COMPLEX STYLISTIC ANALYSIS

COMPLEX STYLISTIC ANALYSIS

The text under analysis is named “Revelation” and is written by an American writer Flannery O’Connor. The work is written in the fifties of the 20-th century. Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) was born in the town of Savanna, Georgia, lived at a farm for a long time and that’s why people and social conflicts of the south of the USA were shown in her works. Flannery O’Connor belonged to Catholic Church and that influenced on the idea content of her works.
The theme is laid in the doctor’s waiting-room at a small town and later at the Turpins’ farm.
The problems that are touched upon “Revelation” are social conflict between white and black population and between white aristocracy and white-trash. But these problems are not the main that Flannery O’Connor wanted to say. The main conflict has not a social but a spiritual character and it takes place in the soul of the main character, Mrs. Turpin. The social problems shown in the “Revelation” are themselves the tools for exposure of the idea – a revelation that Mrs. Turpin has got and that has turned over her inner world. Everything in the work from title to composition serves for the final goal – to help to understand the idea.
The work belongs to epic genres. For it has few characters, covers short period of time (one day), one plot, clear composition we may conclude that “Revelation” is a story.
The main character is Mrs. Turpin, in fact she is the only character of the story because all the others have no their dispositions and inner world and are just means used by the author to reflect the inner world of Mrs. Turpin.
The action started at a doctor’s waiting room where Turpins came. The short exposition depicted a small room “that was inadequate and ridiculous”.
The conflict began to unfold from the moment when Mrs. Turpin first met the ugly girl’s look. She could not understand why the girl looked at her so unkindly. The conflict increased in proportion as negative emotions increased in the girl’s eyes from annoyance to open detestation. “The girl looked as if she would like to hurl them all through the plate glass window.
The culmination is a moment when the ugly girl hurled a book in Mrs. Turpin’s face and “the girl’s fingers sank like clamps into the soft flesh of her neck.” All happened seemed to be an unaccountable doing of the lunatic, but Mrs. Turpin understood that it was not occasionally. She felt that “there was no doubt in her mind that the girl did know her, knew her in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition. “ What you got to say to me?” she asked hoarsely and held her breath, waiting as for a revelation.” The girl’s words had destroyed the peace of Mrs. Turpin’s soul, her system of valuables. The girl named her “an old wart hog from hell” but she regarded herself as “respectable, hardworking, church-going woman”. Mrs. Turpin understood that these words were a message for her from God. And she demanded from Him an answer. May be that was the first time she appealed to God in such a way, “Go on, call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There’ll still be a top and bottom!”
And God answered. The understanding of the message (revelation) had come. Formally, this passage could be named composition denouement but logically this is the 2-nd culmination, because  what she saw shaked Mrs. Turpin more then what she heard. The denouement left unknown. We can only imagine what can be further.
Let’s speak of devices used by the author in the story.
The scene of action - a small room – is chosen no accidentally. In this small room Mrs. Turpin looked larger than she was and she “made it look even smaller by her presence”. The author from the beginning turns our attention on that Mrs. Turpin thought highly of herself. The small size of the room let the author to gather in one place the representatives of   different social layers and to show  to whom Mrs. Turpin gives preference and whom she neglects. We can see that Mrs. Turpin values people according to their clothes and shoes, their behavior.  
The portraits of the people in the waiting room are very expressive. Besides Claud, the husband of Mrs. Turpin, who was “florid and bold and sturdy, somewhat shorter than Mrs. Turpin”, in the room there were a well dressed lady, “a lean stringy old fellow with a rusty hand spread out on each knee”; “a blond child in a dirty blue romper”; “a thin leathery old  woman in a cotton print dress”; “a lank-faced woman who was certainly the child’s mother. She had on a yellow sweat shirt and wine-colored slacks, both gritty-looking, and the rims of her lips were stained with snuff. Her dirty yellow hair was tied behind with a little piece of red paper ribbon”; “a red-headed youngish woman reading one of the magazines and working a piece of chewing gum whose feet Mrs. Turpin couldn’t see”; and “a fat girl of 18 or 19” who had played so important role in Mrs. Turpin’s life.
In spite of the fact that the narration is going from the third person, the author’s point of view is moved to the side of Mrs. Turpin, that is to say the author sees with Mrs. Turpin’s eyes. Therefore even portrait characteristics of the patients tell not of them but of Mrs. Turpin who compares everybody with herself and finds herself better.
The important detail is “radio softly playing gospel music”. Mrs. Turpin considered herself to be a good woman worth to be in heavens because of her right life. She is church-going and knows the hymns she hears on the radio. She joins in singing mentally not thinking over the words.
The inner speech of Mrs. Turpin is very important too. She imagines the conversation with God. “Sometimes at night when she couldn’t go to sleep, Mrs. Turpin would occupy herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn’t have been herself. If Jesus  had said to her before he made her, “There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white-trash,” what would she have said? “Please, Jesus, please,” she would have said, “just let me wait until there’s another place available,” and he would have said, “No, you have to go right now and I have only those two places so make up your mind.” She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded [the author likes gradation to make the text ironical] but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, “All right, make me a nigger then – but that don’t mean a trashy one.” And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.” The author shows Mrs. Turpin likes herself very much. In the next dialog God offers her to chose between a white-trash, a nigger and ugly. To be ugly is the worst thing for her. The 3-d time she imagined “Jesus had said, “You can be high society and have all the money you want and be thin and svelte-like, but you can’t be a good woman with it,” she would have to say, “Well don’t make me that then. Make me a good woman and don’t matter what else, how fat or how ugly or how poor!” Her heart rose. He had not made her a nigger or white-trash or ugly! He had made her herself and given her a little of everything. Jesus, thank you! She said. Thank you thank you thank you! Whenever she counted her blessings she felt as buoyant as if she weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds instead of one hundred and eighty.” The author expressly puts this comic simile to show how ridiculous is Mrs. Turpin in her self-adoration. This time her inner speech had burst out. “I thank the Lord he has blessed me with a good one [disposition]. The day has never downed that I couldn’t find something to laugh at… 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, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, “Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!” It could be different!” She can’t see herself outsider how abusive her words are for some other people. She does not understand that her inner world that has become visible is so dirty. At that moment she is like a Pharisee (Luke 18: 9-12). “To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.”
Just at that very moment “the book [thrown by the girl] struck her directly over her left eye”.
We can’t help saying of figure of the ugly girl. She is a daughter of the pleasant lady. The most essential detail is her uncommon look. First it was just ‘scowling’ at Mrs. Turpin “as if she did not like her looks”. Later on she “looked directly at Mrs. Turpin and smirked”, the eyes “in the girl’s scared face appeared alternately to smolder and to blaze”. Later “the girl’s eyes seemed lit all of a sudden with a peculiar light, an unnatural light like night road signs give”. Then “the ugly girl’s peculiar eyes were still on her, and she [Mrs. Turpin] had trouble bringing her attention back to the conversation’. Later on the girl  looked at Mrs. Turpin “as she had known and dislike her all her life – all of Mrs. Turpin’s life, it seemed too, not just all the girl’s life. Why, girl, I don’t even know you, Mrs. Turpin said silently”. And later the girl’s “eyes were fixed like two drills on Mrs. Turpin…Girl, Mrs. Turpin exclaimed silently, I haven’t done a thing to you!” Then “the girl made a loud ugly noise through her teeth” and “her face was almost purple”.
The conflict rises as though by spurts, from one Mrs. Turpin’s look at the ugly girl to another. Nothing else says of any conflict. The author emphasizes that the conflict of the story is not visible, it lays in the soul of Mrs. Turpin. At the culmination moment Mrs. Turpin “leaned forward until she was looking directly into the fierce brilliant eyes… ‘What you got to say to me?’ she asked hoarsely and held her breath, waiting, as for revelation. The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. ‘Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,’ she whispered. Her voice was low but clear. Her eyes burned for a moment as if she saw with pleasure that her message had struck its target… After a moment the girl’s eyes closed and she turned her head wearily to the side”. Nobody else could hear these words. Obviously the girl suffered from the epilepsy. They say that just before the attack the epileptics may have a moment of extraordinary lucidity of mind when they can see something nobody else can see. That’s why the author chooses a light metaphor to illustrate the girl at that moment: “The girl’s eyes seemed a much lighter blue than before, as if a door that had been tightly closed behind them was now open to admit light and air”.
The vocabulary of the story is rich  and varied. The language of the characters is colloquial, from literary colloquial to folk speech. We can feel the atmosphere of the farmer south of the USA in the middle of the last century.
It is interesting to monitor the language of Mrs. Turpin. She can speak literally colloquial language that is evidence of her belonging to a higher society, and she wants to lay stress on it when she plays to her audience. But she speaks low colloquial when she doesn’t play the role of a well-bred lady: “It’ll quit terreckly”, “Hi yawl this evening?”, “Yawl hep yourselves”, “Lea’ me be”, “Quit your pattin me”. To show her good disposition Mrs. Turpin jokes on herself using hyperbole: “ I just look at something good to eat and I gain some weight”. The hidden condemnation lays in her similes: “It’s a heap of things worse than a nigger and dirtier than a hog”. With these words she condemns the trash woman who is dirty, unintelligent,  a bad mother and unkind according to niggers. When Mrs. Turpin and her husband tell about  niggers their language displays their contempt for ‘those niggers’, ‘idiots’: “I sure am tired of buttering up niggers, but you got to love em if you want em to work for you. When they come in the morning, I run out and say, ‘Hi yawl this morning?’ and when Claud drives them off to the field I just wave to beat the band and they just wave back. And she waved her hand rapidly to illustrate”, though with the right words they try to show that racism is alien to them: “It’s all kinds of them just like it’s all kinds of us”. But the small size of the waiting-room makes all the present closer to each other and Mrs. Turpin forgets that she as a lady has to exemplify  kind-heartedness. Her statements about niggers become more scornful: “It wouldn’t be a way in the world you could get all the niggers back over there. They’d be hiding out and lying down and turning sick on you and waiting and hollering and raring and pitching. It wouldn’t be a way in the world to get them over there”. The gibe is built by means of gradation of the verbs with negative semantic meaning. She uses refrain to intensify her statement. Then she continues: “They ‘re going to stay here where they can go to New York and marry white folks and improve their color. That’s what they all want to do, every one of them, improve their color.” The gradation and refrain make her speech very emotional. The negative metaphor ‘improve their color’ gives Claud the opportunity to build a joke:
“You know what comes of that, don’t you?” Claud asked.
“No, Claud, what?” Mrs. Turpin said.
Claud’s eyes twinkled, “White-faced niggers,” he said with never a smile”. White-face is a cow breed that was prevalent in the south of the USA at that time. The author uses a stylistic device of the hidden negative simile.
Now let’s view the lexical means and stylistic devices used to describe Mrs. Turpin.
-    “She stood looming at the head of the magazine table”. The Participle  looming in this context has a figurative meaning and serves to show a grotesque figure of Mrs. Turpin.
-    Mrs. Turpin was “a living demonstration that the room was inadequate and ridiculous”. This metaphor has an ironic character, because the author at the beginning of the story mocks at her main character.
-    Mrs. Turpin “gave her husband a push down” into a vacant seat with her “firm hand” (grotesque).
-    “… her gaze settled agreeably…” (not look but gaze). Can you imagine this looming huge figure with a firm hand that gazing at all the patients? This synecdoche supplements the previous devices and makes the image of Mrs. Turpin very expressive.
-    In her inner speech Mrs. Turpin “couldn’t understand why a doctor – with as much money as they made charging five dollars a day to just stick their head in the hospital door”. The periphrases with a comic shade like this are usually used in the low colloquial speech.
On the whole the beginning of the story has an ironical shade that reaches by means of gradation in the description of the other man in the room: “as he were asleep or dead or pretending to be so”; metaphor “the highest stack of yellow hair” concerning the nurse’s coiffure; metonymy “her stomach and shoulders shook with laughter”; ellipsis in the description of the child: “He was slumped down in the seat his arms idle at his sides and his eyes idle in his head”; epithet “leathery old woman”; simile “as if they would sit there until Doomsday if nobody called and told them to get up”.
Humorous manner of narration had ceased as soon as Mrs. Turpin began to notice the girl’s look fixed on her.
At the culmination moment in order to show the horror of the situation the author uses a dreadful metonymy: “the row face came crashing across the table toward her, howling. The girl’s fingers sank like clamps into the soft flash of her neck”.
At the second part of the story the author pities Mrs. Turpin. She paints her depression: “Quit your pattin me’, Mrs. Turpin growled”; Mrs. Turpin looked straight ahead at nothing”;  “she was looking straight up as if there were unintelligible handwriting on the ceiling”; she had “an expression of ferocious concentration”; “her face was very dark and heavy”; “she began again and finished this time with a fierce rush of breath”. The images become dark the narration becomes dramatic:  “The image of a razorbaked hog with warts on its face and horns coming out behind its ears snorted into her head”; “the dark protuberance over her eye looked like a miniature tornado cloud which might any moment sweep across the horizon of her brow. Her lower lip protruded dangerously…, she had the look of a woman going single-handed, weaponless, into battle”.
Later on the narration mood changes again as if Mrs. Turpin has straighten herself up and wants to clear things up. The figurative simile with personification tell about where and how fast Mrs. Turpin rushes: “The sun was a deep yellow now like a harvest moon and was riding westward very fast over the far tree line as if it meant to reach the hogs before she did”. She came to her pig parlor.
-    She “glowered down at the hogs”.
-    She “yanked a hose away from Claud”.
-    She looked “like she might have swallowed a mad dog”.
-     “Her wrathful eyes scanned the path”.
-     “She seemed to gather herself up. Her shoulders rose and she drew in her breath”.
“What do you send me a message like that for?” she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” Her free fist was knotted and with the other she gripped the hose, blindly pointing the stream of water in and out of the eye of the old sow whose outraged squeal she did not hear”. Mrs. Turpin has revolted against God. Everything she trusted in was crashed down and now she demands an explanation from God: “Why me? She rumbled. “It’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church…How am I a hog?” she demanded. “Exactly how am I like them? And she jabbed the stream of water at the shoats. “There was plenty of trash there. It didn’t have to be me. If you like trash better, go get yourself some trash then,” she railed. “You could have made me trash. Or a nigger. If trash is what you wanted why didn’t you make me trash?” She shook her fist with the hose in it and a watery snake appeared momentarily in the air. “I could quit working and take it easy and be filthy,” she growled. “Lounge about the sidewalks all day drinking root beer. Dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over my face. I could be nasty. Or you could have made me a nigger. It’s too late for me to be a nigger,” she said with deep sarcasm, “but I could act like one. Lay down in the middle of the road and stop traffic. Roll on the ground.”
The second culmination moment is about to happen. The miraculous changing of the usual scenery serves as a background for it: “In the deepening light everything was taking on a mysterious hue. The pasture was growing a peculiar glassy green and the streak of highway had turned lavender.”
The emotional atmosphere of the narration became heated to the highest degree: “A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do you think you are?” The miraculous changing of the scenery continued (what a wonderful metaphor!): “The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood…There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk.”
And at last Mrs. Turpin gets the visible revelation. The rich and various stylistic devices used by Flannery O’Connor help us to see this grand, miraculous but terrible for Mrs. Turpin scene: “A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upwards from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even  their virtues were being burned away.”
CONCLUSION
The story “Revelation” by Flannery O’Connor is a wonderful work. Flannery O’Connor showed herself as a talented writer that wields skillfully different stylistic devices. Using the variety of them she managed to deliver to readers the main idea of her work: the eternal life is a free gift for those who trust in Jesus; your virtues and good deeds will not give you the salvation. This book is worth to read to enjoy its language and to think of its argument.