Flannery O’Connor is known for her knack of incorporating Southern values and religious beliefs in all of her stories and novels. Often, the main character goes through a horrific event that extracts views and interpretations of religion from the characters as well as the audience. “Good Country People” is a story about a woman and her daughter, and their reluctance to escape their small world on their country farm. Mrs. Hopewell, who lives with her daughter Hulga, welcomes a bible salesman named Manley Pointer into their house one day under the impression that he is wholesome and innocent. Hulga, who is an arrogant atheist with a prosthetic leg, believes she can seduce the boy and wanders into a barn with him. In her arrogance, she does not realize she is being tricked, and Manley runs off with her leg and a harsh reality: he has lied about being a good Christian boy and she has fallen for it. There are many metaphors and symbols within the story: Hulga’s leg, her glasses, and her ugliness. Manley himself is a metaphor for evil, and how it can strike against those who do not accept religion. Mrs. Hopewell’s metaphor for those who are not good country people being trash represents the notion that she identifies as better than others, leading her to vulnerability. In O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People,” metaphor and symbolism are used to reinforce three major ideas of the text: identity, reality, and religion.
Identity is a major theme in the play because the main characters have different takes on how they identify themselves as well as other people. Through three of the main characters, Mrs. Hopewell, Hulga, and Manley, identity is shown in different ways. Mrs. Hopewell has a very specific view on identity, and believes that anyone who is not good country folk like herself is not worthy of respect. She uses the metaphor of “trash” to describe people she believes are below her, who are not “good country people” (O’Connor 178). She holds herself in very high regard and identifies as someone who is a good person and better than many others, especially Mrs. Freeman, to whom she often speaks down to. Mrs. Hopewell believes that “if, in this day and age, you get good country people, you had better hang onto them” (O’Connor 179). She obviously associates herself with good country people instead of the trash that she so badly despises and passes judgements against. Symbolism is used to represent Hulga’s own personal identity. She sees herself as fractured and monstrous, and is described as “the large hulking Joy” (O’Connor 178) in order to associate her self-identification as ugly. The symbolism of her desire to remain ugly is rooted in her name change. Firstly, she changes her name in order to assume her own identity and create herself in “her own image” (Katz 63). She desires to be something else other than Joy because she lacks a solid identity to base her own self-worth on. Since her identity is essentially broken, she feels the need to take on a new name in order to escape this. She specifically chooses something ugly because this is how she sees and associates herself. She chooses the name Hulga because “she had a vision of the name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace” (O’Connor 180). This is a reference to the Greek God Hephaestus, who was associated with blacksmithing, crafting, fire, and volcanoes. Hephaestus was also known for his deformity: he is described as having two crooked feet, which made him lame (Bazopoulou-Kyrkanidou 144). His crippled feet made him an outsider among the other Gods and made him feel different from the perfect beings he was supposed to associate with (Bazopoulou-Kyrkanidou 144). Hephaestus’ feelings of being a disabled outcast relate directly to Hulga, who feels the same due to her fake leg. Hulga’s leg represents her fractured identity, as she had “never danced a step or had any normal good times” (O’Connor 179), and therefore had missed out on many experiences in life because of her handicap. When Manley steals her wooden leg, it symbolises the idea that he is stealing a piece of this fractured identity (McMullen 49). Manley hides his identity and makes the ladies believe he is not who he truly is, which is how he is able to steal Hulga’s leg. Mrs. Hopewell is convinced that he is good country people and the “salt of the earth” (O’Connor 187). This is how he gains the ladies’ trust, and proceeds to take advantage of it. Manley’s hollow identity is expressed through the metaphor of his hollow bible, which is not a bible at all and ends up containing “a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and a small blue box with printing on it” (O’Connor 193). By being a bible on the outside, and filled with vices on the inside, the bible reflects Manley’s fake persona and false identity. Through his creation of a hollow identity, the symbolism used within this context is the idea that no one can be trusted and that in reality, everyone has the capacity to become a bad person.
The main characters contemplate the concept of existence and reality, and its meaning changes with each character. To Mrs. Hopewell, reality is simple. She exists within her own small sphere and does not stray from that venue. Her life is devoted to taking care of her daughter, even though she is quite “disagreeable” (Westling 510). Mrs. Hopewell finds her daughter very odd and is often exasperated with frustration in regards to her attitude (Westling 511). She still sees Hulga as her child, even though “she was thirty-two years old and highly educated” (O’Connor 177). This showcases Mrs. Hopewell’s narrow-minded reality that her daughter is not going to grow up and will remain a child forever. However, even though Mrs. Hopewell has dedicated her life to taking care of Hulga, she has still been unable to mature successfully (Westling 512), meaning that Mrs. Hopewell’s existence is ineffective and pointless. To Hulga, existence means something more due to her condition. She is overwhelmed with self-pity (Burke 100) and therefore can only see the world within her small atmosphere. She believes that she is stuck at home, and that “if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these red hills and good country people” (O’Connor 181). The idea that she blames her reality on her condition symbolises the idea that she is stuck forever. Manley is nihilistic (Burke 100), and therefore sees the world according to his own existence. These two viewpoints clash when Manley takes advantage of Hulga. He changes her reality through the metaphor of the glass eye and her glasses. When he takes off Hulga’s glasses, it symbolises Hulga’s change in view of the world (McMullen 49). She is now able to see Manley for the terrible person that he is, and has realized that her education might not be the only thing she can rely on in her life. Manley tells Hulga, “I got a woman’s glass eye this way” (O’Connor 194). By telling her he has someone’s glass eye, he is altering her vision of reality and this acts as a metaphor for her newfound outlook. Hulga is now inclined to believe that her view about religion was wrong, and she struggles to assert a new view on a world revolving around God (Dowell 236). Her reality, therefore, has changed, and without her leg she cannot feel as confident standing on her pillar of truth. In this sense, the different moral realities of Hulga and Manley have crossed paths, and their attitudes toward morality have clashed (Burke 100), ultimately forcing them apart in a dramatic way.
Religion is one of the common themes among all of O’Connor’s stories, and therefore it comes to no surprise that many of the examples of symbolism and metaphor in “Good Country People” are centered on religion. Through symbolism and metaphor, O’Connor aims to teach the readers of this story the idea that those who denounce God and do not live religious lives will suffer in the end. This is presented early on in the story, with the metaphor of Hulga’s ugliness. Hulga purposely identifies as ugly and makes an “awful noise” when she walks on purpose to enhance her ugly demeanor (O’Connor 180). She has a fondness for being unpleasant, which makes her an unpleasant character that represents what happens when one is lacking the beauty that religion provides. Hulga’s atheism and refusal to accept religion in her life acts as symbolism for this idea, since she gets tricked and conned and is the one who suffers the most by the end of the story. When Mrs. Hopewell opens up Hulga’s book and sees the atheist thought she has underlined, she looks at them as if they are “some evil incantation in gibberish” (O’Connor 182). This symbol of evil is meant to foreshadow what will happen to Hulga in her lack of faith. Since she had rejected any view of God, she had rejected safety and comfort (Dowell 236). In many of O’Connor’s stories, “the protagonist is humiliated in order to recognize his state of sin” (Katz 55). This happens to Hulga as a result of her sin, which is being an atheist and believing that she is better than God. Hulga’s arrogance in thinking that she is better than the others because of her education and ability to see through religion has also become her downfall. As Manley escapes with Hulga’s leg, she realizes that her arrogance has masked her ability to sense good deeds from bad ones (Gordon 133). This is what has been referred to as her “moment of grace” (Dowell 236). She has truly begun to recognize the conflict between good and evil and the role religion plays that she had been ignoring all along. She had originally characterized Manley as an innocent Christian boy who she imagined herself seducing. She had never desired to be with any man because she believes that she is better than everyone else. It states that “she looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity” (O’Connor 182). Therefore, she looks at Manley in this same way, taking him to be someone that she can outsmart or outwit and be the bigger person with. When she realizes his true evil, she is shocked because she had not expected a Christian to do something like this; she had instead made the judgement that all Christian boys are innocent and naive (Gordon 179). Manley’s character has been referred to as a “rebel-prophet,” which is a type of character that O’Connor uses in her stories to represent a moral and religious conflict (Vande Keift 338). He is possessed by the devil and represents a struggle to let morality in (Vande Keift 338). As a result, he takes the moral low ground and leaves Hulga vulnerable, stuck, and lonely. Therefore, the religious metaphor here is judgement (Vande Keift 341). Hulga must make a moral and religious judgement about the world, and about Manley, which turns out to be wrong. Instead of the high and mighty vision of Hulga at the beginning of the story, the audience is left with a pathetic view of her at the end (Gordon 179). This view is intended to reduce respect for her character because of her rejection of religion, and the suffering that she has received as a result. Hulga’s leg is an ultimate metaphor for the theme of religion. O’Connor herself once stated in an interview that Hulga’s leg “is growing in importance” throughout the story (Magee 59). Therefore, O’Connor is using the metaphor of Hulga’s leg being stolen to show the evils that can happen when one does not embrace religion, according to O’Connor’s own belief.
In “Good Country People,” metaphor and symbolism are used to represent three major themes: identity, reality, and religion. Mrs. Hopewell, Hulga, and Manley Pointer are the three main characters who are described with metaphors and symbols that dictate the type of people that they are. All of these themes are important in the story in order to express the events that take place between Hulga and Manley. Mrs. Hopewell, in her small world, has been led to believe that good country people are the best people, and that by being religious one can remain a moral person. Hulga does not agree with this view, and remains arrogant that her education has given her a solid foundation to denounce God and religion, and be an atheist. It is this view that becomes her downfall when Manley, posed as a good Christian bible salesman, takes advantage of Hulga and steals her fake leg. Hulga is left alone and vulnerable in the barn, contemplating the decisions that have brought her to this very moment and considering a new outlook on life. O’Connor once stated that, “symbols are big things that knock you in the face” (Magee 59). Her use of symbolism in “Good Country People” showcases this notion, and the fact that symbolism was extremely important in her writing.
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