that are usually in tough touch with forces larger than themselves.”[8] O’Connor determined to deepen the end vision “so that there’ll be no mistaking Ruby is not just an evil Glad Annie.”[9]

O’Connor also made clear that she did not want to mock Ruby. She said, “If the story is taken to be one designed to make fun of Ruby, then it’s worse than venal.”[10] What O’Connor was after was the purifying of Ruby’s Christian faith. But the primary instrument through which Christ speaks, Mary Grace, is pictured as unattractive on every level. In fact, so unflattering did O’Connor make Mary Grace—repeatedly described as fat, her face covered with acne, and possessing a sour disposition—that Lee’s niece after reading the story asked her aunt why O’Connor had made Mary Grace so ugly. Lee replied, “Because Flannery loves her.” O’Connor affirmingly told Lee after hearing the account, “Very perceptive girl.”[11]

Mrs. Ruby Turpin

Along with Ruby and Claud, seven other individuals are in a doctor’s waiting room—a runny-nosed child, a white-trashy mother, a well-dressed lady, a fat teenage girl, a gum-chewing woman, an old woman, and a seemingly sleeping old man. Gospel music softly plays in the background: “When I looked up and He looked down,” and Ruby, who knew the lyrics, good Christian lady that she is, supplies the last line mentally, “And wona these days I know I’ll we-eara crown.”[12]

Ruby’s version of Christianity, however, is tied to Southern mores. Her first item of business in the waiting room is to assign individuals their proper social class. Her surefire way to confirm their social standing is to notice their shoes. Ruby’s footwear choice that morning, “her good black leather pumps,” aligns her with the well-dressed lady who has on red and grey suede shoes to match her outfit. Ruby is not aligned with the ugly girl wearing Girl Scout shoes,[13] and definitely not the white-trashy mother who has on what looked like bedroom slippers, black straw with gold braid threaded through them.

Sometimes when Ruby could not sleep at night she imagined Jesus saying to her, “There’s only two places available for you. You can be a nigger or white-trash.” What would she have said? If that was the choice, she hoped that Jesus would make her a neat clean respectable Negro woman.[14] In Ruby’s ordering, on the bottom rung were most colored people and all white-trash; then came homeowners, and above them, Claud and her as home-and-land owners; then people with lots of money and big houses. By the time she would fall asleep after thinking about it, people “moiling and roiling” around in her head, she would dream that they were gathered in a box car being taken off to a gas oven.[15]

But Ruby comforts herself knowing that she never spared herself when she finds out that someone, whether white or black, trash or decent, is in need. Still, Ruby’s habit is to take back with her mind what her hands offer.[16] She thinks of blacks, “You can talk at them but not with them.”[17] She thinks of trashy-people, “Help them you must, but help them you can’t.”[18]

Ruby’s sense of superiority is seen particulary with her wanting to avoid interaction with the white-trash mother. When the mother engages Ruby about the clock on the wall, “You want to know wher you can get you one of themther clocks?” Ruby replies that she already has a nice clock. Undeterred, the women blurts out that you can get one with green stamps. That is how she got herself some “joo’ry.”[19] Ruby thinks to herself that it would have been better if the woman had gotten a wash rag and some soap.

Changing subjects and conversation partners, Ruby explains life on the Turpin farm to the pleasant lady. Ruby shares that Claud and her raise hogs. The white-trash woman declares that hogs are filthy and no amount of hosing off can change that. Ruby counters that she and Claud have the ability with their modern machinery to make her pigs cleaner than most children.[20] She then adds mentally, cleaner by far than that child right there.

These two episodes reveal Ruby’s misguided beliefs. In equating redemption to social standing, she believes the trashy-woman is in need of cleansing. Then in reverse fashion, in praising the ability of modern technology to cleanse the hogs, she thinks that washing the outside of the cup is the same as washing the inside of the cup. For Ruby to stop judging by appearance—shoes, clothes, manners, race, and cultural standing— she must see that she (and not those around her like the trashy-woman) is in need of spiritual healing. She must also be brought to see that cleansing from sin comes from God alone.

Ruby continues the conversation with the pleasant lady and laments what has to be done to get Negro workers to pick cotton. Claud drives them in his truck to the field, and when they come in from the field, Ruby runs out with a bucket of ice water for them. The white-trash woman interjects that there was no way she was loving them and scooting down any hog with a hose. “The look that Mrs. Turpin and the pleasant lady exchanged indicated they both understood that you have to have certain things before you could know certain things.”[21]

Ruby is aware, however, that whenever she says anything about social standing, or even thinks about it, the nasty girl’s eyes are fixed on her. Earlier, when Ruby enters the room and thinks that etiquette demands that someone should relinquish a seat for her, Mary Grace makes the ugliest face that Ruby had ever seen anyone make. When Ruby thinks that the trashy-woman should clean herself up, Mary Grace slams her Human Development-book shut and looks straight through Ruby with such intensity that Ruby turns her head to see if anything was going on behind her that she should notice. When Ruby thinks one must help the trashy-white, but help them you could not, Mary Grace turns her lips inside out and fixes her eyes on Ruby as if they were two drills.

Mary Grace’s prophetic role as the messenger of divine displeasure with Ruby’s view of others is tipped off by her eyes. Her blue eyes “appeared alternatively to smolder and to blaze” and “seemed lit all of a sudden with a peculiar light, an unnatural light.”[22] Her rage reaches the boiling point when Ruby mirrors the Pharisee of Luke 18 and announces for everyone to hear,

“If its’s one thing I am,” Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, “it’s grateful. When I think of who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different!” For one thing, somebody else could have got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. “Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!” she cried aloud.[23]

A flying book hits Ruby right above the right eye with Mary Grace following close behind attempting to strangle her.[24] When others join in to save Ruby, the scene resembles Ruby’s class status dream, people moiling and roiling around on the floor of the small boxcar-like, rectangular room.

Ruby intuits that this is God speaking to her. Her subsequent question to the girl, “What do you have to say to me?” operates on two levels. It is as much seeking a further revelation as it is seeking an apology.[25]

The Sun, a Snake, and the Pig Parlor

Ruby returns home believing that God is upset with her. Her guilt is so extreme that she would not have been surprised to return to her farm house and to see a burnt wound between two blackened chimneys.[26] Still, she disputes the truthfulness of the girl’s declaration. “I am not,” she said tearfully, “a wart hog. From hell.” But the girl’s words brook no repudiation. The message had been given to her, “a respectable hard-working, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes began to burn instead with wrath.” She laid on the bed, occasionally raising her fist and making “a small stabbing motion over her chest as if she was defending her innocence to invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job, reasonable-seeming but wrong.”[27]

When the sun starts to set, she puts on her brown oxfords and heads out with the bucket of ice water for the three Negro women and the young boy that Claud had brought in from the field.[28] They notice the lump over her eye. She tells them about the girl throwing the book and saying something to her, and they ask, “what she say?” “The sun was getting whiter and whiter, blanching the sky overhead so that the leaves of the hickory tree were black in the face of it, but Ruby cannot bring forth the words. ‘Something real ugly,’ she muttered.”[29]

The helpers respond with outrage that anyone would say anything bad about a sweet white lady like Mrs. Turpin. “That’s the truth befo’ Jesus.”[30] Ruby, however, knows exactly how much Negro flattery is worth. She tells them that the girl had called her an old wart hog from hell.

Looking like a woman going singlehandedly into battle, Ruby then heads down to the pig parlor. “The sun was a deep yellow now like a harvest moon and was riding westward very fast over the far tree line as if it meant to reach the hogs before she did.”[31] The seven shoats in the pig parlor who await hosing down by Ruby match the seven people who waited in the doctor’s office with her. The reaction of the shoats, “running about shaking themselves like idiot children, their little slit pig eyes searching the floor for anything left,” parallels the scene in the waiting room after Mary Grace attacked Ruby. Ruby challenges God as she had challenged Mary Grace about the message. “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?”[32] Blindly pointing the water stream in and an out of an old sow whose outraged squeal she did not hear, her answer in the language of the farm is “not in a pig’s eye.”[33]

This questioning of God occurs “as the sun was behind the wood, very red, looking over the paling of trees like a farmer inspecting his own hog.”[34] In her self-justification, Ruby shakes her fist at God while holding the water hose so that “a watery snake appeared momentarily in the air.” She then lets out a roar to God in a last outburst of Job-like rage.

“Go on,” she yelled, “call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There’ll still be a top and bottom!”

A garbled echo returned to her.

A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do you think you are?”

The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood.

She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it.[35]

She stares out towards the highway, and then bows her head and gazes at the hogs, as if through the very heart of mystery. There was a red glow around them, and they appeared to pant with secret life. When she lifts her head, “there was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting across through a field of crimson and leading like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk.”[36]

Then, her hands raised, she receives a vision. She sees Claud and her in a procession on “a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.” But, ironically, while marching she views the shoes of everyone—“whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes”[37]—ahead of Claud and her. They are at the end of the line, marching on key, but behind blacks, white-trash, freaks, and lunatics.

The irrevelance of social values in the kingdom of heaven revealed to her,[38] Ruby lowers her hands and grips the rail of the hog pen, not the top or the bottom rail. As she walks back to her house, she does not hear condemning cries coming from the woods. Rather, “around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”[39]

Critical Evaluation

Joyce Carol Oates argues that an extraordinary part of the story is Mrs. Turbin’s assumption that words spoken by Mary Grace, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,” are in fact the words of Christ intended for her alone. “Not only is the spiritual world a literal, palpable fact, but the physical world—of other people, of objects and events—becomes transparent, only a means by which the ‘higher’ judgment is delivered.”[40]

Robert May asserts that O’Connor in “Revelation” provides profound contemporary expression to Jesus’s teaching that the first shall be last and the last first. Ruby initially attempts to interpret the Word in order to remove its sting, but eventually she allows the Word to interpret her, which results in a shattering of her folly in judging life by appearance. “Ruby Turpin did not think either who she was or what she did would be her salvation; like the servant who received one talent, she unhappily confused what she was given with her final reward.”[41]

Ralph Wood maintains Ruby isn’t like the self-seeking Grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” who needs someone to shoot her every minute of her life in order to become a good women, but she does need her world turned upside down so that she can see things as God sees them. Having received the vision from God, she must learn to live in the revolutionary new age that Christ has inaugurated through this redemptive work, even as it awaits its final completion.[42]

Frederick Asals believes that the ending of “Revelation” provides a hermeneutic key for understanding O’Connor’s stories.

Her outraged characters begin to discover that they inhabit a world which, without ceasing to be corporeal, has taken on eschatological dimensions. The radical tension of this double perspective pervades O’Connor’s later work, and Mrs. Turpin’s cry in “Revelation,” “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” articulates the duality that underlies all the stories.”[43]

O’Connor’s Comments

O’Connor told Betty Hester that in the original draft, she “started to let it end where the hogs pant with a secret life, but I thought something else was needed.”[44] After the story had been published, O’Connor acknowledged to Maryat Lee the importance of the added eschatological vision. “She gets the vision. Wouldn’t have been any point in that story if she hadn’t. You got to be a very big woman to shout at the Lord across a hogpen. She’s a country female Jacob. And that vision is purgatorial.”[45]

When O’Connor received news that she had won the O. Henry first-prize for the story, she informed Hester. “We can worry about the interpitations of Revelation but not its fortunes. I had a letter from the O. Henry prize people & it got first.”[46] Soon after her letter to Hester, O’Connor slipped into a coma and died on August 4, 1964.

Endnotes

[1] Ralph Wood, The Comedy of Redemption (Notre Dame, 1988), 131.

[2] Joyce Carol Oates, New Heaven, New Earth (Vanguard, 1974), 171, 174.

[3] Irving Howe, “Flannery O’Connor’s Stories,” New York Review of Books (Sept. 30, 1965): 16–17.

[4] Maryat Lee, “Flannery O’Connor, 1957,” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin 5 (1976): 43.

[5] Flannery O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins, November 5, 1963, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 546.

[6] Flannery O’Connor to “A”, December 6, 1963, Habit of Being, 552.

[7] Flannery O’Connor to “A,” December 25, 1963, Habit of Being, 554.

[8] Flannery O’Connor to Ward Allison Dorrance, January 5, 1964, Good Things Out of Nazareth, ed. Benjamin B. Alexander (Convergent, 2019), 293.

[9] Flannery O’Connor to “A,” December 25, 1963, Habit of Being, 554.

[10] O’Connor to Dawkins, December 6, 1963, Habit of Being, 552.

[11] Flanner O’Connor to “A,” May 17, 1964, Habit of Being, 578.

[12] Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories (Noonday, 1995), 490.

[13] Girl Scout shoes often play a prominent role in O’Connor’s stories. Sally Poker Sash in “A Late Encounter of the Enemy” is mortified when she sees two brown Girl Scout oxfords protrud[ing] from the bottom of her dress at the premiere of Gone With the Wind. Joy-Hulga Hopewell in “Good Country People” wears a “brown flat shoe” with her artificial limb, and Mary Fortune Pitts in “A View of the Woods” has on “heavy brown school shoes.” Like Mary Grace, Joy-Hulga and Mary Fortune are discontent and socially inept. Margaret Whitt, “You Will Know Them By Their Shoes,” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, Vol. 21 (1992), 97–98.

[14] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 491. Margaret Whitt comments that Ruby in referencing Jesus brings him into her social ordering obsession as co-participator, but does so on her terms as she controls his lines. Margaret Whitt, Understanding Flannery O’Connor (Univ. of South Carolina, 1995), 147.

[15] Oates writes, “O’Connor’s chilling indictment of Mrs. Turpin grows out of her conviction that the displacement of Christ will of necessity result in murder, but that the ‘murder’ is a slow steady drifting rather than a conscious act of the will.” Oates, New Heaven, 173.

[16] John R. May, The Pruning Word (Notre Dame, 1976), 114.

[17] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 505.

[18] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 497.

[19] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 492.

[20] Dorothy Tuck McFarland, Flannery O’Connor (Frederick Ungar, 1976), 61.

[21] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 494. According to Sura Rath, O’Connor’s Thomistic slip is showing by italicizing the words “have” and “know” in “you have to have certain things before you could know.” Aquinas taught that familiar objects in this world provide the basis for growth in spiritual knowledge. That is, for Aquinas, the natural world is the starting point for one’s acquisition of knowledge of the presence of the supernatural in this world. Sura P. Rath, “Ruby Turpin’s Redemption: Thomistic Revolution in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Revelation,’” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, Vol. 19 (1990): 1–2.

[22] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 492.

[23] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 499.

[24] Oates states that it is obvious that O’Connor identifies with Mary Grace. “It is she, through Mary Grace, who throws the textbook on human development at all of us, striking us in the foreheads, hopefully to bring about a change in our lives.” Oates, New Heaven,173–174.

[25] Jacky Dumas and Jessica Hooten Wilson, “The Unrevealed in Flannery O’Connor’s Revelation,” Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Spring, 2013), 80.

[26] Wood, Comedy, 129.

[27] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 502–503.

[28] The lack of identification is telling. Wood writes, “It never occurs to Ruby Turpin that she can have no common life with her black workers since she never bothers even to learn their names—only to identify them as old, young, hatted and so forth.” Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible (Baylor, 2024), 156.

[29] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 504.

[30] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 505.

[31] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 505.

[32] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 506.

[33] Whitt, Understanding Flannery O’Connor, 149.

[34] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 507. Baumgaertner comments, “The sun goes down behind the trees and reminds her of ‘a farmer inspecting his own hogs’ (507)—and there she is straddling two kingdoms. Christ the Sun is the farmer watching her, his “hog,” while she, the farmer, stands watching her own hogs. She is both redeemed, identified with Christ himself, and sinner, identified with the “wart hogs from hell.” Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner, Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring (Wipf & Stock, 1988), 150.

[35] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 507–508. Wood writes, “Both the question and the reply are central to the Christian faith: How can one be the reborn child of God while remaining a miserable offender? Luther struck at the core of the matter when he declared that Christians are simul justus et peccator. We are simultaneously justified by Christ’s life and death and resurrection, said Luther, while remaining dreadful sinners who must work out our salvation in fear and trembling.” Ralph Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2004), 263.

[36] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 508.

[37] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 509.

[38] Dorothy Tuck McFarland, Flannery O’Connor (Frederick Ungar, 1976), 62.

[39] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 509.

[40] Oates, New Heaven, 171.

[41] May, Pruning of the Word, 116.

[42] Ralph Wood, Comedy, 127, and Christ-Haunted South, 264.

[43] Frederick Asals, Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity (Univ. of Georgia, 1982), 67–68.

[44] O’Connor to “A,” November 23, 1963, 549.

[45] Flannery O’Connor to Maryat Lee, May 15, 1964, Habit of Being, 577. The biblical reference that O’Connor is referring to is Genesis 32:24. Jacob wrestles with the Lord until he knew that the Lord was with him.

[46] Flannery O’Connor to “A,” July 25, 1964, Habit of Being, 594.

Danny E. Olinger is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as the general secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, April, 2025.