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Good Country People

Introduction

The main character of the story, Manley is an overweight 10-year-old boy with blue eyes that are always watering behind wire-rimmed glasses. For the girl's party, he is dressed in a white suit, but he is also wearing his toy pistols and holster. His escape from the girl's party, destroying her gift of the bottle of perfume, and his attire make his name particularly fitting. He expresses a moment of "manly" rebellion in the face of females who are older (his mother and grandmother) as well as his age (the girl). His thoughts turn frequently to his older brother and his family's fears that Roy Jr. is going "bad." Manley is manly in another way as well—in his struggle with God, he represents the human condition. O'Connor did not comment on whether this Manley may or may not represent a younger version of the character Manley Pointer in a later story, "Good Country People."

Manley Pointer, a Bible-selling con man, is the antagonist in "Good Country People" who affects an awakening in the protagonist of the story, Hulga Hopewell. His comically phallic name suggests his carnal nature, which he conceals behind claims of devotion to a life of "Chrustian service." A prototypical O'Connor grotesque, Manley collects "interesting things" from the women he seduces. To a collection that already includes "a woman's glass eye," Manley adds Hulga's artificial leg. O'Connor commented in an interview that "All during the story 'Good Country People' the wooden leg is growing in importance. And thus when the Bible salesman steals it, he is stealing a great deal more than the wooden leg." What Manley "is stealing" is the symbolic equivalent of Hulga's corrupted soul, rendered lifeless by her nihilistic philosophy, the belief in nothing on which all her actions are founded. When Manley vanishes with her leg, he also takes away the illusions of superiority and invulnerability that her rejection of a supreme being has spawned (Connor, pp. 178).

Among O'Connor antagonists, Manley can be compared to Mary Grace of "Revelation" (1964) and the scrub bull in "Greenleaf" (1956), both of whom force the protagonists into a much-needed self-assessment. O'Connor handles each of these awakenings in a similar fashion, portraying the antagonist as a destructive agent, more villain than savior. Yet, she employs Christ imagery in each case to indicate that the physical assault is a divinely inspired attempt to trigger spiritual awareness. In addition, each protagonist experiences an unexplainable feeling of familiarity with his attacker. Once the symbolic connection with Christ is established, the story functions on two distinct levels, literal and allegorical. Consequently, spiritual significance colors Manley's response to Hulga when she demands that he reattach her leg: "Leave it off for a while. You got me instead."

Character Analysis

O'Connor prepares the reader for Hulga's spiritual encounter during Manley's initial appearance in the story. "He who losest his life shall find it," he tells Mrs. Hopewell, roughly paraphrasing Jesus' words regarding the worldly sacrifice necessary to sustain a spiritual life. Later, while in the hayloft with Manley, Hulga feels as if she is "face to face with real innocence." As a result, she acquiesces to his demand to remove her leg, which is "like surrendering to him completely." O'Connor notes that Hulga's surrender is like "losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his." The biblical allusion also calls to mind another O'Connor story that, like "Good Country People," appears in the collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955): "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" (1953). One of the Christian messages O'Connor conveys in this story, which also involves a con man who uses religion to seduce his victims, also appears in "Good Country People": selfishness stands in the way of spiritual salvation (Connor, pp. 256).

O'Connor supplies other Christian references and symbols to reinforce Manley's role as savior. Early in the story he tells Mrs. Hopewell that he wants to be a missionary because "that was the way you could do most for people," a comment that foreshadows Hulga's apparently redemptive experience. Manley also mentions that he is the seventh of twelve children, calling to mind the biblical Judah, the seventh of Jacob's twelve children, from whose line the Bible alleges Jesus descended. In addition, Manley's seduction of Hulga mirrors a spiritual calling, which she ultimately cannot ignore. During dinner at the Hopewell house he continuously glances at her "trying to attract her attention," but she will not acknowledge him. When she meets him the next morning, he seems to suddenly appear from nowhere, remarking, "I knew you'd come!"

That this humiliating encounter will lead to a heightened sense of spiritual vision, though, is foreshadowed in Manley's pocketing Hulga's eyeglasses, a symbol reminiscent of Hazel Motes's blinding in Wise Blood (1952). After Hulga surrenders her leg, Manley tests the validity of her belief in nothing. Opening his briefcase, he takes out his Bible whose pages have been hollowed out to conceal, among other items associated with illicit pleasures, a packet of condoms. Under the impression that she had seduced him, Hulga is dumbfounded by his intentions, reminding him "You're a Christian!" Manley insists that he does not really "believe in that crap." He proceeds to place her leg in his briefcase "with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends." Upon exiting, Manley explains that Pointer is not his real name, and he seems to be speaking for all O'Connor's spiritual messengers when he remarks, "I use a different name at every house I call at and don't stay nowhere long." In the description of Hulga's final vision of him, he seems to be walking on water: "she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.

Mrs. Hopewell has kept the Freemans working on her farm for four years because she thinks they are "good country people." Good country people are not explicitly defined in the story. However, Mrs. Hopewell does say that she thinks Manley Pointer, the young Bible salesman, was boring when he stayed and had dinner with them. She says that he was not only boring but also sincere and genuine and that she thought he was good country people, whom she also calls the salt of the earth (Baym et al, pp. 212).

Mrs. Hopewell has a weakness for good country people like the Freemans. She allows Manley Pointer to stay and talk for two hours at her home because he gains her sympathy when he describes himself as a "just a country boy". Pointer implies that he may not be good enough for her to talk with, that she is more sophisticated. When she sees him look at the silver on her two sideboards, she decides that her house must be the most elegant he has ever seen. Unlike Hulga, she cannot be deliberately rude to anyone, and she impulsively invites him to dinner. Mrs. Hopewell distinguishes between good country people and "white trash." White trash is never defined in the story either, but there is an implication that they do not like to work. Mrs. Hopewell's previous employees, whom she called white trash, did not stay longer than a year. Manley Pointer is clearly not good country people, and he does not seem to be white trash either. He turns out to be a force of evil that appears, like so many of O'Connor's devil figures, seemingly out of nowhere, then retreats intact and back into the nowhere from which he came.

Several dichotomies are found in the story—good country people and white trash; educated and uneducated people; those who believe in God and those who believe in nothing. Good country people, though perhaps unsophisticated, believe in God and hard work. They are responsible and try to be good to others. They are the salt of the earth, as Mrs. Hopewell says, because they keep businesses and farms going. There are many of them, and they do no lasting harm to society (Connor, pp. 96).

To Joy/Hulga Hopewell, good country people are simple and uneducated. They believe in God or say they do because they have not thought out the serious questions of faith for themselves. They speak in clichés because they do not take the time to think an original thought or form a unique means of expression. Joy/Hulga considers herself superior to good country people because she is highly educated and has come to the conclusion that God is a lie. Her philosophy degree has her thinking in existentialist terms that her mother does not understand and that what "science wishes to know is nothing of nothing".

Both Mrs. Hopewell and Joy/Hulga mistake Manley Pointer for good country people. When he tries to "seduce" Mrs. Hopewell into buying one of his Bibles, like her daughter, she at first is not taken in at all. When he appeals to her sympathy, she relents and impulsively invites him to stay for dinner. She does not, however, ever purchase a Bible. In this way, she is much less taken in than her daughter. Interestingly, when Pointer mentions that she should have a Bible in the parlor, Mrs. Hopewell lies and tells him that hers is by her bedside when it is, in fact, in the attic. She does not tell Pointer that her daughter is an atheist who keeps her from having her Bible out, but she also does not tell him that it is stored away in an inconvenient place. Mrs. Hopewell may not have read the Bible any more recently than her daughter. Perhaps Joy/Hulga's views have had more of an effect on Mrs. Hopewell than one first realizes (Stillinger et al, pp. 201).

All Mrs. Hopewell loses out on in mistaking Manley Pointer for a good country boy when he is not, however, is some of her time and food and perhaps the cost of a new artificial leg. Joy/Hulga, who thinks she is so much more sophisticated and educated than her mother, has lost much more, but perhaps she has gained more as well. Joy/Hulga thinks that she can seduce this good country boy, and then when he is feeling guilty over the seduction (as any good Christian country boy would feel), she will attack his mind and beliefs and try to confuse him about the existence of God for his own good. She will try to educate him. Joy/Hulga is miserable and seems determined to make everyone around her as miserable as she is. She lost her leg in a hunting accident when she was 10 and developed a sour disposition. She believes that she is more sophisticated than her mother and everyone else because of her education and her turning away from religion. Only the sophisticated and educated would have enough sense to turn away from God. Anyone who does not must be simple and ignorant.

Joy/Hulga learns a lesson in humility from the incident in the barn. She does not seduce Manley Pointer in the end, but he seduces her. When they first kiss, she is able to keep her mind clear. When he first makes his moves in the barn, she is able to do the same. However, when he figures out her secret, that she believes her artificial leg makes her different but that she is still special, he is able to break down her barriers against intimacy. He convinces her that he is a real innocent, and she begins to hope for the first time in many years that human contact is worth being vulnerable for after all (DiYanni, pp. 159).

At that moment, she surrenders her mind to him, which, to Joy/Hulga, is more important than her body. She begins to envision a future with this boy, losing her life to his, and allowing him to take her leg on and off in an act of real intimacy. When she sees the items hidden in his valise, however—instead of Bibles, he carries disease protection, liquor and playing cards with pictures of nudes on them—she is completely confused. Manley is not a good country boy at all. When he says that he has never believed in the Bibles he sells or in God or Christianity, she realizes that one need not be educated or sophisticated to be an unbeliever. He runs off, taking not only her leg to add to his grotesque collection but also her glasses so that she cannot see. Pointer has taken advantage of her rather than the other way around (Rosenberg, pp. 58).

Conclusion

Mrs. Freeman's comment at the end of the story is ironic. As the good country woman she is, she has common sense. Mrs. Hopewell approves of the common sense in her daughters and thinks Joy/Hulga lacks it, for all her education. When she sees Pointer leaving the woods, Mrs. Hopewell says that maybe the world would be better off if more people were as simple as he. Mrs. Freeman says that some people just cannot be that simple; she knows that she could not. She is likely speaking of Manley Pointer as anything but simple. He is one of those who could never be simple and innocent. She may also be speaking, ironically, of Joy/Hulga—that not everyone would be as simple as she is to be taken in by him.

Names are an interesting motif in the story. Joy Hopewell changes her name to what her mother thinks is the ugliest sounding name in any language. Presumably, Joy/Hulga does this out of bitterness over her condition and as a means of acting out her frustrations against her mother. Joy/Hulga calls Mrs. Freeman's daughters, Glynese and Carramae, by the nicknames Glycerin and Caramel. She cannot identify with them and so trivializes them by substituting phony sweet names for their real names. Lastly, Manley Pointer tells Joy/Hulga that she will not be able to track him down once he leaves the farm with his trophy of her leg. He uses a different name every place he goes, he says, and he moves around often. Just as he uses false names to get away with his evil tricks, Joy/Hulga uses false names to avoid dealing with the two young women and a disability she cannot tolerate (Barnet et al, pp. 78).

Works Cited

Barnet, Sylvan, William Burto, and William E. Cain. “Literature for composition: essays, stories, poems, and plays”, 9th ed. Boston: Longman, (2011), pp. 78-81

Baym, Nina, Robert S. Levine, and Arnold Krupat. “The Norton anthology of American literature”, 7th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., (2007), pp. 212-216

Connor, Flannery. “The complete stories”, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (1971), pp. 256-262

Connor, Flannery. “Good country people”, Cambridge: ProQuest Information and Learning, (2002), pp. 178-185

Connor, Flannery. “A tribute to Flannery O'Connor”, Lexington, Va.: Washington and Lee University, (2010), pp. 96-102

DiYanni, Robert. “Literature: reading fiction, poetry, and drama”, 5th ed. Boston, Mass.: McGraw-Hill, (2002), pp. 159-165

Rosenberg, Donna. “World literature: an anthology of great short stories, drama and poetry”, Lincolnwood, Ill. U.S.A.: National Textbook Co., (1992), pp. 58-61

Stillinger, Jack, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Greenblatt, and M. H. Abrams. “The Norton anthology of English literature”, 8th ed. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Co., (2006), pp. 201-207

Annotated Bibliography

Barnet, Sylvan, William Burto, and William E. Cain. “Literature for composition: essays, stories, poems, and plays”, 9th ed. Boston: Longman, (2011), pp. 78-81

The new edition of Barnet's Literature for Composition continues to offer superior coverage of reading, writing, and arguing about literature and a deep anthology of readings presented in Sylvan Barnet's signature accessible style. A new chapter one gives students a crash course on writing an effective essay. Six new student essays provide helpful models of student writing on a wide array of topics with nineteen essays in all. Two timely thematic units have been added: "The World Around Us" and "The Sporting Life." The new 2009 MLA guidelines are included in an appendix for guidance on writing papers. This book consists of various essays and stories that are renowned in the American literature history.

Baym, Nina, Robert S. Levine, and Arnold Krupat. “The Norton anthology of American literature”, 7th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., (2007), pp. 212-216

As far as the content goes, the articles vary from being historical documents to biographies to actual stories. Some of the better readings include Royall Tyler's "The Contrast" and Hannah Webster Foster's "The Coquette". The author of the anthology has provided background information on the authors of the works and historical context on them, which can be helpful for both the casual reader and students creating essays. As the anthology has only writings from the beginnings of America, there are large sections devoted to the Puritans' arrival and the literature they created. I would consider that a con. Quality-wise, it's a little difficult to take care of, if one does not respect books and property. It has "Bible-pages" which can be torn easily and the text is rather small (size ten).

Connor, Flannery. “The complete stories”, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (1971), pp. 256-262

The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.  O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death—is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.

Connor, Flannery. “Good country people”, Cambridge: ProQuest Information and Learning, (2002), pp. 178-185

While Flannery O'Connor is hailed as one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century American south, few appreciate O'Connor as a philosopher as well. In Return to Good and Evil, Henry T. Edmondson introduces us to a remarkable thinker who uses fiction to confront and provoke us with the most troubling moral questions of modern existence. 'Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul, ' O'Connor once said, in response to the nihilistic tendencies she saw in the world around her. Nihilism Nietzche's idea that 'God is dead' preoccupied O'Connor, and she used her fiction to draw a tableau of human civilization on the brink of a catastrophic moral, philosophical, and religious crisis. Again and again, O'Connor suggests that the only way back from this precipice is to recognize the human need for grace, redemption, and God. She argues brilliantly and persuasively through her novels and short stories that the Nietzschean challenges to the notions of good and evil are an ill-conceived effort that will result only in disaster. With rare access to O'Connor's correspondence, prose drafts, and other personal writings, Edmondson investigates O'Connor's deepest motivations through more than just her fiction and illuminates the philosophical and theological influences on her life and work. Edmondson argues that O'Connor's artistic brilliance and philosophical genius reveal the only possible response to the nihilistic despair of the modern world: a return to good and evil through humility and grace.

Connor, Flannery. “A tribute to Flannery O'Connor”, Lexington, Va.: Washington and Lee University, (2010), pp. 96-102

In 1964 when J.J. Quinn, the moderator of University of Scranton's literary journal Esprit, learned of Flannery O'Connor's death, he solicited a wide range of distinguished literary figures for tributes to Flannery.  Among the contributers were: Brother Antoninus, Saul Bellow, Cleanth Brooks, Walter Burghardt, Harold Gardiner, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Katherine Ann Porter, and Robert Penn Warren.  The present volume is a reprint of the original Esprit tribute issue, modified only by light editing and a few recent essays.

DiYanni, Robert. “Literature: reading fiction, poetry, and drama”, 5th ed. Boston, Mass.: McGraw-Hill, (2002), pp. 159-165

This anthology offers a lively introduction to the study of fiction, poetry, and drama, and is appropriate for introduction to literature courses as well as literature-based composition courses. Known for its clear presentation of the formal elements of literary analysis, DiYanni's Literature effectively balances classical, modern, and contemporary works across the three major genres, blending well-known writers with a diverse gathering of newer, international figures. This literary breadth is supplemented by extensive coverage of writing about literature, making DiYanni an excellent resource for literature instructors who want a full-featured anthology.

Rosenberg, Donna. “World literature: an anthology of great short stories, drama and poetry”, Lincolnwood, Ill. U.S.A.: National Textbook Co., (1992), pp. 58-61

World Literature 2004 is a superb collection of short stories, poems, and plays from around the globe. This anthology is ideally suited for use as an integral part of the standard high school English curriculum or for a global literature elective. Content and activities provide valuable practice in preparing high school students for college classes or for the Advanced Placement exam. World Literature can also be used in an English-social studies core program that focuses on the study of world cultures, or as the perfect literature supplement to a world history course.