Passing Judgment In Mrs. Turpin's Revelation

Clothing has its own meaning in communication. We are being judged by our clothing every time we come in contact with someone. Human communication is accomplished by two ways, one third by words and the rest by nonverbal communication (Hickson, 1989). Clothes serve to be protection, social identification, sexual attraction, and many other services. Someone’s clothing can be different compared to others. Their clothing is based on their age, gender, occupation, personality, and values. According to William Thourlby, there are ten decisions that people around someone make based on their clothing along (Hickson, 1989). The ten decisions are:

While in the waiting room, Mrs. Turpin is attacked by Mary Grace, a young girl with acne and is given a revelation that seems to change Mrs. Turpin’s life. Mrs. Turpin clings to her religion as tightly as she does her bigotry. She is judgmental of African-Americans, poor people, uneducated people, dirty people and even a child. Mrs. Turpin’s major flaw is that she is

Mrs. Turpin in the story Revelation by Flannery O’Connor is a very interesting character. Mrs. Turpin thinks of herself as a righteous Christian. She depicts herself as a respectable and very charitable person. She views herself as a morally superior person that is going to save come judgement day. Mrs. Turpin in reality has not one of these qualities, although she promotes herself as women, that is saved and going to receive an eternal bliss. Instead of having true Christian qualities she is judgmental and a racist. One is able to view the way Mrs. Turpin racism by looking at the way she judges people on her ranking system. At the bottom of her ranking system is Blacks and White Trash and above that are people that are homeowners. Above the homeowners are the people with homes and own land which was her class and the last rank was peopled with home, land and are rich. Given this example, this illustrates the

Mrs. Turpin in Flannery O’Connor’s short story Revelation, is a prejudice and judgmental woman who spends most of her life prying in the lives of everyone around her. She looks at people not for who they are, but for their race or social standing. In fact, Mrs. Turpin is concerned with race and status so much that it seems to take over her life. Although she seems to disapprove of people of different race or social class, Mrs. Turpin seems to be content and appreciative with her own life. It is not until Mrs. Turpin’s Revelation that she discovers that her ways of life are no better then those she looks down upon and they will not assure her a place in Heaven.

Turpin, who knew it, supplied the last line mentally, "And wona these days I know I'll we-eara crown” (O’Connor 5). Being able to recite gospel lyrics without hesitation proves Mrs. Turpin is a devout woman of faith. Although she may be spiritual she suffers the fault of judging and comparing herself to others this fault is a direct product of her environment. This quote epitomizes her fault “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” (O’ Connor 6). Even with her faults Mrs. Turpin showed compassion to the help that her and Claud would bring to work their crops. “When they come in the morning, I run out and I say," “How yal 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. And when they come in from the field, I run out with a bucket of ice water” (O’Conner10). It is apparent that Mrs. Turpin’s compassion does not go

In Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation” Mrs. Turpin, is portrayed as a judgmental person who is racist and highly opinionated. She considers herself a moral, respectable Christian. She feels far superior to those that she is confined in a doctor’s waiting room with during the majority of the story. Turpin’s antics force the reader to perceive her as a character with a warped sense of others. The only person she relates to is a “well dressed, pleasant lady” with a daughter that she thinks is ugly. O’Connor uses irony through a series of events that cause Mrs. Turpin to experience a “revelation” that may convince her to change her racist and judgmental ways.

Though this Southern Christian white woman is superficially pleasant and well-mannered, she conceals her ugly thoughts of class stratum cognizant of what is below her pedestal. A church going woman who treats slaves fairly, she believes her time volunteered and philosophy of doing things for others are enough to sanctify her ugliness on the inside. The omniscient narrator observes that “Mrs. Turpin felt at awful pity… it was one thing to be ugly and another to act ugly” (473) Ironically, Mrs. Turpin is the one who acts ugly. Arrogant about her station in life, when faced to choose between “a nigger or white-trash” she would plead with Jesus to “let [her] wait until there’s another place available” (472). Silently judging others she is pleased to not be anything less socially acceptable than she already is, and often occupies herself at night classifying people. Mrs. Turpin believed that you “had to have certain things before you could know certain things;” this consequently places her on a higher plane (474).

Turpin’s standards in her eyes. The readers can see through Mrs. Turpins thoughts and views how brutal and harsh she really is for example, when Mrs. Turpin is talking to herself and asks herself a question “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?” Mrs. Turpin answers with “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.” (416).

It is because my own mother at age nineteen married a black man; she is white. This was the mid-nineteen-eighties in a suburban area of Fort Worth, Texas. My mother has shared many of the challenges she and her husband faced as newlyweds. Whenever they went riding in the car together they were stopped at least twice a month by the police because they were concerned that my mother was being abducted by a black man. They didn't go out in public very often because her husband was uncomfortable by all the attention. This led to stress within the marriage. Things became even more difficult when my mother became pregnant with my older brother. Her family was uncomfortable with their daughter marrying an African-American man and even more uncomfortable with the idea of her having a biracial child. Then thankfully when her father held his grandson all of that melted away.

Our nature as humans is to judge others. We are programmed to judge everything for the benefit of ourselves. Think about it for a second. What do you do when you meet new people? You judge them from the way

In the article "The Rush from Judgement," Theordore Dalrymple argues that refraining from making judgements creates an unhealthy society. Judgements are usually evaluations of certain behaviors or ideas. Dalrmple believes that those who refrain from making judgments practice self deception. Self deception is the generally defined as the practice of deceiving oneself, which in turn hinders us from attaining self knowledge. The number one problem associated with self deception is that it has the capability of creating moral dilemmas, such that people use it as a "prophylactic against leaning from experience," according to Dalrymple. Because one knowingly deceives oneself into believing something even in the face of strong evidence to

“BEFOR I CAN TALK TO YOU, PEOPLE SHOW THEIR SEX, AGE, CALSS, POSITION, WITH WHAT THEY ARE WEARING. ALL THIS IS REGISTERED UNCONCIOSLY“ Those words said by Alison Lurie in the language of clothes (1992), reflect perfectly the main point of my research. The society we are now living is an extremely conscious society regarding body image and the way we are presented to the exterior. We found an obsessive trend on wanting to look like celebrities by having certain items or looks and in relation to that a fear of not being percepted the tight way. This is where we found relation to how clothes are part of a conversation we haven 't started and are a form of expression. As there will be explained further on, we use clothes as a sign of our identity,as a way of representing ourselves and stand out from the crowd and also influence on how we appear in front of others making them (clothes) a huge part of our non verbal communication. This essay will discuss the ideas behind self -expression and the role of clothes has changed in that mater thought time.

During our life we construct many different identities of who we want to portray ourselves as to the rest of society; fashion plays a vital role in generating who we are. With the ideas from Storry and Childs they state that “the way that we dress can either serve to confirm or to subvert various facets of our identities, such as our gender,

Ever since their invention many centuries ago, clothes have been used as a way of communicating. The message communicated relies on a number of factors including the social background of both the communicator and the receiver, and the context in which the message is communicated. Although at times the exact message or symbolism one is trying to portray may not be clear, it is evident that clothing has long been embraced as one of the best ways to project one’s desired personal image to those around them.

Look after your appearance – appearance is important, it can give us confidence or it can make us feel awkward. Dressing smart for the right occasion gives us self-confidence. Dress for your own benefit: don’t dress in the expectation of pleasing others and receiving compliments.