3.4–Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”
Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”
In this chapter
Link to Full Text
Author Bio
Considered one of the finest short-story writers of the twentieth century, Flannery O’Connor chose the American South as the backdrop of her fiction. Sometimes referred to as “the maker of grotesques,” her dark humor often highlights the distortions of contemporary religion and is filled with keen mockery of her characters’ banal lives and their cliché-ridden conversations about life, death, and the universe (note that O’Connor was a devout Roman Catholic). Many of O’Connor’s characters face a violent spiritual struggle or are confronted by violence for which their ingrained, habitual behavior is completely unprepared.
Born in Savannah, Georgia, O’Connor was educated at Georgia State College for Women and the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. At Iowa she won the Rinehard-Iowa prize for work-in-progress, specifically the writing that eventually became her first novel, Wise Blood. At age 25, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus, an incurable degenerative blood disease that had slowly killed her father ten years earlier. Her doctors informed her she had 5 years to live, a diagnosis that prompted O’Connor to leave the New York writer’s colony (Yaddo) where she was living and return home to live with her mother in Georgia. Having e spent the last fourteen years of her life writing and raising peacocks on her mother’s farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, O’Connor died in Georgia at age 39.
Story Overview
Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” which Henry T. Edmondsen perceptively calls “a study in manipulation,” is one of the most widely anthologized short stories in the American canon, even after more than fifty years since its first publication. Initially included in the 1955 collection A Good Man is Hard to Find, the story was republished in 1971 in the posthumously published The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. The latter compilation won the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction. In brief, the story tells of a woman named Joy (which she changes to Hulga) and the difficult life (or, for some critics, just bad luck) that has left her resentful and loveless, with an impressive academic pedigree yet without any certainty in her belief systems or theories of life. But, when a traveling salesman stops by her family home to sell a Bible, Joy/Hulga’s intellectualized worldview seems to collapse as her heart responds to his presence. The encounter opens a new path for Joy/Hulga, though the salesman’s identity and intentions are hard to nail down and there is no tidy ending.
O’Connor herself considered “Good Country People” to be one of her finest short stories. Richard Giannone, in Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love, reports that in a letter to Robert Giroux, her editor, she wrote that “Good Country People” would anchor the rest of the stories included in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, as it was a “very hot story” that would “set the whole collection on its feet.”
The story contains all the hallmarks of class O’Connor fiction. Set in the American South, “Good Country People” explores themes of faith, good and evil, and grace through irony and symbolism using a gothic style that O’Connor preferred to think of as grotesqueness. Her stories, including “Good Country People,” were typically humorous, although hers was a dark humor commonly lost on the average reader, who could not always see through the violence wrought by corrupt characters to O’Connor’s moral message. As quoted by J.B. Cheaney in “Radical Orthodoxy: The Fiction of Flannery O’Connor,” Giroux once explained that her critics often “recognized her power but missed her point.”
Major Themes
Names and Their Significance
Important to pay attention to names in the text. O’Connor is a big on irony. Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, arguably, are uses of irony. Also the delicious dark humor of Joy/Hulga, and how she choose Hulga because it was the ugliest name possible. In thinking of names/how they function, it’s useful to ask how/if the characters’ behaviors match (or not, of course) their given names.
Joy/Hulga: Anti gender norms?
Hulga is a wonderfully complicated (even contradictory?) character. On the one hand, Joy/Hulga violates gender norms. She wants to be “ugly,” for example, and we can think also about the mentions of her clothes, and what her mother thinks is her strange professional choice: the study of philosophy. On the other hand, Joy/Hulga falls in love with Manley Pointer, and even thinks about making a life with him. These, it seems, are standard gendered expectations. Yet, as is often the case, with O’Connor’s stories, nothing is that easy. As you read, keep in mind what you make of Hulga in terms of gendered behaviors.
Self Discovery: The Work of Grace
Many religious readings of the text, and in fact all of O’Connor’s work. One of her most famous statements helps in thinking about such readings. “The reader likes his grace warm and fuzzy, not dark and disruptive,” O’Connor famously said in her work titled “The Church and the Fiction Writer.”
Lots has been done with O’Connor as a religious author, but it’s always a really disturbing sort of picture that she paints. Traditional religious readings would equate Manley Pointer, despite his despicableness, with the work of the theological concept of grace. O’Connor has spoken about the work of/opportunity for grace in many of her pieces—lots of scholarship is out there on O’Connor and Grace, and/or O’Connor and Religion. O’Connor will often say that grace, even if it comes through intense darkness and danger, nonetheless offers those upon whom it is visited the chance for a better life. Could read Hulga as a recipient of this frightening sort of grace. Depending on one’s interpretation of her, Hulga did break through some of her defenses. She admitted that she felt for Pointer, when earlier in the text she scoffed at the notion of love. She also trusted Pointer by showing him her leg—trust is something seemingly new to Hulga. But, we can’t forget that this supposed agent of grace was a pretty horrible man. Perhaps O’Connor is making some sort of point about faith/trust in others. Sometimes it is incredibly difficult, but we must do it. O’Connor would probably endorse that idea. For more, a library Summon search on something such as “Flannery O’Connor and religion” will produce many, many results …
O’Connor’s categorization as a “Southern Gothic” author
As Thomas Ærvold Bjerre explains, “Southern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in literature from the early 19th century to this day. Characteristics of Southern Gothic include the presence of irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque characters; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation.” The big thing to remember about Southern Gothic? It’s that word “southern” itself. In other words, the genre is uniquely rooted in the South’s tensions, history, struggles, and aberrations. Again turning to Bjerre’s useful summary, we see that Southern Gothic “brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the pastoral, agrarian South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy.” Other scholars have usefully explained that lots remains hidden in the psyche of many characters from Southern Gothic fiction: in the confused motivations of a character such as Hulga, for example, of Miss Amelia from Carson McCuller’s “Ballad of the Sad Cafe,” we can usefully locate a Freudian return of the repressed, or “the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history” (Bjerre).
Critical Context:
Edmondsen, Henry T. Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O’Connor’s Response to Nihilism. Lexington Books, 2002.
Book description:
While Flannery O’Connor is hailed as one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century American south, few appreciate O’Connor as a philosopher as well. In Return to Good and Evil, Henry T. Edmondson introduces us to a remarkable thinker who uses fiction to confront and provoke us with the most troubling moral questions of modern existence.'”Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul,” O’Connor once said, in response to the nihilistic tendencies she saw in the world around her. Nihilism—Nietzche’s idea that “God is dead’—preoccupied O’Connor, and she used her fiction to draw a tableau of human civilization on the brink of a catastrophic moral, philosophical, and religious crisis. Again and again, O’Connor suggests that the only way back from this precipice is to recognize the human need for grace, redemption, and God. She argues brilliantly and persuasively through her novels and short stories that the Nietzschean challenge to the notions of good and evil is an ill-conceived effort that will result only in disaster. With rare access to O’Connor’s correspondence, prose drafts, and other personal writings, Edmondson investigates O’Connor’s deepest motivations through more than just her fiction and illuminates the philosophical and theological influences on her life and work. Edmondson argues that O’Connor’s artistic brilliance and philosophical genius reveal the only possible response to the nihilistic despair of the modern world: a return to good and evil through humility and grace.
Foss, Jerome C. “The Contemplative Mentality on Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People.'” The Catholic Social Science Review, vol. 22, pp. 237-247, Jan 2017. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=124789127&site=ehost-live.
Article abstract:
Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” offers readers a chance to better understand the shortcomings of modern political theory. The story makes explicit references to the modern thinkers Malebranche and Heidegger, both of whom sever philosophy from sensual reality. Hulga embraces these thinkers’ approach, but is unprepared for the con artist, Manly Pointer. Mrs. Hopewell accepts the ideas of early modernity without question, and is likewise deceived by Pointer. Mrs. Freeman, who relies on her senses, immediately recognizes deception. The story reflects O’Connor’s preference for a Thomistic approach to political thought that honors the senses and cultivates contemplative habits.
Lebow, Jess. Prosthesis Repurposed: Gender and Rehabilitation in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction. Journal of Cultural & Literary Disability Studies, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 385-402, 2017.
Article abstract:
The article posits Flannery O’Connor’s writing as an articulation of prosthesis’s subversive potential. A crutch user, O’Connor wrote in the wake of World War II, as rehabilitation professionals sought not only to supply disabled people with sophisticated prostheses, but also to train them in their use. While the prescriptive instruction of the rehabilitation industry worked to reinstate normative productivity along gender lines, O’Connor’s work illuminates technology’s potential as a site for reimagining and reframing disabled embodiment. O’Connor’s texts and characters attempt this repurposing through individual and subversive prosthesis use. Drawing primarily on her stories “Good Country People” and “The Lame Shall Enter First,” the article considers how the use of prostheses to communicate unique predilections and desires challenges the standardizing impulse that undergirded postwar
rehabilitation.
Haddox, Thomas F. ” ‘Lingering’ and ‘Incurable’: Flannery O’Connor’s Humor and the Game of Status in ‘Good Country People.’ “ Women’s Studies, vol. 51, no. 4, 2022.
Bonus Content: Why Should You Read Flannery O’Connor? (Video)
Sources
Prentice Hall Anthology of Woman’s Literature, ed. Debra Holdstein. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000.
Thomas Ærvold Bjerre, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Literature, “Southern Gothic”
