Lucas Eddy
The Irony of the Intellect
Cistercian Preparatory School
gnied@cistercian.org
The Irony of the Intellect
Hulga is an intellectual. She has received a PhD in philosophy, has immersed herself in
numerous philosophical texts, and has developed a philosophy of her own. She lives in the
country among those whom she perceives to be mentally incompetent and philosophically blind.
Thus, she deifies herself as the one source of truth and knowledge in the midst of a wasteland
bereft of any intellect. In reality, each character is far off from who she perceives them to be, and
by the end of the story, she shows herself to be the most naïve in this ironic work.
Mrs. Hopewell’s name is no mere coincidence, and her relationship with Hulga is less
than friendly. Her philosophy in life is simply to hope well and assume that all things in
existence work for the better of existence itself. Her speech is filled with platitudes such as,
“Nothing is perfect,” “Everybody is different,” and “well, other people have their opinions too”
(CS, 272-273). Despite this, she ironically has little tolerance for other people’s beliefs, namely
Hulga’s. “Mrs. Hopewell thought of [Hulga] as a child, though she was thirty-two years old and
highly educated” (CS, 271). In the one time in the day when Mrs. Hopewell would be able to
speak with her daughter freely, without Mrs. Freeman’s watchful eyes over their shoulders or a
door to separate her from Hulga, she refused it in an act of intolerance, telling her daughter, “If
you can’t come pleasantly, I don’t want you at all (CS, 274)”.
Joy changed her name to Hulga in an act of rebellion against her mother’s intolerance.
Indeed, “One of her major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into
Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga” (CS, 275). Like
a rebellious teenager, Hulga frequently shuts herself in her room, refuses to make eye contact
with her mother, and dissociates herself from her mother. Her given name, Joy, was symbolic of
her mother’s possession of her. The changing of the name breaks these bonds, and a legal name
change is an action that one can only make when they are an adult—independent of one’s parent.
Hulga wishes her mother to recognize and accept her as an adult with a superior intellect.
Hulga’s response to her mother’s confession of not wanting an unpleasant Hulga is, “If you want
me, here I am—LIKE I AM” (CS, 274). Ironically, this self-professed epitome of rationality and
wisdom has changed her name—how she is introduced to all she meets—as an emotional
reaction to a lack of acceptance and affection from her mother.
Mrs. Hopewell is not the innocent and ignorant optimist that Hulga might believe her to
be. The beginning of the story is from Mrs. Hopewell’s point of view. She tells of the trouble of
her daughter, and she commends herself on the meeting and hiring of the Freeman’s. She states,
“[She] had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a
constructive way that she never felt the lack” (CS, 272) She liked to call Mrs. Freeman a “lady,”
this lowly woman that she had plucked from common jobs and employed, and, “[she] was never
ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody that they might meet” (CS, 272). Mrs.
Hopewell uses Mrs. Freeman as a trophy that can be shown to her neighbors. Similarly, Mrs.
Hopewell was left “at a complete loss” (CS 276) when she states that Hulga obtained a PhD in
philosophy, because she could not use her own daughter as a trophy and say, “My daughter is a
philosopher” (CS, 276). Her talent is manipulation, and she has great experience with it. She
prefers to deceive others into thinking that she is even better than a good country person, and she
deceives Hulga. She is not even truly Christian as she objects to owning more than one bible, and
she “would not for the world have smiled” (CS, 280) upon hearing Manley’s proclamation, “He
who losest his life shall find it” (CS, 280). In this scene, Manley’s proclamation seems so
genuine that it sickens her.
The character of Mrs. Freeman in particular is an odd and shocking one, and it is her odd
characteristics that lead both Hulga and the reader away from the truth. The reader tends to feel
comfortable with dismissing her as a simple, country woman. In her conversations with Hulga,
she often displays a deficient intellect, and only the narrator, reflecting Mrs. Hopewell’s
perspective, vindicates her intelligence insofar as Mrs. Freeman agreed with all her platitudes.
The reality of her character is in fact that she is the most perceptive woman in the story. She is
free from ideological platitudes and false hope, and she is able to see through the deception of
other characters. “Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden
deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable” (CS,
275). She has a fondness and an ability to find secrets in general. Thus, she is quick to
understand that there is some sort of bond between Manley and Hulga, as she notes, contrary to
one of Mrs. Hopewell’s platitudes, “Some people are more alike than others” (CS, 282). It is her
ability to see behind Hulga’s veil of secrecy that makes Hulga truly uncomfortable, as Hulga’s
pride rests on the perception that she has a superior intellect. Mrs. Freeman, when alone with
Hulga, would call her by her real name rather than her original one, Joy. At this, “Hulga would
scowl and redden as if her privacy had been intruded upon. She considered the name her
personal affair” (CS, 275). The significance of this in particular is that Mrs. Freeman has come to
an understanding of Hulga’s true identity that Hulga is not comfortable with. Finally, at the end
of the story, as Manley Pointer flees toward the highway, Mrs. Freeman states, “Some can’t be
that simple. I know I never could” (CS, 291). She was able to understand Manley without any
sort of shocking revelation as that which occurred with Hulga. She is the only person other than
Manley to lift up their veil of “good country people” in front of another.
Yet nothing is more ironic, hypocritical, and deceitful than Hulga’s philosophical views
themselves. Hulga claims to be a nihilistic atheist. She so easily brands all other people as “good
country people,” a class of humans that she has transcended. Yet her atheism is weak and
superficial, a characteristic which Manley is infuriated by. As her time with Manley becomes
more intimate, she opens herself up to him and allows him to take off her leg, which, “She took
care of as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away”
(CS, 288). This scene “was like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his”
(CS, 289). She gave up her objective of raping his supposed Christian beliefs. She allowed
herself to replace rationality with emotion, as if life had a greater meaning—a direct contrary to
nihilism. Even worse, she sought to turn his ideology “into something useful” (CS, 284). The
fundamental principle states that nothing has meaning, purpose, or use. The word nihilism comes
from the Latin word nihil, meaning “nothing,” and the English suffix ism, meaning “the practice
of.” Manley openly states that he believes in nothing, and he lives his life for the pleasure of
metaphorically raping people such as Hulga, and taking trophies from them. Hulga’s actions
contradict her entire ideology.
Another irony, still, is found in one of Hulga’s books. It states, “Science, on the other
hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely
with what-is. Nothing—how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm?...If
science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing” (CS,
277). Science does not have opinions or concerns; it is merely a method of obtaining information
regarding the physical. Additionally, Hulga’s nihilistic beliefs are concerned with nothing and
nothing only, since everything is nothing. During the final scene with Manley, she states, “We
are all damned, but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see.
It’s a kind of salvation” (CS, 288). This is a reaffirmation of her nihilistic beliefs of nothingness,
followed by a contradiction of them. If the philosophy of nihilism itself was correct, then
knowing this would not be a sort of salvation, because salvation would not exist. The image of
the blindfold must be noted; earlier in the story, Hulga is described looking as if she “achieved
blindness by an act of will and means to keep it” (CS, 273). Her contradictions of this philosophy
are so numerous that she has to deliberately blind herself to the truth in order to make her into a
nihilist. This same charge of deliberate self-blinding in order to adhere to some leap of faith is
what Hulga accuses theists, namely her mother, of doing.
Hulga’s final revelation occurs when she comes into contact with an actual nihilist. She was not
merely impaired physically by this encounter; she was intellectually defeated by a foe posing as
an inferior. Still, the physical aspect of this encounter reflects the intellectual aspect. Hulga saw
Manley as a child, and as Ralph C. Wood points out in Flannery O'Connor and the Christhaunted South, Manley and Hulga’s intimate scene is filled with images of pedophilia. This
describes the degree of the crime that Hulga wishes to commit—to rape and destroy Manley’s
ideological innocence. In order for Pointer to inflict great harm on Hulga, it must be to her
ideology. Pointer finally breaks through via her most sensitive point. “With acute moral insight,
Pointer discerns what Hulga loves most: it is not her maidenhead but the emblem of her crippled
condition, her wooden leg” (Wood, 207). Hulga has already deified herself as the center of
truth—the one enlightened person. Manley recognizes this, and he acknowledges that she is
different from all others, granting her the sense of acceptance that she never received from her
mother. He had her soul and her brain in his hand, and he ended the ceremony with his offerings.
He ultimately exposes her as a fake nihilist, and he harshly criticizes her when as exclaims, “You
just a while ago said you didn’t believe in nothing. I thought you was some girl!” (CS, 290) Now
left both physically and intellectually humiliated, violated, and bereft of vital parts of herself, the
girl must rebuild.
The characters of Hulga as well as Mrs. Hopewell are examples of those frauds that claim
to be one thing, though are actually another. Mrs. Hopewell claimed to be kinder than a good
country Christian, while Hulga claimed to be an enlightened atheist. Now, a part of Hulga that
she held so dear has been taken from her, and she has received only the revelation of her foolish
predicament in return. We can only hope that she will benefit from this experience rather than
becoming a true nihilist like Manley. Hulga claimed to be a nihilist, and indeed she knows
everything about nothing.
Works Cited
O'Connor, Flannery, and Robert Giroux. "Good Country People." The Complete Stories. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. N. pag. Print
Wood, Ralph C. "Demonic Nihilism: The Chief Moral Temptation of Modernity." Flannery
O'Connor and the Christ-haunted South. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub.,
2004. N. pag. Print.