Good Country People and Those Who Hate Them
             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, and
             is very negative about life. 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. There seems to be a symbolic
             connection between her "weak heart" (O'Connor 108) and her lack of emotional attachments.
             She resents the heart condition that forces her to stay with her mother instead of getting a
             lecturing job at a university, and she punishes her mother each day by being rude. 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" (O'Connor 108). Hulga is unable to conceal the painful emotions, which
             plague her and keep her from appreciating the good. She seemingly has no interest in men
             either. According to her mother, she looks at them "as if she could smell their stupidity"
             (O'Connor 109). This is one reason why Hulga fails to establish emotional ties with family,
             Mrs. Hopewell neither acknowledges Hulga's pain nor makes
             ...