"We are Freaks": The Hermeneutics of Personhood in O'Connor's "A Temple of the Holy Ghost"

Flannery O'Connor's short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” is a narrative greatly interested in the question of bodies and how they relate to God and other bodies. This issue is explored through the eyes of a 12-year-old referred to simply as “the child,” and through her interaction with the people around her – in particular, albeit indirectly, with a carnival “freak” – a person of anomalous body type described to her by two teenage second cousins visiting the child and her mother for the weekend. Early in the story, the child establishes a hermeneutic for reading bodies and persons through the chatter of these two second cousins: a nun at the convent where they attend school told them that if a young man should “behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile,” they were to say “Stop, sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!” (85), a phrase echoed, then, by the child in her meditations throughout the narrative.

The child considers herself, for the most part, above most of the other characters in the story. She quickly assesses the two older girls as “practically morons” and is “glad to think that they [are] only second cousins and she couldn't have inherited any of their stupidity” (83). Similarly, she characterizes one of the Wendell boys, who come to dinner to entertain the two older girls, as a “big dumb ox” and a “big dumb Church of God ox” (90). Her final analysis of all four of these characters is “Those stupid idiots” (90), and in her bedtime prayers she thanks God fervently that she is not in the Church of God – a thanksgiving seemingly a bit ironic and self-contradictory, but for the fact that earlier she notes that both Wendell boys should both be Church of God preachers “because you don't have to know anything to be one” (86).

The child has her quiet moments, however, moments of genuine human compassion. When her mother speaks of their boarder, the unmarried teacher Miss Kirby, as “that poor soul” who is “so lonesome she'll even ride in that car that smells like the last circle in hell” (86) -- referring to the car of her suitor, Mr. Cheatam – the child reflects that “[Miss Kirby]'s a Temple of the Holy Ghost, too” (86). This is an important point, because, in acknowledging her as a “Temple of the Holy Ghost,” the child is acknowledging Miss Kirby's status as a person, a complete subject with individual worth – something not necessarily the norm in a society in which little value is given to unmarried women.

The real turning point, however, for the child, comes relatively near the end of the story, when the two older girls describe “the freak” which they saw at the carnival to her. This “freak” is referred to as “it” and “the you-know-what” by the girls, and is “a man and a woman both” (95). This “freak” walks back and forth between two sides of the carnival tent, segregated along gender lines by a black curtain, displaying h/er body to the audience, and delivers the following dialogue:

That the existence of “the freak” in the first place calls into question the very lines along which the audience is segregated, and exposes “gender,” “sex,” and “sexuality” as effects of a particular configuration of power subsequently taken for causes and points of generation in order to mask the reproductive and hetero-normative operation of this configuration of power never occurs to the child. However, with her newly developed hermeneutic technique of reading bodies as “temples of the Holy Ghost,” and thus “holy thing[s]” (96), the child is able to work “the freak” into a system of personhood completely unconsidered by the two older girls. In her reflection following the description of “the freak”'s speech, the child envisions the members of the carnival audience as if they were in a church – observing the body of “the freak” not with derision and ridicule (the customary attitude toward carnival displays), but, rather, with the reverence and awe proper when one is in the presence of God. “Amen” (96), the people say, over and over again, as “the freak” delivers h/er speech once more, this time in the form of a litany. This Utopian vision, as the child moves into sleep, is, in fact, a return to “the entrance of Paradise” (92) like those she had been envisioning earlier in her daydreams about becoming a martyr – a vision in which every individual body is acknowledged in its personhood and subjecthood as a nexus of the presence of God.

She comes back to this image again the next day, during mass, as the priest lifts up “the monstrance with the Host shining ivory-colored in the center of it” (98) – the Host is, of course, yet another nexus of the presence of God, a Temple of the Holy Ghost in another form – and again, in the closing lines, as she observes the sun as “a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood” (99). Through these images, and her reflections on “the freak” – a body radically different in appearance from her own and from any other she had known, the child instates a worldview in which she is able to consider the outcast and the marginalized – Miss Kirby, “the freak,” even herself – not as outcast in any way, but, rather, as fully human in their status as “holy things,” as “temples of the Holy Ghost.”

To conclude, then, finally: while God may have made “the freak” “thisaway,” in terms of h/er anomalous body type, the question of whether it was God or a normative society that imposed on h/er the category of “freak” is an issue – and one of great importance – never explicitly addressed by the child. Furthermore, questions of the political and power investment in the language of gender and biological sex – those questions whose answers are “more puzzling than the riddle itself” (95) – are similarly never considered. However, the child's willingness to grant "the freak" the status of personhood, by acknowledging h/er status as a “temple of the Holy Ghost” – a personhood denied her by the other characters in the story (who refer to h/er as “it” or “the you-know-what”) – is, while perhaps still remaining problematic, a definite element of hope in the story.

Works Cited

O'Connor, Flannery. “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Other Stories. New York: Harvest Books, 1977. 82-99.