1. Living Vegetarian
The most prolific sinner of all time was thrown from Heaven for the very sin Ruby Turpin wallows in throughout Flannery O"Connor's "Revelation". However, in Mrs. Turpin's own self-righteous mind, her nature couldn't be further away from that of Lucifer's. Pride is often seen as having good connotations. We take pride in our work, children, country et cetera, but pride is a dangerous emotion to get caught up in. There is a fine line between pride and hubris, a line so razor thin that it is all too common to for some to skip merrily over it without a care. In "Revelation" we see deep into a woman who had, shall we say, lumbered over that fine line many years before her day in the doctor's office. She is humbled before God by a child wielding a book titled "Human Development", which when hurled against her face reveals her as the wart hog from hell she truly is. O"Connor sets up the story so that the reader sees from the point of Mary Grace, except that we are explicitly told how Mrs. Turpin thinks, while Mary Grace intuitively perceives her ugliness. O"Connor makes it painfully clear what kind of woman Mrs. Turpin is from the way she looks, to the way she domineers over her meek husband and ultimately to the way she sees other people as less than human. Although her cordial veneer is easily seen through, her judgmental thoughts are helpful to the reader and leave little doubt of her inner folly.
From the moment Mrs. Turpin walks through the doctor's office door we are aware that to her, the world is painfully inadequate. Even her robust stature echoes this sentiment as she was, "a living demonstration that the room was inadequate and ridiculous" (410). Just as she does every night before bed, Mrs. Turpin set about categorizing every one in the waiting room. Only one woman, who it could be said shares some of Mrs. Turpin's sins, is good enough to give the time of day. No one is spared from her sweeping critique of the landscape, not even the waiting room.