Good Country People
In Flannery O'Connor's short story "Good Country People," Hulga spends her whole life denying and rebelling against her mother's hopeful attitude. Hulga is a thirty-two-year-old with a Ph.D. who lost her leg in a hunting accident at the age of ten and who also suffers from a heart condition. Still, living with her mother makes her have a bad outlook on life and those around her. O'Connor uses Hulga to show how a strong feeling of insecurity and lack of reality can harm different relationships. Despite Hulga's impairments, she believes she is smarter and above the rest around her. There seems to be some kind of symbolic attachment between Hulga's "weak heart"(133) and her lack of relationships. She resents the fact that she is living at home instead of lecturing at a university where people would understand her. She punishes her mother every day by the rudeness she exerts. Hulga, "had made it plain that if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these red hills and good country people"(133). Mrs. Hopewell neither acknowledges Hulga's pain nor does she make any attempt to comfort
with a man that abandons her sitting "on the straw in the dusty sunlight"(143) helpless, with her face "churning"(143) in agony and humiliation. her. Mrs. Hopewell says, "People who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful even if they were not"(133). Hulga considers herself ugly, and after her accident when she was of legal age was when she made the decision to change her name from Joy to Hulga, she feels it suits her personality: "She had Hulga plans to take him to the barn, seduce him, and then ruin him by taking away what he believes in. She will take away his shame and turn it into something useful. She feels she is manipulating him, but it is actually the other way around. She lets her shield down, and Manley tricks her into removing her artificial leg. After putting her in a helpless position, he reveals that he does not really love her, and that he has done this before and even got a woman's glass eye from being this person he is really not. Since Hulga for so long "[achieves] blindness by an act of will"(131), her step into reality is especially painful. What starts out as a "great joke"(13
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Approximate Word count = 765
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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