Irony and metaphor in good country people

Excerpt from Essay:

Good Nation People: Metaphor and Paradox

Joy Hulga is the main figure of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country Persons. ” The lady represents the proud, fresh educated student who has renounced any trust in Christ. As her mother Mrs. Hopewell puts it to Manley Pointer, the Bible salesman, “My girl is a great atheist and won’t i want to keep the Bible in the parlor” (O’Connor 278). Manley actually is both Joy’s double and foil – atheistic just like herself, yet also seeking to seduce her for her bogus leg (he is a collector of oddities), even as the lady seeks to seduce him to show that she would not believe in trouble. The great paradox is that happy Hulga fall in love with Manley – only to always be rejected. For O’Connor, a Roman Catholic, sin is a absence of good – as well as the absence of decent whatsoever towards the end of the tale is what acts as the real hit to Joy Hulga, giving her high up in the loft without assistance, her pride taken away by her in support of the representation of her own need of solution staring again at her from the distance. This paper will show how in “Good Country People” O’Connor uses irony and metaphor to share a sense of the gulf that exists among “enlightened” nevertheless ignorant Hulga and “humble” but up to date Joy.

Mrs. Hopewell’s little girl Joy is actually a college graduate student whose education has been so excellent that she’s no longer certified to do anything although look straight down her nostril at everybody around her – in the end, O’Connor as luck would have it notes, one particular cannot say that “my child is a thinker, ” as Mrs. Hopewell ruefully observes (O’Connor 276). In other words, Delight Hulga has received a doctorate but can do nothing with it other than sit “on her neck in a profound chair, reading” and looking “at nice teenagers as if the girl could smell their stupidity” (O’Connor 276). Part of Joy Hulga’s is actually that she gets a fragile heart – otherwise, as she likes to tell her mom, she would always be away lecturing at a school. Because her heart is no good, however , she is limited to her mom’s home in the country. O’Connor is using paradox and metaphor here – Joy Hulga hasn’t the heart as a good thinker and have not the convenience and delight to be a great country person. She is great for nothing – and that is why your woman believes in nothing. In fact , your woman hates her mother – which is why the lady legally altered her name from Joy to Hulga: it had been an action of payback against her mother, much like Milton’s Satan seeks to damage God’s creation – Adam and Event – in order to get back in his own Creator.

Delight uses her wooden leg to further bother those about her: O’Connor states that she can easily walk gently but chooses not to – she likes unsettling all those she despises and deliberately seeks to become ugly (which is why the lady chose the name Hulga – it sounds bumps to the ears). In the Holy book salesman, she sees her perfect food: an harmless (so the girl believes him to be) whom the girl can corrupt/convert to her own belief in nothingness. Seeing that she are not able to lecture nihilism and atheism