Good Country People (1955). Content and Description

O’Connor added “Good Country People” to the short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find at the last minute, after she had already negotiated the collection’s contents. The story appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in July 1955, the same month the collection was published by Harcourt, Brace. At the center of the story lies Joy (Hulga) Hopewell, a 32-year-old woman with a heart condition and an artificial leg—her father shot her leg off during a hunting trip when she was 10 years old—who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy and who, inspired by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, changed her name to Hulga.

Joy-Hulga reluctantly lives with her mother, a divorcee, on the family farm. After establishing the setting and describing Joy, Mrs. Hopewell, and Mrs. Hopewell’s friend and tenant farmer Mrs. Freeman, the action of the story begins the morning after a 19-year-old Bible salesman with a phallic name, Manley Pointer, has visited the Hopewell home, a farm much like O’Connor’s beloved Andalusia. In a flashback to the previous evening, the reader learns that Manley professes to have a heart condition, has dedicated his life to “Chrustian [sic] service,” and he and Joy-Hulga have agreed to go for a picnic the following day.

She, viewing the salesman as inferior and impressionable, has dreamed during the night that she will seduce Manley and teach him about philosophy, exposing the weaknesses of what she sees as his finite belief system and revealing that God does not exist. Ironically, Manley becomes the seducer, the one who leads Joy-Hulga into a hayloft, convinces her to allow him to remove her artificial leg, shares with her a whiskey flask hidden in a hollowed-out Bible, lays out pornographic playing cards, gives her a box of condoms, leaves her marooned in the hayloft, and comments, “You ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” as he makes off with Joy’s glasses and artificial limb. After this stunning climax, the story returns to the banter of Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who, seeing Manley leave the barn, comment on his dullness and simplicity.

The story plays with different possibilities for understanding; the ways that people negotiate the world, interpret others’ actions, and arrive at their own ways of making meaning. It also deals with the manipulative way human beings vie for control and the many games that ensue from the desire to master others and, ultimately, life’s purpose. The chief example of such a tricky figure is Joy Hopewell, who in graduate school changes her name to Hulga: something ugly, unthinkable, the Germanic name that declares her nihilistic enlightenment and philosophical affinities. Joy-Hulga believes that she has risen above the farm’s banalities and the limitations of the surrounding community’s adherence to a literal interpretation of religious teaching.

Whereas her mother and Mrs. Freeman attribute worldly actions to a divine plan, Joy-Hulga deduces that nothing matters, that life lacks purpose. As with many of her works, O’Connor gives the reader not-so-subtle signs of Joy-Hulga’s fallen nature: her absurd name, her desire to seduce Manley, and her physical afflictions—a wooden leg (she treats it “as someone else would his soul”) and weak heart, both metaphors for spiritual sickness.

Having failed to escape what she views as the simplistic farm world inhabited by the “good country people” her mother holds in the highest regard, Joy-Hulga stomps around the house disparaging rural life. Here O’Connor depicts the radical conflict between worldviews of unsophisticated farm people who fail to see beyond outward appearances and those of university-formed intellectuals who, in their exalted pride, dismiss the possibility of grace and blind themselves to the ways of the world.

While Joy-Hulga is determined to create her own, differentiated reality, she also is a game player, someone who derives pleasure from toying with the Bible salesman and dreams of pulling apart what she considers to be his crude worldview. Ironically, she becomes trapped in her own game, the victim of a con man. Even though she possesses a great intellect, her mother, Mrs. Freeman, and Manley understand her vulnerability and childlike nature. Although O’Connor lampoons Joy-Hulga in the story, she, unlike the other characters, experiences an epiphany, one in which, in the face of hardship, she confronts her own weakness, blindness, and lost innocence. The story ends with the closest thing to romance O’Connor offers: a foodless picnic in which two manipulators try to outfox each other.

As Manley unveils his intelligence, his equally nihilistic worldview, and the licentious tools of his trade, Joy-Hulga gasps, “Aren’t you . . . just good country people?” Here, she reveals the naivete that she and her mother share. In a typical O’Connor moment of revelation, Joy-Hulga confronts her own blindness and, like many of O’Connor’s protagonists, is shocked into awareness. She, her mother, Mrs. Freeman, and Manley mirror one another in their self-absorbed visions of the world, but the reader is left with Joy-Hulga’s epiphany and her potential for both seeing the fallen nature of the world and accepting grace. As her mother and Mrs. Freeman have, Joy-Hulga has fallen for a cliched notion of human nature. O’Connor describes Joy-Hulga in “dusty sunlight” as she turns “her churning face toward the opening” and sees Manley moving over the “green speckled lake.”

While the language here hints that she has gained a new understanding of the world, O’Connor leaves the reader to stitch together the story’s details, imagine what Joy-Hulga now sees, and evaluate the motives behind the characters’ shocking actions. In this final moment the narrator leaves Joy-Hulga and returns to her mother and Mrs. Freeman, who still see Manley as an exemplar of the simple life. “The world,” Mrs. Hopewell says, “would be better off if we were all that simple.” Of course, this vision of the world, one of false appearances and game players, cannot sustain itself. As Mrs. Freeman pulls an “evil-smelling onion shoot” from the earth, she concedes, “Some can’t be that simple. . . . I know I never could.” These final words ring of a truth that Joy-Hulga’s epiphany makes manifest, one in which goodness lies just beyond reach, and the evils of the world rise each day anew.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Discuss the ways that Mrs. Hopewell, Mrs. Freeman, and Joy-Hulga use language. What emphasis do they place on words; what significance does this emphasis have?

2. On one level, this story, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, is a romance that deals with seduction, sin, and redemption. Compare and contrast O’Connor’s story and Hawthorne’s novel. Why is it significant that both focus on similar subjects?