Good Country People

Just after New Year’s, Flannery O’Connor wrote “Good Country People,” the final addition to and the ninth story in her first collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in 1955. Harper’s Bazaar quickly accepted the story for publication in its May 1955 issue. The story received tremendous praise from O’Connor’s circle of literary friends, including Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, and Robert Giroux. However, biographer Brad Gooch narrates that inspiration for “Good Country People” unquestionably derives from O’Connor’s romantic relationship with Erik Langkjaer. Born to a Danish father and Russian mother, Langkjaer was working as a college textbook salesman responsible for the entire southeast U.S., mirroring Manley Pointer, when he met O’Connor in April 1953. Langkjaer was visiting an English professor at Georgia State College for Women who took him to see O’Connor, her publisher being the same company for which Langkjaer sold textbooks. O’Connor and Langkjaer were instantly compatible and soon developed a close relationship where Langkjaer drove hundreds of miles to see O’Connor on the weekends at Andalusia, writing to O’Connor in between trips. At the end of the following spring, Langkjaer announced his leave of absence from the publishing company to spend the summer in Europe, where he attended classes in literature at universities in Germany and Denmark. While in Copenhagen, Langkjaer secretly engaged in a serious relationship with a Danish woman, thus contributing to the extension of his leave of absence around the same time O’Connor began writing “Good Country People.” In an April 1955 letter, Langkjaer told O’Connor of his engagement, the marriage date set for June, and his intention to move back to the United States with his new wife. After this announcement, O’Connor and Langkjaer never saw each other again but maintained a minimal, irregular correspondence over the next few years. Gooch chronicles in his biography of O’Connor that, years later, “when Sally Fitzgerald asked Regina whether Flannery had suffered, her mother looked down, and against her customary reserve, said, ‘Yes, she did, it was terrible.’ Not only did Flannery endure the pain of unrequited affection, but also the bracing clarity that such intimacy was probably never to be hers” (257). Therefore, in tying O’Connor to “Good Country People,” Gooch concludes that, “like Hulga, she, too, had lost ‘a wooden part of her soul’ in the encounter with Erik, painful as it was” (258).

While “Good Country People” may echo aspects of O’Connor’s personal life, the story more profoundly presents the Christian ideals for which her writing is known. She blatantly points out in a letter that “of course I have thrown you off myself by informing you that Hulga is like me. [...] You cannot read a story from what you get out of a letter. Nor, I repeat, can you [...] read the author by the story. You may but you shouldn’t” (The Habit of Being, 170). Therefore, while literary scholars recognize the influence of O’Connor’s life on her work, they more appropriately highlight, for instance, the Christian theological implications of “Good Country People.” Scholar Sarah Gordon supports this trajectory by arguing that O’Connor “intended her mature fiction to reflect the Christian emphasis on humanity’s fallen nature, the need for belief” (119). Therefore, “Good Country People” ultimately mirrors the Biblical story of the fall of humanity in Genesis 3, where Manley Pointer, the deceptive Bible salesman, represents the serpent, and Hulga, an intellect with a wooden leg, represents Eve. Pointer, an epitome of duplicity and a representation of Satan, uses the Bible to foreshadow his deception and Hulga’s downfall. O’Connor illuminates Hulga’s spiritual blindness caused by self-righteousness as Biblically corrupt and in need of adjustment, which she provides through Pointer, who uncovers Hulga’s debilitating self-righteousness. Overall, O’Connor’s mirroring of Hulga and Pointer with Genesis 3 establishes a moment of grace that enlightens Hulga, which achieves O’Connor’s purpose of warning readers against destructive deception and urging readers to avoid spiritual blindness and ineptitude.

Hulga, a 32-year-old intellectual with a Ph.D. in philosophy, demonstrates her self-righteousness in relation to her established education, believing everyone around her to be stupid. For instance, Hulga believes that, if she did not have a heart condition, “she would be far from these red hills and good country people. She would be in a university lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about” (“Good,” 276). Mrs. Hopewell notes that Hulga “looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity” (276), exactly as Hulga views Pointer when he arrives. Later, Hulga presumes she can seduce Pointer as a result of his stupidity, asserting that her “true genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind” (284), which further solidifies the depth of her self-righteous superiority. O’Connor explains Hulga’s rejection of Biblical teaching as a result of her self-righteousness by writing that “it is implied that her fine education got rid of her [faith] for her, that purity has been overridden by pride of intellect through her fine education” (Habit, 170). For example, when Hulga and Pointer are in the barn, she confesses that she does not “‘even believe in God.’ At this he stopped and whistled. ‘No!’ he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to say anything else” (“Good,” 285). Hulga continually rejects the Bible by first asking Pointer, “Why did you bring your Bibles?” (285) and then blatantly telling him, “We won’t need the Bible” (287), supporting her conclusion that “‘in my economy,’ she said, ‘I’m saved and you are damned but I told you I didn’t believe in God’” (286). Hulga’s rejection of the Bible climaxes when she demeaningly tells Pointer that “‘we are all damned,’ she said, ‘but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation’” (288), thus revealing the extent of her spiritual blindness as a result of self-righteousness.

Manley Pointer, who echoes the devil, engineers his deception through references to well-known Biblical passages that foreshadow his deceit as well as Hulga’s downfall. Charmed by his performed uprightness, Mrs. Hopewell remarks that Pointer “was so sincere, so genuine and earnest” (280), leading to her positive reflection that “‘he was so sincere and genuine I couldn’t be rude to him. He was just good country people, you know,’ she said, ‘–just the salt of the earth’” (282). Mrs. Hopewell’s comment refers to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount where he teaches that his followers are “the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet” (Matt. 5.13 ESV). Jesus compares his followers to salt because, similar to the many useful benefits of salt, Jesus’s followers are just as beneficial to others by spreading his teachings. However, those who stray from faith in Jesus “are no longer good for anything” and experience the downfalls of rejecting him, thereby foreshadowing Hulga’s downfall. At dinner, Pointer confidently spews his false Christian charm by saying that “‘he who losest his life shall find it,’ he said simply and he was so sincere” (“Good,” 280). Here, Pointer refers to a teaching of Jesus that appears in all four Gospels, the account in Mark recording Jesus’s assertion that, “if any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake and for the sake of the Good News, you will save it. And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?” (Mark 8.34-37 NLT). Jesus instructs that only those who follow his values will save their eternal souls, evoking Hulga’s spiritual blindness and rejection of Christianity, to which Pointer enlightens her by stealing her wooden leg, the leg that “she took care of as someone else would his soul” (“Good,” 288). Therefore, Pointer’s false support of the Bible prophesies his deception and foretells Hulga’s downfall.

Clear similarities between Hulga and Pointer and the story of humanity’s fall in Genesis 3 parallel Pointer with Satan and Hulga with Eve. In the Garden of Eden, the serpent, “the shrewdest of all the wild animals” (Gen. 3.1 NLT), tempts Eve to eat fruit from the tree God specifically instructs her and Adam not to eat from. The serpent deceptively tells Eve that she “‘won’t die!’ the serpent replied to the woman. ‘God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat [the fruit], and you will be like God’” (Gen. 3.4-5 NLT). Therefore, Eve gives into temptation because “she saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her” (Gen. 3.6 NLT), ultimately resulting in the introduction of sin into the world and humanity falling out of favor with God. In the same way that the serpent takes advantage of Eve’s desire for wisdom and knowledge, Pointer, whom literary scholar Melita Schaum calls a “wanderer-catalyst-trickster” (6), exploits Hulga by feeding her self-righteous intellect, ultimately “lur[ing] her by way of her own vanity into crossing boundaries from the world she thinks she knows and claims to be master of, to one both unpredictable and revelatory” (7). The apostle Paul fears that, “as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2 Cor. 11.3 ESV), which suggests the damage of Hulga’s spiritual ineptitude and blindness that parallels her to Eve and that Pointer reveals, just as the serpent causes Eve’s downfall. When Pointer snidely asserts that “you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at” (“Good,” 291), he further parallels himself and Satan, who, as part of his deception, goes by many names, including the “great dragon—the ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, the one deceiving the whole world” (Rev. 12.9 NLT). Ultimately, O’Connor equates Hulga and Pointer with Eve and the serpent in Genesis 3 respectively to warn readers against the deceit she reveals in Pointer and to instruct against the spiritual blindness and ineptitude embodied in Hulga.

Scholars generally agree that, as Jeffrey Walker offers, “Hulga’s maimed body is symbolic of her maimed soul” (20), referring to her wooden leg as a physical representation of her spiritual ineptitude. O’Connor alludes to the significance of the wooden leg symbol when she states in an interview that “all during the story ‘Good Country People,’ the wooden leg is growing in importance. And thus when the Bible salesman steals it, he is stealing a great deal more than the wooden leg” (Magee 59). According to Walker, Pointer’s theft of Hulga’s leg “reveals Hulga’s pride and intellectual posturing to be only gullibility and ignorance” (20), thus identifying the downfall of losing her leg, which symbolizes her soul, with Mark 8:34-37. Here, Jesus instructs that people will lose their souls if, out of ignorance, they do not follow him. As a result, scholar Margaret Earley Whitt concludes that O’Connor uses Hulga’s leg to match “a physical deformity to a spiritual affliction” (76), which produces in Hulga “a recognition essential to O’Connor’s Christian emphasis on the need for conversion” (119), argues Sarah Gordan. O’Connor reveals the significance of the wooden leg’s symbol in Hulga’s reflection that “this boy, with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her” (“Good,” 289), the truth of her spiritual ineptitude and her need to adjust her Biblical corruptness. As a result, Schaum describes the wooden leg symbol as “an emblem for the inversion and blindness [Hulga] has willed upon herself by way of her nihilistic philosophy and pride” (7). Therefore, O’Connor ultimately conveys to readers the need for adjusting their own spiritual inadequacy through demonstrating Hulga’s enlightenment.

References to literal blindness that relate to Hulga’s spiritual blindness capture O’Connor’s warning against spiritual ineptitude while portraying Pointer as Hulga’s redeemer who provides for her a moment of grace. When Hulga and Pointer first climb up to the hay loft, Pointer “had taken her glasses” (“Good,” 287), so that when he flees the barn after stealing her leg, Hulga’s blurry vision gazes out of the window at “his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake” (291). The literal blurry state in which Pointer leaves Hulga represents her larger spiritual blindness, leading to Jeanne Campbell Reesman’s conclusion that, even though Hulga “loses her eyeglasses at the end of the story, her internal vision has been readjusted. It is in many ways a story about looking and not seeing” (46). God warns against spiritual blindness in his message to the Israelites through the prophet Isaiah when he says that the people “watch closely, but learn nothing. [They] shut their eyes. That way, they will not see with their eyes, nor [...] turn to me for healing” (Isa. 6.9-10 NLT). In reducing her physical vision, Pointer sharpens Hulga’s vision of her spirituality, revealing to her a need for redemption from her religious ineptitude. As a result, Whitt explains that when Hulga’s “vision is faulty, but spiritually insightful,” her view of Pointer running across the lake serves as “a reminder of Jesus, who walked on water” (78). Therefore, O’Connor creates in Pointer a redeemer for Hulga who, in stealing her leg, provides her with an opportunity to redeem herself of her spiritual inadequacy. Wood concludes that “Pointer is, in fact, [Hulga]’s unintentional savior, having stolen not so much her wooden leg as her false faith” (209). As a result, through depicting the detriment of Pointer stealing Hulga’s metaphorical soul, O’Connor establishes her purpose in warning readers against deceit, urging them to redeem themselves of spiritual blindness and inadequacy.

Works Cited

ESV Study Bible: English Standard Version. Translated by Crossway, ESV text ed., Wheaton, Crossway Bibles, 2011.

Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. New York, Little, Brown, 2009.

Gordon, Sarah. “‘The Crop’: Limitation, Restraint, and Possibility.” Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, edited by Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw, U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 96-120.

Holy Bible: New Living Translation. Translated by Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Tyndale House Publishers, 2015.

Magee, Rosemary M., editor. Conversations with Flannery O’Connor. Jackson, UP of Mississippi, 1987.

O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 271-91.

---. The Habit of Being. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald, New York City, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

Reesman, Jeanne Campbell. “Women, Language, and the Grotesque in Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty.” Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, edited by Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw, Athens, U of Georgia P, 1997, pp. 38-56.

Schaum, Melita. “‘Erasing Angel’: The Lucifer-Trickster Figure in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, fall 2000, pp. 1-26. MLA International Bibliography, https://doi.org/10.1353/slj.2000.0013.

Walker, Jeffrey. “1945-1956: Post-World War II Manners and Mores.” The American Short Story, 1945-1980: A Critical History, edited by Gordon Weaver, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 1-34.

Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Flannery O’Connor. Columbia, U of South Carolina P, 1997.

Wood, Ralph C. Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Grand Rapids (Michigan), W.B. Eerdmans Publ., 2005.