“Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor
Let’s start with two points only loosely related to this story. In the back of your
text there are two sections you need to be aware of.
First of all, there’s a brief biography of every author represented in your text.
While I won’t ask any questions about the authors, sometimes the info is interesting,
sometimes it can help you understand the work, or sometimes it could keep you from
making a mistake like asking what kind of weird man would write a story like “Good
Country People.” A check of the biogs would tell you that this Flannery is female.
Second, there’s also a Glossary of terminology. A dictionary if you will of
various literary and critical terms. If you find me or the text using a word you’re not
familiar with, check the Glossary first of all. Remember this Glossary is limited to
literary and critical vocabulary.
OK, what kind of weird guy, I mean gal, would write a story like this one. It is,
after all, certainly one of the two or three strangest you’ll read in the course. (I can hear
some of you now, “There’s weirder stuff to come. Oh gawd.”) Well, a Catholic living in
the rural south, all her stories are moral and many—including this one—are highly
religious. Those things make her and her fiction highly unusual.
More than strange, the story frequently misleads us, draws us into assumptions or
conclusions which we later have to revise. First of all, as the story starts, our protagonist
or main character seems to be Mrs. Freeman or Mrs. Hopewell. Like others, that idea
quickly proves to be wrong as either Joy/Hulga or Manly Pointer quickly takes that role.
And real quick, let’s get this out of the way. Can you think of a more phallic name than
his? We’ll discuss that later.
And what was your initial reaction to Manly? Did you buy his “innocent, good
ole country boy” pose? I’m afraid some of you did, but even if you assumed he was a
conman, I doubt you were much closer to an accurate judgment of Pointer than Joy/Hulga
when she accepted him at face value.
If you laughed at Joy/Hulga for failing to see through Pointer’s mask, O’Connor
would be happy. For she entrapped you in the same situation. You judged Hulga for her
inability to see the “true” Manly, but you demonstrated the same inadequacy. Even
worse, if you will, because you (erroneously) felt superior to her, O’Connor made you
share the same false superiority complex than Joy/Hulga feels. Many writers (Faulkner
and Hemingway, among others) and film makers (Hitchcock, for example) implicate
readers and viewers in the same way, making them share the guilt of characters in their
works.
Probably our most erroneous assumption, however, came while we knowingly
watched the seduction in the hayloft. Manly seems to plead with Hulga to tell him she
loves him. When she finally says yes, he tells her, “Prove it.” When she coyly asks
“How,” we all know where this dialogue is going.
How long did it take you to recover from his response?
Notice the interesting role reversal or gender bender here: Stereotypically in such
scenes the male plans the seduction and the female needs to be told “he” loves her. And
while Manly has the phallic name, it is Hulga who possesses the tangible phallic symbol,
her wooden leg. (I know some of you are shaking your heads here, but we’ll come back
to this later).
Why does Hulga decide to seduce Manly? She’s a virgin (at least we can assume
that since we’re told she’d never been kissed) . But her decision isn’t simple carnal
curiosity. Seeing what she believes is simplistic innocence in Manly, she perversely
wants to prove her superiority by corrupting him. Although she would scoff at the idea,
surely there is some “sour grapes/envy” involved. Like all of us, she was once innocent.
“Sophomore psychology” or “nickel Freud” would argue she resents the presence of that
lost quality in anyone else.
In the midst of the seduction scene, Hulga tries to explain her philosophy to
Manly: “We are all damned….but some of us have taken our blindfolds off and see that
here’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation” (118).
So we are face to face again with nihilism, the same philosophy of or belief in
nothing we saw in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” Understand that if Joy’s philosophy is
right—if indeed nothing in the world has meaning, if everything means nothing, then it
would be a “kind of salvation” to realize it.
This is probably as good a point as any to note that Hulga is a fraud. Her belief in
nihilism is self-deception. If she really believed that “everything is nothing” and that
“nothing has any importance,” she would not be bothered by her mother and Mrs
Freeman or feel the need to destroy Manly’s “innocence.”
After Hulga removes her leg, Manly attempts to continue the sexual scenario.
When she balks, he slaps the leg in his brief case and leaves, with his parting shot, “You
ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born” (145).
And thus Manly not only robs her of her leg (and for that matter of her glasses),
he robs her of her sense of superiority. She feels superior to all those around her, not
merely because of her advanced academic degree but because she believes she—unlike
these “simple foolish country people”—believes in nothing. While it took her years of
intellectual study and advanced degrees to achieve that “superiority,” Manly has totally
deceived her with his “innocent” act and asserts he’s “been believing in nothing” since
birth.
Robbing her of her intellectual “superiority” and her leg, he leaves her
without……(gawd awful pun warning!) without a leg to stand on.
Hulga’s three physical “problems” are all symbolic. Her “heart condition”
symbolizes her inability to love; her nearsightedness symbolizes her inability to see
beyond herself. But her leg is the most interesting.
Once Joy had youth, innocence, an earthly father, and two legs. Hulga has none
of those things. The real leg she once had has been replaced by a lifeless, artificial leg
just as the real innocence, faith, or belief she once had has been replaced by a lifeless,
artificial belief—nihilism. Just as her earthly father is no longer a part of her life, neither
is any heavenly father.
Let’s look at the seduction scene again: A virgin, a “man of God,” three gifts
(whiskey, “rubbers,” and pornographic playing cards), and a straw filled barn—almost a
manger. Symbolically, we have a nativity scene. I know some of you are really shaking
your heads now; this is too weird, too perverse. But every feature and item of the
Biblical nativity scene is present.
Wait a minute; no, not everything. One thing is missing. And that’s the point.
Not only is the scene perverse, it is missing the single most important element: the babe,
the Christ. That’s Miss O’Connor’s view of the 20th century: without Christ at the
center, everything is, at best, meaningless and empty or, at worse, perverse.
With her Ph D, Joy demonstrates mankind’s pride in rational intellect which
makes “simple faith” impossible.
But “lack of advanced education” is not the answer either. Mrs. Freeman and
Mrs. Hopewell are hardly models of anything positive. They’re walking cliché factories.
Mrs. Freeman is a noisy busy body, and Mrs. Hopewell has no real religion, lying about
her Bible.
Their names are symbolic. Mrs. Freeman is apparently a hired hand, perhaps the
wife of a sharecropper, anything but free. Even Manly plays with Mrs. Hopewell’s name,
and it suggests her blind, “rose-colored glasses” optimism, hoping everything will go
well but doing nothing about it.
The phallic symbolism of Pointer’s name has already been noted, and that’s all
the more interesting when he tells us it’s an assumed name. It seems logical to believe
that he understood the sexuality of the name. Joy’s original name matches her “pre-fall”
innocence. She selected the name Hulga, she says, because it was the ugliest name she
could think of, demonstrating her self pity (again showing that her proclaimed nihilism is
fraudulent).
The title of the story is, first of all, ironic (“irony”: something quite different,
perhaps even the opposite of, what it appears). These country people are anything but
good. If the story were set in New York, we probably wouldn’t have been taken in by
Manly’s “mask.” The big city, after all, is filled with perversity and sin. By placing the
story with its perversity and duplicity in the country, Miss O’Connor makes her
indictment of mankind placeless, ubiquitous, universal.