31 Days of Short Stories: Day 9. “Good Country People,” by Flannery O’Connor

Posted 9 August, 2008 in Flannery O'Connor, Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories |

From A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

Flannery O’Connor was a vicious ironist, and her irony is on full display in “Good Country People,” which shares several points of commonality with O’Connor’s better-known story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Both stories feature malevolent interlopers who disrupt the tranquility of a Southern family, leaving chaos in their wake. Although the murderous Misfit in “A Good Man” is ultimately the more destructive of the two, the hypocritical Bible salesman who calls himself “Manley Pointer” (has there ever been a more phallic name in fiction?) operates in much the same fashion when he steals the wooden leg of the self-deluded Ph.D. Hulga (née Joy) Hopewell.

“Good Country People” is nevertheless atypical of O’Connor, because it neglects to provide its central character with a moment of recognition at the finish. Unlike the Grandmother in “A Good Man,” whose ultimate realization — “You’re one of my own children!” — leads to her death, Hulga ends the story as blissfully unaware as she was when it began.

Hulga has a Ph.D. in philosophy, which riles her mother, Mrs. Hopewell:

You could say, “My daughter is a nurse,” or “My daughter is a school teacher,” or even, “My daughter is a chemical engineer.” You could not say, “My daughter is a philosopher.” That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans.

The latter statement recalls Mrs. Flood, Haze Motes’s landlady at the end of O’Connor’s novel, Wise Blood, who says of Haze’s self-flagellation: “It’s not natural … It’s like one of them gory stories, it’s something that people have quit doing — like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats.” But whereas Haze’s trajectory involves a collision with his Christ-haunted psyche, Hulga explicitly disavows Christianity, invoking the name of God as a curse rather than a prayer: “Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!”

Hulga styles herself a nihilist in the tradition of Sartre’s idea of nothingness, but this is ultimately a pose: “I don’t have illusions,” she says. “I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.” In this, Hulga is simply repeating the stock phrases she has interiorized from the books she reads. When Mrs. Hopewell picks up one of these books, her eye falls on an underlined passage:

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. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.

Mrs. Hopewell finds in these words some “evil incantation in gibberish,” but Hulga applies them to her pseudo-nihilistic worldview, despite being hopelessly naive about the nature of true nihilism. Even when she finally encounters it in Manley Pointer, she can’t allow herself to recognize it for what it is: “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all — say one thing and do another.” But O’Connor’s point is that the would-be Bible salesman is no kind of Christian at all, as he derisively tells Hulga: “I hope you don’t think … that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!” He makes off with Hulga’s wooden leg — which is hollow and has been explicitly likened to her soul in the story — stranding her in a hayloft. As he leaves, he puts the final capper on the woman’s humiliation by revealing himself to be what she has pretended to be for so long: “I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga … you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!”

If Hulga’s wooden leg represents her spiritual malaise, Manley Pointer’s own true character can be seen in the hollowed-out Bible inside which he carries booze, contraceptives, and a pack of pornographic playing cards. If Hulga comes to some sort of realization about Pointer’s true nature upon seeing his stash — ” ‘Aren’t you,’ she murmured, ‘aren’t you just good country people?’ ” — it is a limited realization, as is her inability to see Mrs. Freeman, the Hopewell’s housekeeper, for what she truly is. Mrs. Freeman has “a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering and the incurable.” She shares a kind of malevolence with Pointer, which is made explicit when O’Connor describes the latter’s “eyes like two steel spikes,” a deliberate echo of “Mrs. Freeman’s beady steel-pointed eyes” (indeed, “steel-pointed” contains a double echo, aligning as it does with the Bible salesman’s nom de guerre).

The final image in the story is of Mrs. Freeman pulling up an “evil-smelling onion shoot.” ” ‘Some can’t be that simple,’ she said. ‘I know I never could.’ ” In O’Connor’s fiction, nothing is ever as simple as it at first appears, and “Good Country People” is a shining example of the author’s own “steel-pointed eyes” and biting, scabrous wit.

2 comments to “31 Days of Short Stories: Day 9. “Good Country People,” by Flannery O’Connor”

DW., August 10th, 2008 at 1:03 pm:

• To me “Good Country People” has always seemed like a companion piece to “Everything That Rises” (or vice versa, I guess, since “People” came first). Both are about educated adult children who — mistakenly — pride themselves on being more sophisticated than their surroundings/mothers, only to have those pretensions shaken out of them by a crisis.

  Loving the short-story project, by the way.

Panic, August 15th, 2008 at 8:40 am:

• So I read Flan, on the recommendation of many. Maybe it’s just my general aversion to short stories (though I did love the Gaitskill), but I just didn’t take from it what others seem to.
  Thus proving (what with my Coupland love, and Lam approval) that I’m a very odd bird.

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