Flannery OConnors Good Country People - Admission/Application Essay Example

‘Good Country People’ Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People’ revolves around four main characters. In this story country people are the good ones with traits like honesty and modesty. The names of the characters reflect their personality.O’Connor has used symbolism to develop the importance of each character in the story. Symbolism is also used by the writer to signify the difference between the good and bad and the physiological problems and the psychological issues of the characters. The use of biblical parallels is also very common in the story. This is done in order to illustrate events in the plot. Mrs. Hopewell lives in rural Georgia and owns a farm which she runs with the help of her tenants namely Mr. and Mrs. Freeman. She has a daughter called Hulga, born Joy. Mrs. Hopewell is afraid of her cynical and ill-mannered daughter. Although she is not a very religious woman she does not completely lack faith. She is divorced but still thinks positively. She thinks she is superior to others with more knowledge than anyone else. She has a pet sentence ‘Nothing is perfect’ and ‘this is life’ (weber.edu) that she often mentions in her conversations. She just wants to manage her life; run the family farm and keeping Joy alive, who is expected to die young. The only reason Mrs. Hopewell bears her daughters bad attitude is because of her condition. Her daughter Hulga also inherited her mother’s superiority complex and lives under the assumption that her knowledge exceeds everyone else’s. The thirty two year old Hulga has a heart condition and a wooden leg. She is very educated too with a PhD in philosophy although she lacks in common sense. Joy is mostly angry at her mother and Mrs. Freeman too. She changed her legal name Joy to Hulga because she felt unhappy most of the times and the name Joy did not make her feel good. Joy means happiness which was nowhere near her life because of her disabilities. On the other hand, Hulga sounds like the name of an ugly and fat woman being a good representation for her. Then we have Mrs. Freeman who loves to gossip and as the name can tell she is a very free minded woman. According to Mrs. Hopewell, she was the wheel behind the wheel (weber.edu). Finally the antagonist of the story is Manly Pointer who claims that he is a bible salesman. However the truth is far from that. Manly Pointer is in fact a con man. When he comes to their door pretending to sell bibles, Mrs. Hopewell refuses saying that her daughter was an atheist and did not let her keep a bible in the parlor. Mrs. Hopewell listens to Manly who is praising himself trying to act like an innocent country fellow as he says ‘I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how to say a thing but to say it. I’m just a country boy’. (weber.edu) Mrs. Hopewell praises him by saying that good country people are the salt of the earth to which Joy, who was standing nearby listening to their conversation replies ‘Get rid of the salt of the earth and let’s eat’ (278) Joy’s behavior changes completely when he tells her that he had a heart condition. She invites him in for dinner. Hulga plans to seduce the man however she was mistaken because he had plans of his own. When they meet in a secluded barn as promised Manly Pointer leaves her without her glasses and steals her wooden leg. That is when Hulga realizes that he was not a ‘good country man’ after all. He has exploited her physical handicap and takes the one thing that Hulga had been dependent on all her life (289). O’Connor has divided the story in four parts to put emphasis on the relations between the main characters. Although every character is unique and distinct the reader can easily compare the characters of Mrs. Hopewell and Joy as well as Mrs. Freeman and Manly Pointer. Mrs. Freeman and Manly have more common sense making them superior characters whereas Mrs. Hopewell and Joy are more naive ones. They thought that they were too clever and no one could ever make a fool out of them however the truth was that Manly Pointer lied to both and pulled a stunt that neither could have imagined. Even though Mrs. Hopewell uses cliched maxims such as ‘You are the wheel behind the wheel’, ‘Everybody is different’ and ‘it takes all kinds to make the world’ which give the impression that she is a very all-accepting and compassionate woman. However she cannot come to terms with the fact that her daughter has some serious problems. She does not understand Joy at all and considers her to be very immature without any common sense whatsoever. Her degree in philosophy is a big problem for Mrs. Hopewell and that her wearing a ‘six-year old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it’ is stupid and even if she has a PhD and has changed her legal name, Joy is still a kid. She praises her Mrs. Freeman’s daughters as opposed to her own daughter. Both the women are similar because both of them are not aware of the reality. Joy claims that her mother is blind to the truth and ironically she is too. And this blindness later leads to her falling in Manly Pointer’s trap. The hostility of both women towards Mrs. Freeman and then later towards Manly Pointer is the proof of their naivety. Mrs. Freeman is a clever woman like Manly Pointer who can easily manipulate her because of her ‘blindness’. Both let their victims to form an untrue view of the ‘good country people’. Joy allows Pointer to see her wooden leg. This is a depiction of the loss of her virginity and pride. This is when she is faced with the epiphany that Pointer is in fact not one of the ‘good country people’. He tells her that he changes his name wherever he goes and doesn’t stay at one place for long. When she questions him about it he replies ‘"Yeah . . . but it ain't held me back none. I'm as good as you any day in the week’ and when leaving her he says ‘You ain't so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born." The final parts of the story also make a clear comparison between Mrs. Hopewell and Joy. Joy has gone through humiliation because of her own foolishness and her mother is undergoing a future revelation. Her final analysis of Manly Pointer is that he was a very simple fellow and that the world would be better place if everyone was as simple as him. Her assessment about him is wrong just as Joy’s was in the beginning of the story. The irony in the conclusion is portrayed by Mrs. Freeman’s statement ‘Some can't be that simple. . . . I know I never could’. This forms an impression on the reader that she will do something clever that will change Mrs. Hopewell’s confidence in her capability of controlling things and using Mrs. Freeman. The simplicity with which Mrs. Hopewell and Joy believe that they can have or do whatever they please is very important to the story because this is what it teaches the reader that the world is a place where good and evil both exist alongside and that it is wrong to presume that there is nothing that can go against one’s will. REFERENCES Hyman, Stanley Edgar. Flannery O'Connor-American Writers 54: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. No. 54. University of Minnesota Press, 1966. Magee, Rosemary.  “Coversations with Flannery O'Connor”.  University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, MS, 1987. O’Connor, Flannery. "Good country people." The Complete Stories 33 (1955): 271-291. Read More