The Grandmother and Ruby Turpin - Essay Example

? The Grandmother and Ruby Turpin Flannery O’Connor’s 1953 masterpiece “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is more than just a story of murder, nor is her 1965 classic “Revelation” simply a story of life of a wealthy landowner who was choked by a violent teenage girl. These two works of O’Connor’s are a testament to the idea that evil usually hides within the kindest of us, and that, sooner or later, someone will come to expose this evil. The bitter epiphany that the Grandmother and Ruby Turpin have experienced in these stories reflects the journey of every human being toward coming to terms with himself. Moreover, in the stories, the Grandmother and Ruby Turpin share a number of similarities and differences in terms of character, experience and various other aspects. The Grandmother and Ruby Turpin share a number of similarities in terms of character and other aspects. First of all, they are both bigots. The Grandmother, in fact, is a “hypocritical old soul” (Bandy 109). As the oldest character in the story, she seems to show to Bailey, his wife and the children that she possesses the greatest wisdom and the deepest connection with Jesus Christ. However, the irony is that she is the most afraid among the characters when the Misfit shows up. While the rest of the family are curious about the Misfit and his friends, the grandmother is the first one who “shrieked [and] scrambled to her feet [and called out] “You’re the Misfit!” (O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” 306). This particular line simply shows how fearful she is of what can possibly happen to her and the rest of the family. The Grandmother’s hypocrisy in her faith in Jesus Christ also shows when, even as she calls out Jesus’ name, she offers the Misfit a bribe – “I’ll give you all the money I’ve got” (308). Several times in the story, she has shown acts of kindness to the Misfit like when she says “If you would pray…Jesus would help you” (308). She does all these things perhaps in an effort to convince him to spare her life. The Grandmother’s last act of kindness is making an effort to reach out to the Misfit and touch him on the shoulder at the same time that she is telling him, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children” (309). Nevertheless, this last attempt of the Grandmother at survival turns out to be the exact opposite of what she actually wants. Perhaps she thinks that by mentioning God, the Misfit will not kill her, but she is wrong. Ruby Turpin, just like the Grandmother, is simply “bigoted and complacent” (Paquet-Deyris 1). She keeps mentioning to everyone in the room, or at least make them feel, that she has “a little of everything” – land, property, slaves, hogs – thus implying that she is better than them (O’Connor, “Revelation” 89). The phrase “a little of everything” seems like a humble way of saying “I have a lot” but it is the latter meaning that she wants to make everyone feel. Moreover, like the Grandmother, Ruby also has this seemingly religious image which she flamboyantly projects upon everyone she sees. However, unlike the Grandmother who uses Jesus’ name as a sort of attempt at survival, Ruby seems to invoke the holy name out of pride. Toward the middle of the story, she mentions, “I thank the Lord he has blessed me with a good [disposition]” (91), and “Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you” (92). This last line, however, has cost her a lot as we all know. Perhaps Ruby thinks that everyone is impressed with her just because she tells everyone how close she is to Jesus. Little does she know that Mary Grace is not the least impressed. Mary Grace knows that beneath the cloak of this “respectable, hardworking, church-going” follower of Jesus Christ lurks an evil that looks down on everyone (94). And indeed Mary Grace is right about Ruby Turpin – the latter is full of prejudices against people in general. In fact, Ruby has indeed proudly ranked herself as a “home-and-land-owner” – far above the nigger, the white trash and the home-owner (88). Ruby also secretly feels disgust toward the people in the waiting room. She thinks of Mary Grace as “pitiful” with all her pimples, the old woman as “vacant and white-trashy,” and the blond woman as “worse than niggers any day” (87). Even while talking to the people around her, she would say something different to them on the inside. Also, despite her black slaves sympathizing with her when she tells them what has happened at the waiting room, all Ruby can think that all blacks are “idiots” (95). Thus, on the whole, Ruby Turpin is far from the kind woman that she projects she is. The Grandmother does not go far. When the car the family is in passes by a black child, the Grandmother tells her grandchildren, “Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!...wouldn’t that make a picture, now?” (O’Connor, “A Good Man” 301). She then adds something not only critical of blacks but also of their financial state: “Little riggers in the country don’t have things like we do” (301). Surely this is not only blatant hypocrisy from someone who proclaims the name of Jesus Christ but also a picture of a woman “filled with the prejudices of her class and her time” (Bandy 108). In fact, both the Grandmother and Ruby Turpin, through their criticisms of others, invite the young people around them to do the same thing. But what must be done to stop them both from doing this? Perhaps it is God’s will that toward the end of the “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the Grandmother experiences “a breakdown in the cliches she lives by” (Hardy 526). As the Grandmother hears the shots that kill the three other family members, she “raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water” (O’Connor, “A Good Man” 308). This is a sign that she has somehow given in to her fear. She then mentions, “Maybe [Jesus] didn’t raise the dead” (308). This is a sign that her faith in God has finally faltered, or, perhaps, she has seen its futility or her own unfaithfulness. The Grandmother is finally defeated and humbled. This defeat she humbly accepts in the form of a bullet from the Misfit’s gun through her chest. In fact, the Misfit seems like her deliverer – the one who has seen through the holes in her faith and the one who, through his example, enlightens her about her own ignorance of Jesus Christ. Ruby Turpin’s humbling experience, just like the Grandmother, comes in the equivalent of the Misfit in the person of Mary Grace, an eighteen to nineteen-year-old teenager with a pimply face and a violent temper. Ruby Turpin awakens when Mary Grace hits her with a book and calls her “an old wart hog [who should] go back to hell where [she] came from,” and “once hit…Ruby is…severed from her fantasy world and returned to reality” (O’Connor, “Revelation” 93; Paquet-Deyris 3). She then experiences this “revelation” or “illumination” when she goes home and especially when she decides to bathe the pigs herself (3; O’Connor, “Revelation,” 96). This is where she honestly asks herself, “How am I a hog and me both?” (96). The answer does not come in the form of words. It comes to Ruby in the form of two things. The first is the wrath that she feels because deep inside she knows the truth that what Mary Grace has said about her is true – perhaps not necessarily about being “an old wart hog” but the fact that it is “hell where [Ruby] came from.” Yes, indeed Ruby Turpin is actually not the good person that she believes she is. The second form of answer comes in the form of a vision of souls ascending to heaven, but first in line are not the home-and-land-owners like Ruby but the white-trash, niggers, freaks and lunatics – the very people that she hates (96). Thus, Ruby’s defeat is the fact that, through Mary Grace, she has recognized her own evil and accepted the fact that other people deserve as much respect and dignity as she. Ruby, however, unlike the Grandmother, is not murdered in cold blood. Notwithstanding their similarities, both the Grandmother and Ruby Turpin are also different in many ways. For one, the Grandmother is full of lies, selfishness and vanity. As for the lies, the Grandmother has in fact told two, almost unconsciously and primarily for a selfish purpose. First, she tells her son Bailey that she does not want to go to Florida because the Misfit has just escaped from prison, but the truth is that “she wanted to visit some of her connections” (O’Connor, “A Good Man” 299). She also lies again when she tells the family especially the kids that there is an old plantation house with “a secret panel [where] all the family silver was hidden” (303). This she does perhaps because she wants to delay the trip for selfish reasons. Aside from the lies and selfishness, the grandmother is vain. This vanity shows when she puts on “a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet…so that anyone would know at once that she was a lady” (300). What she does not realize, however, is that there are some people in this world like the Misfit who does not respect a lady and who does not fall for anyone’s vanity. The Grandmother’s vanity is somehow similar to Ruby Turpin’s “materialistic” nature (Paquet-Deyris 2). In “Revelation,” Ruby mentions that she has “a little of everything,” which she indeed has (O’Connor, “Revelation” 89). The problem is that the way she mentions this to others comes with the intention of impressing them or making them feel jealous, and this evil intention in Ruby is what Mary Grace senses. Ruby may be wealthy and kind but her mistake is making these two things a reason for her to look up to herself too much and at the same time look down on others. Unlike the Grandmother, Ruby has material wealth, yet although she seems materialistic, she does not show that much vanity in dressing up unlike the Grandmother. Aside from the materialism and wealth of Ruby, she also differs from the Grandmother in that her reaction to what Mary Grace has said is that of wrath, which she experiences as she gets back home (94). The Grandmother reacts to the Misfit in fear. Nevertheless, for both characters, both wrath and fear has led to their epiphany. The Grandmother in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Ruby Turpin in “Revelation” both share a number of similarities and differences based on the nature of their personalities, their experiences and other aspects. As to the similarities, both are bigots as they hypocritically proclaim Jesus’ name when in fact they themselves are simply pretending to be good people. They are also both prejudiced – the Grandmother dislikes blacks, while Ruby Turpin dislikes anyone unlike her kind, including blacks and white-trashes. One last similarity they share is that, through the antagonists in the story, both the Grandmother and Ruby Turpin have recognized the evil in them and have come to terms with it. The Grandmother meets this with fear and death, while Ruby undergoes a moment of wrath followed by dejection and acceptance. Apart from the similarities, there are a few, although insignificant, differences. The Grandmother tells lies out of selfishness and that she is vain. Ruby, on the other hand, more materialistic and wealthier compared to the Grandmother. Top of Form Bottom of Form Works Cited Bandy, Stephen C. “’One of My Babies’: The Misfit and the Grandmother.” Short Story Criticism 61 (2003): 107-118. Gale, Cengage Learning. Print. 6 Aug 2011. Hardy, Donald E. “Politeness in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction: Social Interaction, Language, and the Body.” Style 44:4 (Winter 2010): 524-544. Web. 5 Aug 2011. O’Connor, Flannery. “Revelation.” 2010. Scribd Inc. 5 Aug 2011. O'Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” The Norton Introduction To Literature. Shorter 10th ed. Ed. Allison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. 299-310. Print. Paquet-Deyris, Anne-Marie. “Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Revelation’: ‘Some vast construction work.’” Cercles Occasional Papers Series3 (2005): 1-11. Web. 5 Aug 2011. Read More