A Grotesque Beacon of God’s Grace in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”

The faith of Flannery O’Connor, a Catholic writer, creates a unique tension within her short stories, between the grotesque aspects of the natural world and the sanctity of the divine. Her work “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” exemplifies this tension as a young female narrator encounters an unexpected transformative experience after her two cousins see a “hermaphrodite”[1] at a local “freak show.” In “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” Flannery O’Connor employs the hermaphrodite character as a vessel for the narrator to explore the mysterious virtue of purity as she matures both literally and spiritually. In doing so, O’Connor calls readers to adopt a perception of sacramentality upon the physical world.