The Grace of Shattered Illusions in O’Connor’s “Good Country People”
By Marybeth Baggett
Flannery O’Connor’s style is inimitable. The mid-20th century writer’s unique combination of ridiculous caricature and sudden violence, her theological heft wrapped in the cloak of everyday Americana, and her persistent theme of grace to cover a multitude of sins: all of these are distinctive marks of an O’Connor story. She recognized that readers during this time of increased secularization needed something extreme to reawaken them to long forgotten spiritual realities: “[T]o the hard of hearing,” she once wrote, “you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling pictures.”[i]
Take O’Connor’s classic short story “Good Country People.”[ii] The plot centers on a simple and cheerfully gullible mother and her dour, disagreeable daughter. The appropriately named Mrs. Hopewell is constantly at a loss for how to manage her daughter Hulga, an intentional caricature to project a truth the reader can’t miss. In this case, Hulga has changed her name from Joy, her given one, precisely because of its ugly sound and hideous connotations. She aims to be as offensive to her mother as her mother’s vacuous optimism is to her. In turn, the mother and daughter create unbearable conditions for each other.
The clashes between mother and daughter are both comical and poignant. Hulga, although an adult with a Ph.D. in philosophy, seems stunted in perpetual childhood. She dresses in a cartoonish sweatshirt with a cowboy and horse emblazoned on it. She pouts around the house, mocking her mother’s superficiality and lording her education over anyone within ear shot. Nary a dinner goes by without some outburst by Hulga spouting inscrutable and esoteric theories, usually in response to some milquetoast sentiment from her mother.
But even after such consistent mistreatment, Mrs. Hopewell — sweet, simple, and innocent as she is — sadly continues to humor and pander to her daughter, which probably only encourages Hulga’s arrogance and condescension. When we learn Hulga suffered a hunting accident as a child, the source of this dysfunctional relationship becomes clear. Hulga unfortunately lost her leg and now walks with a wooden prosthetic. But rather than receive her mother’s love and embrace any emotional or spiritual healing on offer, Hulga instead makes matters worse, stomping whenever she enters or leaves a room to remind everyone of just how terrible is her plight.
Nothing Mrs. Hopewell dredges up from her well of banality, pleasant as her attitude may be, accounts for Hulga’s bitterness, let alone disrupts it. She may think herself a sincere Christian woman, but she has no language or framework whatsoever to account for sin. Instead, she ignores offense and through sleight of hand sweeps the whole unpleasant notion under the rug. In fact, Mrs. Hopewell’s unwillingness to confront the viciousness of her daughter’s mistreatment of her ironically accommodates and enables Hulga’s descent into darkness. This abuse is good for neither of them and diminishes the dignity of both the perpetrator and the victim. Denying sin, O’Connor makes clear, does nothing to undermine its reality or its consequences.
While Mrs. Hopewell preaches a Pollyannaish gospel of positive thinking where everything starts and ends well, Hulga sees morality as a mere construct, as irrelevant to her day-to-day life as is the God she also does not believe in. Perhaps Hulga finds materialism a more satisfying explanation for the suffering she has endured. Surely her mother’s views won’t cut it. Whatever the case, Hulga’s atheism and corresponding moral skepticism give her ammunition for judging gullible innocents who still swallow up all that God stuff.
But it is precisely this sinful pride, even if Hulga doesn’t recognize it as such, that is her undoing. Her fall comes by way of a new character arriving on the scene, one Manley Pointer, a seemingly unassuming Bible salesman who charms and disarms Mrs. Hopewell with his earnest faith, southern slang, and corny jokes. Hulga, on the other hand, sees the apparent simpleton as another means to self-exultation, another target for her egoistic disdain. Yet Hulga’s scorn for all things spiritual blinds her to the darkness behind Pointer’s guileless façade. Pride, for all its short-term gratification, never fails to bring you crashing down. And hard. Even still Hulga thinks she can avoid reaping what she has sown.
Mistaking Manley Pointer as a folksy, innocent rube, Hulga mounts the hayloft with him where she pontificates about the world and grows ever bolder in her smug contempt of silly beliefs like damnation and salvation and even love. This scene culminates in a startling conclusion that I won’t spoil here. Suffice it to say that Manley leaves Hulga with no illusions about the dangers of nihilism fully embraced.
Hard as Hulga’s story is to read, O’Connor provides a vital service. Through these large and startling pictures, she shocks and confronts us with an obstinate reality that we ignore at our own peril. Good and evil, right and wrong, vice and virtue: these are not illusory. They are bedrock truths of our existence. Jettison the terms all you like; bandy them about in the academic discourse to your heart’s content. As Hulga painfully learns, and as we should learn through her example, that does nothing to dissolve, disrupt, destroy, undo, or otherwise taint the truth. To think otherwise merely blinds us further from our only path to life. The truth, Jesus tells us, will set us free. And for a character who has denied the truth for so long, something drastic is needed for her to see that truth: Hulga’s violent confrontation with a truth she cannot easily dismiss, a truth she cannot stand in judgment over but one instead that stands in judgment over her, shatters the illusions that served her so poorly.
—Marybeth Baggett is professor of English and Cultural Apologetics at Houston Christian University where she serves as chair of her department. Her most recent book is Ted Lasso and Philosophy, coedited with her husband David.
[i] Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and Her Country,” Mystery & Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), 34.
[ii] Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People,” A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 177-206.