Flannery O’conner’s Revelations

In Flannery O’Conner’s “Revelation” her character Mrs. Turpin, a toffee-nosed

old woman, has a fixation on the classes of people and the shoes they wear. Mrs. Turpin

believes that she is better than most people and she has broken up into “classes,” even

ones with more money, land, and bigger houses. She believes this because they are

common people and not from “good blood,” which means they are from new money and

not from money that has been passed down from family. During this story Mrs. Turpin

will have a live altering event in which she will indeed have a change in heart about her

beliefs.

Mrs. Turpin’s classes consist of most colored people and white trash at the bottom,

she considers them the same, next she has the common people who own homes, then

people who own land and homes which her and her husband Claud are, and finally

there are rich people with large houses, lots of land, and of course lots of money. Though

sometimes she had people in between or had no place for like the rich dentist who was

colored man. He had “two red Lincolns, a swimming pool, and a farm with registered

white faced cattle.” Then there were people of “good blood” who had lost their money

and like I had written in my first paragraph; common people with lots of money.

While Mrs. Turpin was at the doctor’s office with her husband she begins sizing

people up and associating people’s shoes with their class. She looks at her own feet and

notices herself wearing her “good black patent leather pumps,” patent meaning they were

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name brand. The nicely dressed woman she had been speaking to was wearing “red and

gray suede shoes to match her dress.” Because the woman is wearing a suede shoes,

which are not cheap, and they match her dress we get the idea that she comes from one of

the upper classes. The “ugly girl,” the nicely dressed woman’s daughter, is wearing Girl

Scout shoes and heavy socks, which gives us the impression that she is young and

somewhat of nerd. Then there was the “leathery old woman” who was wearing sneakers

which leads us to believe that she was probably white trash like her daughter. The

daughter of the old woman, “white-trashy mother,” had on what Mrs. Turpin believed to

be bedroom slippers. The slippers were made of black straw with a gold braided thread in

both slippers. The last woman she had sized up was a somewhat young woman who had

red hair who at first she could not see her shoes. When the nurse called her name “Mrs.

Finely”,