The Child in Flannery O’Connor’s A Temple of the Holy Ghost

The Child in Flannery O’Connor’s A Temple of the Holy Ghost

“None of their ways were lost on the child” (236).

This passage introduces the main character only named the “child” in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” and indeed she is influenced not only by the two girls that this line refers to, but by everything she hears and sees. She is very direct and speaks without thinking, for example when she asks her mother to invite Mr. “Cheat,” an admirer of Miss Kirby’s, the schoolteacher who is lodging with her family. Her directness can be read as “ugliness” as she herself calls it. The line “None of their ways were lost on the child” (236) mentions for the first time the very important characteristic of the child that turns out to be central to the story, that really nothing, especially things that are said, are lost on the child, they are much more repeated and reappear throughout the story in different contexts. The story shows a girl caught between Catholicism and secular things, as she mixes everything in her very own picture of the world.

The first thing that has an impact on the “child” is when the girls tell how Sister Perpetua told them to stop “ungentlemanly boys” by saying “Stop sir! I am the Temple of the Holy Ghost!” (238). She sees how the phrase influences Miss Kirby and she herself feels “as if somebody as given her a present” (238). This phrase reappears as a motif later in the story and already in this original context the religious is confronted with the secular.

She constantly thinks about being a “good person,” she would even like to have been a saint, “because that included everything you could know” (243) but she thinks that she has too many faults such as being a liar, ...

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... smell and she finally realizes she is “in the presence of God” (247). These effects make her calm down and start to pray and confess her “sins” although “mechanically”: “Hep me not to be so mean…Hep me not to give her so much sass. Hep me not to talk like I do.” When the priest finally raises the monstrance “with the Host shining ivory-colored in the center of it” she is in turn reminded of the freak at the fair and what he said and the religious world and the world of the fair are mixed together in her mind.

The last image of the story is the child seeing the setting sun from the car on their way back home from the convent and she imagines it to be a Host that is “drenched in blood.” One last time the interrelation of church and fair become visible as she imagines this scene right after Alonzo mentions that the fair has been shut down on request of preachers.