A Temple of the Holy Ghost
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"She could hear the freak saying, “God made me thisaway and I don’t dispute hit,” and the people saying, “Amen. Amen.”" --"A Temple of the Holy Ghost" (1955) by Flannery O'Connor |
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"A Temple of the Holy Ghost" is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was written in 1953 and published in 1955 in her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find and is one of O'Connor's few explicitly Catholic stories, featuring the notion of catholic guilt. A devout Roman Catholic, O'Connor often used religious themes in her work, but more commonly described rural Southern Protestants as her main characters.
The story is an oft-cited example of grotesque sensibility in literature.
Plot summary
The story is told from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl and involves a visit from a pair of her 14-year-old cousins, Roman Catholic convent school girls who are mostly interested in clothes and boys. The cousins were recently lectured by the nuns about preserving their bodies as "temples of the holy ghost," a reference to the Bible passage from Template:Bibleverse. The young girl's mother arranges for a pair of neighborhood boys who are training to be preachers to accompany the girl's two cousins to a fair but does not allow the 12-year-old to join them. While picking up the girls, the boys are mildly ridiculed by them for their Protestant Church of God views. At the fair, the girls see a hermaphrodite displayed as a freak, which they later describe to their younger cousin, saying that the hermaphrodite "lifted his skirt to show what was underneath." The hermaphrodite explained that this was how God made him or her. The end of the story may deal with the acceptance of God's will as in the case of the hermaphrodite.
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