Good Country People Character Essay

Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” is a short, complex story that takes place on a farm in the South. An unnamed narrator tells the story from a limited omniscient point of view. It is divided roughly into four sections and begins with a description of Mrs. Freeman, a farm hand who has worked there for four years. She is described as having only two directions: forward and reverse. She is of the type that nobody can really tell her anything, as she already knew it to begin with. She has two daughters, Carramae and Glynese, who are very normal girls. She has a strange fascination for Hulga’s wooden leg as well as “a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases , she preferred the lingering or incurable.” She is considered to be a simpleton by Mrs. Hopewell.
Mrs. Hopewell is the farm owner and mother to Joy, also know as Hulga. She has all kinds of proverbial sayings such as “nothing is perfect,” and “that is life.” She is sweet enough, yet self-righteous as she supposedly has “no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.”
Then there is Hulga. Hulga is a thirty-two year old woman, who lost her leg when she was ten in a hunting accident. This has caused a significant impact on her life, turning her away from social situations having “never danced a step or had any normal good times” and instead focusing on academics. Her name given to her by her mother is Joy, but she had it legally changed to Hulga, because that is the ugliest name she could come up with. She has earned her Ph. D. in philosophy (to Mrs. Hopewell’s despair who believes philosophy is “something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans,”) but she does not put it to use for anything important. She also has a heart condition, limiting her