Good Country People Character Analysis

Dr. Brown
10/16/13
Essay #2 English 102
Flannery O’Connor and the Fighting of Inner Evils in 2 Stories Whether we believe in God or not, our image of God is of a supernatural being that is all-knowing, has a certain amount of control over the way life works, and is perfect. The characteristics that accompany the word “evil” contradict the perfection that goes along with our image of God. As stated in many different religious texts, we all have internal evils or struggles and must face them or get through them in order to reach salvation and God. In many religious texts, it is also stated that our trials often times define our faith in God. Many writers portray character’s tribulations in order to overcome their inner evils. Flannery
O’Conner was a strong Catholic from Georgia who eventually became a very well known Southern writer who showcased the South, the importance of religion in the South, and the moral struggles of people to make the transition to salvation and redemption. In the stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People”, Flannery O’Conner portrays the theme of evil by providing many examples of characters—better known as grotesques—that are evil in some form or another but find God through their moral struggles by employing her infamous use of Southern Gothic style. Grotesque is usually associated with the South. The South is well known even today for its issues with racism, past dealings with slavery, losing the civil war, and being a strong center of Christianity. While the South does not have the best reputation in the eyes of the rest of America due to the intolerance, writers that employ the style of Southern Gothic believe that this moral conflict is what brings the Southern people closer to redemption and salvation. For example, losing the civil war and having to rebuild afterwards was a “redemptive catastrophe” for the South because this struggle brought them closer to God since they had an opportunity to deepen their faiths and fix their moral flaws by realizing what their immorality had brought them to (Shinn 60). The Southern Gothic style used by Flannery O’Conner employs grotesques or characters whose negative qualities allow the author to highlight unpleasant aspects of the southern culture. The Southern Gothic style also employs irony, violence, and strong sense of place. Evil is depicted in Flannery O’Conner’s stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People” as a privation or lack of goodness, where she has her most grotesque characters as the most evil ones as well. While both stories are set in the deep South, both employ irony and violence but also have many differences. Flannery O’Conner’s tough love for the South is seen in the depiction of the grotesques. The exact characteristics that a grotesque has are the lack of empathy, mercy, kindness, faith, love, honesty, and respect—all characteristics that are essential to developing a deeper relationship with God and being a good Christian. These grotesques bring out the evils in the South since many people had these characteristics at the time. There are three kinds of grotesques in the modern world—spiritual, secular, and physical. Spiritual grotesques are characters that like to destroy others and lack empathy. Secular grotesques reject God and believe in science, rationality, and materialism. Physical grotesques are physically deformed or mentally handicapped. In Flannery O’Connor’s stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, there is a spiritual grotesque while in “Good Country People”, there is secular and physical grotesqueness. There is also a difference between the level of violence in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Conner. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, O’Conner employs more physical violence while in “Good Country People”, she employs more emotional violence. Physical imperfections and materialism are two common things that people have dealt with on a regular basis.
In “Good Country People” there is secular grotesqueness along with physical grotesqueness. Not every character is evil and the majority of the evil is dealt with as internal conflict rather than external. All characters in the story “Good Country People” are well educated. Mrs. Hopewell owns a farm that the Freeman family rents out and helps run. Mrs. Hopewell in O’Conner’s “Good Country People” rejects God by showing a lack of interest in purchasing a Bible and is oblivious to the world (O’Connor, Flannery). While Mrs. Hopewell turns down the opportunity to buy the Bibles Bible salesman Manley Pointer is selling, she goes onto believing that he is “good country people” and invites him to a family dinner where Mrs. Hopewell’s atheist daughter Hulga meets him and desires seducing him (O’Conner, Flannery). Hulga has a prosthetic leg, replacing a leg she lost in a childhood accident. Pointer invites Hulga on a picnic where he persuades her to remove her prosthetic leg and reveals that he is a nihilistic atheist and collects prosthetics. Mrs. Hopewell is a secular grotesque and is largely materialistic and is oblivious to the world and to God because she cares more about her farm and reputation rather than the Word of God and discerning who is good and who is evil. If it were not for Mrs. Hopewell’s oblivion, she would not have thought of Pointer as “good country
people”, and this is ironic because while she thought he was “good”, he turned out to be evil, which serves the purpose of the realization that rejecting the Lord results in suffering which brings on further suffering (O’Conner, Flannery). Manley Pointer is a thief and a womanizer and serves as the main antagonist who is the figure of lack of empathy and evil since he also rejects God but disguises himself as a Bible salesman—comparatively to Lucifer once being an angel and betraying God, resulting in the entity of the devil. Hulga is both a physical and secular grotesque because her leg is prosthetic and this external wound shows her internal flaw of materialism—resulting in her secular grotesqueness—in believing that her PhD in psychology gives her reason to reject the Lord and be atheist. Hulga’s overconfidence ironically gets to her and she is tricked and robbed of her leg but in a symbolic sense she is robbed of her struggle because she learns to accept God and be humble through this experience. People often find their suffering as a reason to reject God.
In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Conner, the characters of the Grandmother and the Misfit are juxtaposed in order to show contrast in the ways that a person can be evil. In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the Grandmother is highly materialistic and superficial and speaks of the Misfit, an escaped convicted killer headed for Florida, which is the same state that they are going to for their vacation. She hides her beloved cat in the car and dresses in her Sunday best so that even if she dies, people will know she died “a lady” (O’Connor, Flannery). Ironically enough the cat jumps out of the basket and jumps onto her son Bailey’s neck, causing an accident. When the Grandmother signals for help, she ironically enough signals the Misfit’s car and exclaims that she recognizes him. While the Misfit’s accomplices kill the family, the Misfit himself shoots the Grandmother after she refers to how he should believe in Jesus—making him extremely angry since he dislikes Jesus. While the Grandmother portrayed the image of the perfect Southern Christian lady, she was lying to herself and living out the image for the sake of reputation. The Grandmother’s dishonesty and materialistic ways are shown in her hiding the cat in the car and the importance she gives to what she is wearing and how people view her, ironically resulting in her death in her “Sunday best” (O’Connor, Flannery). The Misfit is spiritually
grotesque. He is a psychotic killer who openly rejects Jesus and is angry with Jesus because he internally feels no need to believe in someone who has the power to make miracles and change lives while he holds so much power when he murders people. Through the moral struggles the characters face in “Good Country People” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Conner, the theme of the connection between suffering and finding God is portrayed. Suffering makes people deepen their faith because through suffering, they have to believe in the Word of God and trust that He will help them. Sin is normal in human nature and is a flaw found in every human. No matter how big or little the sin is, the sins are still categorized as an evil as are our human flaws. The evil portrayed in “Good Country People” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor resides in all of us but not to that extent and can be brought out by various circumstances in our life. Though not extreme as the grotesques O’Connor uses, the evil that resides in humans and the internal temptation that causes us to sin is universal, and since she is a strong Catholic and Southerner, she uses Southern Gothic to showcase this universal theme of the flaws of human nature—bringing out the evil in both the South and the regular human.

Works Cited
Mays, Kelly J. "The Author 's Work as Context: Flannery O 'Connor." The Norton Introduction to Literature. New York, London: W W Norton & Co, 2013. 540-91. Print.

Mays, Kelly J. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Flannery O 'Connor." The Norton Introduction to Literature. New York, London: W W Norton & Co, 2013. 540-54. Print.

Mays, Kelly J. "Good Country People: Flannery O 'Connor." The Norton Introduction to Literature. New York, London: W W Norton & Co, 2013. 554-68. Print.

Shinn, Thelma J. "Flannery O 'Connor and the Violence of Grace." Flannery O 'Connor and the Violence of Grace Winter 9.1 (1968): 58-73. University of Wisconsin. Web. 8 Oct. 2013.