Thesis on Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People Essay

Joy-Hulga plans to seduce Manley Pointer into being intimate with her. She assumes he is gullible because he is a young boy; seducing him would be like taking candy from a baby. Joy-Hulga is the victim of an bewildering accident; she now plans to make Manley Pointer a victim of her seduction. Joy-Hulga joins her young prey in the loft of a barn. This is her opportunity to have Manley Pointer all to herself. She falls victim to his first tactic of getting her to tell him she loved him. He proceeds by persuading her to show him how take off her wooden leg. “Without the leg she felt entirely dependent on him (O’Connor 184). This is the moment that the tables turn and Joy-Hulga becomes the victim of Manley Pointer’s manipulation. Mr. Pointer runs off with Joy-Hulga’s artificial leg and she is left sitting there in the loft. Joy-Hulga learns that there are good country people in the world and then there are some people like Manley Pointer who are no good at all.

Most of Flannery O'Connor's stories seem to contain the same elements: satirical and regional humor, references to God and Christianity, violent similes and metaphors, lots of stereotypical characters, grotesque humor and often focuses a lot of description on character's clothes and faces. However, one of the most important elements of O'Connor's "Good Country People" is the relevance of names. Her choice of names seem to give indications about the personalities of the characters and seem to be more relevant to the story than what the reader would commonly overlook as simply being stock character names. Mrs. Hopewell losing her "joy" (both her daughter and her

Freeman are not the good country people, but Mrs. Hopewell and Joy-Hulga are. Mrs. Hopewell comes across as very sincere and earnest. She tells Manley up front that she didn't want a Bible and he "might as well put those up" (302). She didn't mislead him in any way. Joy-Hulga also demonstrates her qualifications to be a good country person. As she spends more time with Manley, and the story develops, she shows her genuine self that she has been trying to hide behind Hulga. She becomes very open and honest with Manley. She tells him that "there mustn't be anything dishonest between [them]" (307). She also shows how simple, or innocent, she really is. She, despite having a Ph.D. in psychology, is very naive to the way people behave. She is clueless about Manley's real intentions with her. He had met her the day before and had already proclaimed his love to her. She reveals her innocence when she asks him "Aren't you, aren't you just good country people?" (309). The masked truth and reality are most obviously revealed through the character's souls. Mrs. Freeman, who had a "special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, [and] assaults upon children," had an evil soul that was fortunately very passive in its actions (299). Mrs. Hopewell, on the other hand, "had no bad qualities of her own" (298). Her soul was passively good.

“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and “Good Country People” are two short stories written by Flannery O’Connor during her short lived writing career. Despite the literary achievements of O’Connor’s works, she is often criticized for the grotesqueness of her characters and endings of her short stories and novels. Her writings have been described as “understated, orderly, unexperimental fiction, with a Southern backdrop and a Roman Catholic vision, in defiance, it would seem, of those restless innovators who preceded her and who came into prominence after her death”(Friedman 4). “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and “Good Country People” are both set in the South, and O’Connor explores the tension between the old and new South. The stories are tow

Because of her poor self-image, Hulga Hopewell melts as soon as she sees that the Bible salesman thinks that she is beautiful. He looks at her in a way that no one else ever has before. Manley Pointer not only smiles at her, but gazes at her in admiration and tenderness. The mere idea that this Bible salesman would be drawn to her leaves Hulga in complete astonishment and wonder. The narrator describes Hulga's fascination with the boy's fondness by saying, "It was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his" (141). No one, including her mother, had ever seen Hulga as beautiful. For this reason, Manley easily wins her trust, and ultimately, tricks her. Hulga's immediate surrender to Manley

Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ is a poem expressing Mackellar’s deep passion and love for her country, Australia. The whole poem’s intention seems to evoke the sense of praising for the country and express Mackellar’s deep relationship and passion with her land. Mackellar attains this response from the audience by using numerous language techniques such as; Juxtaposition, personification, sound patterns including alliteration and assonance, imagery, and paradox. The use of first person throughout the whole poem suggests that the theme of this poem has been evoked by personal experience.

“Being Country” by Bobby Anne Mason is a recollection of childhood memories that are told by a young girl who wants something more out of her life. Throughout her story she mentions how she does not want to stay living the way her family does. She disagrees with the way her mother and grandmother have lived considering she hated depending on life of farming. She repeatedly expressed how much she thought her life at home was plain in comparison to the ways of the town people. Bobby was often immersed by the way she thought the people in town would live; how even the food and writing in the stores were fancy and tastier than the food from home. This essay reminded me of how society infers affairs of people they do not

He has been able to have her “[surrender] to him completely” by taking off her wooden leg, a piece of her identity that she has never shown other people, especially men (O’Connor 8). By instilling a sense of understanding and longing for her, Manley has finalized his alternate persona as a conman. Soon after, he pulls out a Bible and opens it to reveal hidden contents of a flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and condoms. His goal is to have sex with her by getting her drunk first and then leaving her broken and scared and without her leg. She stammers, “’Aren’t you… aren’t you just good country people?’” when finally coming to the realization that Manley is not the man he claims to be (O’Connor

In addition to the characterization of Joy-Hulga O’Connor’s depiction of Mrs. Hopewell creates irony that begins with her names. Like joy, Mrs. Hopewell, is full of the same limiting perceptions of those around her. Demonstrated by the belief that country people are “good”, or the “salt of the earth.” In much the same way Joy’s impairment results in Mrs. Hopewell’s perpetual assumption that joy is like a child. She regards her with

In Good Country People, the characters that experienced the tragedy can easily fit within either the protagonist or the antagonist box. In the story, the three main characters within the tragic event are a kind old mother, an arrogant disable college grad, and a seemingly simple bible salesman. After O’Connor gives the initial description of the characters, the characteristics that are usually associated with protagonist and antagonist.

Good Country People by Flannery O’Connor is a story with a lot of ironic elements in it. These are mostly found in the way that the characters depict themselves in contrast of how they truly are. For example, Mrs. Hopewell says that she has no bad qualities of her own, but she is a constant liar is an how she happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to her and how she had them for four years. The reason for keeping them for so long was because they were not trash” (O’Connor 247). Mrs. Hopewell is not the only hypocrite in this story; Manley Pointer is also incredibly hypocritical, fake, and manipulative. He depicts himself as a “Bible salesmen”, but in reality he is a con artist. When Hulga opens up his Bible, she sees a flask of whiskey, cards, and condoms in it. This would be seen as incredibly offensive and sinful to a Christian. According to Thomas F. Gusset, “Joy/Hulga begins to discover that the Bible

People in the south often get stereotyped based off their appearances or the way they act. Most southerners have rituals they follow, but some are just living life. The way Flannery O'Connor deals with the traditional social structure in the South in her fiction shows that it was of major concern to her and was the source of much of her power and humor. O'Connor's exposition of a southern society which values a good, moral person yet struggles to identify Three of her short stories deal with the relationship between Christianity and society in the South: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Good Country People," and "Revelation.”

Flannery O’Connor, undoubtedly one of the most well-read authors of the early 20th Century, had many strong themes deeply embedded within all her writings. Two of her most prominent and poignant themes were Christianity and racism. By analyzing, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” these two themes jump out at the reader. Growing up in the mid-1920’s in Georgia was a huge influence on O’Connor. Less than a decade before her birth, Georgia was much different than it was at her birth. Slaves labored tirelessly on their master’s plantations and were indeed a facet of everyday life. However, as the Civil War ended and Reconstruction began, slaves were not easily assimilated into Southern culture. Thus, O’Connor grew up in a highly racist area that mourned the fact that slaves were now to be treated as “equals.” In her everyday life in Georgia, O’Connor encountered countless citizens who were not shy in expressing their discontent toward the black race. This indeed was a guiding influence and inspiration in her fiction writing. The other guiding influence in her life that became a major theme in her writing was religion. Flannery O 'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. The region was part of the 'Christ-haunted ' Bible belt of the Southern States. The spiritual heritage of the region profoundly shaped O 'Connor 's writing as described in her essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" (1969). Many

Manley Pointer is introduced as a good country simple young man who is going around selling Bibles. He tries to sell Mrs. Hopewell a bible but she does not buy one, because she has one already so she invites Manley to stay for dinner. As she talks to him she is under the impression that he is a good country person, which she believes is a person who is a person from the

Flannery O’Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. She was an American writer. O’Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories in her life time. She was a southern writer who wrote in Southern Gothic style. In the Article, Female Gothic Fiction Carolyn E. Megan asks Dorothy Allison what Southern Gothic is to her and she responded with, “It’s a lyrical tradition. Language. Iconoclastic, outrageous as hell, leveled with humor. Yankees do it, but Southerners do it more. It’s the grotesque.”(Bailey 1) Later she was asked who one of her role models was and she stated that Flannery O’Connor was one she could relate to. One of O’Connor’s stronger works was “Good Country People” which was published in 1955.