Good Country People Hulga Character Analysis

In meeting Hulga, O'Connor's humor starts to get slightly more complicated. This is where she really begins to intermingle the tragic with the comic, and now her

Manley’s actions indicate two different personas that are conflicting. In the beginning Manley presents as a simple character that is only interested in selling Bibles. He talks with Mrs. Hopewell and creates a friendly environment around himself that influences how the other characters view him. Through this alternate persona, he is able to trick the other characters into thinking that he is a sweet, innocent young man. Believing in this act, Hulga and the other characters are

Changing her name was a very arrogant action. Her arrogance is a major part of her personality. This is evident in her interactions with Mrs. Hopewell. She obviously looks down upon her as ignorant - she stands up in the middle of a meal and says “do you ever look inside and see what you are not?” (637). The arrogance is evident to the reader, because if Hulga were to really look at herself she would see all that she is not. She obviously thinks of herself as above all the good country people, saying “she would be in a university lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about” (637).

Hagar Shipley is a very stubborn woman at the age of ninety. She is very set in her ways, and does not appreciate being told what to do. The most prominent sign of this stubbornness is when Hagar is brought to Silverthreads nursing home to view this location. Upon this discovery Hagar attempts to run away, only to find herself lost in a forest. The

Flannery O’Connor was a short story author from Savannah, Georgia. She has produced many critically acclaimed pieces and has won several awards for them. Two distinct pieces she wrote are titled The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Good Country People. While both of her stories are unique, the underlying storyboard and character creation process that O’Connor used is the same throughout her stories. Her stories usually involve one or more self-centered woman, a younger person who become the victim of egregious crime, and a conniving male driven by his own motives. Good Country People and The Life You Save May Be Your Own do not stray from this rule. In either story, the narrative is driven around a shocking tragedy that is very unexpected. Even though in the tragedies committed in the book always have a belligerent and a victim, it is not easy to discern who amongst the two are the antagonist and the protagonist. In either of these narratives, the tragedy that occurred within the stories blurs the line between antagonist and protagonist.

The Mrs. Hopewell was mesmerized by the charm of the Bible salesman. She thought he was “good country people,” but it wasn’t until Hulga spent time with Manley that we learned his true personality. Manley’s name is symbolism for exactly what it says, masculity. Hulga was a strong woman, but it wasn’t until she allowed herself to be vulnerable to a man that she became weak. When he removed her glasses, he left her blind to her surroundings and to the truth. He took advantage of her. He tried to make her vulnerable by forcing her to say that she loved him, even though she clearly was not ready, and then making her prove her love for him by removing her artificial leg. If Hulga had stayed true to herself and not allowed herself to be manipulated by a man, she would have seen passed his lies. This situation proves that failure to stick to feministic thinking can allow woman to be controlled by

By definition joy means a great feeling of pleasure and happiness. In Mary Flannery O'Connor's short story Good Country People, Joy Freeman was not at all joyful. Actually, she was the exact opposite. Joy's leg was shot off in a hunting accident when she was ten. Because of that incident, Joy was a stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. (O'Connor 249). She had a wooden leg that only brought her teasing from others and problems in doing daily activities. Joy was very rude as well. In the story it speaks of her comments being so rude and ugly and her face so glum that her mother's boss, Mrs. Hopewell, would

Hulga did not care about anyone else but herself. She lived in self-pity. There are many disabled kids, adults and veterans in the world. There are professional runners and people without limbs that work and do amazing things. Even though she had these issues she thought she was better and too good for everyone else. Mrs. Hopewell states that Hulga, “was brilliant but she didn’t have a grain of sense.”(O’Connor 558) Hulga even

Joy-Hulga, who had grown cynical and cold as she grew up with only one leg and heart ailment, creates an image that she is smarter and better than the rest of the characters in the story. Her education and self-absorption seemed to instill this attitude in her to greater extent than if she hadn’t studied and read so much. Her weakness is the feeling of power she believed she gained from her studies. She refers to herself as a person who “sees

Hulga tried to prove her philosophy on life to the good country people. Hulga is upset with her mom, the bible salesman and all the other good country people. One day Hulge decided to try and take advantage of the guy who sold her mother bibles. Hulga soon sees the truth about the bible salesman. The bible salesman seduces Hulga instead by gets her alone in a hayloft he takes the thing that is most relevant to her life. In “Good Country People” it states, “But she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail. No one ever touched it but her.” The bible salesman finds the most important things to people and takes advance of them.

She expresses herself in ways that are more destructive. Violence is the outlet Hagar sees in expressing herself. Her “graveyard love” for Milkman initially mutes her voice (148). His goodbye letter “sent Hagar spinning into a bright blue place where the air was thin and it was silent all the time, and where people spoke in whispers or did not make sounds at all, and where everything was frozen except for an occasional burst of fire inside her chest” (116). Hagar is hardly aware of her own emotions and finds it impossible for her to tell Milkman how she feels because she has no identity. Instead, Hagar turns to physical violence. She was a “doormat wom[a]n” that “wanted to kill for love, die for love” (336). When she tries to kill Milkman, she finds herself “paralyzed” by her obsessive love for him (150). Like Ryna, her love left her. When Milkman left and “dreamt of flying, Hagar was dying” (363). Hagar’s extreme obsession ultimately turns self-destructive and assists to the cause of her death. She spends her last hours in a frantic search for clothes and cosmetics that will make Milkman love her again. She dies convinced that “he loves silky hair . . . penny-colored hair . . . and lemon-colored skin . . . and gray-blue eyes” unlike her own (346). To Hagar, her African-American race and body are worthless if they do not attract Milkman; she was trying to create “this ideal of beauty” that she could never have (Pereira). Hagar’s dependence on Milkman and

As we first meet Manley Pointer he is trying to sell Mrs. Hopewell a Bible. When she is not interested, he apologizes and plays on her sympathy by saying, “I’m just a country boy….People like you don’t like to fool with country people like me!'; When confronted with this Mrs. Hopewell exclaims “good country people are the salt of the earth!'; and “there aren’t enough good country people in the world';. Seeing that he has found Mrs. Hopewell’s weakness for “Good Country People,'; Manley proceeds to play up his being a country boy. “Not even from a place, just from near a place.'; Then in what I believe to be just another attempt to gain sympathy, Manley tells Mrs. Hopewell that he has a heart condition and may not live long. This gains him an invitation to dinner, which he gladly accepts. Yes Manley Pointer is a fine example of “Good Country People.'; NOT! And we are only just getting to know him.

The initial step in her metamorphosis occurs when, at the age of 21, she legally changes her name from Joy to Hulga. She openly admits that she chose the name, because it was the ugliest sounding name she could think of. She is quite sensitive about her wooden leg and her adopted name. To her, they are very personal matters and are important to her as psychological symbols. She seriously attributes special powers to her new name and the ugliness it represents. « Philosophically, to name a thing is to encompass it, to know it, to control it. To bestow a name indicates power, and to rename shows—biblically the special call of God. Abram became Abraham ; Jacob became Israel ; Simon became Peter. God summoned his prophets. Hulga summoned herself to a new life. Her renaming is a comic perversion of God’s practice, a self-call to a life of sterile intellectualism » (Feeley 25). Obviously, this new name cultivates her ugliness. « She had a vision of the name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace and to whom presumably, the goddess had to come when called »

In the same fashion that the law binds the Biblical Hagar to Abram and Sarah, Hagar Shipley is bound by - as D. Blewett points out - the Currie code of values, the Shipley freedom, and the Manawakan elitist attitude, in addition to her own pride (Blewett 36). Hagar Shipley is a modernised version of the Biblical Hagar, in that, people can no longer be bound as slaves in western culture but are, quite often, bound by personal or social restraints, like Hagar is. Hagar's freedom is limited by the conflicting influences - internal versus external - in her own life. The Currie virtue keeps Hagar from expressing any outward form of emotion, which, ultimately, limits or ruins the majority of her relationships, including her marriage to Brampton Shipley. Initially attracted to the Shipley casualness and freedom, because it is the exact opposite to the Currie conformity, Hagar marries Bram, a poor farmer and social

To illustrate, regardless of the care that Aunty Doll provided Hagar over the years, she thought of her as "a homely woman with her sallow skin"(Laurence, 17), snubbing her merely because she was hired help.  Furthermore, Hagar's "God-fearing" (Laurence, 16) father who pulled "himself up by his boot straps" (Laurence, 14), seeded her immense dislike for human weakness.  To elaborate, Hagar states, "for she was a flimsy, gutless creature"(Laurence, 4) about her own "ungrateful fox-voiced mother" (Laurence, 4).  Hagar detested her own mother because she perceived her as weak, a characteristic her father taught her to hate.  Right through the novel, we see very little humanistic qualities of Hagar, but more accurately an immovable stone figure filled with Currie pride.