Country People

In Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People," the protagonist Hulga, spends her entire adult life doing her best to deny and rebel against her mother's optimistic attitude. Hulga is a highly educated southern woman who lost her leg in an accident at the age of ten and suffers from a heart ailment. Due to these hardships, at thirty-two she still lives with her mother. The highly educated Hulga feels superior to those around her due to their lack of education and complexity. Hulga has no control over the negative emotions she feels, and allows these incidents to shape the remainder of her life. O'Connor uses Hulga to demonstrate how an intense feeling of hostility and intellectual superiority can damage relationships, inhibit intellectual and emotional growth, and blind one to reality.

Hulga despises her situation and believes that she is mentally above those around her, therefore, she feels no need to develop her relations with them. She resents the heart

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Since Hulga assumes her first opinions of others are correct, she is blind to the reality that any mature person recognizes: people, even "good country people," are not always what they seem. Since Hulga feels that the people around her are inferior and have nothing to contribute morally or academically, she has closed her mind to any new ideas in the years since college. Hopewell's refusal to refer to her daughter as Hulga represents her denial of Joy's conversion.

Maturing emotionally and intellectually requires a willingness to learn from the experience and knowledge of others as well as from one's own experiences. There is hope for her if she sheds her air of intellectual superiority and realizes that no one person has all of the answers to life's questions. After putting her in a helpless position, he reveals that he too is an atheist, that he does not really love her, and that he is actually a pervert and an impostor who collects women's artificial body parts. Hopewell neither acknowledges Hulga's pain nor makes any attempt to comfort her child. On the surface he seems to be just like any other country boy. The only thoughts she entertains come from the philosophy books she reads each day. She perhaps realizes when she thinks of her daughter as "still a child",that Hulga's growth has been stunted. However, she finds that he is not the innocent boy he appears to be when he tricks her into removing her artificial leg. She changes her name to Hulga to reflect the way she feels about herself. Hopewell also states "every year she grew less like other people and more like herself-bloated, rude, and squint-eyed".

Common topics in this essay:
O'Connor Hulga, Manley Pointer, Country People, country people, hulga feels, highly educated, intellectual superiority, blind reality,

Approximate Word count = 685
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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