"A Temple of the Holy Ghost" is a

short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest ...

Flannery O'Connor Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often ...

. It was written in 1953 and published in 1955 in her short story collection ''

A Good Man Is Hard to Find ''A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories'' (published in the United Kingdom as ''The Artificial Nigger and Other Tales'') is a collection of short stories by American author Flannery O'Connor. The collection was first published in 1955. The ...

'' and is one of O'Connor's few explicitly Catholic stories. A devout

Roman Catholic Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lette ...

, O'Connor often used religious themes in her work, but more commonly described rural Southern

Protestants Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century against what its followers perceived to b ...

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 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 The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...

passage from . 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 In reproductive biology, a hermaphrodite () is an organism that has both kinds of reproductive organs and can produce both gametes associated with male and female sexes. Many Taxonomy (biology), taxonomic groups of animals (mostly invertebrate ...

displayed as a

freak A freak is a person who is physically deformed or transformed due to an extraordinary medical condition or body modification. This definition was first attested with this meaning in the 1880s as a shorter form of the phrase " freak of nature ...

, 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 "God's Will" is a song written by Barry Dean and Tom Douglas and recorded by American country music artist Martina McBride. It was released in December 2004 as the fourth and final single from McBride's 2003 album '' Martina''. Music video Th ...

as in the case of the hermaphrodite.Margaret Earley Whitt
Understanding Flannery O'Connor
(Univ of South Carolina Press, 1997)

References

Short stories by Flannery O'Connor 1954 short stories Southern Gothic short stories {{1950s-story-stub

Plot summary

See also

References