Jesus, Stab Me in the Heart! Flannery O’Connor at 100

In Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” Hulga Hopewell, a thirty-two-year-old PhD in philosophy who lives with her mother, believes that there is no God. She further believes that Christianity is a social convention that steers people into psychological slavery. When a traveling Bible salesman, Manley Pointer, arrives at the Hopewell farm, Hulga grasps the opportunity to convert Manley from belief in Christ to the reality of nothingness. In trying to seduce Manley and gain him to her side, Hulga feigns affection. Manley persuades Hulga to express her love for him. After she does, he turns out to be an absolute nihilist who finds delight in meanness to others, particularly robbing them of what they treasure in life.

O’Connor’s focus on making characters nihilists, not just Hulga and Manley in “Good Country People,” but also The Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” was due to what she was observing in society. She said, “If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe.” She also maintained that without the “Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”[1] The fight, as O’Connor saw it, was a fight about the meaning of life, whether it was found in the coming of Jesus Christ or not.

The clever twist that O’Connor employed in “Good Country People” is to make it a comic variation of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” In the latter story, the grandmother, who considers herself a “good” Christian, utilizes conventional platitudes in “good” cultural fashion. In the former story, Hulga, who considers herself a “good” nihilist, rejects all conventional platitudes in “good” nihilistic fashion.[2] The result is that the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is exposed as not being a “good” Christian, and Hulga in “Good Country People” is exposed as not being a “good” nihilist.

Mrs. Freeman, Mrs. Hopewell, and Joy-Hulga

The story opens with Mrs. Freeman at the Hopewell home as she is every morning. Her black eyes never swerve when she hears anyone else talk, for she has already made her mind up on any matter, like a heavy truck going down the road. No one could convince her to admit that she is wrong on any point.

Mrs. Hopewell originally hesitated to hire Mr. Freeman as a farmhand years earlier because she was advised that Mrs. Freeman is the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth. Mrs. Hopewell, however, believes that she knows how to handle Mrs. Freeman. She includes her in everything. Mrs. Hopewell “had 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.”[3]

Mrs. Hopewell expresses her outlook on life in her favorite sayings, “nothing is perfect,” “that is life!,” and the most important, “well, other people have opinions too.”[4] She would make these statements in a tone of gentle insistence, as if no one else holds them. Her grown daughter, Joy, however, would just stare at her after the pronouncements with a look of outrage.

When Joy was ten years old, she suffered a hunting accident that resulted in the loss of her leg below the knee. The accident left her not only with a wooden leg, but also embittered. Upon becoming an adult, she legally changed her name to Hulga. “She saw it as the name of her highest creative act. One of her major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga.”[5]

Her mother would not use the name and continued to call her Joy, to which her daughter responded in a mechanical way. Mrs. Freeman, however, called her Hulga with relish, which only irritated the girl. “It was as if Mrs. Freeman’s beady steel-pointed eyes had penetrated far enough behind her face to reach some secret fact.”[6]

Hulga moved to Europe, enrolled in graduate school, and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. Receiving a medical diagnosis that she had not more than a decade to live, she returned to her mother’s home. On the farm her main activities were reading all day and exhibiting her distaste for nice young men. “She looked at young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”[7]

In complete opposition to her mother’s attachment to surface renderings through her sentimental expressions, Hulga turns to philosophical declaration to get past the surface of things to nothingness. This led to explosions of rage on Hulga’s part, in which Mrs. Hopewell had no idea why her daughter had responded the way that she did. Once at the dinner table while they were eating a meal, she had told her that a smile never hurt anyone. The daughter, her face purple and her mouth half full, stood up and said, “Woman! 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!”[8]

One day Mrs. Hopewell started reading a philosophy book that Joy-Hulga had left open. It spoke of science wishing to know nothing of nothing, such “after all is the strictly scientific approach to Nothing.” Mrs. Hopewell shut the book quickly and rushed out of the room as if she were having a chill.[9]

Manley Pointer

Into this mother-daughter clash arrives a travelling Bible salesman, Manley Pointer. Talking to Mrs. Hopewell at the front door, he observes that there is no family Bible in the Hopewell parlor. Mrs. Hopewell, who could not say that her daughter is an atheist who would not let her keep a Bible there, tells him falsely that she keeps it by her bedside, when in truth it was hidden away in the attic. Manley persists that the Bible ought to be in the parlor, but Mrs. Hopewell is just as adamant that she does not want to buy one. He then blurts out that he is just a simple country boy. His declaration pleases Mrs. Hopewell, who cries out that good country people are the salt of the earth and invites him to stay for dinner.

At the dinner table, Joy-Hulga pretends not to hear anything that Manley says, but when Manley departs the house, the two talk as they walk to the end of the road. The subject of the talk is a picnic together the next day. That night, Joy-Hulga dreams of different ways to seduce him. Her aim is to deprive him of his Christian faith and gain him as a convert to the reality of nothingness.

Devoid of any perfume, she smears Vapex on the collar of the dirty white shirt that she decides to wear and heads down the road without any food at ten o’clock. When Manley appears, she notices that he is carrying his valise, and she questions why he brought his Bibles. He takes her elbow, smiles as if he could not stop, and tells her that you can never tell when you will need the Word of God. Manley swings the valise as if it is as heavy as the day before and puts his other hand on the small of her back. He then asks her softly where her wooden leg joins on. She turns an ugly red and glares at him. He tells her that he did not mean her any harm, that he is only curious because he finds her so brave. “I guess God takes care of you.” “No,” she said, looking forward and walking fast. “I don’t even believe in God.” At this he stopped and whistled. “‘No!’ he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to say anything else.”[10]

When they reach the edge of the woods, he kisses her, and having never been kissed before, she is pleased to discover that it is an unexceptional experience. As they walk up a sunlit hillside, he suddenly asks her, “Then you ain’t saved?” The girl smiles. It is the first time she smiles at him. “In my economy,” she said, “I’m saved and you are damned but I told you I didn’t believe in God.”[11]

They find a hayloft, and a wide sheath of sunlight, filled with dust particles, slants over her, so that it appears to her, looking through and out the barn, that there are two pink-speckled hillsides against a dark ridge of woods. The sky is cloudless and cold blue as the boy removes her glasses, puts them in his pocket, and begins to kiss her again. He begs her for a declaration of love. She tells him that love is not a word that she uses, because as someone who sees through to nothing, she has no illusions. Frowning, he demands that she tell him that she loves him. She pulls him closer to her and declares that it is just as well that he does not understand the reality. “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.”[12]

He whines, “But do you love me or don’tcher?” He kisses her until she says, “Yes, yes.” He then whispers in her ear to show him where the wooden leg joins on. Her face drains of color, as she is as sensitive about her wooden leg as a peacock is about his tail. No one ever touched it but her, as “she took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away.”[13] She refuses, and he replies that he knew she is playing him for a sucker. She cries out, “Oh no no!” and reveals that it joins only at the knee, but she questions why he wants to know. He gives her a penetrating look and tells her it is what makes her different.

In hearing these words, “she felt as if her heart had stopped and left her mind to pump her blood. She decided that for the first time in her life she was face to face with real innocence.”[14] Here is her secular savior. “When after a minute, she said in a hoarse high voice, ‘All right,’ it was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously in his.”[15]

She believes that perhaps this might develop into a lover’s routine between the two, his taking the leg off and then putting it back on her every morning. But when Manley opens his suitcase, it does not contain Bibles, but whiskey, playing cards, and condoms. Stunned, she murmurs in disbelief, “Aren’t you just good country people?” He curls his lip sinisterly at her and replies that he was, but “it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day of the week.”[16]

She screams at him, “Give me my leg!” and lunges for it, but he pushes her down. He then reminds her that she said that she didn’t believe in nothing.

“What’s the matter with you all of a sudden?” he asked, frowning as he screwed the top of the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible. “You just a while ago said you didn’t believe in nothing. I thought you were some girl!” Her face was almost purple. “You’re a Christian!” she hissed. “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all—say one thing and do another. You’re a perfect Christian . . . ” The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t believe that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which way is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!”[17]

As he departs down the ladder with her wooden leg in his suitcase, he tells her that he uses a different name everywhere he goes, and then adds sharply, “‘I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga,’ using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, ‘you ain’t so smart. I have been believing in nothing since I was born!’”[18]

As Manley departs from the barn and heads across the field, he appears to Hulga, sans her spectacles, to be walking on water: “When she turned her churning face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.”[19] Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who were in the back pasture digging up onions, see Manley leaving. “Mrs. Freeman’s gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared under the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evil-smelling onion shoot she was lifting from the ground and declares, ‘Some can’t be that simple’ as the Bible salesman appeared to be. She then adds, ‘I know I never could.’”[20]

Manley and Mrs. Freeman

O’Connor’s closing paragraph puts the finishing touch to her clues throughout the story that Manley and Mrs. Freeman are spiritually aligned.[21] Mrs. Hopewell identifies both as “good country people,”[22] and Mrs. Freeman says of Manley that “some people are more alike than others.”[23] Both Mrs. Freeman and Manley are gripped with Joy-Hulga’s wooden leg. Both Mrs. Freeman and Manley exalt in the suffering of others, as “Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable.”[24] Both Joy-Hulga and Mrs. Hopewell misjudge their relationships with Manley and Mrs. Freeman, respectively. Joy-Hulga considers herself intellectually superior to the naïve Bible salesman, believes she has him under her control and can mold him. Mrs. Hopewell considers herself superior to Mrs. Freeman and believes she has Mrs. Freeman under her control.[25]

O’Connor further hints at the similarity of Mrs. Freeman and Manley in a comparison of their eyes when interacting with Hulga and understanding Hulga’s identity. Mrs. Freeman’s “beady steel-pointed eyes” [26] penetrate far enough behind her face to reach some secret fact. With greater intensity, Manley’s eyes, “like two steel spikes,” [27] would glance behind him in the hayloft to see where the leg stood.

O’Connor’s Commentary

O’Connor admitted that the average reader is amused in “Good Country People” to read about an academic having her wooden leg stolen by a Bible salesmen whom she has tried to seduce. But, without ceasing to appeal to the average reader’s pleasure at reading about anyone’s wooden leg being stolen, O’Connor’s goal was to make the story reveal as much of the mystery of life as possible. In her judgment, she is able to accomplish this because as the story goes on, she shows how the wooden leg continues to accumulate meaning. O’Connor explained,

Early in the story, we’re presented with the fact that the Ph.D. is spiritually as well as physically crippled. She believes in nothing but her own belief in nothing, and we perceive that there is a wooden part of her soul that corresponds to her wooden leg. Now of course this is never stated. The fiction writer states as little as possible. The reader makes this connection from things he is shown. He may not even know that he makes the connection, but the connection is there nevertheless and it has its effect on him. As the story goes on, the wooden leg continues to accumulate meaning. The reader learns how the girl feels about her leg, how her mother feels about it, and how the country woman on the place feels about it; and finally, by the time that the Bible salesman comes along, the leg has accumulated so much meaning that it is, as the saying goes, loaded. And when the Bible salesman steals it, the reader realizes that he has revealed her deeper affliction to her for the first time.[28]

When O’Connor’s friend Betty Hester commented that she believed that the story’s denouement revealed the flowering of Hulga’s need to worship, that Hulga never had any faith, nor had ever loved anyone, O’Connor disagreed fiercely. She replied that Hulga “is full of contempt for the Bible salesman until she finds he is full of contempt for her. Nothing ‘comes to flower’ here except her realization in the end that she ain’t too smart.” Regarding Hulga’s faith, “it is not said that she has never had any faith but it is implied that her fine education has got rid of it for her, that purity has been overridden by pride of intellect through her education.”[29]

Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate

O’Connor took great delight in the fact that Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate both loved “Good Country People.” On March 1, 1955, she told them, “I do appreciate both your letters and I am glad to have my opinion on that story confirmed. I really thought all the time it was the best thing I had done.”[30]

O’Connor told Gordon and Tate that immediately after she had received their feedback that she wrote her publisher Robert Giroux about including the story in A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Giroux had the collection ready to send to the printer, but O’Connor pleaded,

I have just written a story called “Good Country People” that Allen and Caroline both say is the best that I have written and should be in this collection. I told them I thought it was too late, but anyhow I am writing now to ask if it is. It is really a story that would set the whole collection on its feet.[31]

Tate’s letter in particular stuck with O’Connor. He told O’Connor that he admired the story greatly. “It is without exception the most terrible and powerful story of Maimed Souls I have ever read. This kind of soul is obviously your subject, in whatever situation you may embody it; and this new fiction is a landmark in your treatment of it.”[32] O’Connor agreed with Tate that the story was about a maimed soul, but she added that “just by the grace of God” she had escaped being Hulga.[33]

Endnotes

[1] Flannery O’Connor to “A”, January 13, 1956, Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 97.

[2] Dorothy Tuck McFarland, Flannery O’Connor (Frederick Unger, 1976), 35.

[3] Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories (Noonday Press, 1995), 272.

[4] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 273.

[5] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 275. Kathleen Feeley comments, “God summoned his prophets: Hulga summoned herself to new life. Her renaming is a cosmic perversion of God’s practice, a self-call to a life of sterile intellectualism.” Kathleen Feeley, Flannery O’Connor: Voice of the Peacock (Rutgers, 1972), 25.

[6] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 275.

[7] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 276.

[8] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 276.

[9] Ralph Wood writes, “Mrs. Hopewell is no philosopher, but she senses that she has encountered something sinister. What she does not know, of course, is that she has encountered a passage from [Martin] Heidegger’s 1929 inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg, entitled, “What is Metaphysics?” There, as elsewhere, Heidegger argues that the whole of Western thought and life has constituted a sustained exercise in nihilism, that is, a negation of this present world for the sake of an alleged superworld.” In Heidegger’s own words, “the supersensible world, especially the world of the Christian God, had lost its effective force in history.” Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2005), 202–203.

[10] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 285.

[11] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 286.

[12] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 288.

[13] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 288.

[14] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 289.

[15] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 289.

[16] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 290.

[17] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 290.

[18] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 290.

[19] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 291. Wood argues that Manley’s stealing Hulga’s wooden leg is O’Connor’s action of grace for what he has also taken is Hulga’s false faith. The possibility exists that Hulga, her vision altered, might embrace that which she has rejected and make her way back to her true name, Joy. Ralph Wood, “God May Strike You Thisaway: Flannery O’Connor and Simone Weil on Affliction and Joy,” Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism, eds. Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo (University of Tennessee Press, 2010), 51.

[20] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 291.

[21] Frederick Asals, The Imagination of Extremity (University of Georgia, 1982), 106–107.

[22] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 273, 282.

[23] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 282.

[24] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 275.

[25] Robert Coles writes that O’Connor “knows how quickly her readers will dismiss Mrs. Hopewell, and take an instinctive interest in the dour, shrewdly observant Mrs. Freeman—who may well be the person meant to exemplify a certain kind of intellectuality: coldly attentive to all that is wrong in the world; pessimistic, if not sour and crabbed; willing, always, to feast off the failures, the disasters, the accidents, and tragedies of the world. Mrs. Freeman will be taken in by no one. Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter are, in different respects, Mrs. Freeman’s prey. The salesmen is a brief version of the longer-lasting Mrs. Freeman: the darkness of the world, ever present.” Robert Coles, Flannery O’Connor’s South (Louisiana State University, 1980), 139–40.

[26] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 275.

[27] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 289.

[28] Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” in Mystery and Manners, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 99.

[29] Flannery O’Connor to “A,” August 24, 1956, Habit of Being, 170.

[30] Flannery O’Connor to Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate, March 1, 1955, Good Things Out of Nazareth, 90.

[31] Flannery O’Connor to Robert Giroux, February 26, 1955, Habit of Being, 75. Giroux not only agreed with O’Connor’s assessment after reading the story and told her that he would make every effort to get it included, but suggested to O’Connor that she include a closing paragraph returning to Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman that might improve it. Flannery O’Connor to Robert Giroux, March 7, 1955, Habit of Being, 75.

[32] Allen Tate to Flannery O’Connor, February 22, 1955, Good Things Out of Nazareth, ed. Benjamin Alexander (Convergent, 2019), 86. In Gordon’s article, “An American Girl,” written after O’Connor’s death, Gordon declares that “Good Country People” is a story that to Gordon “nearly reached perfection.” Caroline Gordon, “An American Girl,” in The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O’Connor, eds. Melvin Friedman and Lewis Lawson (Fordham, 1966), 128.

[33] O’Connor to Gordon and Tate, March 1, 1955, Good Things Out of Nazareth, 90.

Danny E. Olinger is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as the general secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, August, 2025.

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