Good Country People Research Articles

Ethical Analysis of Hulga and the Family Relationships in Good Country People

Good Country People is one of the representative works of Flannery O 'Connor. The heroine in the story, Hulga or Joy, is a distinct image created by the author. The adult-baby’s disability, rebellion, intertextuality, together with her self-conceit contributes to the sharpening of the special grotesque character of Hulga.This paper will explore the characteristics of Hulga, the ethical dilemma of the family relations and the ethical choice of the protagonists in the story from five aspects: the first part is an introduction; the second part briefly introduces the creation background, author background and the plot of the novel; the third part will analyze Hulga's characteristics including advocating nihilism, inferiority and blind arrogance, and then continue to discuss the reasons for the formation of her grotesque characteristics; the fourth part will analyze the ethical dilemma of the family relations; the fifth part will concern the the ethical choice of the protagonists. The conclusion will focus on some effective suggestions for the families who are suffering ethical crisis and point out that this work has a very high research value to the contemporary construction of harmonious society.

Tracing Poe in short stories of Flannery O Connor

Flannery O'Connor was a Southern gothic writer, a subgenre of Gothic fiction. Edgar Allan Poe, the father of Gothic fiction, contributed substantially to it. Many gothic elements of O'Connor are from Poe. These two writers have been from the same region. Her fiction does not include the exact writing style of Poe. Despite that, she has successfully used gothic elements slightly differently than he had and altered its elements in her writings. She has imbued mental and physical alienation, confinement, grotesque, macabre, and isolated places with a gothic motif in her short stories, 'The Life You Save May Be Your Own', 'Good Country People' and 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'. Her characters do not have supernatural elements in her selected short stories, but they are harmful and flawed. They elicit sympathy from the readers for their plight but do the opposite to their appearance. It adds grotesque, a gothic fiction sub-element. It makes her short stories compelling. Unlike Poe, her villain and evil characters usually do not directly kill. They try to mentally hurt the victims, as in the first two stories. The story revolves around the idea of alienation. While decaying and desolate surroundings create an isolated zone in Poe's writings, self-absorption is the primary cause of alienation in O'Connor's works. Swindling individuals’ entails macabre, such as confinement in O'Connor's stories. On the contrary, it is supernatural in Poe's work. In terms of location, the stories’ settings are similar. Alternatively, the story's primary storyline and climax are often confined inside a small area. Many of these elements are apparent in Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. This paper will study how O’Connor has traced Poe in her selected short stories.

Dysfunctional Families: A Study in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is hard to Find” and “Good Country People”

Flannery O’Connor is one of the great short stories writers of the twentieth century. She wrote about southern life. She reflects a theme that became well-known in most of the modern works, which is the dysfunctional family. It is the sense of vanity and disobedience that leads to dysfunctional families that became a modern age phenomena.
 In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” one can find the self- reliant individualو the Baily, his kids and the grandmother. No one seems to pay any attention to the grandmother’s fears or suggestions, it is only her cat that gives her the sense she is not alone. In ‘Good Country People’ O’Connor’s other short story that deals with a prideful individual ‘Joy Hopefull’, with her fits of rage, she reveals an image of dysfunctional family. Challenging her mother who treats her as still a young child, Joy changes her name to Hulga. Breaking with her mother and the traditions, Hulga became an easy prey to a deceiving Bible salesman.

A Feminist and Psychoanalytical Analysis of Flannery O’Connor “Good Country People”

Flannery O’Connor is one of the greatest American writers during the twentieth century whose writings have been analyzed as criticism for the emptiness in the American society. She dissents the new attitudes towards rejecting religion and resorts to her literature to bridge the chasm that was highly expanded with the prevalence of Darwinian nihilism between religion and the individuals. However, critics assume that the complexity in O’Connor’s works transcend the theological limits; thus, they have started to analyze her literary production from new perspectives. This paper provides a close feminist and psychoanalytical reading for “Good Country People” to highlight the acts of repressing women in patriarchal society , applying a psychoanalytical approach to examine Hulga’s psychological defenses to maintain the balance between herself and the society, in addition to dissect the spiritual transformation of Hulga by resorting to a clear analysis for the psychological and archetypal symbols in the text.

"I ain't you": Fat and the Female Body in Flannery O'Connor

This article examines how hegemonic beauty ideals infiltrate the relationships between mothers and daughters in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. The daughters’ bodies—depicted as fat, awkward, and aesthetically disappointing—become the site where the conflict between the mothers’ anxieties regarding gender performance and the daughters’ process of individuation most frequently collide. By considering O’Connor’s fiction through the methodological frameworks of fat studies and material feminism, this article proposes that “A Circle in the Fire,” “Good Country People,” and “Revelation” trace the source of tensions between mothers and daughters to a fundamental discomfort with embodiment itself. Moreover, O’Connor ultimately implies that embracing embodied subjectivity, rather than a dualistic conception of self, can provide the possibility for connection and/or reconciliation in these tumultuous relationships, yet societal pressures regarding feminine norms conspire to keep mothers and daughters estranged both from their own bodies and from each other. In this sense, the spiritual roadblocks that other critics have identified in O’Connor’s stories stem from the same dynamics that produce feminine self-loathing in a society that associates fat with failure and embodiment with dissolution. As O’Connor designates grotesque or abnormal characters as her chosen prophets, she also adopts abjection as an avenue to insight, and maternal intimacy, however fleeting, as a surprising form of grace.

A Good Man is Easy to Find: Flannery O’Connor’s Theology of Death

The aim of this paper is to describe Flannery O’Connor’s stories as the repetition of a pattern that consists in, through sickness, changing good country people into good men. Therefore, sickness, in O’Connor’s oeuvre, has to be described as a blessing, an idea that the writer herself would gladly approve of. To prove it, this paper takes into consideration the way O’Connor described the debilitating disease that would end up by killing her. The usual portrait critics make of O’Connor’s work consists in randomly applying catchwords like South, Catholic or Grotesque. Contrarily to these critics’ description, the somehow systematic approach to O’Connor’s stories here proposed does not in any way serve to reduce and simplify the writer’s work, but to enhance its mystery and manners. What this paper tries to demonstrate is that, through the analysis of the plot of O’Connor’s short stories, we can have access to her personal theology. A theology that, although pictured so ghastly in tales full of rapes, delusions and murders, is profoundly optimistic. O’Connor’s aim as a writer is, thence, to prove that redemption and revelations are only dependent of an awareness regarding our own death, an awareness only sickness, in its many forms, can bring.

A Good Man is Easy to Find: Flannery O’Connor’s Theology of Death

The aim of this paper is to describe Flannery O’Connor’s stories as the repetition of a pattern that consists of, through sickness, changing good country people into good men. Therefore, sickness, in O’Connor’s oeuvre, has to be described as a blessing, an idea that the writer herself would gladly approve of. To prove it, this paper takes into consideration the way O’Connor described the debilitating disease that would end up killing her. The usual portrait critics make of O’Connor’s work consists of randomly applying catchwords like South, Catholic, or Grotesque. Contrarily to these critics’ descriptions, the somehow systematic approach to O’Connor’s stories here proposed does not in any way serve to reduce and simplify the writer’s work but to enhance its mystery and manners. What this paper tries to demonstrate is that, through the analysis of the plot of O’Connor’s short stories, we can have access to her personal theology. A theology that, although pictured so ghastly in tales full of rapes, delusions and murders, is profoundly optimistic. O’Connor’s aim as a writer is, thence, to prove that redemption and revelations are only dependent on awareness regarding our own death, an awareness only sickness, in its many forms, can bring.

Introduction

Introduction

Prophetic Comedy: Bernard Shaw, Flannery O'Connor, and the Sacred Laughter of Distance Realism

ABSTRACT Bernard Shaw and Flannery O'Connor are more alike in crucial respects than perfunctory assessments might suggest. This article defends two propositions. First, Shaw and O'Connor are kindred distance realists claiming to perceive something exceeding the external reality that initially presents itself for observation. Second, Shaw and O'Connor oracularly employ the same rhetorical strategy—the comic—and the same tactic within that genre—the shocking—to express their shared vision of the sullied age they live in, and to project an alternative way of being in the world that can potentially redeem the race and safeguard the environment: an approach to existence grounded in the social gospel Jesus taught and lived during his Galilean ministry. To help make the presentation concrete, one short story by O'Connor, “Good Country People,” and one play by Shaw, Major Barbara, serve as probative examples of just how close the pair are when it comes to matters of paramount concern.

Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion by Monica Carol Miller

Reviewed by: Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion by Monica Carol Miller Christy Davis Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion. By Monica Carol Miller. Southern Literary Studies. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 174. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6560-7.) Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion by Monica Carol Miller argues that southern women writers use ugliness to reject normative roles of gender and marriage. Careful to distinguish ugly from grotesque and monstrous, Miller traces the use of casual ugliness in twentieth-century southern literature. Focusing on the common refrain of "'being ugly,'" Miller explains how ugly in the South is used to describe rude or unladylike behavior and appearance (p. 3). She identifies four foundational claims at the outset of her work: first, ugliness demands recognition; second, ugliness is a product of its context; third, ugliness often refers to rebellious behavior; and fourth, ugliness can result in "the ugly plot," which Miller defines as a potential life outside of marriage (p. 3). Since being ugly often requires action, Miller emphasizes the productive and generative nature of those characters who fall outside the realm of normative marriage and beauty standards. Beginning with Gone with the Wind (1936), she explains how Scarlett O'Hara's descriptors are often striking and "arresting" rather than beautiful (p. 48). Miller traces how beauty, specifically white southern beauty, is in direct opposition to having to work. Whiteness and beauty are both standards upheld by slavery, and O'Hara becomes shocking and ugly due to her callused and working hands. Much like the resourcefulness that Miller identifies in Scarlett O'Hara, she also explores the generative power of the ugly plot. Grounding her theoretical lens of queer negativity in Judith Halberstam's and Lee Edelman's works, Miller examines how often the ugly plot allows for possibilities outside of marriage. However, she is careful to point out that this plot is not a "feminist utopia" (p. 99). In chapters 2 and 4 Miller focuses on the power of being ugly. As opposed to the grotesque, ugly demands attention for being slightly striking and "by forcing an interaction" (p.24).In Flannery O'Connor's fiction, the ugly characters, like Joy who names herself Hulga, in the short story "Good Country People" (1955), actively choose their ugliness in order to reject the confining rules of white southern womanhood. However, Hulga is an interesting example for Miller to use since one of the complicated issues in this study is how ugliness differs from grotesqueness. Southern studies has long been obsessed with the grotesque and the abject as representations of the South's degeneration. However, Miller's focus on ugliness shifts the conversation toward how these authors reject a passive acceptance of female victimhood. For example, Miller explains how often the image of the white beauty queen as a victim is used to foster racial violence. While Miller's primary subjects are white authors and characters, throughout the study she depicts how race and class affect one's ability to choose to be ugly. The success of Miller's work liesin her ability to closely read the agency of a character's ugly choices, and it opens a promising route in southern studies to reimagine the possibilities of ugliness. [End Page 503] Christy Davis San Jacinto College Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

A Good Man is Easy to Find: Flannery O’Connor’s Theology of Death

The aim of this paper is to describe Flannery O’Connor’s stories as the repetition of a pattern that consists of, through sickness, changing good country people into good men. Therefore, sickness, in O’Connor’s oeuvre, has to be described as a blessing, an idea that the writer herself would gladly approve of. To prove it, this paper takes into consideration the way O’Connor described the debilitating disease that would end up killing her. The usual portrait critics make of O’Connor’s work consists of randomly applying catchwords like South, Catholic, or Grotesque. Contrarily to these critics’ descriptions, the somehow systematic approach to O’Connor’s stories here proposed does not in any way serve to reduce and simplify the writer’s work but to enhance its mystery and manners. What this paper tries to demonstrate is that, through the analysis of the plot of O’Connor’s short stories, we can have access to her personal theology. A theology that, although pictured so ghastly in tales full of rapes, delusions and murders, is profoundly optimistic. O’Connor’s aim as a writer is, thence, to prove that redemption and revelations are only dependent on awareness regarding our own death, an awareness only sickness, in its many forms, can bring.

Belief in Disbelief: Philosophical Questioning in O’Connor’s “Good Country People”

Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Good Country People,” starts with two country women, Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman. O’Connor once mentioned that she did not have a plot in her mind when she wrot...

Prosthesis Repurposed

The article posits Flannery O’Connor’s writing as an articulation of prosthesis’s subversive potential. A crutch user, O’Connor wrote in the wake of World War II, as rehabilitation professionals sought not only to supply disabled people with sophisticated prostheses, but also to train them in their use. While the prescriptive instruction of the rehabilitation industry worked to reinstate normative productivity along gender lines, O’Connor’s work illuminates technology’s potential as a site for reimagining and reframing disabled embodiment. O’Connor’s texts and characters attempt this repurposing through individual and subversive prosthesis use. Drawing primarily on her stories “Good Country People” and “The Lame Shall Enter First,” the article considers how the use of prostheses to communicate unique predilections and desires challenges the standardizing impulse that undergirded postwar rehabilitation.

Transatlantic Gothic Topographies of New Woman in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” and “The Stroke of Good Fortune”

In this article, I explore the aspects of the “modern” woman with regard to the impending imminence of the pre-Civil Rights movements. C. S. Lewis’s and Flannery O’Connor’s treatments of women center upon their concepts of evil, upon women’s biology and pregnancies, and upon education for women. Underneath the literary and cultural contexts of the stories, the victimization of women has not received full attention. The reader can infer the underlying ideology of male domination over women. Lewis’s portrayal of female spirituality incurred charges that he relies on using inferior stereotypes of women. Lewis and O’Connor both tend to baffle female readers in terms of their conventional echoes against female liberation. In Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, women are generally described as vulnerable to evil and further positioned as ‘almost’ children in terms of women’s perceived lower spiritual status. In his works, Lewis adopted gender essentialism based on Christian doctrines. However, in his real life, Lewis supported female education, and his later life showed his gradual acceptance of dynamic female roles in society. Thereby, Lewis’s views of modern woman tend to be ambivalently portrayed in his writing. Similarly, O’Connor has baffled many feminist critics in terms of her ludicrous female characters in fictions such as “Good Country People” and “A Stroke of Good Fortune” because she portrays women as spiritually and intellectually ugly regardless of their education. My approach unveils Lewis’s gradual development of accepting women as equal figures in his later works. In addition, recent criticism shows that O’Connor revised her original manuscripts because of her vulnerable position relative to Southern male readership due to her gender and religious faith. I suggest that, contrary to previous critical perceptions, Lewis and O’Connor question the barrenness of single intelligent women with regard to the issue of productivity in Christianity while they explore female education, professional roles, and the changing values of modern women.

Commentary on Selections From “Good Country People”

Commentary on Selections From “Good Country People”

Medicine and the Arts. Good Country People: [Selections from the short story]. Commentary.

Medicine and the Arts. Good Country People: [Selections from the short story]. Commentary.

“It’s Not All Hard Candy and Horse Shit”: Christmas in Cat Square

“It’s Not All Hard Candy and Horse Shit”Christmas in Cat Square photography by Aaron Canipe Inside the Cat Square Superette, above the meat counter, under the garish fluorescent lights and a watercolor painting of the store, a plaque lists four decades of Cat Square mayors. Among them is my great uncle Harold Canipe, who owns and operates the Superette and who served as the Mayor of Cat Square in 2008. Each year, the mayoral election is held at a makeshift poll set up in the Superette days before the annual Christmas parade, as the unofficial title comes with the duty of leading that gathering. Cat Square is a small community in Vale, North Carolina, tucked in the foothills of Catawba County. To outsiders, it might appear as Flannery O’Connor described Manley Pointer’s whereabouts in “Good Country People”: “not even from a place, just from near a place.” Since 1974, the Cat Square Christmas Parade has been held on the second weekend of December. My great aunts and uncles remember the parade’s more modest beginnings with participants on horseback handing out cartons of cigarettes and beer to spectators. Growing up, I heard tales of the homemade floats, the teams of horses that line up on Zur Leonard Road, and the pieces of hard candy thrown to the crowds. People spoke of life- sized sleighs made out of unused lumber, miles of modified trucks and hotrods, and children and adults acting out mobile nativity scenes. The number of people attending and participating has grown to include thousands who make their way into town, though no one officially keeps track of the numbers. I started attending annually in 2012 to document the parade and solidify in my mind its near-mythical status. The camera became my excuse to talk to the beauty queens, artists, musicians, rebels, angels, and street preachers of my family’s community. Between “ho ho ho”s from one of Santa’s helpers atop a homemade pirate ship, parade- goers noted, “Cat Square: it’s not all just hard candy and horse shit!” [End Page 23] Click for larger view View full resolution Meat with holiday display paper. [End Page 24] Click for larger view View full resolution Children look down Zur Leonard Road. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution Tobacco advertisement. [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution Cotton ball Santa and Cheerwine. [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full resolution Street preacher. [End Page 28] Click for larger view View full resolution Miss Rebel 2014. [End Page 29] Click for larger view View full resolution Teenagers watching the parade. [End Page 30] Aaron Canipe Aaron Canipe was born and raised in Hickory, North Carolina, and earned his MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. He helped co-found the publishing imprint Empty Stretch (emptystretch.com), and his work has been exhibited throughout the Southeast. He lives and works in Durham, North Carolina. See more work at aaroncanipe.com. Copyright © 2016 Center for the Study of the American South

Dear Clarice

Dear Clarice Adrienne Celt (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution © Quinn Dombrowski, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr YOU ARE THE LAST PERSON I EXPECT to be interested in my explanations and confessions, and yet you’re the only person I can think of to address them to. As I write, I imagine the ballet of reactions on your face; that familiar mix of—forgive me—envy and disgust. Exhaustion. I imagine each upcurled lip and puckered brow, and feel them play out across my own features. You know we made identical faces at one another, always. It was our only real common ground as sisters: being so different that we responded to one another in exactly the same baffled way. [End Page 113] So I’m sending you these pages, because I know you’ll be compelled to read them all the way through, by your parallel senses of duty and dread. Not a compliment, but not an insult either, whatever you may think. I’m grateful for the chance to offer someone what I feel to be the whole truth. THE INTERNET WAS, OF COURSE, INSUFFERABLE in the days that followed the event. All the social media outlets and special-interest blogs were flooded with some version of this sentiment: “I’m so happy I got to visit France before all this happened. It was a lifelong dream, and le château de Versailles will live forever in my heart. #blessed” Or alternatively: “Those socialist elitist fucks had it coming. You want to eat snails? Well, you’re asking for something bad to happen. Just my opinion.” Or even: “You all know the government is behind this, right? It’s a systematic depopulation program, and we’re next. You’ll see.” Not one of these people had any idea what they were talking about. But that was to be expected, really. We’re the ones who should’ve known. OUR PROJECT, AS I’M SURE YOU’RE AWARE BY NOW, was called the Cooperative International Thermonuclear Reactor Assessment, CITRA for short. “Cooperative” because it was built and funded by a number of different international agencies. “Assessment” because, in the early stages, it was unclear when, if ever, it would work.1 The other pieces, I think even you can figure out. Fusion energy was still a pie-in-the-sky proposition back then, but we were cocky—no surprise to you, I’m sure—and convinced ourselves that we could transform our theories into reality by sheer will. The world needed a safe alternative to gas, coal, and oil—and we would give it to them. No more exhaust fumes, no more fission plants blowing good country people to kingdom come. It wasn’t easy, though. There was no room for error. We couldn’t afford even a millimeter of discrepancy between the plans and the product. Like anything so precise, CITRA at work was worthy of awe. The force of the reaction could only be contained within a subzero vacuum, supported by powerful electromagnets. It was hotter than any natural phenomenon on Earth. It was a small terrestrial star. BUT I’M FORGETTING—or, as you’d more likely say, ignoring—you. The things that fill each of us with awe are not the same, are they? Always, you loved the Pentecost, the long hand of God. The descent of the Holy Spirit onto the body of the Earth. We both preferred to love things that the other [End Page 114] could not understand. So when I speak of CITRA, I know I risk boring you. Me and my scientific mumbo-jumbo, the kind of talk that was over your head and beneath your concern. After seven years, and a promise of confession, I don’t mean to be so disappointing. I want to hold your attention, Clarice, I really do—after all, these may be my last words. And I think there’s a way. The personal, you always said. The personal, and the providential. Dancing in our bedroom slippers, singing at the top of our lungs—to you, the point wasn’t to annoy our parents into sending us to summer camp...

A Freudian Psychoanalysis of Hulga in “Good Country People”

Flannery O’Connor is identified today as one of the most outstanding American Southern writers. Enlightened by Christianity, she treats spiritual crisis as her works’ eternal theme. She believes that writers’ responsibility is to help the readers get profound insight into humanity. The critical reviews on O’Connor’s works have focused on the religious motif and the characters’ grotesqueness, sin and salvation, etc. So far, researches have been conducted within the framework of new criticism, feminist criticism, violence aesthetics and narratology and so on. Until now, however, few Freudian psychoanalytic studies have been done to explore the internal reasons for the characters’ grotesqueness and the author’s writing motivations. So this paper applies such Freudian concepts as libido, defense mechanisms and life- and death instinct to interpret the protagonist in O’Connor’s “Good Country People”, in an attempt to shed light on Hulga’s actions and minds as well as the author’s motivations. Moreover, the integration of Freudian psychoanalysis into the social background and the author’s experiences provides us with a new perspective to scrutinize the inner nature of O’Connor and her fictional figures.

Flannery O'Connor: Writing a Theology of Disabled HumanityTimothy J.Basselin. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013.

Flannery O'Connor: Writing a Theology of Disabled Humanity Timothy J. Basselin. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013.Timothy J. Basselin's Flannery O'Connor: Writing a Theology of Disabled Humanity is a captivating work which explores Flannery O'Connor's fiction from a perspective of disability studies and a theology of disability. Throughout the book, Basselin presents a compelling argument for the influence O'Connor's illness played in molding her writing and discusses how her perceptions of good, evil, sickness, and limitations enhanced her uniqueness as a writer.The text is structured into four primary chapters covering topics ranging from how the authentic grotesque manifests itself in her fiction to the inherent conflicts that existed between O'Connor's perspectives and that of society's modern Enlightenment-de rived philosophies. Some of the O'Connor works specifically examined include A Good Man is Hard to Find, A Temple of the Holy Ghost, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Good Country People, Habit of Being, Parker's Back, Revelation, The Displaced Person, The Enduring Chill, The Lame Shall Enter First, The River, and The Violent Bear It Away.The book also features a tasteful postscript section in which Basselin elaborates on some of the challenges he encountered when incorporating disability studies language into the text. The attention devoted to expounding on the difficulties of this task alludes to his impressive ability to address sensitive, philosophical issues with the tactfulness and care they require. Flowever, much like O'Connor, Basselin does not shy away from making bold, declarative points to support his theories and does a commendable job of thoroughly supporting his assessments with necessary literature.Aesthetically, the book's cover is quite attractive with an engaging design featuring a picture of a young O'Connor immersed in reading a publication with which she assumes a contemplative, if not disturbed, expression. Fier furrowed brow interestingly emits a discernible tension present in her examination of the publication, which is a visual readers may identify as particularly foretelling to the inquisitorial spirit she was known to have exhibited throughout her life. The book itself seems relatively slight when considering the extensive body of literature available on O'Connor as well as the wealth of information published on disability studies. However, upon delving into the beginning paragraphs, it quickly becomes apparent this resource takes full advantage of its allotted pages by treating readers with clear and purposeful writing.From the opening pages, Basselin intricately sows stories of O'Connor's childhood, life experiences, and family relationships to form a foundation upon which he discusses her struggle with lupus and the substantial impact her limitations had on developing her ideologies and writing. …