payment page
People are not always what they seem.
Mrs. Freeman seems like a simple, straightforward person. She doesn’t like to admit she’s wrong. Mrs. Hopewell holds a high opinion of her, thinking her and her family to be “good country people.” Mrs. Freeman’s previous employer, however, does not share this positive assessment. He could not stand her since she is meddlesome, always prying into other people’s business. As proof of his opinion, readers see Mrs. Freeman’s eavesdropping on the Hopewells and her obsession with other people’s physical problems.
Mrs. Hopewell is also not as she seems. She appears to be optimistic, holding positive beliefs, such as “nothing is perfect,” yet she expects perfection from Hulga. She preaches acceptance of people who are different, but she judges others, dividing the world into good country people and so-called trash.
On the surface, Hulga appears to be ill-tempered, immature, and haughty. She thinks of herself as superior to those around her and liberated by her rejection of religious and moral principles. However, her experience with Manley shows that she desires connection and wants something to believe in. She mistakes him for a simple, moral country man, someone she can corrupt. But her belief in her own superiority makes her susceptible to his deceit. Manley, for his part, misreads Hulga, too. He believes her claim to be an atheist and nihilist. He thinks her disbelief will make her a willing sexual conquest. When she resists, he becomes enraged that she is not.
Manley is the only character who intentionally hides his true nature. He presents himself to the Hopewells as a simple, moral hayseed. He sells Bibles and claims to devote his life to religious service, but he is like the valise he carries. It appears to be heavy with Bibles, but instead holds only two, including one that is filled with scandalous items. Mirroring the valise, Manley presents an image of earthy piety, masking his true faithless self.
Good country people do not exist.
Mrs. Hopewell holds an idealized idea of “good country people.” They are simple and honest. Although they are hardworking, they are poor. They contrast with people she calls “trash,” including Mrs. Hopewell’s former tenant farmers. To Mrs. Hopewell, “trash” people are also uneducated and poor, but they are more complicated, lazy, and dishonest by Mrs. Hopewell’s standards.
Mrs. Hopewell thinks that Mrs. Freeman and her daughters are good country people. However, Mrs. Freeman looks down on others. She is a busybody and gossip who is obsessed with other people’s physical problems. Glynese is implied to be sexually promiscuous, while fifteen-year-old Carramae is already married and pregnant.
Mrs. Hopewell also thinks Manley is a good country person. She excuses his boring nature because she believes he is simple, sincere, and genuine. At the end of the story, she remarks that the world would be a better place if more people were simple like him, implying that simplicity equals goodness. Manley may be a country person, but he certainly is not good or simple.
Hulga also believes that Manley is good country people. When he reveals his true colors and takes her prosthetic leg, she is shocked. She wants to believe in his simple goodness. Manley responds that he hasn’t let his rural background keep him from getting what he wants. In fact, he uses the façade of the good country person to manipulate others.
By revealing the hypocrisy of her characters, O’Connor shows that good country people do not exist. As Mrs. Freeman’s closing lines suggest, people are complicated and rarely simple. The idea of good country people, like the idea of the genteel South, is just sentimental longing for a time and people who never truly existed.
Good and evil do exist in the world.
Flannery O’Connor often explored religion and the nature of good and evil in her works, including in “Good Country People.” At the story’s beginning, Hulga thinks good and evil are merely illusions. Her education, she believes, frees her from religious and moral principles. She thinks herself as empty, and yet she expresses her nihilism in spiritual terms. She subverts Manley’s faith, believing she is saved by her atheism while he is damned by his religious beliefs. She sees her rejection of religion as salvation since it frees her.
Hulga’s nihilism and atheism fail her when she encounters Manley. She believes he is good as a result of his simple, rural background and Christian faith. At first, she sets out to corrupt his goodness. She assumes that her intellectually superior position will help her communicate ideas about the absence of good and evil to his uneducated mind, indoctrinating him and destroying his faith in God. However, when Hulga believes herself to be “face to face with real innocence,” she confronts real evil instead.
When Hulga surrenders herself to Manley, she places her faith in him, like true believers place their faith in God. By allowing him to remove her wooden leg, she symbolically entrusts her soul to him. Yet Manley repays Hulga’s faith and trust with betrayal. He reveals that his goodness is just an act. Although he claims to have never believed in anything, he is not a nihilist. His malice and deception are truly evil. At the story’s end, Manley’s betrayal takes away Hulga’s spiritual blindfold. She sees that good and evil are not illusions, and they happen to be very real.
