Characters In Flannery O 'Connor's Good Country People'

Flannery O’Connor’s short story, Good Country People, is a masquerade of characters who pretend to be something they are not. The wisdom of Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman hide only shallowness, the pious Manley Pointer is a cunning, deceptive trickster with a perverse hobby, while the nihilist Hulga hides, behind of seeming indifference towards faith and contempt for the simple-minded people surrounding her, a much profound and repressed need for the spiritual side of life. The first clue to Hulga’s search for divinity is her resemblance to O’Connor herself. The author’s “crippling, killing disease” (Horner), lupus, forced her to stay at home, and her life might have taken an entirely different direction had she not had this condition. Her

The fact that the paternal figure is barely mentioned points to a less-than-perfect father-daughter relationship, possibly made worse by the hunting accident. Likewise, Mrs. Hopewell was unable to provide Hulga with support, as the two women had opposite personalities and beliefs – and this lack of connection between mother and daughter deepened the young girl’s feeling of isolation. Besides the fact that Mrs. Hopewell was unable to provide moral support, due to her shallow character and empty reactions, it was also impossible for her to ever represent a model for her daughter because of her low intellect and false astuteness. Moreover, her mother was extremely self-centered and, ironically, Hulga also adopted this trait, although her sense of self-worth had a certain basis, for it came after years of studying, unlike Mrs. Hopewell’s.
In this situation, Hulga had no choice but face life alone - her way of coping with this trauma was not to ignore it, but rather to start viewing reality in an overly-realistic way. She was so aware of her physical flaws, that she actually came to hyperbolize them in her mind, leading her to change her name from Joy to Hulga, as to emphasize her lack of grace and beauty and ironize her own situation. She could so clearly see the details of reality that she became a nihilist, fact which came as a shock to her

Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, “Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!” (O’Connor 3)
But even in this statement, one can see that her values are higher than those of the people who surround her. Despite her nihilism and self-proclaimed disdain for religion, through her lack of affectation and the rawness of her behavior, she is closer to God than those who only claimed to be Christians.
Hulga lived most of her life involuntarily seeking the things she did not have. Her fashion style was childish, as she was trying to recapture somehow a childhood that she did not have - “Here she went about all day in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it.” (O’Connor 3) She was “in need of both attention and control” (Gordon 176), so when Pointer came into her life, besides what she made herself believe, that she actually wanted to seduce him, it was also her own desire to feel a romantic and sexual experience that she had never