Good County People by Flannery Essay

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Feminist critics have taken a more positive view of Hulga and a more deflationary view of O'Connor's central meaning. "Nothing in O'Connor quite so flagrantly bears out the feminist theologian Mary Daly's assertion that '[t]he myths and symbols of Christianity are essentially sexist' - which is to say "rapist."(1)…it is the author's strategy in… 'Good Country People' to knock these proud female characters down a notch" (Havird 1). David Havird calls the loss of Hulga's leg and, symbolically her intellect, a kind of rape. Given the way that O'Connor frames the tale, O'Connor views it as a kind of deserved 'rape.' Manley Pointer's name supports this reading -- his manliness and taking away of Hulga's symbolic phallus or male 'member' (her leg) suggests that O'Connor views Hulga as insufficiently humble as a woman should be before God. Hulga's disdain of affection, her coldness to being kissed, and her disgust at the pregnancy of Mrs. Friedman's daughter all suggest that O'Connor believes that Hulga does not accept her appropriate, womanly role in God's creation.

"There can be little doubt that the injury to Joy is at least psychosexual. She has in the past felt 'shame,' and she can still regard Manley Pointer's request that she show him where the prosthesis attaches to her stump as obscene" (Havird 5). Joy has refused to accept her body, both because of its imperfections and also because of its femininity, a double sin in O'Connor's eyes: "Through education she has attempted to separate herself intellectually from her maimed but nonetheless female body. Through her adoption of a masculine persona, she has made submissive her feminine self" (Havird 5). Havird states that the removal of the leg, a false, masculine symbolic phallus that is arrogantly constructed by human beings makes Joy vulnerable and feminine once again.

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It reduces her to a state of humility: "when at the end of the story, with that fake life lost and no new, authentic life miraculously found in her nihilistic false savior, she must now, be ready in her humility to receive the Word as she had been prepared to receive the Bible salesman. In that submissive position, that state of female receptivity, do we leave her, a normal girl" (Havird 5).

This reading explains why, despite Hulga's unpleasantness, the reader is inclined to sympathize with her plight. While Manley Pointer is able to escape freely, without being rebuked for his own 'manly' arrogance, Hulga as a maimed woman must suffer. Even her own mother, who displays her own brand of social snobbishness regarding 'good country people', does not experience Hulga's humiliation. O'Connor does not sympathize with Hulga's injury or her impending death from a heart condition: in the Catholic worldview expressed by the story, all human beings are dying, and will die at some point; it is only the acceptance of divine grace and eternal life that makes life valuable.

Even if the reader does not subscribe to the Christian worldview of "Good Country People," the story is compelling because of its portrayal of intellectual arrogance and the limits of human understanding. Hulga fails to understand the con artist who bests her, and she also fails to understand and accept her own limitations as an intellectual, as well as the limits of her body. The final image of the abandoned Hulga is both disturbing and enigmatic, as the reader never learns how Hulga herself interprets her humiliation and symbolic rape of her intellect.

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