Who Do You Think You Are?

Humanity has always depended on visual clarity. In ancient times, the inability to accurately see one’s surroundings and thus hunt or scavenge for food led to starvation. An inability to see human nature at a deeper level is also dangerous since those who cannot detect selfish motivations in others frequently end up in abusive situations. Today, pride is especially harmful because it drastically alters one’s perception of oneself and one’s surroundings. Prideful people often fail to realize their shortcomings since they preoccupy themselves with finding others’ flaws. In “Revelation,” Flannery O’Connor encourages readers to see their own pride by demonstrating that Mrs. Turpin’s pride warps her perception of herself and others.

First, Turpin’s racial pride leads her to misjudge Black Americans. In an imaginary conversation with Jesus, Turpin, a White woman, reveals her racial bias when she says, “You could have made me a nigger … but I could act like one. Lay down in the middle of the road and stop traffic. Roll on the ground” (507). O’Connor wrote “Revelation” in the middle of the American Civil Rights Movement when protestors would sometimes lie down in streets and disrupted traffic to protest injustices against Black Americans. Instead of considering the inequities that prompted the protests, Turpin characterizes Black people as childish attention-seekers.

Turpin also believes Black people are less intelligent than White people. She states, “You could never say anything intelligent to a nigger. You could talk at them but not to them” (505). She thinks herself better and more intelligent than Black people because her skin is lighter. Though there are no significant anatomical differences between Whites and Blacks, Turpin allows a barrier as thin as skin to separate her from Black people in her mind. Her pride leads her to see an entire race of people as mentally incompetent merely because of their pigmentation.

Second, Turpin’s physical pride also causes her to ignore her own flaws while emphasizing Mary Grace’s. While in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, Turpin encounters Mary Grace, a “fat girl of eighteen or nineteen” whose face is “blue with acne” (490). Turpin, who is so overweight that she makes the doctor’s waiting room appear smaller by her presence (488), ignores her own unhealthy size to criticize Mary’s acne-ridden face. She thinks, “How pitiful it was to have a face like that at that age.” Turpin “was fat but always had good skin” (490).

Throughout the book, Turpin continues to emphasize Mary’s acne-ridden face, calling her “ugly” (492), “sear-faced” (492), and “raw-complexioned” (495). However, she deliberately avoids criticizing Mary’s obesity to circumvent implicating herself. Instead, Turpin selectively attacks Mary’s acne, a superficial flaw they do not share, allowing Turpin to highlight her own good skin. In this instance, her unwavering focus on Mary’s superficial physical blemishes and failure to consider her extreme obesity demonstrates a severe sense of physical pride.

Third, Turpin’s socioeconomic pride leads her to denigrate poor people. Throughout “Revelation,” she refers to poor Whites who do not own land as “White trash” (491). She encounters one such woman during a doctor visit. She describes the woman as wearing a “yellow sweat shirt and wine-colored slacks, both gritty looking … her dirty yellow hair was tied behind with a little piece of red paper ribbon” and being “worse than niggers any day” (490). Instead of realizing the woman may be unable to afford regular baths or buy new clothes, Turpin labels her lazy. She says, “Too lazy to light the fire. There was nothing you could tell her about people like them that she didn’t know anything … She knew all this from her own experience” (497).

Turpin’s pride leads her to shortsightedly label the stranger lazy because of the stranger’s appearance and socioeconomic status even though poverty and uncleanliness do not necessarily imply anything about a person’s character! A morally good woman who experiences calamity may become poor and unable to bathe or afford new, clean clothes. At the same time, a lazy, morally corrupt woman may become rich due to good fortune. Ultimately, Turpin’s pride colors her vision, leading her to perceive another woman as worthless “trash” without sufficient justification (491).

In “Revelation,” Turpin allows her pride to color her perception of others. Throughout the book, pride leads her to view unimportant cultural, economic, and physical differences as reasons to criticize people she does not know. While one can often recognize vices like lust or sloth within oneself, a person can hide their pride by highlighting superficial differences others. Because prideful people are intent on criticizing others, they fail to evaluate whether their criticisms are warranted and neglect to uncover their own flaws. Flannery O’Connor writes “Revelation” with a deep understanding of pride’s harmful nature and ability to go undetected in the one who harbors it. By emphasizing Turpin’s foolish habit of judging others by the appearance of their skin, O’Connor calls readers to examine themselves and ask, “Who do you think you are?” (507).