A Temple of the Holy Ghost

"A Temple of the Holy Ghost" is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was written in 1954 and published in 1955 in her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find and is one of O'Connor's only explicitly Catholic stories. A devout Roman Catholic, O'Connor often used religious themes in her work, but more commonly described rural Southern Protestants as her main characters.

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. 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 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. The young girl's mother arranges for a pair of neighborhood boys who are training to be preachers to accompany the cousins to a fair. While picking up the girls, the boys are mildly ridiculed for their simple, fundamentalist religious views. At the fair, the girls see a hermaphrodite displayed as a freak, which they later describe to their younger cousin. The hermaphrodite explained that this was how God made her. The end of the story reflects upon the acceptance of God's will as in the case of the hermaphrodite.^[1]

References

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