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CHAPTER CONTENTS
11 Writing about Fiction
CHAPTER CONTENTS
What Is Fiction?
Readers Guide: Common Forms of Fiction
Reading: A Gentleman’s C
Padgett Powell
310
311
Describing the World: Stories
Reading: Snow
Julia Alvarez
320
Writer at Work
Student Model: The Motherland
Hashim Naseem
Fiction Casebook: Flannery O’Connor
Reading: Revelation
Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor on Writing
Reading: On Her Catholic Faith
Flannery O’Connor
Reading: Excerpt from “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction”:
The Serious Writer and the Tired Reader
Flannery O’Connor
Critical Views
Reading: The Character of Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation” 2005
Louise S. Cowan
312
320
322
322
325
326
339
339
340
341
341
Cotton, Study 1. Courtesy of Jenny Ellerbe, www.jennyellerbe.com.
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CHAPTER 11 WRITING ABOUT FICTION
11 WRITING ABOUT FICTION
What is fiction?
The word fiction comes from the past participle of
the Latin verb fingere, which means “to form” or
“to craft”—and in many ways a fiction is indeed
something that has been crafted. Usually, however,
we use the word to refer to something that is not
true. Nevertheless, for most writers, fiction continues to mean something that one crafts, painstakingly, from a diverse selection of raw materials,
with language. The raw material of fiction—the
stories it tells, the characters who act in them, and
the places where they act—may be drawn from real
life, the author’s imagination, or some combination of the two. No matter the origin, crafting
materials into fiction transforms those materials
into artifact—another word from the Latin, meaning “made by art.” As horror maestro Stephen King
puts it, “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
Fiction and History
In the classical world, the genre of fiction was contrasted to the genre of history in terms of the order
in which events both real and imagined were told
rather than in terms of imagined versus real events.
Today many critics argue that the primary distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not the
degree of truth each genre contains but the conventions and expectations, the way the events are
presented to us. It is certainly possible to distinguish between truth and fiction most of the time:
there are newspapers and histories that are credible
most of the time, and there are plenty of genres of
fiction that are totally imaginary. Nevertheless,
when you read a newspaper headline while waiting
in a supermarket checkout line that reads “Elvis
Dug Up & It Isn’t Him,” you are not likely to
believe a word of it. When you read a historical
novel about the events of the French Revolution,
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Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly
perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF
by contrast, you will likely assume that most of the
events described are true. And even in the most
wildly speculative novel of science fiction, you may
find that a particular character or detail strikes you
as quite realistic—after all, much of science fiction,
too, is drawn from the raw material of the world
around us.
If we cannot judge fiction solely according to
how much truth it contains, then how do we recognize it? As with all genres, we recognize it
through a combination of its own presentation and
self-labeling and our familiarity with generic conventions and expectations. The ancients assumed
that history started at the beginning and recounted
events in chronological order; fiction, by contrast,
started wherever it believed the story could best be
presented. These days, fiction often borrows the
conventions of history and newspaper reporting,
and history and reporting often borrow the conventions of fiction. Fiction is better at some
things—character, psychology, suspense—while
fact-based writing is better at others—recounting
events, making broad historical connections, making its subject appear true-to-life—and writers in
each genre use whatever tools work best for the
story they have to tell.
Types of Fiction
There are two different ways to distinguish
between types of fiction: in terms of genre
(romance, mystery, science fiction) and in terms of
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the form of the text, which is usually determined
according to length (short story, novella, novel).
In general, novels and novellas offer a much
broader variety of formal and thematic combinations; short stories offer structural elegance and
compression of effect. Because the majority of the
fiction selections in this book are short stories, we
outline the basic components of fiction through
short story examples.
The Craft of Fiction
READER’S GUIDE
News as fiction: cover of the 29 June 1999
issue of the Weekly World News, a tabloid
newspaper published between 1979 and 2007.
As an introduction to the craft of fiction, read the
very short story by Padgett Powell that follows
here. Born in 1952, Powell is the author of several
novels, including Edisto and Edisto Revisited, and
many short stories. He teaches creative writing at
the University of Florida, Gainesville. Observe how
“A Gentleman’s C” manages to tell a moving story,
develop two characters, and establish a setting in a
scant 163 words.
Common Forms of Fiction
Form
Conventional Features
Short story
• Length will range from a few sentences to a few dozen pages.
• Text focuses on the events of the plot rather than on description and commentary;
uses dialogue sparingly.
• Narration covers a limited number of characters, settings, and situations.
• There is little or no formal division between parts (although all short stories can be
divided into segments).
• Many short stories conclude with a final twist or revelation.
Novella
• Length will range somewhere between fifty and a hundred pages; often described as
a “long” short story or a “little” novel.
• Relative brevity allows for unity of structure and intensity of focus, while the length
allows for depth and detail.
Novel
• Length may be described as a “longer” story, usually divided into formal segments:
chapters, and sometimes the larger segments of parts and books.
• The narration is greater in scope, either in breadth of events and chronology or in
depth of characterization and detail of description.
• There are multiple, usually intersecting, stories, with often detailed commentary on
the events described.
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Reading
A Gentleman’s C
Padgett Powell
to complete his exams—it was his final term. On
the way home we learned that he had received his
grades, which were low enough in the aggregate to
prevent him from graduating, and reading this
news on the dowdy sofa inside the front door, he
leaned over as if to rest and had a heart attack
and died.
For years I had thought the old man’s passing
away would not affect me, but it did.
My father, trying to finally graduate from college at
sixty-two, came, by curious circumstance, to be
enrolled in an English class I taught, and I was,
perhaps, a bit tougher on him than I was on the
others. Hadn’t he been tougher on me than on other
people’s kids growing up? I gave him a hard, honest,
low C. About what I felt he’d always given me.
We had a death in the family, and my mother
and I traveled to the funeral. My father stayed put
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
1.
2.
3.
4.
Who is the narrator of the story? What is his
perspective on the events described?
Each paragraph narrates a different situation.
What happens in each paragraph?
What has the author left out of the story in
order to make it so short?
The author is in fact a professor of English and
the events narrated may well be true, or they may
be partially true, or they may be totally fabri-
5.
6.
cated. What difference (if any) does the relation
of the events to real life make in your attitude
toward and understanding of the short story?
The final sentence is different in form and tone
from the others. Characterize this difference
and comment on the way it affects your understanding of the short story.
What is the meaning of the title and how does
it relate to the story?
The Materials of Fiction
STORY AND PLOT
From what materials did Powell craft “A Gentleman’s C”? The raw materials of any work of fiction
can be categorized as follows: the story, the character or characters, the setting, and the genre conventions familiar to the writer. From these materials,
the writer will begin to craft a fiction. The initial
impetus to write can come from any one of these
elements, or from all of them at once, but all four
will be present in the finished text.
The process of writing may begin with a story, a
description of a set of events. The events we know
for certain recount, in chronological order, a story:
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1. A father is hard on his son (the narrator).
2. The father enrolls in his son’s English class and
receives a C.
3. A death in the family occurs while the father is
completing the exams of his final semester.
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WRITING EXERCISE: FICTION AND HISTORY
Choose a short newspaper article and rewrite it as a
story
or
Based on your exercise, what are the primary
differences between the conventions of fiction and
the conventions of history?
Choose a brief story from elsewhere in this book
and rewrite it according to the conventions of the
newspaper article.
4. The mother and son attend the funeral while
the father has a heart attack on learning he will
not be able to graduate.
5. The son reacts to his father’s death.
The story also includes inferred events—events
that we can logically assume to have occurred
based on what we are told by the narrator but that
are not actually recounted in the text itself. For
example, we infer that the narrator must have
attended school for years. The sum total of events
that we infer or imagine in fiction is known as the
story world. It can be helpful to characterize the
degree to which the story world is established as
realistic or unrealistic, but remember that this is a
formal assessment rather than a value judgment.
As we will see below, the conventions of realism are
well suited for certain themes and topics, while the
conventions of fantasy or antirealism are well
suited for other themes and topics.
Sometimes our inference about story events
turns out to be incorrect, and often the ending of
a short story will cause us to reevaluate what we
assume has happened. Choosing to omit or delay
a crucial event in a story is one way that writers
shape a narrative. We call the result of this shaping process a fiction’s plot. That is, the story
includes all of the events we are told about and
infer, in chronological order; the plot includes
only what we are told and the order in which we
are told it. Comparing the plot of a text with
what we can reconstruct of its story reveals its
structure—the way it has been put together to
create the illusion of a chain of story events in
our minds as we read.
This is how the plot of “A Gentleman’s C” orders
the story events we presented above, beginning
with the central element of the plot:
1. The narrator’s father receives a C in the narrator’s English class.
2. The narrator describes the events of his childhood with the suggestion that one event led to
the next.
3. The father is facing his last semester.
4. The father dies when he learns he will not
graduate.
5. The story describes the effect of the father’s
death on the narrator.
The plot tells most of the story in chronological
sequence, but it interrupts this order to provide
background information from the past. This is a
common pattern in fiction; however, story events can
be combined in any conceivable manner. Historical
novels, for example, will often jump back and forth
in time, putting dates at the head of each chapter to
keep the reader from becoming disoriented.
When reading a narrative, pay close attention to
how it establishes temporal relations between
events.
• Are events recounted in chronological order?
• How much time passes between specific plot
events?
• How clear is the temporal relation between each
event recounted?
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When the temporal relation between events is
marked precisely, as in a historical novel, we tend to
pay close attention to the plot and the sequence in
which the events occur. When the temporal relation
is less clear, we tend to focus more on character, setting, and other thematic aspects. The extreme
brevity of “A Gentleman’s C” does not provide the
space to establish strongly the temporal relation
between events. We neither know how much time
passed between the “C” and the final semester, nor
do we know if the final sentence refers to the period
immediately following the father’s death or to some
later point. In contrast, the relation between the
events in the second paragraph is extremely precise,
because it is crucial for the meaning of the narrative that we know that the funeral and the heart
attack occurred simultaneously.
CHARACTER
Every narrative includes at least one character, or
actor, in its events; “A Gentleman’s C” includes
four: the narrator, the narrator’s father and
mother, and the relative who dies. We are provided
no information about the latter two characters
beyond the mere fact of their existence. These two
characters fulfill necessary plot functions: the
funeral motivates the father’s solitary death; the
mother’s existence establishes that the father is
married rather than divorced or a widower. We call
such figures minor characters, and while they are
not always as underdeveloped as this pair, minor
characters do usually fade in comparison to the
principal characters. At the same time, however,
they provide important information; here, for
example, you can argue that the lack of attention
they receive reveals to us how much the narrator’s
attention is fixed on the father. Minor characters
often provide contrast that helps to define the
principal characters, but often, as here, the contrast
is implied by the way they are described rather
than explicitly stated.
Short stories tend to develop character through
action rather than description. This requires the
reader to piece together the details, often with
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incomplete information, and “A Gentleman’s C” is
a good example of this tendency. We are provided
almost no information about the narrator or the
father either except for the specific circumstances
of the “C,” its origins, and its consequences. We are
left to infer the father’s character and motivation
from what we are told. Sixty-two is an odd age to
return to school. The likeliest possibility is that the
father has taken early retirement, but there are
other plausible explanations as well. That he is a
“C” student is also a significant feature of this
character, as is the fact that he has a heart attack
when discovering he will not be able to graduate,
but we do not have enough information to know
what these facts mean, just as we do not know why
he was hard on the young narrator.
When you are thinking critically about character,
remember that meaning in literature is made less
through what is said directly than what is done and
what is said between the lines. When characters
speak and act, note the context: with whom are
they speaking and with what possible motivations
are they acting? If we view a character in a single
context only, we must be especially conscious of
how that context influences the presentation of
that character—this is the case of the father in “A
Gentleman’s C.” If we are provided multiple contexts or the objective presentation of an omniscient
narrator we will have a stronger basis for a comparative assessment of the character.
NARRATION
It is often the case that the character we are told
the most about is not the main character, especially
when a fiction is recounted by a first-person narrator, usually identified by the use of the pronoun
I. By the end of “A Gentleman’s C,” we in fact have
learned far more about the narrator than we have
about the father, even though he is the title character. This is not only because of the childhood
memory in the first paragraph and the concession
of the final sentence, but because every choice
made in crafting this story has been made in terms
of the person who is narrating it. If we reflect care-
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fully on what is happening in the second paragraph, we realize that there is no way for the narrator to know what caused the father’s heart attack,
or to be able to reconstruct the death scene with
the precision it is recounted in the short story.
There is, for that matter, no objective reason for
the narrator to feel that the father’s “C” was the
ultimate cause of his failure to graduate—there
must have been plenty of other low grades as well
that had nothing to do with him.
Because we have no perspective on the story events
beyond what the narrator presents us, we cannot be
certain what motivated his assumption of responsibility for his father’s fate. What we can be certain of
is what the plot does show: the narrator has created a
causal chain of events in his mind (“C”—failure to
graduate—heart attack) that has no demonstrable
basis in fact. From the basis of this argument, a textual analysis could then posit an interpretation about
the narrator’s motivation in creating this chain of
events: guilt would be the most likely explanation,
but others could be argued as well.
When a first-person narrator is also a primary
character in the plot, the presentation of events
will usually be affected by the narrator’s subjectivity, or personality and motivations. Sometimes, the first-person narrator will be fairly
objective; at other times, as in “A Gentleman’s C,”
the first-person narrator will present personal
conclusions as if they were facts. At other times,
we find a partially unreliable narrator, one
whose reliability we are never certain about. We
may also encounter a wholly unreliable narrator, as in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club
(and the movie adapted from it), in which the
relationship between the narrator and another
major character turns out to be completely different than we had been led to believe. Faced
with a first-person narrator who is a primary
character, our first task will be to decide how
much we should trust that character’s version of
events. We may also have to revise our initial
assessment of a character after learning more
about him or her later in the story.
Fiction can also be narrated by a minor character
that functions more as an observer than as a participant in the plot events; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
novel The Great Gatsby is a famous example. Imagine, for example, how the relationship between the
narrator and the father in “A Gentleman’s C” might
appear differently if the mother were narrating.
Most of the time, the more a narrator participates
in the plot, the more subjective the narrator’s point
of view will be. Remember, however, that some fiction will play against our expectations: the narrator
who portrays himself as a minor actor in a crime
may turn out to be the perpetrator; the narrator
who appears to be providing a wildly paranoid
account of events may turn out to have been justified after all, like the child nobody believes until it
is almost too late.
Every first-person narration implicitly addresses
the reader; in second-person narration, the reader
is addressed directly as “you.” Because it is difficult
to sustain the illusion of the story world when the
narrator is directly addressing the reader in this
way, such writing tends to be categorized as selfconscious fiction. In Margaret Atwood’s “Happy
Endings” (p. 299), for example, the narrator
addresses the reader directly, making no effort to
persuade us of the reality of the story world, for
she is more concerned with how we tell stories and
the ways in which story conventions affect our own
lives than with persuading us to accept literary
characters as real.
Range and Depth of Narration
Many fictions that stress the objective reality of
their story world are recounted by a third-person
narrator from an omniscient, or all-knowing,
point of view. Rather than a character in the story
world, an omniscient narrator stands outside of it
and is able to observe the actions and motivations
of every character within it. There are many
degrees of omniscience available to the writer, and
we can categorize them in terms of the range of
narration. Many third-person narrators can be
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qualified as possessing limited, or selective omniscience: they may know a lot about some or all of
the characters, but not everything, or they may
limit their observations to only a single character,
setting, or time. When analyzing a third-person
narrative, it is important both to determine the
range of omniscience attributed to the narrator
and to define precisely the limits to the narrator’s
omniscience.
Point of view can also be characterized in terms
of depth of narration—the degree to which the
narration enters into the minds and motivations of
its characters. Does it observe only the surface of
events and characters’ actions, as in Edgar Allan
Poe’s tale of horror, “The Cask of Amontillado”, or
does it delve more deeply into motivations and
psychology? Depth of narration is distinct from
range of narration. An omniscient narrator may
primarily observe the story world or may comment
at length upon its mechanisms and motivations. A
selectively omniscient third-person narrator or
first-person narrator may portray the world objectively or may be subject to the perceptions of a
particular character. Indirect free discourse refers
to a third-person narration that reproduces the
inner thoughts and perceptions of a character or
characters primarily as narration rather than
through dialogue, as in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The
White Heron”. When rendered in the first person,
these inner thoughts and perceptions are known as
internal monologue, as in Dorothy Parker’s short
story, “The Waltz”, or, when closer to a representation of unformed thought processes, stream-ofconsciousness.
Temporal Relations between the Narrator
and Plot Events
In addition to range and depth, narration also
includes the temporal relation of the narrator to the
events being narrated. The most common temporal relation is retrospective: the narrator recounts
events that occurred in the past. Looking back, the
narrator presents his or her version of what hap316
pened. This is the situation in “A Gentleman’s C”—
every sentence records a past event or emotion in
terms of the narrator’s understanding of its significance. The other temporal relation we are likely to
encounter is simultaneous: the narrator recounts
events as they occur in the present. Simultaneous
temporal relations generally have the effect of
increasing our sense of participation in the events
as they unfold, and in decreasing our sense of the
narrator’s influence on their meaning.
SETTING
The events of a story can take place anywhere—
from the confinement of a single room to the
streets of a metropolis to the expanse of outer
space—and at any time from the present to the distant past to the future. Setting refers to the when
and where of a story; basically, it includes whatever
information does not fall under the purview of plot
and character. Often given prominence in longer
fiction where—as the nineteenth-century French
novelist Honoré de Balzac maintained—the careful
description of a room could tell you everything you
needed to know about the character who inhabited
it, setting is used more sparingly in the short story.
Regardless of how sparingly it is used, however, setting provides essential context, atmosphere, and figurative meaning to any work of fiction.
Let’s turn once again to “A Gentleman’s C.” Setting
is filled in very broadly—the college classroom
where father and narrator meet, the distant location
of the funeral—with one exceptional detail: the
“dowdy sofa inside the front door” on which the
father is leaning as he suffers his fatal heart attack.
What motivates this detail is a matter for interpretation; your initial analysis would single out its peculiarity in terms of the pattern established during the
rest of the text (lack of precise setting). The singular
appearance of this detail in the plot suggests a figurative meaning, associating the “dowdiness” of the
sofa with some aspect of the father’s character.
In other short stories you will find equally sparse
settings; in others, you will find that setting plays a
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prominent role. In Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson,” a famous New York toy shop provides crucial
context for the characters’ actions; T. C. Boyle considered the primary setting of “Greasy Lake” so
important that he used its name for the story’s
title; the plot events of Julia Alvarez’s “Snow”
(p. 320) would be incomprehensible without the
historical backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Whether setting takes center stage or appears only
as carefully selected detail, you should never neglect it when constructing an argument about the
meaning of a text.
GENRE CONVENTIONS
The conventions of literary genres are a further raw
material in any fiction. When “A Gentleman’s C”
begins with the words “My father” it immediately
raises a set of expectations in the reader about the
story that is to follow. When the advanced age of
the father is introduced, the specter of death hovers
over the story as well. And “A Gentleman’s C” does
indeed meet these expectations, although in its
own way. We expect plots from first-person narrators to be different than those from third-person
narrators, and different plots depending on the setting as well as the gender, age, race, and social class
of the primary characters.
Genre expectations are an efficient and unobtrusive means of involving the reader immediately in the events of the fiction without the
need for excessive exposition or introductory
explanations.
In addition to general conventions governing
specific characters and situations, you should also
be mindful of the more narrowly defined genres
discussed above. A short story beginning with the
description of a lone cowboy riding in the high
plains will likely develop in one of the handful of
directions governed by the western. But fictions
can also raise expectations so as to confuse them or
they can use genre expectations to fill in details
around the story world they are describing.
Whether general or specific, be attentive to the way
a fictional text uses the raw material of genre conventions to guide and focus your responses.
The Tools of Fiction
Decisions about what materials to use and how to
use them constitute the primary tool for writing a
work of fiction: they provide the structure, the
actors, the spatial context, and the social context.
These are all decisions that can be made in the
planning stages of a work of fiction; however, there
are other tools that come into play during the
actual process of writing. In order to craft a work
of fiction, writers must use the tools of language to
bring to life the images and ideas imagined in their
head. To study the results of that transformation is
the stuff of literary analysis.
DICTION
As discussed above, diction is a matter of word
choice and word order. Look again at the first sentence of “A Gentleman’s C”: “My father, trying
finally to graduate from college at sixty-two, came,
by curious circumstance, to be enrolled in an English class I taught, and I was, perhaps, a bit
tougher on him than I was on the others.” Like the
placement of words in a line of poetry, the order of
words in a sentence guides our attention. The
opening words (“My father”) are always the primary focus, while participial phrases (“trying
finally to graduate from college at sixty-two”),
prepositional phrases (“by curious circumstances”), and examples of apposition, or the addition of parallel terms separated by commas, channel our mind in various directions as we make our
way through the sentence. Parallel constructions—
notice how “by curious circumstances” in the first
independent clause is mirrored by “perhaps” in the
second independent clause—develop rhythmic
patterns and associations.
Word choice is an equally significant tool for
making meaning out of the raw materials of narrative. We commented above on the narrative function
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WRITING EXERCISE: WHAT’S YOUR POINT OF VIEW?
Retell the events of “A Gentleman’s C” from one of
the following points of view:
•
•
•
The father
The mother
A student in the same class as the father
who knows the events of the stories from
hearsay only
of the “dowdy sofa”; it is the choice of the adjective
“dowdy” in a text extremely short on adjectives that
makes the setting of the sofa stand out. Word choice
creates patterns and associations just as word order
does. Patterns and associations are formed both by
the usual choices a text makes (lack of adjectives)
and by the exceptions to those norms (“dowdy”).
Once you notice the first exception to a pattern,
start looking for parallel occurrences. Looking back,
we can see that another noteworthy use of adjectives
occurs in the phrase “hard, honest, low C,” a phrase
that echoes in the repetition of “low” in the third
paragraph. So, the two moments the narrator
judged worth elaborating through adjectives also
turn out to be the two moments of the story in
which the “C” plays a key role.
IMAGERY AND LITERARY DEVICES
The patterns formed by diction provide the thematic backbone of a work of fiction, but that
backbone is usually fleshed out by the use of
imagery and literary devices, or figures of
speech. Patterns of diction tend to focus our
attention on the relation between characters and
events; imagery and literary devices establish figurative meanings that help us to interpret those
characters and events. Figurative meanings are
most commonly attributed to aspects of setting,
especially objects, but they may also be attributed
to particular characters and events. Whenever we
can establish that some aspect of a fiction takes on
significance in addition to its literal meaning, we
say that it has a figurative meaning. The “C” in “A
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•
•
A third-person omniscient narrator
A police detective who discovered the body
when called to the father’s house by a suspicious neighbor
Gentleman’s C” clearly means far more to the narrator than a letter on a page or even a grade for a
class; it somehow encapsulates the meaning of the
relationship with the father. Moreover, it imparts a
particular quality to that relationship, a quality
that changes through the telling of the story. It
begins as the narrator had long conceived the
relationship—“hard, honest, low”—but it ends
with a less quantifiable sense of guilt presented to
the reader in an image: the father dead on the sofa
with the grade clutched in his hand. The fact that
this image may exist only in the imagination of
the narrator only makes it a more significant clue
to his state of mind.
We use the term imagery to refer to any element
of setting or character that takes on a figurative
significance. Such imagery is usually signaled in a
text through its diction, as in the adjectives in “A
Gentleman’s C,” or through its apparent redundancy in terms of the plot information it supplies.
Much of literary imagery is based in the patterned
use of diction; the most common of these patterns
and repetitions were described and categorized by
the ancient Greeks and Romans as rhetorical figures, or literary devices.
Figurative meaning is often referred to as symbolism, but this term can be confusing. A symbol is
one type of literary device: an image whose meaning has become fixed by convention, such as the
flag, a bald eagle, or a rose. When a symbol
becomes so fixed in meaning that that it ceases to
function figuratively and has only a literal meaning,
writers call it a cliché and tend to avoid using it,
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WHAT IS FICTION?
WRITING EXERCISE: WRITING IN STYLE
Here is a barebones story based on the situations
described in Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings”
(p. 299): “John and Mary meet. John and Mary
marry. John and Mary die.” Retell the events of this
story, elaborating its world as required, in the style
appropriate to one of the following genres or
situations:
preferring figures whose meaning they have more
control over. Like the “Gentleman’s C,” the titular
objects in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The White Heron”
are emphasized to such a degree in the story that
they take on as much significance as any of the
characters. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to
call them symbols, because their meaning is wholly
created and explained within the context of the plot
rather than in reference to a previously existing definition. The meaning of imagery is primarily determined within the text through patterns of diction
and narration. Raw materials will sometimes be
used for their symbolic meaning—the early 1960s
setting of the Cuban Missile Crisis in “Snow” is one
such example—and your analysis of the text should
incorporate the sense of that symbolism into the
other textual patterns.
STYLE
By style, we refer to the way a text brings its patterns and associations together into a cohesive
whole. The lack of adjectives, of descriptive
phrases, and of range and depth of narration
characterizes “A Gentleman’s C” as being written
in an objective style. The choice of style can powerfully affect our understanding of character and
events. Imagine, for example, if the narrator
recounting the events of “A Gentleman’s C” were
hysterically wracked with grief over the father’s
death, rather than being tightly controlled in
manner. Style is not identical with theme or argument, however; the breaks in stylistic patterns
may suggest the opposite of what appears on the
•
•
•
•
A murder mystery
A romance novel
A first-person narration by either John or
Mary, addicted to hallucinogenic drugs
A first-person narration by either John or
Mary, who is a cyborg, part person and part
machine.
surface. To analyze style, use the tools of critical
thinking:
1. Characterize the general style of a text or portion of text.
a. Does a text have a consistent style
throughout—what is often referred to as a
voice—or does the style vary?
b. Can you discover any likely motivation for
variations in style?
c. Using analytical words such as “objective”
or “subjective,” list the patterns and characteristics of each style. Avoid evaluative
words such as “brilliant,” “flowery,” and
“boring,” which can have a different
meaning for each reader.
2. Look for breaks in the style you have identified, and try to identify possible thematic patterns established by these breaks.
There are many stylistic conventions in literature, and the style of many works of fiction may be
wholly or partially influenced by these conventions. Particular narrative points of view are commonly associated with particular styles of writing.
Objective forms of narration tend to employ a flat,
rational style, as in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,”
while more subjective forms tend to employ a
wider range of adjectives, imagery, and literary
devices to reflect the greater subjectivity of the narrator as in T. C. Boyle’s “Greasy Lake.” But, again,
other texts play with our expectations of style to
surprise or momentarily to confuse us. Specific literary genres also have specific stylistic conventions
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just as they have conventions of plot, character, and
point of view, and these conventions can create
certain expectations that will be met, confounded,
or confused.
The tools of fiction, like the raw materials crafted
by them, can be used to recall the meanings conventionally associated with them, or to derive
meaning from the ways they diverge from those
conventions. The majority of fictions, like the
majority of literary texts, employ a mix of both
strategies. They use what is familiar to settle us
into a particular story world, and they use what is
unfamiliar or surprising to create the set of meanings unique to that world.
Describing the world: stories
Unlike the other genres we study in this book, we
categorize fiction according to the kinds of events
(mystery, romance, science fiction) it narrates
rather than the specific forms it takes. Moreover,
within these broad categories, we find an enormous range of possible results of the writer’s combination of the different materials and tools of fiction. As the American short-story writer John
Cheever once said, “Fiction is experimentation;
when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.”
The stories in this book range in time over the last
two centuries and in space around the world; collectively, they demonstrate how many different
effects the fiction writer can achieve with the mate-
Good fiction reveals feeling, refined events, locates
importance and, thought its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience
of living our own lives.
—VINCENT CANBY
rials of plot, character, point of view, and setting,
and the tools of diction, imagery, literary devices,
and style. What all these stories share, as the late
contemporary American writer David Foster Wallace said about fiction in general, is that they’re
about “what it is to be a human being.”
Reading
Snow
Julia Alvarez b. 1950
Born in New York City, Julia Alvarez spent her childhood in the Dominican Republic,
returning to New York with her family as political refugees when she was ten. She completed her undergraduate education at Middlebury College and received an MFA from
Syracuse University, and taught at various schools before returning to Middlebury, where
she has been a professor of English since 1988. Alvarez began publishing poetry in the mid-1980s; her first
novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, portrayed the lives of Dominican immigrants in New York,
and incorporated the previously published story “Snow”; the continuing story of the main character is the subject of her third novel, Yo! As you read Julia Alvarez’s “Snow,” consider how she uses description to establish
the setting and context of her very short story with consummate efficiency.
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READING
Our first year in New York we rented a small
apartment with a Catholic school nearby, taught
by the Sisters of Charity, hefty women in long
black gowns and bonnets that made them look
peculiar, like dolls in mourning. I liked them a lot,
especially my grandmotherly fourth-grade teacher,
Sister Zoe. I had a lovely name, she said, and she
had me teach the whole class how to pronounce it.
Yo-landa. As the only immigrant in my class, I was
put in a special seat in the first row by the window,
apart from the other children, so that Sister Zoe
could tutor me without disturbing them. Slowly,
she enunciated the new words I was to repeat:
laundromat, cornflakes, subway, snow.
Soon I picked up enough English to
understand holocaust was in the air. Sister Zoe
explained to a wide-eyed classroom what was
happening in Cuba. Russian missiles were being
assembled, trained supposedly on New York City.
President Kennedy, looking worried too, was on the
television at home, explaining we might have to go
to war against the Communists. At school, we had
air-raid drills: An ominous bell would go off and
we’d file into the hall, fall to the floor, cover our
heads with our coats, and imagine our hair falling
out, the bones in our arms going soft. At home,
Mami and my sisters and I said a rosary for world
5
peace. I heard new vocabulary: nuclear bomb,
radioactive fallout, bomb shelter. Sister Zoe
explained how it would happen. She drew a picture
of a mushroom on the blackboard and dotted a
flurry of chalk marks for the dusty fallout that
would kill us all.
The months grew cold, November, December.
It was dark when I got up in the morning, frosty
when I followed my breath to school. One morning,
as I sat at my desk daydreaming out the window, I
saw dots in the air like the ones Sister Zoe had
drawn—random at first, then lots and lots. I
shrieked, “Bomb! Bomb!” Sister Zoe jerked around,
her full black skirt ballooning as she hurried to my
side. A few girls began to cry.
But then Sister Zoe’s shocked look faded.
“Why, Yolanda dear, that’s snow!” She laughed.
“Snow.”
“Snow,” I repeated. I looked out the window
warily. All my life I had heard about the white
crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter.
From my desk I watched the fine powder dust the
sidewalk and parked cars below. Each flake was
different, Sister Zoe said, like a person, irreplaceable
and beautiful.
[1984]
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
1.
2.
3.
What are the most important elements of
description in the story? What is the function
of each element within the story’s form?
The words Yolanda learns are dense with the
symbolism of American culture. Compare the
two lists of English words she mentions. What
motivates the choice of these words to stand for
the immigrant’s new culture?
The final paragraph marks a stylistic shift from
the rest of the story and a change of tone from
4.
the prior narration. How would you characterize this change?
“Snow” is the title of the story; the figurative
meaning of this image underlies the story and
its themes of immigration and unfamiliarity
with a new language and culture. Beyond the
girl’s literal misunderstanding of the falling
snow, what figurative meaning is developed
through this image?
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Writer at work
A Descriptive Essay
Description is a fundamental tool of the fiction
writer; it is also a key component of a number of
different essays. To focus on the skill of description, Hashim Naseem’s class was assigned a twopage descriptive essay. Without concern for narra-
tive, the students were asked to describe a person, a
setting, or a thing in such a way as to provide a
vivid impression of its defining characteristics. As
you read Hashim’s essay, consider the choices he
made in writing his description, and what choices
you would have made given the same subject.
Student Model
Naseem 1
Hashim Naseem
English Composition 2
Professor Frank
5 September 2009
The Motherland
I am sitting down outside of my grandmother’s house by Ghizri Road in Karachi,
Pakistan. I am observing the lifestyle of the people that live here so I can gain a better understanding of where I came from, where my parents lived most of their lives,
and why they chose to leave our motherland to come to America.
There is no artificial cement or asphalt to cover the true beauty of Mother
Nature. The ground consists of soft, powder-like sand the color of the desert with a
few anomalies of dark brown patches amongst it. There are rocks emerging from the
sand in absolute randomness with their rough and edgy texture, with the appearance
of what seems to be a polished gray, almost silver-like surface. There is a calm that
comes with the cool breeze, a sense of belonging, a sense of understanding. In the
sky there is the blazing sun, a white circle surrounded by an intense ring of yellow
which emits unbearable heat making it impossible to walk barefoot. The kids from
the neighborhood have become immune to the heat. You can tell as they run around
barefoot because they cannot afford shoes. I look down on my Jordans, disgusted by
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WRITER AT WORK
Naseem 2
the fact that I spent over a hundred dollars, when the children out here have to adapt
to the harsh conditions of poverty.
There are people, all of the same descent, walking around half naked with scars
over their bodies and their ribcages exposed due to lack of proper nutrition. I wonder how life would have been had my parents not come to America. Would I have
been among the men walking around, with scars over my body and my skeletal
structure exposed due to hunger? My mind trembles even to consider it. As I begin
to feel sorrow and pity for the people who have had to endure this hardship, I am
overwhelmed by the happiness of the children. You can sense the joy of the children
in the air almost as if it had a texture and can be cut through with a knife. Some
children are flying kites, others are playing “lattoo,” a game where a pear-shaped
piece of wood, with ridges on the surface and a nail sticking out from the bottom, is
spun on the floor with a piece of white string as quickly as humanly possible.
The smell of the gutter is so intense that it seems like you were sitting inside of it.
Up until this day, I would have squeezed my nostrils if I had smelled such an awful
odor, but now I take in as much as I can to remind myself of the smell of the motherland. Regardless of the dirty water and the stench of the sewage system, which is
the norm in most of the country, some people in Pakistan wouldn’t trade living there
for the world.
My parents decided to move, my father mainly. He thought we would live a better
life in America. In terms of our financial situation, he was definitely right. I live in a
three-bedroom and two-and-a-half bathroom apartment with just my parents. I
have a 42′′ Sony television set with an Onkyo 6.1 surround sound system and a sixdisc DVD player in my living room. Compared to my cousins in Pakistan, I am living
large. I think it would have been better to move a few years later. That way I could
have grown up in my country and would have had somewhere to call home. Pakistan
is my home, but all I have really seen is the poverty for which it is famous. I realized
that in America, money is the be all and end all of everything. In my country, money
is just something you use to survive physically.
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Naseem 3
When someone dies in Pakistan, the entire neighborhood cooks for the family of
the deceased to help ease the pain regardless of the financial situation of the giver.
With love, one can survive the many struggles and obstacles life has in store for us.
That is what I learned that day on the sand outside my grandmother’s house.
Children playing at Karachi, Pakistan, in 2006. The largest port, financial center,
and most populous city in Pakistan, Karachi has an arid hot climate. Like most
world-class cities, it also has a sizeable underclass of its estimated 15 million
inhabitants living in poverty.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
1.
2.
324
What are the more successful elements of
description in Hashim’s essay? Why? What are
the less successful elements? Why?
Conduct research on a short story that has been
incorporated into a novel—Julia Alvarez’s
“Snow” is one possible choice; Tim O’Brien’s
“The Things They Carried” is another. Write an
essay comparing the short story on its own and
as a part of the larger text of a novel.
3.
4.
Are there elements in Hashim’s essay that do
not belong in a strictly descriptive essay? To
what form of essay would they belong?
If you were going to revise this material as a
short story, similar to Alvarez’s “Snow,” how
would you do it? What would you take out?
What would you add? How else would you
change the essay?
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FICTION CASEBOOK: FLANNERY O’CONNOR
WRITING EXERCISE: THE POWER OF DESCRIPTION
1.
Choose a person, place, or thing that you know
extremely well, or that you can observe directly.
In preparation for writing, make a list of the
defining qualities of your subject: What makes
it different from other people, places, or things?
What makes it worth writing about? In 1 to
2 pages, write a detailed description of your
chosen subject. Try to impart the defining qualities of your subject solely through a description, without relating any events involving it,
and without overt commentary or analysis.
2.
3.
Reflect on the writing process. Which part was
easiest? Which part was most difficult? How
satisfied are you with your description? What
works about it? What do you think requires
further revision?
How would you revise your essay as a short
story with the description as its primary setting? What would you take out? What would
you add? How else would you have to change
the essay?
DESCRIBING THE WORLD: TOPICS FOR ESSAYS
1.
2.
3.
4.
Choose a short story and analyze its use of
description.
Compare the use of point of view in two or
three stories included in this book.
Compare the use of setting in two or three stories included in this book.
Compare a short story and the novel into
which it was expanded or in which it was
included (“Snow” is one possible choice).
5.
6.
Compare a short story on its own to its place
within a collection in which it was included.
Write an essay outlining the conventions of a
specific genre of fiction and ways in which several stories employ those conventions.
Fiction casebook: Flannery O’Connor
Mary Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) was born in
Savannah, Georgia, but spent most of her life in
the small town of Milledgeville. While attending
Georgia State College for Women, she won a local
reputation for her fledgling stories and satiric cartoons. After graduating in 1945, she went on to
study at the University of Iowa, where she earned
an M.F.A. in 1947. Diagnosed in 1950 with disseminated lupus, the same incurable illness that had
killed her father, O’Connor returned home and
spent the last decade of her life living with her
mother in Milledgeville. Back on the family dairy
farm, she wrote, maintained an extensive literary
correspondence, raised peacocks, and underwent
medical treatment. When her illness occasionally
went into a period of remission, she made trips to
lecture and read her stories to college audiences.
Her health declined rapidly after surgery early in
1964 for an unrelated complaint. She died at
thirty-nine.
O’Connor is unusual among modern American
writers in the depth of her Christian vision. A
devout Roman Catholic, she attended mass daily
while growing up and living in the largely Protestant South. As a latter-day satirist in the manner of
Jonathan Swift, O’Connor levels the eye of an
uncompromising moralist on the violence and
spiritual disorder of the modern world, focusing
on what she calls “the action of grace in territory
held largely by the devil.” She is sometimes called a
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CHAPTER 11 WRITING ABOUT FICTION
“Southern Gothic” writer because of her fascination with grotesque incidents and characters.
Throughout her career she depicted the South as a
troubled region in which the social, racial, and
religious status quo that had existed since before
the Civil War was coming to a violent end. Despite
the inherent seriousness of her religious and social
themes, O’Connor’s mordant and frequently outrageous humor is everywhere apparent. Her combination of profound vision and dark comedy is
the distinguishing characteristic of her literary
sensibilities.
O’Connor’s published work includes two short
novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It
Away (1960), and two collections of short stories,
A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything
That Rises Must Converge, published posthumously
in 1965. A collection of essays and miscellaneous
prose, Mystery and Manners (1969), and her
selected letters, The Habit of Being (1979), reveal an
innate cheerfulness and engaging personal warmth
that are not always apparent in her fiction. The
Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor was posthumously awarded the National Book Award in 1971.
Reading
Revelation
1965
The doctor’s waiting room, which was very small,
was almost full when the Turpins entered and
Mrs. Turpin, who was very large, made it look even
smaller by her presence. She stood looming at the
head of the magazine table set in the center of it, a
living demonstration that the room was inadequate
and ridiculous. Her little bright black eyes took in
all the patients as she sized up the seating situation.
There was one vacant chair and a place on a sofa
occupied by a blond child in a dirty blue romper
who should have been told to move over and
make room for the lady. He was five or six, but
Mrs. Turpin saw at once that no one was going to
tell him to move over. He was slumped down in the
seat, his arms idle at his sides and his eyes idle in
his head; his nose ran unchecked.
Mrs. Turpin put a firm hand on Claud’s
shoulder and said in a voice that included anyone
who wanted to listen, “Claud, you sit in that chair
there,” and gave him a push down into the vacant
one. Claud was florid and bald and sturdy,
somewhat shorter than Mrs. Turpin, but he sat
326
5
down as if he were accustomed to doing what she
told him to.
Mrs. Turpin remained standing. The only man
in the room besides Claud was a lean stringy old
fellow with a rusty hand spread out on each knee,
whose eyes were closed as if he were asleep or dead
or pretending to be so as not to get up and offer her
his seat. Her gaze settled agreeably on a well-dressed
grey-haired lady whose eyes met hers and whose
expression said: if that child belonged to me, he
would have some manners and move over—there’s
plenty of room there for you and him too.
Claud looked up with a sigh and made as if
to rise.
“Sit down,” Mrs. Turpin said. “You know you’re
not supposed to stand on that leg. He has an ulcer
on his leg,” she explained.
Claud lifted his foot onto the magazine table and
rolled his trouser leg up to reveal a purple swelling on
a plump marble-white calf.
“My!” the pleasant lady said. “How did you
do that?”
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10
15
“A cow kicked him,” Mrs. Turpin said.
“Goodness!” said the lady.
Claud rolled his trouser leg down.
“Maybe the little boy would move over,” the
lady suggested, but the child did not stir.
“Somebody will be leaving in a minute,”
Mrs. Turpin said. She could not 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 and look at you—couldn’t afford
a decent-sized waiting room. This one was hardly
bigger than a garage. The table was cluttered with
limp-looking magazines and at one end of it there
was a big green glass ash tray full of cigaret butts
and cotton wads with little blood spots on them. If
she had had anything to do with the running of the
place, that would have been emptied every so often.
There were no chairs against the wall at the head of
the room. It had a rectangular-shaped panel in it
that permitted a view of the office where the nurse
came and went and the secretary listened to the
radio. A plastic fern in a gold pot sat in the opening
and trailed its fronds down almost to the floor. The
radio was softly playing gospel music.
Just then the inner door opened and a nurse
with the highest stack of yellow hair Mrs. Turpin
had ever seen put her face in the crack and called
for the next patient. The woman sitting beside
Claud grasped the two arms of her chair and
hoisted herself up; she pulled her dress free from
her legs and lumbered through the door where the
nurse had disappeared.
Mrs. Turpin eased into the vacant chair, which
held her tight as a corset. “I wish I could reduce,”
she said, and rolled her eyes and gave a comic sigh.
“Oh, you aren’t fat,” the stylish lady said.
“Ooooo I am too,” Mrs. Turpin said. “Claud he
eats all he wants to and never weighs over one
hundred and seventy-five pounds, but me I just
look at something good to eat and I gain some
weight,” and her stomach and shoulders shook with
laughter. “You can eat all you want to, can’t you,
Claud?” she asked, turning to him.
20
Claud only grinned.
“Well, as long as you have such a good
disposition,” the stylish lady said, “I don’t think it
makes a bit of difference what size you are. You just
can’t beat a good disposition.”
Next to her was a fat girl of eighteen or
nineteen, scowling into a thick blue book which
Mrs. Turpin saw was entitled Human Development.
The girl raised her head and directed her scowl at
Mrs. Turpin as if she did not like her looks. She
appeared annoyed that anyone should speak while
she tried to read. The poor girl’s face was blue with
acne and Mrs. Turpin thought how pitiful it was to
have a face like that at that age. She gave the girl a
friendly smile but the girl only scowled the harder.
Mrs. Turpin herself was fat but she had always had
good skin, and, though she was forty-seven years
old, there was not a wrinkle in her face except
around her eyes from laughing too much.
Next to the ugly girl was the child, still in
exactly the same position, and next to him was a
thin leathery old woman in a cotton print dress.
She and Claud had three sacks of chicken feed in
their pump house that was in the same print. She
had seen from the first that the child belonged with
the old woman. She could tell by the way they sat—
kind of vacant and white-trashy, as if they would sit
there until Doomsday if nobody called and told
them to get up. And at right angles but next to the
well-dressed pleasant lady was 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. Worse than
niggers any day, Mrs. Turpin thought.
The gospel hymn playing was, “When
I looked up and He looked down,” and
Mrs. Turpin, who knew it, supplied the last line
mentally, “And wona these days I know I’ll we-eara
crown.”
Without appearing to, Mrs. Turpin always
noticed people’s feet. The well-dressed lady had on
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red and grey suede shoes to match her dress.
Mrs. Turpin had on her good black patent leather
pumps. The ugly girl had on Girl Scout shoes and
heavy socks. The old woman had on tennis shoes
and the white-trashy mother had on what appeared
to be bedroom slippers, black straw with gold braid
threaded through them—exactly what you would
have expected her to have on.
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 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.
Next to the child’s mother was a red-headed
youngish woman, reading one of the magazines and
working a piece of chewing gum, hell for leather, as
Claud would say. Mrs. Turpin could not see the
woman’s feet. She was not white-trash, just
common. Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself
at night naming the classes of people. On the
bottom of the heap were most colored people, not
the kind she would have been if she had been one,
but most of them; then next to them—not above,
just away from—were the white-trash; then above
them were the home-owners, and above them the
home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud
belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a
lot of money and much bigger houses and much
more land. But here the complexity of it would
begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with
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25
30
a lot of money were common and ought to be
below she and Claud and some of the people who
had good blood had lost their money and had to
rent and then there were colored people who
owned their homes and land as well. There was a
colored dentist in town who had two red Lincolns
and a swimming pool and a farm with registered
white-face cattle on it. Usually by the time she had
fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling
and roiling around in her head, and she would
dream they were all crammed in together in a box
car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.
“That’s a beautiful clock,” she said and nodded
to her right. It was a big wall clock, the face encased
in a brass sunburst.
“Yes, it’s very pretty,” the stylish lady said
agreeably. “And right on the dot too,” she added,
glancing at her watch.
The ugly girl beside her cast an eye upward
at the clock, smirked, then looked directly at
Mrs. Turpin and smirked again. Then she returned
her eyes to her book. She was obviously the lady’s
daughter because, although they didn’t look
anything alike as to disposition, they both had the
same shape of face and the same blue eyes. On the
lady they sparkled pleasantly but in the girl’s seared
face they appeared alternately to smolder and to
blaze.
What if Jesus had said, “All right, you can be
white-trash or a nigger or ugly”!
Mrs. Turpin felt an awful pity for the girl,
though she thought it was one thing to be ugly and
another to act ugly.
The woman with the snuff-stained lips turned
around in her chair and looked up at the clock. Then
she turned back and appeared to look a little to the
side of Mrs. Turpin. There was a cast in one of her
eyes. “You want to know wher you can get you one of
themther clocks?” she asked in a loud voice.
“No, I already have a nice clock,” Mrs. Turpin
said. Once somebody like her got a leg in the
conversation, she would be all over it.
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“You can get you one with green stamps,” the
woman said. “That’s most likely wher he got hisn.
Save you up enough, you can get you most
anythang. I got me some joo’ry.”
Ought to have got you a wash rag and some
soap, Mrs. Turpin thought.
“I get contour sheets with mine,” the pleasant
lady said.
The daughter slammed her book shut. She
looked straight in front of her, directly through
Mrs. Turpin and on through the yellow curtain and
the plate glass window which made the wall behind
her. The girl’s eyes seemed lit all of a sudden with a
peculiar light, an unnatural light like night road
signs give. Mrs. Turpin turned her head to see if
there was anything going on outside that she should
see, but she could not see anything. Figures passing
cast only a pale shadow through the curtain. There
was no reason the girl should single her out for her
ugly looks.
“Miss Finley,” the nurse said, cracking the door.
The gum-chewing woman got up and passed in
front of her and Claud and went into the office. She
had on red high-heeled shoes.
Directly across the table, the ugly girl’s eyes
were fixed on Mrs. Turpin as if she had some very
special reason for disliking her.
“This is wonderful weather, isn’t it?” the girl’s
mother said.
“It’s good weather for cotton if you can get the
niggers to pick it,” Mrs. Turpin said, “but niggers
don’t want to pick cotton any more. You can’t get
the white folks to pick it and now you can’t get the
niggers—because they got to be right up there with
the white folks.”
“They gonna try anyways,” the white-trash
woman said, leaning forward.
“Do you have one of those cotton-picking
machines?” the pleasant lady asked.
“No,” Mrs. Turpin said, “they leave half the
cotton in the field. We don’t have much cotton
anyway. If you want to make it farming now, you
45
have to have a little of everything. We got a couple
of acres of cotton and a few hogs and chickens and
just enough white-face that Claud can look after
them himself.”
“One thang I don’t want,” the white-trash
woman said, wiping her mouth with the back of her
hands. “Hogs. Nasty stinking things, a-gruntin and
a-rootin all over the place.”
Mrs. Turpin gave her the merest edge of her
attention. “Our hogs are not dirty and they don’t
stink,” she said. “They’re cleaner than some children
I’ve seen. Their feet never touch the ground. We
have a pig-parlor—that’s where you raise them on
concrete,” she explained to the pleasant lady, “and
Claud scoots them down with the hose every
afternoon and washes off the floor.” Cleaner by far
than that child right there, she thought. Poor nasty
little thing. He had not moved except to put the
thumb of his dirty hand into his mouth.
The woman turned her face away from
Mrs. Turpin. “I know I wouldn’t scoot down
no hog with no hose,” she said to the wall.
You wouldn’t have no hog to scoot down,
Mrs. Turpin said to herself.
“A-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin,” the
woman muttered.
“We got a little of everything,” Mrs. Turpin said
to the pleasant lady. “It’s no use in having more
than you can handle yourself with help like it is. We
found enough niggers to pick our cotton this year
but Claud he has to go after them and take them
home again in the evening. They can’t walk that
half a mile. No they can’t. I tell you,” she said and
laughed merrily, “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 I 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.
“Like you read out of the same book,” the lady
said, showing she understood perfectly.
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“Child, yes,” Mrs. Turpin said. “And when they
come in from the field, I run out with a bucket of
icewater. That’s the way it’s going to be from now
on,” she said. “You may as well face it.”
“One thang I know,” the white-trash woman
said. “Two thangs I ain’t going to do: love no
niggers or scoot down no hog with no hose.” And
she let out a bark of contempt.
The look that Mrs. Turpin and the pleasant
lady exchanged indicated they both understood that
you had to have certain things before you could
know certain things. But every time Mrs. Turpin
exchanged a look with the lady, she was aware that
the ugly girl’s peculiar eyes were still on her, and she
had trouble bringing her attention back to the
conversation.
“When you got something,” she said, “you got
to look after it.” And when you ain’t got a thing but
breath and britches, she added to herself, you can
afford to come to town every morning and just sit
on the Court House coping and spit.
A grotesque revolving shadow passed across the
curtain behind her and was thrown palely on the
opposite wall. Then a bicycle clattered down against
the outside of the building. The door opened and a
colored boy glided in with a tray from the drug
store. It had two large red and white paper cups on
it with tops on them. He was a tall, very black boy in
discolored white pants and a green nylon shirt. He
was chewing gum slowly, as if to music. He set the
tray down in the office opening next to the fern and
stuck his head through to look for the secretary. She
was not in there. He rested his arms on the ledge
and waited, his narrow bottom stuck out, swaying
slowly to the left and right. He raised a hand over
his head and scratched the base of his skull.
“You see that button there, boy?” Mrs. Turpin
said. “You can punch that and she’ll come. She’s
probably in the back somewhere.”
“Is thas right?” the boy said agreeably, as if he
had never seen the button before. He leaned to the
right and put his finger on it. “She sometime out,”
60
he said and twisted around to face his audience, his
elbows behind him on the counter. The nurse
appeared and he twisted back again. She handed
him a dollar and he rooted in his pocket and made
the change and counted it out to her. She gave him
fifteen cents for a tip and he went out with the
empty tray. The heavy door swung to slowly and
closed at length with the sound of suction. For a
moment no one spoke.
“They ought to send all them niggers back to
Africa,” the white-trash woman said. “That’s wher
they come from in the first place.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do without my good colored
friends,” the pleasant lady said.
“There’s a heap of things worse than a nigger,”
Mrs. Turpin agreed. “It’s all kinds of them just like
it’s all kinds of us.”
“Yes, and it takes all kinds to make the world
go round,” the lady said in her musical voice.
As she said it, the raw-complexioned girl
snapped her teeth together. Her lower lip turned
downwards and inside out, revealing the pale pink
inside of her mouth. After a second it rolled back
up. It was the ugliest face Mrs. Turpin had ever seen
anyone make and for a moment she was certain
that the girl had made it at her. She was looking at
her as if she had known and disliked 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.
She forced her attention back to the discussion.
“It wouldn’t be practical to send them back to
Africa,” she said. “They wouldn’t want to go. They
got it too good here.”
“Wouldn’t be what they wanted—if I had
anythang to do with it,” the woman said.
“It wouldn’t be a way in the world you could
get all the niggers back over there,” Mrs. Turpin
said. “They’d be hiding out and lying down and
turning sick on you and wailing and hollering and
raring and pitching. It wouldn’t be a way in the
world to get them over there.”
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“They got over here,” the trashy woman said.
“Get back like they got over.”
“It wasn’t so many of them then,” Mrs. Turpin
explained.
The woman looked at Mrs. Turpin as if here was
an idiot indeed but Mrs. Turpin was not bothered by
the look, considering where it came from.
“Nooo,” she said, “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.”
“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.
Everybody in the office laughed except the
white-trash and the ugly girl. The girl gripped the
book in her lap with white fingers. The trashy
woman looked around her from face to face as if
she thought they were all idiots. The old woman in
the feed sack dress continued to gaze expressionless
across the floor at the hightop shoes of the man
opposite her, the one who had been pretending to
be asleep when the Turpins came in. He was
laughing heartily, his hands still spread out on his
knees. The child had fallen to the side and was lying
now almost face down in the old woman’s lap.
While they recovered from their laughter, the
nasal chorus on the radio kept the room from
silence.
“You go to blank blank
And I’ll go to mine
But we’ll all blank along
To-geth-ther,
And all along the blank
We’ll hep eachother out
Smile-ling in any kind of
Weath-ther!”
75
Mrs. Turpin didn’t catch every word but she
caught enough to agree with the spirit of the song
80
and it turned her thoughts sober. To help anybody
out that needed it was her philosophy of life. She
never spared herself when she found somebody in
need, whether they were white or black, trash or
decent. And of all she had to be thankful for, she was
most thankful that this was so. If 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 had to say, “Well
don’t make me that then. Make me a good woman
and it 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 twentyfive pounds instead of one hundred and eighty.
“What’s wrong with your little boy?” the
pleasant lady asked the white-trashy woman.
“He has a ulcer,” the woman said proudly. “He
ain’t give me a minute’s peace since he was born.
Him and her are just alike,” she said, nodding at the
old woman, who was running her leathery fingers
through the child’s pale hair. “Look like I can’t get
nothing down them two but Co’ Cola and candy.”
That’s all you try to get down em, Mrs. Turpin
said to herself. Too lazy to light the fire. There was
nothing you could tell her about people like them
that she didn’t know already. And it was not just
that they didn’t have anything. Because if you gave
them everything, in two weeks it would all be
broken or filthy or they would have chopped it up
for lightwood. She knew all this from her own
experience. Help them you must, but help them
you couldn’t.
All at once the ugly girl turned her lips inside
out again. Her eyes were fixed like two drills on
Mrs. Turpin. This time there was no mistaking that
there was something urgent behind them.
Girl, Mrs. Turpin exclaimed silently, I haven’t
done a thing to you! The girl might be confusing her
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with somebody else. There was no need to sit by and
let herself be intimidated. “You must be in college,”
she said boldly, looking directly at the girl. “I see you
reading a book there.”
The girl continued to stare and pointedly did
not answer.
Her mother blushed at this rudeness. “The lady
asked you a question, Mary Grace,” she said under
her breath.
“I have ears,” Mary Grace said.
The poor mother blushed again. “Mary Grace
goes to Wellesley College,” she explained. She
twisted one of the buttons on her dress. “In
Massachusetts,” she added with a grimace. “And in
the summer she just keeps right on studying. Just
reads all the time, a real book worm. She’s done
real well at Wellesley; she’s taking English and
Math and History and Psychology and Social
Studies,” she rattled on, “and I think it’s too much.
I think she ought to get out and have fun.”
The girl looked as if she would like to hurl
them all through the plate glass window.
“Way up north,” Mrs. Turpin murmured and
thought, well, it hasn’t done much for her manners.
“I’d almost rather to have him sick,” the whitetrash woman said, wrenching the attention back to
herself. “He’s so mean when he ain’t. Look like
some children just take natural to meanness. It’s
some gets bad when they get sick but he was the
opposite. Took sick and turned good. He don’t give
me no trouble now. It’s me waitin to see the
doctor,” she said.
If I was going to send anybody back to Africa,
Mrs. Turpin thought, it would be your kind,
woman. “Yes, indeed,” she said aloud, but looking
up at the ceiling, “it’s a heap of things worse than a
nigger.” And dirtier than a hog, she added to herself.
“I think people with bad dispositions are more
to be pitied than anyone on earth,” the pleasant lady
said in a voice that was decidedly thin.
“I thank the Lord he has blessed me with a
good one,” Mrs. Turpin said. “The day has never
dawned that I couldn’t find something to laugh at.”
“Not since she married me anyways,” Claud
said with a comical straight face.
Everybody laughed except the girl and the
white-trash.
Mrs. Turpin’s stomach shook. “He’s such a
caution,” she said, “that I can’t help but laugh at him.”
The girl made a loud ugly noise through her
teeth.
95
Her mother’s mouth grew thin and straight.
“I think the worst thing in the world,” she said,
“is an ungrateful person. To have everything and
not appreciate it. I know a girl,” she said, “who
has parents who would give her anything, a little
brother who loves her dearly, who is getting a
good education, who wears the best clothes, but
who can never say a kind word to anyone, who
never smiles, who just criticizes and complains all
day long.”
“Is she too old to paddle?” Claud asked.
The girl’s face was almost purple.
“Yes,” the lady said, “I’m afraid there’s nothing
to do but leave her to her folly. Some day she’ll
wake up and it’ll be too late.”
“It never hurt anyone to smile,” Mrs. Turpin
said. “It just makes you feel better all over.”
100
“Of course,” the lady said sadly, “but there are
just some people you can’t tell anything to. They
can’t take criticism.”
“If it’s one thing I am,” Mrs. Turpin said with
feeling, “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 have been
different!” For one thing, somebody else could have
got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded
with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran
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through her. “Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank
you!” she cried aloud.
The book struck her directly over her left eye.
It struck almost at the same instant that she realized
the girl was about to hurl it. Before she could utter
a sound, the raw face came crashing across the table
toward her, howling. The girl’s fingers sank like
clamps into the soft flesh of her neck. She heard the
mother cry out and Claud shout, “Whoa!” There
was an instant when she was certain that she was
about to be in an earthquake.
All at once her vision narrowed and she saw
everything as if it were happening in a small room
far away, or as if she were looking at it through the
wrong end of a telescope. Claud’s face crumpled and
fell out of sight. The nurse ran in, then out, then in
again. Then the gangling figure of the doctor rushed
out of the inner door. Magazines flew this way and
that as the table turned over. The girl fell with a
thud and Mrs. Turpin’s vision suddenly reversed
itself and she saw everything large instead of small.
The eyes of the white-trashy woman were staring
hugely at the floor. There the girl, held down on one
side by the nurse and on the other by her mother,
was wrenching and turning in their grasp. The
doctor was kneeling astride her, trying to hold her
arm down. He managed after a second to sink a long
needle into it.
Mrs. Turpin felt entirely hollow except for her
heart which swung from side to side as if it were
agitated in a great empty drum of flesh.
105
“Somebody that’s not busy call for the
ambulance,” the doctor said in the off-hand voice
young doctors adopt for terrible occasions.
Mrs. Turpin could not have moved a finger.
The old man who had been sitting next to her
skipped nimbly into the office and made the call,
for the secretary still seemed to be gone.
“Claud!” Mrs. Turpin called.
He was not in his chair. She knew she must
jump up and find him but she felt like some one
trying to catch a train in a dream, when everything
moves in slow motion and the faster you try to run
the slower you go.
“Here I am,” a suffocated voice, very unlike
Claud’s, said.
110
He was doubled up in the corner on the floor,
pale as paper, holding his leg. She wanted to get up
and go to him but she could not move. Instead, her
gaze was drawn slowly downward to the churning
face on the floor, which she could see over the
doctor’s shoulder.
The girl’s eyes stopped rolling and focused on
her. They 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.
Mrs. Turpin’s head cleared and her power of
motion returned. She leaned forward until she was
looking directly into the fierce brilliant eyes. 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 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.
Mrs. Turpin sank back in her chair.
115
After a moment the girl’s eyes closed and she
turned her head wearily to the side.
The doctor rose and handed the nurse the empty
syringe. He leaned over and put both hands for a
moment on the mother’s shoulders, which were
shaking. She was sitting on the floor, her lips pressed
together, holding Mary Grace’s hand in her lap. The
girl’s fingers were gripped like a baby’s around her
thumb. “Go on to the hospital,” he said. “I’ll call and
make the arrangements.”
“Now let’s see that neck,” he said in a jovial
voice to Mrs. Turpin. He began to inspect her neck
with his first two fingers. Two little moon-shaped
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lines like pink fish bones were indented over her
windpipe. There was the beginning of an angry
red swelling above her eye. His fingers passed over
this also.
“Lea’ me be,” she said thickly and shook him
off. “See about Claud. She kicked him.”
“I’ll see about him in a minute,” he said and
felt her pulse. He was a thin grey-haired man, given
to pleasantries. “Go home and have yourself a
vacation the rest of the day,” he said and patted her
on the shoulder.
120
Quit your pattin me, Mrs. Turpin growled to
herself.
“And put an ice pack over that eye,” he said.
Then he went and squatted down beside Claud and
looked at his leg. After a moment he pulled him up
and Claud limped after him into the office.
Until the ambulance came, the only sounds in
the room were the tremulous moans of the girl’s
mother, who continued to sit on the floor. The
white-trash woman did not take her eyes off the
girl. Mrs. Turpin looked straight ahead at nothing.
Presently the ambulance drew up, a long dark
shadow, behind the curtain. The attendants came in
and set the stretcher down beside the girl and lifted
her expertly onto it and carried her out. The nurse
helped the mother gather up her things. The
shadow of the ambulance moved silently away and
the nurse came back in the office.
“That ther girl is going to be a lunatic, ain’t
she?” the white-trash woman asked the nurse, but the
nurse kept on to the back and never answered her.
“Yes, she’s going to be a lunatic,” the whitetrash woman said to the rest of them.
125
“Po’ critter,” the old woman murmured. The
child’s face was still in her lap. His eyes looked idly
out over her knees. He had not moved during the
disturbance except to draw one leg up under him.
“I thank Gawd,” the white-trash woman said
fervently, “I ain’t a lunatic.”
Claud came limping out and the Turpins went
home.
334
As their pick-up truck turned into their own
dirt road and made the crest of the hill, Mrs. Turpin
gripped the window ledge and looked out
suspiciously. The land sloped gracefully down
through a field dotted with lavender weeds and at
the start of the rise their small yellow frame house,
with its little flower beds spread out around it like a
fancy apron, sat primly in its accustomed place
between two giant hickory trees. She would not have
been startled to see a burnt wound between two
blackened chimneys.
Neither of them felt like eating so they put on
their house clothes and lowered the shade in the
bedroom and lay down, Claud with his leg on a
pillow and herself with a damp washcloth over her
eye. The instant she was flat on her back, the image
of a razor-backed hog with warts on its face and
horns coming out behind its ears snorted into her
head. She moaned, a low quiet moan.
130
“I am not,” she said tearfully, “a wart hog.
From hell.” But the denial had no force. The girl’s
eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low
but clear, directed only to her, brooked no
repudiation. She had been singled out for the
message, though there was trash in the room to
whom it might justly have been applied. The full
force of this fact struck her only now. There was a
woman there who was neglecting her own child but
she had been overlooked. The message had been
given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working,
church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes
began to burn instead with wrath.
She rose on her elbow and the washcloth fell
into her hand. Claud was lying on his back, snoring.
She wanted to tell him what the girl had said. At the
same time, she did not wish to put the image of
herself as a wart hog from hell into his mind.
“Hey, Claud,” she muttered and pushed his
shoulder.
Claud opened one pale baby blue eye.
She looked into it warily. He did not think
about anything. He just went his way.
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“Wha, whasit?” he said and closed the eye
again.
“Nothing,” she said. “Does your leg pain you?”
“Hurts like hell,” Claud said.
“It’ll quit terreckly,” she said and lay back
down. In a moment Claud was snoring again. For
the rest of the afternoon they lay there. Claud slept.
She scowled at the ceiling. Occasionally she raised
her fist and made a small stabbing motion over her
chest as if she was defending her innocence to
invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job,
reasonable-seeming but wrong.
About five-thirty Claud stirred. “Got to go after
those niggers,” he sighed, not moving.
140
She was looking straight up as if there were
unintelligible handwriting on the ceiling. The
protuberance over her eye had turned a greenishblue. “Listen here,” she said.
“What?”
“Kiss me.”
Claud leaned over and kissed her loudly on the
mouth. He pinched her side and their hands
interlocked. Her expression of ferocious
concentration did not change. Claud got up,
groaning and growling, and limped off. She
continued to study the ceiling.
She did not get up until she heard the pick-up
truck coming back with the Negroes. Then she rose
and thrust her feet in her brown oxfords, which she
did not bother to lace, and stumped out onto the
back porch and got her red plastic bucket. She
emptied a tray of ice cubes into it and filled it half
full of water and went out into the back yard. Every
afternoon after Claud brought the hands in, one of
the boys helped him put out hay and the rest waited
in the back of the truck until he was ready to take
them home. The truck was parked in the shade
under one of the hickory trees.
145
“Hi yawl this evening?” Mrs. Turpin asked
grimly, appearing with the bucket and the dipper.
There were three women and a boy in the truck.
135
“Us doin nicely,” the oldest woman said. “Hi
you doin?” and her gaze stuck immediately on the
dark lump on Mrs. Turpin’s forehead. “You done
fell down, ain’t you?” she asked in a solicitous voice.
The old woman was dark and almost toothless. She
had on an old felt hat of Claud’s set back on her
head. The other two women were younger and
lighter and they both had new bright green sun
hats. One of them had hers on her head; the other
had taken hers off and the boy was grinning
beneath it.
Mrs. Turpin set the bucket down on the floor
of the truck. “Yawl hep yourselves,” she said. She
looked around to make sure Claud had gone. “No. I
didn’t fall down,” she said, folding her arms. “It was
something worse than that.”
“Ain’t nothing bad happen to you!” the old
woman said. She said it as if they all knew
Mrs. Turpin was protected in some special way by
Divine Providence. “You just had you a little fall.”
“We were in town at the doctor’s office for
where the cow kicked Mr. Turpin,” Mrs. Turpin said
in a flat tone that indicated they could leave off
their foolishness. “And there was this girl there. A
big fat girl with her face all broke out. I could look
at that girl and tell she was peculiar but I couldn’t
tell how. And me and her mama were just talking
and going along and all of a sudden WHAM! She
throws this big book she was reading at me and . . .”
150
“Naw!” the old woman cried out.
“And then she jumps over the table and
commences to choke me.”
“Naw!” they all exclaimed, “naw!”
“Hi come she do that?” the old woman asked.
“What ail her?”
Mrs. Turpin only glared in front of her.
155
“Somethin ail her,” the old woman said.
“They carried her off in an ambulance,”
Mrs. Turpin continued, “but before she went she
was rolling on the floor and they were trying to
hold her down to give her a shot and she said
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something to me.” She paused. “You know what she
said to me?”
“What she say?” they asked.
“She said,” Mrs. Turpin began, and stopped, her
face very dark and heavy. The sun was getting whiter
and whiter, blanching the sky overhead so that the
leaves of the hickory tree were black in the face of it.
She could not bring forth the words. “Something real
ugly,” she muttered.
“She sho shouldn’t said nothin ugly to you,”
the old woman said. “You so sweet. You the sweetest
lady I know.”
160
“She pretty too,” the one with the hat on said.
“And stout,” the other one said. “I never
knowed no sweeter white lady.”
“That’s the truth befo’ Jesus,” the old woman
said. “Amen! You des as sweet and pretty as you
can be.”
Mrs. Turpin knew just exactly how much Negro
flattery was worth and it added to her rage. “She
said,” she began again and finished this time with a
fierce rush of breath, “that I was an old wart hog
from hell.”
There was an astounded silence.
165
“Where she at?” the youngest woman cried in a
piercing voice.
“Lemme see her. I’ll kill her!”
“I’ll kill her with you!” the other one cried.
“She b’long in the sylum,” the old woman said
emphatically. “You the sweetest white lady I know.”
“She pretty too,” the other two said. “Stout as
she can be and sweet. Jesus satisfied with her!”
170
“Deed he is,” the old woman declared.
Idiots! Mrs. Turpin growled to herself. You
could never say anything intelligent to a nigger. You
could talk at them but not with them. “Yawl ain’t
drunk your water,” she said shortly. “Leave the
bucket in the truck when you’re finished with it. I
got more to do than just stand around and pass the
time of day,” and she moved off and into the house.
She stood for a moment in the middle of the
kitchen. The dark protuberance over her eye looked
336
like a miniature tornado cloud which might any
moment sweep across the horizon of her brow. Her
lower lip protruded dangerously. She squared her
massive shoulders. Then she marched into the front
of the house and out the side door and started down
the road to the pig parlor. She had the look of a
woman going single-handed, weaponless, into battle.
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. The road was rutted and she kicked several
good-sized stones out of her path as she strode
along. The pig parlor was on a little knoll at the end
of a lane that ran off from the side of the barn. It
was a square of concrete as large as a small room,
with a board fence about four feet high around it.
The concrete floor sloped slightly so that the hog
wash could drain off into a trench where it was
carried to the field for fertilizer. Claud was standing
on the outside, on the edge of the concrete, hanging
onto the top board, hosing down the floor inside.
The hose was connected to the faucet of a water
trough nearby.
Mrs. Turpin climbed up beside him and
glowered down at the hogs inside. There were seven
long-snouted bristly shoats in it—tan with livercolored spots—and an old sow a few weeks off
from farrowing. She was lying on her side grunting.
The shoats were running about shaking themselves
like idiot children, their little slit pig eyes searching
the floor for anything left. She had read that pigs
were the most intelligent animal. She doubted it.
They were supposed to be smarter than dogs. There
had even been a pig astronaut. He had performed
his assignment perfectly but died of a heart attack
afterwards because they left him in his electric suit,
sitting upright throughout his examination when
naturally a hog should be on all fours.
175
A-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin.
“Gimme that hose,” she said, yanking it away
from Claud. “Go on and carry them niggers home
and then get off that leg.”
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“You look like you might have swallowed a
mad dog,” Claud observed, but he got down and
limped off. He paid no attention to her humors.
Until he was out of earshot, Mrs. Turpin stood
on the side of the pen, holding the hose and
pointing the stream of water at the hind quarters of
any shoat that looked as if it might try to lie down.
When he had had time to get over the hill, she
turned her head slightly and her wrathful eyes
scanned the path. He was nowhere in sight. She
turned back again and 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.
180
The pig parlor commanded a view of the back
pasture where their twenty beef cows were gathered
around the hay-bales Claud and the boy had put
out. The freshly cut pasture sloped down to the
highway. Across it was their cotton field and beyond
that a dark green dusty wood which they owned as
well. The sun was behind the wood, very red,
looking over the paling of trees like a farmer
inspecting his own hogs.
“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.”
She appeared to be the right size woman to
command the arena before her. “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.”
185
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. She braced herself for a final
assault and this time her voice rolled out over the
pasture. “Go on,” she yelled, “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!”
A garbled echo returned to her.
A final surge of fury shook her and she roared,
“Who do you think you are?”
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.
She opened her mouth but no sound came out
of it.
190
A tiny truck, Claud’s, appeared on the highway,
heading rapidly out of sight. Its gears scraped
thinly. It looked like a child’s toy. At any moment a
bigger truck might smash into it and scatter Claud’s
and the niggers’ brains all over the road.
Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the
highway, all her muscles rigid, until in five or six
minutes the truck reappeared, returning. She waited
until it had had time to turn into their own road.
Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she
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frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was
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. 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. She lowered her hands and
gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but
fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment
the vision faded but she remained where she was,
immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the
faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path
to the house. In the woods around her the invisible
cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard
were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the
starry field and shouting hallelujah.
bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the
very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the
hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the
old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused
them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.
Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line,
Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to
them as if she were absorbing some abysmal lifegiving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. 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. She raised her
hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic
and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes.
She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending
upward 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
QUESTIONS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
338
How does Mrs. Turpin see herself before Mary
Grace calls her a wart hog?
What is the narrator’s attitude toward Mrs. Turpin
in the beginning of the story? How can you tell?
Does this attitude change, or stay the same, at
the end?
Describe the relationship between Mary Grace
and her mother. What annoying platitudes does
the mother mouth? Which of Mrs. Turpin’s
opinions seem especially to anger Mary Grace?
Sketch the plot of the story. What moment or
event do you take to be the crisis, or turning
point? What is the climax? What is the
conclusion?
What do you infer from Mrs. Turpin’s conversation with the black farm workers? Is she their
friend? Why does she now find their flattery
unacceptable (“Jesus satisfied with her”)?
6.
7.
8.
When, near the end of the story, Mrs. Turpin
roars “Who do you think you are?” an echo
“returned to her clearly like an answer from
beyond the wood” (paragraph 188). Explain.
What is the final revelation given to Mrs. Turpin?
(To state it is to state the theme of the story.)
What new attitude does the revelation impart?
(How is Mrs. Turpin left with a new vision of
humanity?)
Other stories in this book contain revelations:
“Young Goodman Brown,” “The Gospel
According to Mark.” If you have read them, try
to sum up the supernatural revelation made to
the central character in each story. In each, is
the revelation the same as a statement of the
story’s main theme?
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Flannery O’Connor on writing
Flannery O’Connor at her mother’s Georgia Farm where she raised peacocks; c. 1962.
On Her Catholic Faith
1955
I write the way I do because (not though) I am a
Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the
bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly
possessed of the modern consciousness, the thing
Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To
possess this within the Church is to bear a burden,
the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It’s
to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate
level. I think that the Church is the only thing that is
going to make the terrible world we are coming to
endurable; the only thing that makes the Church
endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ
and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that
you suffer as much from the Church as for it but if
you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to
cherish the world at the same time that you struggle
to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness
in the stories.
From a letter (July 20, 1955)
in The Habit of Being
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Excerpt from “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction”:
The Serious Writer and the Tired Reader
1960
Those writers who speak for and with their age are
able to do so with a great deal more ease and grace
than those who speak counter to prevailing
attitudes. I once received a letter from an old lady in
California who informed me that when the tired
reader comes home at night, he wishes to read
something that will lift up his heart. And it seems
her heart had not been lifted up by anything of
mine she had read. I think that if her heart had
been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.
You may say that the serious writer doesn’t
have to bother about the tired reader, but he does,
because they are all tired. One old lady who wants
her heart lifted up wouldn’t be so bad, but you
multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times
and what you get is a book club. I used to think it
should be possible to write for some supposed elite,
for the people who attend the universities and
sometimes know how to read, but I have since
found that though you may publish your stories in
Botteghe Oscure,* if they are any good at all, you are
eventually going to get a letter from some old lady
in California, or some inmate of the Federal
Penitentiary or the state insane asylum or the local
poorhouse, telling you where you have failed to
meet his needs.
And his need, of course, is to be lifted up.
There is something in us, as storytellers and as
listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive
act, that demands that what falls at least be offered
the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks
for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has
forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted
or lacking altogether and so he has forgotten the
price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he
wants either his senses tormented or his spirits
raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either
to a mock damnation or a mock innocence.
I am often told that the model of balance for the
novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory
up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and
paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also
there can be no reason to assume that the result of
doing it in these times will give us the balanced
picture that it gave in Dante’s. Dante lived in the 13th
century when that balance was achieved in the faith
of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both
fact and value, which is swept this way and that by
momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a
balance from the world around him, the novelist now
has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself.
There are ages when it is possible to woo the reader;
there are others when something more drastic is
necessary.
There is no literary orthodoxy that can be
prescribed as settled for the fiction writer, not even
that of Henry James who balanced the elements of
traditional realism and romance so admirably
within each of his novels. But this much can be
said. The great novels we get in the future are not
going to be those that the public thinks it wants, or
those that critics demand. They are going to be the
kind of novels that interest the novelist. And the
novels that interest the novelist are those that have
not already been written. They are those that put
the greatest demands on him, that require him to
operate at the maximum of his intelligence and his
talents, and to be true to the particularities of his
*Botteghe Osccure: a distinguished and expensive literary magazine published in Rome from 1949 to 1960 by the Princess
Marguerite Caetani for a small, sophisticated audience.
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own vocation. The direction of many of us will be
toward concentration and the distortion that is
necessary to get our vision across; it will be more
toward poetry than toward the traditional novel.
The problem for such a novelist will be to
know how far he can distort without destroying,
and in order not to destroy, he will have to descend
far enough into himself to reach those
underground springs that give life to his work. This
descent into himself will, at the same time, be a
descent into his region. It will be a descent through
the darkness of the familiar into a world where, like
the blind man cured in the gospels, he sees men as
if they were trees, but walking. This is the beginning
of vision, and I feel it is a vision which we in the
South must at least try to understand if we want to
participate in the continuance of a vital Southern
literature. I hate to think that in twenty years
Southern writers too may be writing about men in
grey flannel suits and may have lost their ability to
see that these gentlemen are even greater freaks
than what we are writing about now. I hate to think
of the day when the Southern writer will satisfy the
tired reader.
From “The Grotesque
in Southern Fiction”
Critical Views
The Character of Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation” 2005
Louise S. Cowan (b. 1916)
O’Connor held that serious writers cannot produce
their works simply from their own ideas and
conscious convictions; rather, if they are to produce
anything of value, they must submit to a larger body
of customs and manners of which they are a part.
“As far as the creation of a body of fiction is
concerned,” she writes, “the social is superior to the
purely personal.” The writer whose themes are
religious particularly needs a region where the
themes find a response in the life of the people.
“What the Southern Catholic writer is apt to find
when he descends within his imagination is not
Catholic life but the life of his region in which he is
both native and alien.” For O’Connor, then, the
South presented the region to which she could
devote her genius. It was out of step with the rest of
the nation, since it was still largely agrarian, retaining
in the early twentieth century traces in it of an older
worldview. Further, as she saw, it still had a “folk,”
both white and black, who maintained an outlook
fundamentally religious. It was likely to be from
these groups that the prophetic figures in her fiction
could emerge. In the South the general conception of
man is still, O’Connor maintained, theological:
The Bible is known by the ignorant as well as the
educated and it is always the mythos which the poor
hold in common that is most valuable to the fiction
writer. When the poor hold sacred history in common,
they have ties to the universal and the holy which
allows the meaning of their every action to be
heightened and seen under the aspect of eternity.
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“Revelation”
The short story “Revelation,” which won first prize in
the 1964 O. Henry Awards, is one of O’Connor’s lastwritten pieces and one of her most accomplished. It is
about her familiar theme of Pharisaism;** and the
epiphany with which it ends is no less devastating for
occurring while the protagonist, Mrs. Turpin, is
hosing down one of her prize hogs.
O’Connor’s favorite target is the respectable,
moral person who has lived a good and sensible life.
The main character in “Revelation,” Ruby Turpin, is
such a figure, innocently falling into the pattern of
self-satisfaction that finally assumes God himself
must be impressed with her virtue. It is a mistake,
however, to construe O’Connor’s keen portrayals as
pitiless. Her pharisaical characters are unaware of
their self-love; they conduct themselves with
kindness and courtesy, as good decent people
should do. Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation” is such a
naively self-righteous person, convinced that her
righteousness makes her a special friend of Jesus.
One of O’Connor’s worries about the story
“Revelation,” as a matter of fact, was that people
would think she was disapproving of Mrs. Turpin.
“You got to be a very big woman to shout at the
Lord across a hog pen,” she wrote in a letter to a
friend.
Ruby Turpin is one of O’Connor’s
masterpieces. Essentially good-hearted, she is blind
to her own pride and self-satisfaction. She passes
judgment on everyone she meets, sometimes
occupying herself with naming over the classes of
people. “On the bottom of the heap were most
colored people . . . then next to them, not above,
just away from—were the white trash, then above
**Pharisaism: hypocritical self-righteousness.
342
them the home-owners, and above them the homeand-land owners to which she and Claud
belonged.” She naively congratulates herself on
having been born as who she is, a good respectable
white woman who, with her husband, makes do
with what they have and takes care of their
property. But there are people who own more
property—and people over them, and some of
them are not morally good; so Mrs. Turpin’s neat
little scale of measurement becomes blurry and
leaves her puzzled.
The crucial event in Ruby Turpin’s life begins in
a doctor’s office. . . . She has been singled out, she
knows, for a message. And, afterwards, the more she
thinks about it in her isolation (for she can’t bring
herself to ask her husband about it; and the black
servants who work for her merely flatter her), the
more the incident seems to have some sort of divine
import. “The message had been given to Ruby
Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going
woman.” Angry, she makes her way to the hogpen;
and as she is watering down a white sow she begins
her questioning of God that turns into a challenge:
“Go on, call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From
hell. Call me a wart hog from hell.” And finally the
blasphemous, “Who do you think you are?”
It is this direct challenge to the Almighty that
produces the real revelation for Ruby Turpin. And
in the vision that she receives, the question she had
always stumbled over—the complexity of
categorizing the classes of people—is answered,
with a revelation at once grotesque and sublime.
From “Passing by the Dragon: Flannery
O’Connor’s Art of Revelation”
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WRITING EFFECTIVELY: TOPICS FOR WRITING
1.
Read three stories by Flannery O’Connor, or
any one of the writers who appear in this book.
Identify a theme or idea common to all three
stories. Write an essay describing how your
chosen author treats this theme. Support your
argument with evidence from all three stories.
2.
All three stories are about revelations of one
kind or another. How do these three revelations
relate to each other? Back up your argument
with evidence from the three stories.
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