"Good Country People"

Flannery O’Connor’s main character in the short story “Good Country People” is known as either Joy or Hulga.  She wears a prosthetic leg, yet she can never be considered a “Tiny Tim” character, poignantly weak or plaintive.  She does not overcome her disability and she inspires no one with her great courage.  The attitude toward disability in this short story, however, remains much more complex and multifaceted than might originally be thought.  Prominent in its complex layers of absurdity, disability has a grotesque representation in the uniquely quirky character of Joy.

When first read, “Good Country People” elicits mixed feelings.  The plot involves a young woman, educated to the doctoral level, who wears a prosthetic wooden leg stolen by a door-to-door Bible salesman whom she has tried to seduce.  O’Conner describes Joy, in her early thirties, as a large blond girl.  Her mother regards her as a child who has never danced or had any normal good times.  Further, she is described as “bloated, rude, and squint-eyed” with a sense of “constant outrage.”  She has the look of “someone who had achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep it,” making an awful stomping noise when she walks.  Accordingly, the reader must only assume that Joy is still a child and that she exaggerates her disability on purpose. 

In fact, at times Joy appears proud of her disability and seems to say, “Here I am, take me as I am.”  The reader wants to admire her for her strength, her wit, her intelligence, her defiance and her seemed ability to be comfortable with her own identity.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Although her name is Joy, she instructs everyone to call her Hulga because, as she says, it lacks the obvious connotation of beauty and pleasure.  Though she has a Ph.D. in philosophy, her intellect is held up to ridicule by O’Connor.  Joy loathes practically everyone and everything.  Though her neighbors do not appear to be pleasant people, they take perverse pleasure and interest in “secret infections” and “horrible deformities.”  This is, undoubtedly, a common occurrence in real life that many disabled people can relate to.

In “Good Country People,” a traveling Bible salesman steals Joy’s glasses and her prosthetic leg.  On first reading, one might assume that O’Connor uses a crude plot device by putting an assertive disabled character in her place, so to speak, for her intellectual pretensions through an attack on her disability.  Disabilities are integral parts of those that have them, but in this short story however, Joy’s disability is her sole defining characteristic, thus making her grotesque in both mind and body.

Joy is trapped now.  She had choices, but she resigns herself to living with her mother.  She resigns herself to bitterness and she seems quite happy with her decision.  She gets to judge others.  She chooses an easy way to go through life.

By using disability a symbol for weakness, ugliness, and undesirability, one must question whether Flannery O’Connor pigeonholes her main character as outside a “normal” life.  Further, one must question whether O’Connor intends for Joy to be interpreted as extremely intelligent, but still subject to pity by those whom she considers her intellectual inferiors.  Joy must decide whether she should drop her pretensions of “genius” and superiority and realize, finally, that no one is perfect, herself included, or hold on the her illusion of mental superiority and being better than everyone.  Joy wrongly assumes she cannot be outsmarted.  She quickly learns there is someone smarter than she.  There always is.