the fact that her pigs are not raised like pigs.

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," 

Mrs. Turpin does not care how pigs are supposed to be raised, or the fact that they like cool mud.  She always puts her needs above anyone else’s.

When she returns to the pig parlor at the end of the story, the revelation from the doctor’s office has not entirely set in yet.  She is still mulling over the idea that she is not above everyone else.  She sees a light in the pig parlor.

Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. 

It seems as if she has fallen into a meditative state upon looking at the hogs, creatures that she does not take care of well enough.

Mrs. Turpin's vision extends to Heaven, where she sees others ascending.  These are people she has looked down upon, and people she has placed below herself.  She realizes then, in those two places, that she is just another woman.  She is no better than anyone else.

In Flannery O'Connor’s short story “Revelation” (published posthumously in Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965), the primary settings—the doctor’s waiting room and the pig parlor—are especially significant because of two reasons. Firstly, they represent the text’s preoccupations with ideas of sickness and hygiene. Rather than being physical in origin, the sickness and hygiene under scrutiny in the story are profoundly moral. Who is truly healthy in the spirit, and who has lived a clean enough life to be worthy of grace? By locating these questions in the twin stages of the doctor’s waiting room and the pig parlor, O’Connor lets them play out in all kinds of interesting ways.

Secondly, both the doctor’s waiting room and the pig parlor serve as classical dramatic devices typical of O’Connor’s fiction. As a writer preoccupied with Christian themes, O’Connor often locates the spiritual crises of her characters in the most unlikely and even jarring settings. So, in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” it is a catastrophic account with a psychopath in a desolate forest that forces the chief character to find grace, whereas in “Revelation,” a mentally unstable girl, “white-trash” characters, and hogs are the mechanisms that propel Mrs. Turpin, the protagonist, to have a moment of epiphany.

The doctor’s waiting room with its collection of oddballs and lunatics and the pig parlor peopled with beasts serve perfectly as arenas for the theater of Mrs. Turpin’s spiritual crisis. Thus, in “Revelation” as well as more of her fiction, O’Connor upturns the sweet, luminous aesthetics of grace; instead, she grounds it purposefully in the everyday, in the bizarre, and in the darkly comical. In O’Connor’s vision, faith is neither boring nor an anodyne, but a flaming sword one walks under.

If we examine each of these settings individually, we note how in the doctor’s waiting room, O’Connor uses an assorted cast of characters to give us an idea about Mrs Turpin’s worldview. The characters represent both the good and the dregs of humanity to the sharp and judgmental Mrs. Turpin. She swiftly slots them mentally in categories such as “white-trash woman,” a woman who is “just common,” a “pitiful” girl with a face “blue with acne,” and a well-bred “stylish lady.” She makes a catalog of their deportment, clothes, and even footwear to get the measure of them.

Without appearing to, Mrs. Turpin always noticed people’s feet. The well-dressed lady had on red and grey suede shoes to match her dress....And the white-trashy mother had on what appeared to be bedroom slippers....exactly what you would have expected her to have on.

Mrs. Turpin identifies with the stylish lady, slotting her in the same class of good folks to which Mrs. Turpin herself belongs. Mrs. Turpin believes she and her husband, Claud, are good Christians and are at the top of the caste ladder because of their cleanliness, civilized manners, and benevolence towards those less fortunate. Ironically, in an unchristian way, she counts poverty too as a moral sin and groups people by class. This reveals her blindness to her own faults.

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....

Mrs Turpin’s disdain of the “sick” people around her gets a comeuppance with a cataclysmic violent encounter in the doctor’s waiting room. Just when Mrs. Turpin, in an exquisitely comical moment of self-righteousness, thanks God aloud for her blessings, the ugly, scowling girl, with a face full of acne, suddenly hurls a book at Mrs. Turpin and tries to choke her. As she is being taken away by the doctor’s attendants in the middle of a fit, the girl locks her eyes with Mrs. Turpin. Mrs. Turpin somehow understands that this is a moment of import.

"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.

This is the grotesque act of violence that creates a fissure in Mrs. Turpin’s understanding of the world and her own goodness. Believing the girl to be in the middle of a seizure and thus acting as a divine conduit, Mrs. Turpin is sure she has been singled out for this particular message. She is a wart hog. But why? The question torments her. To get to the answer, we move to the next of the story’s arenas, the pig farm.

Pigs are traditionally considered unclean animals. Yet Mrs. Turpin is proud of the hogs she raises and believes the clean pigs symbolize her civilizing Christian influence. Earlier in the doctor’s waiting room, she has made it a point to dispel the “white-trashy” mother’s assertion that hogs are “nasty, stinking things.”

Our hogs are not dirty and they don’t stink...they’re cleaner than some children I’ve seen. Their feet never touch the ground.

Yet being called a “wart hog from hell” disturbs Mrs. Turpin’s entire being. Her ideas about her own moral hygiene are trashed and thrown in slop. Like a repugnant wart hog, she too is dirty and beyond grace. Yet the pigs in her parlor "appear to pant with a secret life," more spiritually alive than her. Why is she, "the wart hog" different from these calm animals touched by divine grace? As she washes the pigs in her pig parlor, she enters a strange conversation, both with herself and with God. She cannot understand how she can be both “herself and a hog.” What has she done that she alone is bereft of grace?

It is at this moment of reckoning that Mrs. Turpin has a vision of a vast bridge extending from Earth to heaven with a “vast horde of souls” walking upon it.

There were whole companies of white trash...and lunatics clapping and leaping like frogs.

Significantly, in her vision, people like her and Claud bring up the back of the procession, “even their virtues being burned away.” Her caste system lays toppled, with all the souls she looked down upon marching to heaven. Note the commingling of souls as opposed to the rigid tiers created by Mrs. Turpin. That she has this vision in a pig parlor, and not a church, is important because it further crumbles her ideas about clean and non-clean, holy and non-holy. All her ideas about her own goodness are shaken up, yet the story makes it clear that grace is available for her. However, it will involve her “virtues being burned away” and her self-righteousness being shed. This revelation is a typical example of what O’Connor meant when she said of the Christian themes in her work: "There is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism."

Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation” has two main settings: a doctor’s waiting room and a “pig parlor.” These two settings are appropriate for a number of reasons, including the following:

• A doctor’s waiting room is a perfect setting in which a wide variety of people can believably be brought together and can interact. It is therefore entirely credible that the broad range of social types who appear in the waiting room in O’Connor’s story would appear there.
• A doctor’s waiting room, as the name implies, is a place where people mainly have to wait. They therefore have an opportunity to observe each other and to engage in conversation. Once again, therefore, O’Connor has chosen an ideal setting in which two of the main “actions” of this story – observation and conversation – can occur.
• Most significantly, a doctor’s waiting room brings together people who are, in various ways, sick or ill.  However, O’Connor’s main concern (in this story as in most of her fiction) is not with physical sickness or illness but rather with spiritual sickness or illness.  The setting gives the various characters (especially Mrs. Turpin and Mary Grace) plenty of opportunities to expose the sickness of their souls. Mrs. Turpin physically appears quite healthy, but this is not true spiritually.
• By the same token, O’Connor implies that the true physician whose care Mrs. Turpin needs is not the doctor who owns the waiting room but, instead, the physician whom O’Connor thought all humans needed most – Jesus Christ.
• Partly for this latter reason, the “pig parlor” is a perfectly appropriate setting for the final section of the story.  Mrs. Turpin is proud of her hogs and of their modern, sophisticated habitat. In fact, in some ways she shows more concern for her hogs than for some of her fellow human beings.  Her pride in her “pig parlor” is typical of her pride in general. Pride, indeed, is the source of her true disease in every sense of that word.
• Because Mrs. Turpin is so proud, it is fitting that her “revelation” comes as she is standing outside the pig parlor. Rather than her “revelation” or epiphany occurring in some location more suited to her sense of her own importance (such as a church), it occurs where one might least expect it to occur.
• Another reason, of course, that the pig-parlor is an appropriate setting is that Mary Grace has earlier called Mrs. Turpin a warthog from hell.
• Finally, the hogs are described in such a way that they seem to be behaving more as God intends his creatures to behave than Mrs. Turpin has been behaving for most of the story:

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.

The "old sow" is in some ways a more admirable creature than Mrs. Turpin, the alleged wart-hog from hell.