Good County People by Flannery

¶ … Good County People" by Flannery O'Connor

Arrogance, the intellect, and divine insight:

Symbolism in Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People"

The story "Good Country People" by Flannery O'Conner tells the tale of Hulga, an overly intellectual, unattractive woman whose prosthetic leg is stolen by a con artist and traveling Bible salesman named Manley Pointer. The beginning of the story sets the scene for the theft: Hulga and her mother live together because Hulga, despite her PhD, has a weak heart and cannot take a job as a professor. Hulga clearly believes herself to be above her mother, and the Friedmans, her mother's tenant family. Symbolically, Hulga has changed her name from Joy to a hideous-sounding word. Her mother thinks Hulga has done so because the girl wanted to call herself the ugliest-sounding word in the world; Hulga thinks "she had a vision of the name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace and to whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when called" (O'Connor 4).

Hulga's mother is arrogant, and gives herself airs about being 'good country people.' Her snobbishness is replicated in an even more dire fashion in her daughter, who arrogantly attempts to christen herself with a new name, obliterating her given name of Joy. O'Conner implies that people should embrace the Joy they are given, and strive to 'Hope well' as Hulga's last name counsels, rather than to ignore aspects of goodness in the real world. Hulga's artificial limb symbolizes the artificial, dead intellectual system of philosophy she embraces.

When the itinerant Bible salesman comes to Mrs. Hopewell's door, Hulga's mother is impressed by his apparent simplicity and good manners. He clearly knows how to charm and flatter people, using their false sense of superiority against them. He later does so with Hulga, before he states that he is a fraud and does not believe in the Bible and that his real aim is to collect the false appendages of people. He coaxes Hulga into taking off her leg, so he can steal it from her, and leaves, telling Hulga that he goes by many names: "Pointer ain't really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don't stay nowhere long" (O'Connor 18).

It is often said that the 'devil can quote scripture.' Pointer seems to assume the role of a 'testing' figure, like the dark angel who asks God to test Job as a man of faith. However, Hulga has no faith: her entire conception of self is based upon false intellectual arrogance. Hulga is proud of believing in nothing, but as the Bible salesman says: "you ain't so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!'…the toast-colored [perhaps referencing the hotness of hell] hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting on the straw in the dusty sunlight" (O'Connor 18). The salesman possesses an almost uncanny ability to know how to win people's sympathies, even suggesting that he wishes to be a missionary because he has a similar condition to Joy, when he is trying to win his first invitation to dinner. He lures Joy up onto the barn loft, stating that she cannot get up there (which immediately causes her to lift herself up, to prove him wrong) and flatters her beauty and intelligence to make her vulnerable and trusting.

According to Christina Bieber Lake, in O'Connor's story, Hulga's "failure to experience joy is a problem of failed insight" (Lake 2). "The 'province of joy' -- the characters' true 'country' -- is the supernatural reality that can be seen all around them, but that is blocked by their sin and by the forces of evil acting upon them" (Lake 2). Joy / Hulga's sin is a refusal to experience joy and thus receive the type of true insight that cannot be understood with the intellect alone, "refusing the beatific vision to her own peril. In rejecting her given name, Hulga also rejects the joy of the created world, especially as it reveals the gratuitous love of the creator God" (Lake 2). Lake takes an Christological view of "Good Country People," suggesting that the story implies only "through suffering and humiliation" and the humbling of the intellect can wisdom be gained, although there is no evidence that Hulga has gained any wisdom, other than the symbolic robbery of her leg (Lake 2).

Feminist critics have taken a more positive view of Hulga and a more deflationary view of O'Connor's central meaning. "Nothing in O'Connor quite so flagrantly bears out the feminist theologian Mary Daly's assertion that '[t]he myths and symbols of Christianity are essentially sexist' - which is to say "rapist."(1)…it is the author's strategy in… 'Good Country People' to knock these proud female characters down a notch" (Havird 1). David Havird calls the loss of Hulga's leg and, symbolically her intellect, a kind of rape. Given the way that O'Connor frames the tale, O'Connor views it as a kind of deserved 'rape.' Manley Pointer's name supports this reading -- his manliness and taking away of Hulga's symbolic phallus or male 'member' (her leg) suggests that O'Connor views Hulga as insufficiently humble as a woman should be before God. Hulga's disdain of affection, her coldness to being kissed, and her disgust at the pregnancy of Mrs. Friedman's daughter all suggest that O'Connor believes that Hulga does not accept her appropriate, womanly role in God's creation.

"There can be little doubt that the injury to Joy is at least psychosexual. She has in the past felt 'shame,' and she can still regard Manley Pointer's request that she show him where the prosthesis attaches to her stump as obscene" (Havird 5). Joy has refused to accept her body, both because of its imperfections and also because of its femininity, a double sin in O'Connor's eyes: "Through education she has attempted to separate herself intellectually from her maimed but nonetheless female body. Through her adoption of a masculine persona, she has made submissive her feminine self" (Havird 5). Havird states that the removal of the leg, a false, masculine symbolic phallus that is arrogantly constructed by human beings makes Joy vulnerable and feminine once again. It reduces her to a state of humility: "when at the end of the story, with that fake life lost and no new, authentic life miraculously found in her nihilistic false savior, she must now, be ready in her humility to receive the Word as she had been prepared to receive the Bible salesman. In that submissive position, that state of female receptivity, do we leave her, a normal girl" (Havird 5).