The Refiner’s Fire and the Imago Dei: The Nature of the Self in Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation”

The soul’s essential nature . . . is to be an image of God. The fall of man was the obscuring of the divine image by a dissimilitude, an “unlikeness” superimposed upon it. But the image itself is indestructible: every man retains his “capacity for the eternal.” The so-called annihilation of self is the doing away of the unlikeness; and since the image of God in becoming unlike God became unlike itself, the love which restores the divine similitude restores the soul to itself.

—john burnaby, amor dei: a study of the religion of st. augustine

In the author’s note to the second edition of Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor confesses that the novel “was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations.” And while there may be reason to doubt the extent to which she was “innocent” of the trends and movements in literary criticism, it must certainly be admitted that she operated under the influence of a select few beliefs that held her unswerving allegiance and may be seen as the bedrock for everything she wrote. O’Connor would not have hesitated to agree that these concerns were as unfashionable as they were orthodox and indeed so simple that a parochial school pupil would have little difficulty memorizing and repeating them: “We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ’s death and our slow participation in it” (Mystery and Manners 148). Convinced as O’Connor was, along with theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, that the only real concern is the “ultimate concern,” her fiction flowed out of a mind steeped in the dogmas of the Catholic Church, which to her were the infallible representations of ultimate reality (The Habit of Being 221).

Central to this concern and therefore to all of O’Connor’s stories is the nature of the self. Although she lived to be only thirty-nine, O’Connor bore witness to a proliferation of theories and proclamations concerning human identity as the Western world continued to distance itself from the concept of authoritative, supernatural revelation and its Judeo-Christian roots in general. Whether in philosophy, theology, literary criticism, or a number of other disciplines, this widespread loss of confidence in the Bible’s claims about humanity manifested itself forcefully throughout O’Connor’s lifetime—as it still does today. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre provides a particularly apt summary of this major shift in philosophical thought in his seminal text Existentialism Is a Humanism: “Man first exists: he materializes into the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself” (22). In line with humanistic ideology, this assertion that existence precedes essence is wholly incongruous with everything for which O’Connor contended in her writing. She surely would have agreed with Sartre that people are free and self-determining to a large degree, but present in all her work is the belief that identity is grounded in something absolute and essential: the image of God. O’Connor believed the divine image to be the unifying aspect of all the diverse, individual human personalities across time and place; and it is this that she seeks to recover in her violent, tragic, yet grace-infused stories.

Close to the end of “Revelation,” the last of O’Connor’s stories to be published while she was still alive, the infuriated, floundering protagonist Ruby Turpin bellows to God, “Who do you think you are?” (The Complete Stories 507). In a narrative that delves so deeply into the identity issue, the answer to this question, whether Mrs. Turpin understood the significance of it or not, is pivotal in coming to a coherent understanding of the self. It is the most basic and foundational presupposition: we are necessarily defined by whatever ultimate reality is, and the person who believes that it is the God of the Bible will differ profoundly in how he or she thinks about himor herself and other people from how the person who holds to a relativistic, postmodern stance will, for instance. The purpose of this article is to analyze, in light of concurrent, competing notions regarding the nature of humans, the method O’Connor employs to pierce through Mrs. Turpin’s pretense and thereby expose the indelible image of God in her. Rather than to present a philosophical or theological evaluation of her arguments, the aim of this article is to explore the mind of an author in her context—an author who, as biographer Brad Gooch puts it, “freighted her acidly comic tales with moral and religious messages, running counter to so much trendy literary culture” (9).

The two decades in which O’Connor was publishing her stories held great significance for this culture. It was during this time, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, that many literary critics and theorists became disillusioned with New Criticism and fresh perspectives came into vogue, beginning with structuralism and psychoanalytic theory and evolving into poststructuralism, feminist and Marxist theory, postcolonialism, and several others (Parker 5). Considering the university environment at the end of her life, O’Connor would have noticed an incredible variance in the way literature and creative writing were being taught from when she attended the University of Iowa in the 1940s, especially under such New Criticism stalwarts as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom (Gooch 122). She would have observed an increasing distrust in stable textual meaning over time and place and an emphasis on interpreting cultural systems based on the texts they produce. Correspondingly, she could have also attested to the growing consensus regarding the irrelevance of authorial intent and, to some extent, even a reversal in the traditional literary hermeneutic with the assertion that more could be understood about an author from his or her text than the reverse. And although these burgeoning literary theories would not reach their heyday until a few decades after O’Connor died, she nevertheless acknowledged their gravity and evidently understood them enough to interact with their foundational premises in her stories.

Part of why this was probably so—and in line with her claim of being “innocent of theory”—is that the whole institution of literary criticism rests upon philosophical presuppositions with which O’Connor would have been well acquainted. Before proceeding, then, it will be helpful to briefly outline some of the shifts in philosophy that brought the proper circumstances about for the engendering of modern literary criticism and the correlating beliefs about identity. Moreover, it may be beneficial to view these shifts keeping in mind the union and separation between nature and grace—a topic to which O’Connor paid considerable attention in her essays and letters.¹ Whether couched in theological language or not, the pursuit to unify nature (which is made up of particulars) and grace (the universals) has been the focus of philosophers for millennia. The perennial search has been to find a universal that can adequately offer coherent unity and meaning for all of the particulars in our world.² The Italian Renaissance artist Raphael portrayed this point well in his sixteenth-century painting The School of Athens. In it, Aristotle and Plato stand in the center of the picture with the former emphasizing the particulars by spreading his fingers downward and the latter focusing on the universals, or ideals, by pointing a single finger upward (Schaeffer 215).

Whereas the historic Christian position argues that nature and grace find their unity in the God of the Bible—who singularly consists of three distinct persons and is both transcendent and immanent—by the time of the Renaissance the major players in philosophy began to assert that this unity did not require the invocation of supernatural revelation, but could rather be discovered through the human intellect alone. A few centuries later, however, Francis Schaeffer argues that this rationalistic approach had not yet succeeded in producing a unified field of knowledge on the basis of antithesis,³ and that because of this, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel offered a monumental alternative. Schaeffer contends that Hegel “changed the rules of the game in two areas: epistemology, the theory of knowledge and the limits and validity of knowledge; and methodology, the method by which we approach the question of truth and knowing” (233). In essence, Hegel argued that, instead of truth being thought of in terms of antithesis, it ought to be thought of in terms of thesis-antithesis that always results in synthesis. To put it another way, Hegel’s thought became a catalyst in Western philosophy for the now prevalent skepticism toward objective, exclusive truth claims (thinking in terms of either-or) and opened the way for relativism (thinking in terms of both-and). In large measure, Hegel marks the end of the philosophical pursuit for unity between nature and grace on the basis of rationality (232).

Søren Kierkegaard, born when Hegel was forty-three and considered by many to be the originator of existentialism, provides evidence for this claim. A Danish philosopher and also a Christian, Kierkegaard nevertheless believed that there was no rational basis for the unity between nature and grace and therefore between reason, which is able to label and categorize the particulars, and faith, which deals with universals such as meaning and morality. “Kierkegaard attacked the theologians of his day for attempting to show that Christianity was a thoroughly rational religion, claiming instead that faith is important precisely because Christianity is irrational and even absurd” (Mautner 208). In maintaining this position, Kierkegaard was able to affirm both nature and grace while at the same time denying any semblance of unity between them—that is, he operated on the basis of the Hegelian synthesis rather than antithesis. Although atheists have dominated existentialist thought since Kierkegaard, the claim that he is the founder of the philosophy seems well grounded when one notices his obvious influence throughout the writings of Albert Camus and Sartre, for instance. These two twentieth-century thinkers unashamedly insisted that the universe is meaningless on the basis of rationality and yet that subjective, individual meaning could be obtained by an act of self-authentication (209). It is an act of self-authentication because it is an attempt to assert the self in the face of its apparent nonexistence.⁴ Rationally, the existentialist has every reason to believe that there is no such thing as “the self” and that what is referred to as “human identity” is merely a fiction. Experientially, however, this conclusion is insupportable and, hence, we see the divorce of nature from grace, of reason from meaning.

Sartre published his Existentialism Is a Humanism in 1946, the same year in which O’Connor published her first story and entered her second year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. One of the first courses she took in the workshop was called Understanding Fiction, named after the textbook that had been edited by Cleanth Brooks Jr. and Robert Penn Warren. Gooch notes that the textbook, published in 1943, was “an academic marker for the fashionable school of New Criticism,” an approach to literature that emphasizes paying close attention to the textual elements of form and content to derive meaning rather than focusing on the cultural or biographical aspects of the author (122–23). Additionally, New Criticism advocated the idea that aesthetics hold primacy in literature and that literary works should form a unified whole, both of which can be recognized in the many pronouncements O’Connor made later in life concerning writing and proper interpretation.⁵ As was mentioned earlier, however, many literary theorists began leveling significant objections against New Criticism after O’Connor had graduated from the workshop and was publishing her stories. Considering the philosophical environment, it is not difficult to understand why these theorists rejected New Criticism in favor of structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and others. Philosophy had shifted from the hope of a unified body of knowledge to accepted disunity, from the search for objective, universal coherence to embracing subjective, irrational experiences of meaning—it was time for literary criticism to do the same.

Structuralism—which may be considered the critical fountain from which modern literary theory has flowed—finds its roots in the structural linguistics of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Although he died at the beginning of the twentieth century, his thought reached its greatest influence when the critical movement rose to prominence in France in the 1950s and 1960s. Robert Dale Parker claims, “If we boil structuralism down to one idea, it is about understanding concepts through their relation to other concepts, rather than understanding them as intrinsic, in isolation from each other” (40). Saussure contended that the meaning we derive from language is based in difference—that we only recognize what a word represents by thinking about its difference from other similar words, all of which are arbitrarily assigned.⁶ Furthermore, structuralists continue from this premise to then posit that language, rather than giving labels to objects that possess their own inherent, essential meaning, actually structures reality. Within this paradigm, there is no reality independent of the language, or discourse, that is used to construct it (46). Instead of focusing on the individual text, then, and looking for a unified meaning within it, structuralist critics ask what a piece of literature can tell them about the larger system that produced it and the specific meaning it might have for that system (48).

The implications of structuralism regarding questions of the self are immense, and the best way to see the impact of these ideas will be to focus now on psychoanalytic theory. Although it originated in the thought of Sigmund Freud toward the beginning of the twentieth century, the theory developed into a significant method of literary criticism largely through the writings of Jacques Lacan in the 1950s and 1960s. The link between structuralism and psychoanalytic theory is evident in Lacan’s concise statement “The unconscious is structured like a language” (Elliott 35)—meaning that the linguistic, discursive processes identified by Saussure can be applied to the psyche as well. Anthony Elliott notes, “For Lacan, the position of each of us as individual subjects is determined by our place in our culture’s system of signifiers” (106). In order to reach this conclusion, Lacan expands on elements of Freud’s Oedipus complex to explain a convoluted process of unconscious self-misrecognition that leads to a fictional, imagined identity.

Lacan proposed that infants enter what he called “the mirror stage” sometime between the sixth and eighteenth month of development. Having already some grasp of its own subjectivity, the child identifies with the image of itself in the mirror and, upon recognizing that all the various parts of its body connect in a single unity, “a coherent image of I (that is, of ego, subjectivity, or self)” (Parker 127) results. This is what Lacan labeled “the imaginary,” which is characterized by coherence, completeness, and fullness and where there is no self versus other. Eventually, however, the events of the Oedipus complex—named the “Father’s No” by Lacan—interrupt the imaginary and impel the child into “the symbolic.” Lacan conceived of the symbolic as the realm of language, where instead of unity there is fragmentation; instead of the self there is difference and absence. Upon entering the symbolic, the child begins the lifelong process of maintaining its fictional identity, which, because the symbolic is the sphere of language and the unconscious is structured in this way, involves continually focusing and defining itself in relation to others.

Parker observes, “Any idea of the self or the subject . . . depends on an idea of the loss of self, because we cannot recognize selfhood unless we compare it to its absence. Presence, therefore, depends on absence” (128). The assertion that language does not simply designate and categorize reality but is itself reality is the foundation for this position, which Lacan sums up in the statement “The subject is subject only from being subjected to the field of the Other” (Lacan 188). Because there is no universal that unifies and gives reference to all the particulars—that is, because all we have are particulars that are constructed and lent meaning from language—individual people can define themselves only in relation to one another and, in so doing, betray that they are inherently absence. It is significant to note that, among others, three of Lacan’s scholarly influences were Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, the last two being influential existentialists (Elliott 102). Lacan aligned himself with the thorough existentialist separation of nature from grace—or, in this context, reason from meaning—but took it a logical step further in suggesting the total illusion of identity. O’Connor would remark the year before she died, “At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily” (MM 158). Whether happily or not, the philosophers and literary critics of her day had indeed learned to live with their proclamation tinged at once with humanistic victory and despair: the end of the self.

Bearing in mind that O’Connor seems to have often referred to psychoanalysis synecdochically, several reasons present themselves for why she may have commented, in a letter to Betty Hester, “As to Sigmund, I am against him tooth and toenail” (HB 110). As she was an ardent defender of the freedom of the will, her aversion to the psychoanalytic tradition may have been due, for instance, to the strong influence it ascribes to the unconscious in affecting our thought process and actions. Or, as is clear from her letters, it may have been because of the distaste she derived from what she saw as the Freudians’ inordinate focus on sex and sexual symbols in literature.⁷ One could certainly summon a myriad of instances when she expressed frustration with forms of interpretation that did not concur with her own; and, indeed, the emphases of psychoanalysts in literary texts were in many ways antithetical to those she held. In line with this, literary critic James Mellard alleges, “On a very conscious level, where the head business occurs, O’Connor knows that psychoanalysis offers a way of reading her work that will seem more accessible to most readers than the way she intends or thinks she intends” (114). Considering the recurring criticisms and jests that she directs at the discipline and those who espouse it, this contention appears legitimate as well.⁸

While there were surely a number of factors that shaped O’Connor’s stance, however, the most blatant—the one that provided the structure for all her writing and generated the tenor of her life—was her steadfast conviction in the unity between nature and grace and, consequently, the reality and significance of human identity. Describing herself as a “thirteenth-century Catholic” (Gooch 156) who was nevertheless “peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness” (HB 90), it is clear that O’Connor was keenly aware of the same friction, corruption, and emptiness that her existentialist and literary critic contemporaries diagnosed even as she viewed them through a different lens altogether. In fact, it was precisely because of her affinity for the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas that she felt liberated—even mandated—to faithfully see and render the world as it is.⁹ Foundational to this pursuit is the belief that the invisible, spiritual world is not recognized in spite of our physical bodies and surroundings, but because of them: “The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality” (MM 157). The fiction of O’Connor, then, is where these two visions meet, where a realistic depiction of the natural world opens the door for the realities of grace or, as she put it, where her “moral sense coincides with [her] dramatic sense” (31).

Because “the image of ultimate reality” is the most basic and core presupposition that necessarily defines who we are (or are not) as humans, this penetration of the concrete world included for O’Connor the intention of revealing the nature of the self. In a discussion of the spiritual vision that her characters often receive, Frederick Asals makes this same point: “If what they see at those [apocalyptic] moments seems a glimpse of the full dimensions of Reality, the knowledge they gain is actually twofold, for the sudden eschatological perspective reveals also their irreducible selves, beyond all deceptions of the ego” (210). “Revelation” is a prime example of this process at work. Present in Mrs. Turpin’s identity crisis is the refining grace of O’Connor’s triune God, mediated through the material world and laying bare the essential self that is ultimately grounded in the Bible’s first pronouncement concerning humans—that “God created man in His own image” (Gen. 1:27 [English Standard Version]). To contend for this point, it will be useful to address the story in three different segments: the scene in the waiting room, as Mrs. Turpin constructs her corrupt identity; the irruption of grace through nature when she is struck with the book and the corresponding annihilation of identity; and the end vision, when the foundation for true selfhood is revealed.

The opening scene in the doctor’s waiting room, which also constitutes more than half of the story, is indicative of O’Connor’s effectiveness in endeavoring to represent the world as it is, uncolored by her Catholic presuppositions and other prejudices. Indeed, for all the psychoanalytic fodder it provides, the interactions between Mrs. Turpin and the other characters in the waiting room as well as her ongoing, internal commentary might have been written by Lacan himself. Josephine Hendin seems to agree when she remarks, “In a sense, [“Revelation”] is a story about structure—about ways of relating the self to the world around it and even of looking into the nature of the self” (121). Throughout this scene, O’Connor depicts the interpersonal functioning of life in the symbolic realm, where identity is never something stable and internally possessed but always contingent on one’s relation to other people. This section of the story is dominated by Mrs. Turpin’s quite reflexive and insatiable impulse to rank, label, categorize, and divide—always using people as merely means in the sense that the way she acts toward them and thinks about them serves to fortify her fabricated identity. “When we gaze at the other,” Parker affirms, “we do not see the other itself. Instead, we construct the other by projecting onto it what we wish to see, fear seeing, or know how to see” (132). This principle is aptly played out in the waiting room, where the belief in essential, unifying selfhood is either rejected or ignored, resulting in interactions mired in the symbolic.

From the outset, O’Connor presents Mrs. Turpin as a domineering character, a “very large” woman whose presence makes the room appear to shrink and whose “little bright black eyes took in all the patients” (CS 488) immediately after she entered. With a matronly confidence about her and possessing strong opinions about the way things should be done, it does not take long for Mrs. Turpin to shrink the room by more than just her physical presence: within a short time, she has identified and arranged the various people waiting into distinct classes and categories. It is evident before long that the structure for Mrs. Turpin’s identity is built on assumptions about class and race, the two main determinants for where someone will be placed in her systematized construct. This sort of reflection describes, in fact, one of her default ways of thinking: “Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged” (491). The dominance that Mrs. Turpin feels she has the right to exercise over the others in this scene, then, is rightly understood to be both because of and in order to maintain her manufactured identity. Without something essential governing how she ought to conceive of herself, any notion of the same will inevitably rely on the relative standard of where she is situated among all the particular people in her view, and especially in regard to how she differs from them.

The basis for this type of interaction rests in the absence of a stable, all-inclusive and objective ground for human identity that would unify all the diverse types of people present or discussed in the waiting room. This is not to say, however, that Mrs. Turpin professes the existentialist conviction that existence precedes essence—rather, it appears that she does hold to some sort of belief in essential natures, but that these natures are disparate and unequal. In relation to the poor, white trash family in the room, for instance, the narrator observes, “There was nothing you could tell [Mrs. Turpin] about people like them that she didn’t know already” (497). Moreover, her laughter is taken as a gesture of approbation when Claud wryly comments that, even if black people could “improve their color,” they would still only be “white-faced niggers” (496). Mrs. Turpin’s conception of identity is, overall, quite inconsistent and illogical: despite viewing the superficial features of race and class as markers of an inherent self, she nonetheless treats people as if these distinctions were somehow deserved. The weakness and naïveté of this paradigm—which is the reason she feels justified in continually exalting herself over others—is exhibited in the way her ruminations on class structure generally come to a conclusion. “Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven” (492). Within Mrs. Turpin’s tenuous impression of selfhood, the hierarchy of persons is collapsed only in the individuals’ common mortality.

Adding to the sense of affectation surrounding Mrs. Turpin are punctuated instances of irony concerning her “Christianity” that serve to reveal not only the flimsiness of her facade but also the central contradiction of her character. Being a faithful churchgoer, she would surely know the biblical teaching that every man and woman is made in the image of God. Indeed, throughout this portion of the story O’Connor has Mrs. Turpin filling in the lyrics of a gospel tune (490), playing out an imagined interaction with Jesus, and finally (491), just prior to Mary Grace’s attacking her, breaking out in a paean to Christ for the way he made her (499). The pervading dissonance that exudes from Mrs. Turpin, however, results from the disconnect between what she plainly acknowledges intellectually and the negligible impact these beliefs have on her attitude toward herself and others. In the envisioned dialogue with Jesus, it is manifest that she has reversed the flow of identity: like the couple in the garden who succumbed to the temptation to be as God himself,¹⁰ so too Mrs. Turpin sets herself up as autonomous ruler of her soul—and in so doing, she constructs God in her own image. In the arena of the symbolic, God’s nature, like those of the other characters, is decided by Mrs. Turpin when she projects onto him what she wishes to see. The choice is a continuation of the one that originally defaced the sacred image and lays the groundwork for O’Connor’s characteristic manifestation of the refining, identity-defining grace of God. Asals correctly states that O’Connor’s protagonists are frequently “driven out of their mockingly presented cocoons of illusion, purified by the very intensity of the action until they reach some recognition of the reality beyond the self” (204).

Accordingly, when Mrs. Turpin’s pretentious delusion reaches its height in her public worship of a god fashioned in her own pride, Mary Grace erupts like a modern Jeremiah who, though he tried to stifle it, felt the urgency of God’s message like a fire in his bones.¹¹ Mary Grace, whose eyes were “lit . . . with a peculiar light, an unnatural light like the night road signs give,” and looked “directly through Mrs. Turpin and on through the yellow curtain and the plate glass window which made the wall behind her” (CS 492), is O’Connor’s agent of God’s violent grace and cleansing mercy. In direct contrast to Mrs. Turpin’s dignified posturing and passive aggression, Mary Grace attacks her with savage ferocity and delivers the staggering imperative: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog” (500). For O’Connor, this is the image that embodies two points, that announces with striking lucidity that all is not merely as it seems—this is where the spiritual comes crashing into the natural or, to be more precise, through the natural itself.¹² Evident to both Mrs. Turpin and the reader is that the message is not simply the raving outburst of a disturbed and deranged girl, but rather a grave and compelling warning from God himself mediated, as it were, through the prophet of his choosing. “This notion that grace is healing omits the fact that before it heals, it cuts with the sword Christ said he came to bring” (HB 411), comments O’Connor. The interval between the attack and the apocalyptic vision separates the wounding action of grace from its restorative action, the time given to Mrs. Turpin to wrestle with the force of the message and to see herself, for the first time, as she really is.

Having received the impartation with rapt attention, “waiting, as for a revelation,” she is understandably devastated: “Mrs. Turpin felt entirely hollow except for her heart which swung from side to side as if it were agitated in a great empty drum of flesh” (CS 500). The blow renders Mrs. Turpin helpless and bewildered, with the felt hollowness suggesting that she has been drained of her supposed self—that the conspicuous edifice of her identity has been utterly swept away from its racist and classist foundation. This is communicated when, upon returning home, the narrator comments that Mrs. Turpin “would not have been startled to see,” instead of her house, “a burnt wound between two blackened chimneys” (502). What she used to depend on for self-definition now seems flimsy and impermanent. Meanwhile, the piercing import of Mary Grace’s message infiltrates her mind, unwilling to let her temper or mitigate its denouncing truth. Although she tries to assuage its severity by various methods—including flatly denying that this is who she is, commanding Claud to kiss her, and awkwardly searching for support from her black workers—the knowledge she has gained connects on a level too deep to be repudiated. Because she is aware now that there is something intrinsic in her identity to which she had previously been blind and unable to continue defining herself in relation to others, it will not be long before she is forced to succumb to the ineluctable, searching eye of Christ, typified by the sun, which “was getting whiter and whiter, blanching the sky overhead so that the leaves of the hickory tree were black in the face of it” (504).

Earlier in the story, as a white trash woman expresses disdain at the idea of owning hogs, the narrator explains, “The look that Mrs. Turpin and the pleasant lady exchanged indicated they both understood that you had to have certain things before you could know certain things” (494). Ironically, it is precisely what Mrs. Turpin has that keeps her from knowing the truth about herself, and it is only because of the emotional and spiritual deprivation following Mary Grace’s attack that she learns the indispensable reality of who she is. In order for her to think deeply and critically about her essential self, it is first necessary for her to realize that the things she is using to make sense of her identity—such as her race, socioeconomic status, and outward virtues—are either illusory or worthless. This is the ground on which O’Connor and Lacan meet, where they both agree that, if selfhood is conceived of merely in relation to other people and is not grounded in something stable and comprehensive, there is at bottom only absence or lack and identity is simply a functional notion that contains no inherent substance. The main difference between the two is that, for Lacan, this is the end. He is content to proclaim that the self is a fiction and use psychoanalysis to explain why and how we deceive ourselves, whereas O’Connor destroys her characters’ fabricated identities for the purpose of uncovering a self that is true and constant—the very essence that preceded their existence.

As Mrs. Turpin’s fixation over Mary Grace’s accusation continues to grow and her attempts at deflecting the message keep failing, the story builds toward its climactic finish when she is no longer able to maintain her self-aggrandizing veneer. After receiving only empty flattery from the black workers, Mrs. Turpin’s rising fury drives her to the pig parlor, where she “had the look of a woman going single-handed, weaponless, into battle” (505). Having determined like “a country female Jacob,” (HB 577) to carry on wrestling with the Almighty, Mrs. Turpin turns on the pigs she had praised so highly in the doctor’s waiting room in a final, desperate evasion. The indignation she releases on the pigs is another manifestation of her active avoidance of self-recognition, the calloused reaction to having received a clear communication from God and rejecting it. The link between Mrs. Turpin and her pigs carries so much significance not simply because the general filthiness of hogs relates to her innate sinfulness, but because she and Claud have tried to make these animals something they are not by refusing to acknowledge their natural characteristics. With the implicit admission in this scene that her pigs are still foul even though they live in a concrete hog pen comes the parallel realization that she is nothing more than a washed pig, someone who has cleaned up her life outwardly but is still essentially a defiled soul. She is like the pig astronaut who, after finishing his assignment perfectly died because “they left him in his electric suit, sitting upright throughout his examination when naturally a hog should be on all fours” (CS 506). In Mrs. Turpin’s staunch resolve to forge her own identity, she ended up disfiguring and even dehumanizing herself.¹³

Mrs. Turpin’s enormous misconception is that identity is determined predominantly by external attributes rather than by something more fundamental and internal. This is why she engages in comparison during the first half of the story and this is why she questions God, “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too” (506)? In one sense, these questions get at the heart of the dual nature of the fallen human: although sin has marred the image of God in that person and left him or her corrupt, the image is not destroyed and may be restored through Christ. These questions are also, of course, legitimate in another sense within her skewed paradigm. “It’s not trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church” (507) she grumbles. Indeed, under her assumptions about selfhood she is right in arguing that the message would be more suitably applied to the white trash and black people she proceeds to describe. However, as Mrs. Turpin continues to think in these terms—terms that cohere so well with the psychoanalytic conception of the symbolic realm, where difference and comparison reign—she becomes only more incensed and remains incapable of comprehending the true import of the revelation. While she retains this perspective, it is “as if there were unintelligible handwriting on the ceiling” (503), and she receives only a “garbled echo” (507) in response to her questions.

Illumination finally comes when Mrs. Turpin shifts from her stance of defensive self-justification to asking the latent, underlying, accusatory question of who God thinks he is. In the wake of her bellowed provocation, “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 highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood” (508). Struck dumb by the response, Mrs. Turpin can only stand mesmerized as she stares over the highway, fascinated with the smallness and fragility of Claud’s truck scraping over the horizon. This immediate recognition of transience and weakness suggests that she has caught a vision of something constant, powerful, and immense. It seems that she has borne witness to the presence of the invisible God who by his very nature at once reveals the foolishness of forming identity based on interpersonal differentiation even as he necessitates comparison in relation to himself. In line with the many biblical characters who, upon perceiving the glory of God, were able to see themselves with searing clarity for the first time, Mrs. Turpin turns back to the pig pen and gazes at the hogs with new understanding, ready to receive.¹⁴ Looking “as if through the very heart of mystery,” this understanding allows for the outpouring of grace through nature for a second time, as her vision is oriented to see that the hogs “appeared to pant with a secret life” (508). No longer resisting the awareness of who she is, which was triggered by the cutting action of grace and is defined by her corrupt heart, she is ready for the healing action of grace to recover in her the image of God.

While Mrs. Turpin stares at the pigs, it is “as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge”—knowledge that at once razes and repairs and accords with the knowledge that Christ came to bring. The vision that follows, then, is not so much a revelation to Mrs. Turpin as it is a confirmation of what she has just learned from gazing at the pigs. It is the invisible truth hidden in the visible animals, the awesome spiritual reality that presents itself through even the humblest objects of the material world.¹⁵ Strikingly similar to her earlier daydream of all the classes and races of people crowded in a box car on its way to a gas oven, the vision before her is of a “vast horde of souls rumbling toward heaven” on a “swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire” (508). In direct juxtaposition, however, the white trash, black people, freaks, and lunatics to whom she had exhibited such derision are now rejoicing in procession on their way to eternal life. Whereas the former portrayal was of human distinction destroyed through collective ruin, this latter vision depicts human distinction redeemed through shared salvation. Hendin is grievously incorrect when she asserts that O’Connor’s “salvation is a force for leveling all human distinctions. Her heaven is a celebration of violence, a universal chaos in which everything is destroyed” (130). Rather, O’Connor’s salvation and her heaven achieve the fulfillment of the individual person, where the painful, purging grace of God serves to burn away the dross so that true identity might be restored. According to her, it is not a person’s distinction, but his or her “evil which is naturally burnt away when it comes anywhere near God” (HB 387).

The God-given particularities of human personality remain in Mrs. Turpin’s eschatological vision because there is a universal—a transcendent unifier—that gives them a meaningful point of reference. The depicted heaven is not an arena of destruction, but one where individuals are purified to the point where their intrinsic distinctions are grounded in the essential, divine image. For the Turpins and those like them, this means that “even their virtues,” those supposedly righteous qualities that they used as leverage in their relationships with others and even God, are “burned away” (508). Through this process, Mrs. Turpin realizes that the proper foundation for her identity is based in her relationship to God rather than to other people; and with this new understanding comes reconciliation not only with her Creator, but also with her neighbors whom she had previously used as mere platforms for her ego. United at once by both their common depravity and the victory of Christ in restoring his image in them through redemption, Mrs. Turpin is now free to extend grace to the white trash woman and the black workers, knowing that she has been dealt with graciously.¹⁶ “I believe . . . that God is as present in the idiot boy as in the genius” (HB 99), O’Connor affirms. The congregants on this bridge to heaven embody “a communion created upon human imperfection, created from what we make of our grotesque state” (MM 228). It is a fellowship that produces a mosaic of worship, where divine image bearers employ their distinctive glories to the praise and honor of their Restorer.

Sally Fitzgerald, in the editor’s note to the last section of The Habit of Being, accurately wrote, “With ‘Revelation’ . . . [O’Connor] achieved her form as a writer, the realization of that potential body of work, uniquely her own, to which everything she had written before had contributed” (HB 559–60). The central theme that became more and more defined with each successive story—and reached its pinnacle in “Revelation”—is concisely described by the title of her second collection of short stories: Everything That Rises Must Converge.¹⁷ More than anywhere else, the encounter between Mrs. Turpin and the refining fire of God’s grace exemplifies O’Connor’s developed notion of the complete unity between nature and grace. O’Connor was purposefully writing about and for “people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness” (MM 167); “Revelation” was her attempt to communicate the fullness, coherence, and eventual convergence of a world ordered and governed by Christ, in whom “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). It was her attempt, moreover, to impart to her audience the same abysmal yet life-giving revelation that Mrs. Turpin received, to present before them the infinite reference point from whom all identity flows. O’Connor was confident that her readers possessed within them the same image as her protagonist, and “Revelation” was her cry that the image of God is an actuality at the base of our being and that restoration to the divine similitude has been offered.