Flannery O'Connor: Good Country People
Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, she spent the remainder of her life up in Milledgeville, Georgia. While a child, she became well known in her community for "fledgling stories and satiric cartoons" (415). Unlike many southerners in the Bible Belt of the South, O'Connor grew up Catholic, becoming an avid church goer and devout parishioner. Her Catholic upbringing, no doubt, factored heavily into her literature, as well as a terminal disease that would, at times, color her worldview.
O'Connor would attend college at Georgia State College for Women in her home town, and then go on to Iowa University where she earned a Master's in Fine Arts in 1947. On her way home for the holidays one year, O'Connor became gravely ill. She was then hospitalized in Atlanta, and subsequently diagnosed with disseminated lupus--a terminal disease she inherited from her father, who had died nine years prior (2). Upon her diagnosis, the author returned with family to Andalusia: a dairy farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia, where she kept up avid correspondence, raised peacocks, and sought medical treatment for her illness (415). Her years observing her mother and her family run this dairy farm--their strength and resilience--would become a theme that figured largely into much of O'Connor's work.
Flannery O'Connor's short life was active and prolific. In her 39 years she produced two collections of short stories: Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960); A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955), and Everything that Rises Must Converge (Posthumous, 1965). She is, perhaps, best known for the short story, wherein readers become acquainted with the themes that saturate her work the most--those of religion, redemption, the grotesque, and the gothic. One source quotes her as having said that her fiction dramatizes "[t]he action of grace in territory held largely by the devil" (415). In many of her short narratives, O'Connor features the grotesque character--one may possess a horrifying or disfigured appearance, or, more frequently, one whose soul has become grotesque: as in Hazel Motes of Wise Blood, who is characterized as having been ruined by the sin and the avarice of the material world. Only by "grace" would this damaged individual be delivered, and many of her short works, i.e., "A Good Man is Hard to Find," "Good Country People," configure the grotesque's confrontation with grace--or the opportunity to discover grace.
The Southern Gothic: Many of the South's greatest writers, including O'Connor and William Faulkner, saw the South as a vanquished region: the Confederacy had lost the Civil War, the Old Plantation Regime had been obliterated, its economy ravaged, and the lasting legacy of slavery and racial divide permeated the landscape. Whether these writers openly acknowledged the profound cruelty and inhumanity of the slave system, surely they acknowledged--and felt--the repercussions of the South's avarice, whether they saw it as such, or not. Gothic Literature--that which features old, decrepit mansions, ghoulish figures, and other macabre themes--(statues that bleed, ghosts, psychic vampires) was a genre introduced in the 18th century by English writer, Horace Walpole, in his novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764 (Pearson 285). The Southern Gothic, on the other hand, fixates on the grotesque and macabre as metaphors, or representation of the collective grief and (perhaps?) guilt the South has to bear. Its religious contradictions, together with the fire and brimstone imagery of Old Time Religion, inform the Southern Gothic mightily. One source observes this about O'Connor's treatment of the grotesque, saying that "Throughout her career she depicted the South as a troubled region in which the social, racial, and religious status quo that had existed since before the Civil War was coming to a violent end" (415).
Hazel Motes, O'Connor's character, is a minister of The Church Without Christ--one in which he rails against the religion he has been taught, having been jaded by the vision of sin it represents (3). Below is a clip from the movie adaptation of Wise Blood, with actor Brad Dourif playing the role of Hazel Motes:
Aside from its fairly evident treatment of gothic and grotesque themes (as well as religious), O'Connor's short story, "Good Country People" stands out for its shocking irony. Young Hulga, who has, like her author, been stricken with an illness that affects her mobility and causes her to walk with a limp, emerges as a kind of macabre (grotesque) version of O'Connor herself. Perhaps O'Connor communicates her own frustration with her condition, a feeling of unattractiveness, and an abiding impatience with those around her, as she crafted the character of Hulga, or Joy. The girl's frustration is communicated in a number of ways that helps us either identify with her--or maybe even condemn her. As you read the selection, think about the character of Hulga (Joy) and her positioning as a 'grotesque' character. How are we to understand her as such? And, keeping in mind O'Connor's project concerning grace: does Hulga encounter grace? If so, how?
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