According to Mrs. Turpin, being poor white trash was worse than being black. This statement clearly shows the hypocritical nature of Mrs. Turpin. A self-proclaimed “good woman,” she doesn’t even have enough decency to give all people equal respect. These racial slurs show how black people were often looked down upon in the South, which influenced O’Connor’s work. She talks about how she had a dream once when she spoke with Jesus. In her dream, Jesus asked her to choose whether she would rather be black or white trash. After much turmoil, Mrs. Turpin chooses to be black, but “not a trashy one.”
Inevitably, Mrs. Turpin’s reflections break out into speech and she utters,
“If it’s one thing I am, it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’
At that moment, Mary Grace apparently cannot stand this self-congratulatory blather any longer, and hurls her book at Mrs. Turpin, hitting her in the eye. Mary Grace then lurches across the waiting room, clamps her fingers around Mrs. Turpin's neck and begins to choke her. Mary Grace is subdued and falls into some kind of fit. Mrs. Turpin leans over her and "the girl's eyes [stop] rolling." At this point Mrs. Turpin asks her, "What have you got to say to me?"
Instead of muttering an apology, which Mrs. Turpin expected the young girl to do, Mary Grace yells, "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!”, which Mrs. Turpin thinks is worse than the physical assault. At the same time, the attack makes her think, opening to her for the first time a sense of her own character that is not flattering. She fails to absorb the full meaning of this message at once, but in time she does rethink her entire worldview. There is something mechanical about Mrs. Turpin's life before the attack as she goes through the same motions, holds the same opinions, speaks to the same people, and never changes. She is jolted back to her own humanity by the attack. This phrase confuses Mrs. Turpin and at first she only sees it as a nonsensical insult, but as the story progresses, she begins to contemplate on the statement. "How," she asks God later, "am I hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?"
In O'Connor's world-view, however, both of these things are perfectly consistent. O'Connor believes that Mrs. Turpin is indeed a hog, just like the ones she raises. The symbolism behind pigs being kept clean before their ultimate end has its parallel in the cleanliness of the human soul. Simultaneously, Mrs. Turpin is saved because she wants to be, and everyone who believes in Christ is entitled to his saving grace. The fact that Mrs. Turpin is neat and clean, pleasant to the Negro workers, and volunteers time at her church is all well, but it is not what ensures her eternal salvation. To O'Connor, the shed blood of Christ has ensured that all people who are willing to believe will be saved, even white trash and Negroes alike. In her vision of the souls mounting to heaven, "a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right" were bringing up the rear of the queue. They are saved, yes, but no more saved than anybody else. This concept was something that Mrs. Turpin did not realize nor understand. She had always put herself on a higher pedestal than those “below her”, but it wasn’t until Mary Grace had yelled that statement to her, did she realize that it didn’t matter who you were. Christ would save all, no matter race or social standing.
All throughout her life, Mrs. Turpin had always separated herself from others by classifying herself as a better person because of her race and property. She believed that she had a higher chance of being saved by Christ than the Negroes who worked in her fields. As she comes to the conclusion that none of this holds any significance to God, she hits a point in her life where her virtues and morals collapse and she is filled with the revelation that everything she held as truth is not the key to salvation.
In "Revelation," O'Connor accomplishes her purpose through the linking of opposites -- two levels of meaning, two viewpoints, two irreconcilable conclusions, and out of the collision between these opposites is born a synthesis that illustrates, for O'Connor and her characters, the means of God's grace. In the end, it didn’t matter that Mrs. Turpin was a respectable church-going woman or a white woman that owned property. In the end, Christ had saved everyone. O’Connor continues on to say that, “This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.” (Sorry, I know you shouldn’t end with a quote.)
