Florescu, 1

Joy versus Hulga

A Quest for Identity

Alongside William Faulkner and many others, Flannery OConner is part of what is known as
The Southern Renaissance ( Puritanism, 246), a new beginning for the South Literature. Among
other things, her prose is remarkable due to the deeply religious thesis and to the grotesque
characters she portraits. Indeed, religion played a very important role in her literary work,
hallmarking it. Many of her protagonists are young people who turn their back to religion and
who live in a very nietzschean world where God is dead (Bercovitch, 347). Such characters who
represented for her a modern, cosmopolitan, secular, Northern-oriented consciousness () were
subjected to a ruthless satire (BERCOVITCH, 347). The protagonist of Good Country People
Hulga Hopewell is herself one of those characters, but what is most remarkable about her is her
lack of understanding the world and herself which comes from a lack of definition to her identity.
The aim of this essay is to discuss the way in which Hulga tries to define herself, to gain
autonomy and to separate herself from her clichs-loving mother.
One of the most important issues to discuss when approaching the problem of identity is the
name. Once we are given a name and we are aware of it we face a perfect superposition between
our name and ourselves, in other words, our name define us. In this short story, Flannery
OConner playfully chooses the names, much like Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita. Therefore, the
reader encounters a Mrs. Freeman who is a servant, a Mrs. Hopewell who is all about
appearances but lacks a profound understanding of life and a Manley Pointer whose name will

Florescu, 2

turn out to be very appropriate (BERCOVITCH, 348). Last but not least, Mrs. Hopewell
daughter who is initially named Joy but she changes her name to Hulga Mrs. Hopewell was
certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language.
Then she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until
after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga (OCONNER, 2). Truth be told, the name Joy
was not really suitable for Hulgas personality and the fact that she waited until she turned
twenty-one to change it, proved that she belifed the same. The name Joy would have made the
reader think of a bubbly person, much like Mrs. Hopewell, someone who is always cheerful,
while this is certainly not the case for Hulga, There is nothing wrong with her face that a
pleasant expression wouldnt help. Mrs. Hopewell said that people who looked on the bright side
of things would be beautiful even if they were not ( OCONNER, 3). Therefore, by changing it,
Hulga tried to come to a sort of harmony between her personality and her name in order to
achieve a defined identity.
In Hulga's case, as in Julian's and Asbury's and many others of O'Connor's Modern Young
People, there is something adolescent about their rejection of their religion and about their
rejection of the South: they often seem to be showing their slower-minded parents a thing or
two (BERCOVITCH, 348) Indeed, Hulgas relationship with her mother is much like the
relationship between a teenager and his parents, in that desperate need of opposing to everything
the parent say or done, in that need of escaping, but it is also true that the relationships one has
shapes our personality, especially the relation between parents and children. In Hulgas case, this
desire of opposing goes even further as she feels the need to leave the South, but she is denied
this because of her heath problem Joy had made it plain that if it had not been for this condition,
she would be far from these red hills and good country people (OCONNOR, 3).

Florescu, 3

The tense relation between the modern son/daughter and the mother is a common theme in
Flannery OConnors prose,
OConnors widower mothers care for their children, but neither sons nor daughters
mature successfully.() daughters fail to live up to their mothers expectations or
examples. They are socially crippled, being not only physically unappealing but also too
intelligent, well educated, and sourly independent to ever assume normal roles as wives
and mothers. OConnor makes certain that we notice the younger girls glasses, ugly
braces, and extra pounds, the mature daughters wooden legs, bad hearts ()
(WESTLING, 521)
Indeed, the relationship between Hulga and her mother is the most complicated out of all. On the
one hand, for Mrs. Hopewell, Joy (not Hulga), is still a child even if she is thirty-two years old.
The mother never calls her on her new name, she is still Joy for her, as this name fits her
expectations for her daughter, expectations that Hulga is eager to oppose. On the other hand,
Hulga, who is an outsider to the South mentality and her mothers, and who desperately tries to
escape her house and her mothers power over her so that she can define herself in whatever
terms she likes, not to be limited to religion, clich and appearance.
If in the relationship with her mother Hulga acts almost like a teenager, when she sees Manley
Pointer she starts to think of herself as a woman who can seduce a man, and, even more, as
someone who will open his eyes about life During the night she had imagined that she seduced
him. () she imagined, that things came to such a pass that she very easily seduced him and that
then, of course, she had to reckon with his remorse.() She imagined that she took his remorse
in hand and changed it into a deeper understanding of life. (OCONNOR, 6) Unfortunately, this

Florescu, 4

inferior mind as she thinks of Manley, proves to be the one that tricks her, and to be a truly
nihilistic person. The reader doesnt know how this encounter affects Hulga, how it contours her
identity, but one can only imagine that the change is going to be an important one as Pointer
leaves with her wooden leg, with a part of her. She has already lost her real leg in an accident we
dont know much about, so she as a whole had already been destroyed once. Her fragmented
body may be a proof of her fragmented identity, or maybe, her wooden leg is taking over her
entire identity, as she makes sure anyone can hear it when she walks. Therefore, when Manley
Pointer takes her wooden leg, one can say he takes a big part of her identity, if not all, because he
proves to her that her intelligence and her nihilistic views are not really that strong. At the end of
the story Hulga is left no only without her wooden leg, but also without the identity that she has
worked on for so long.
As previously stated, one important part of Hulgas identity, not Joys, is her intelligence. The
girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy (OCONNOR, 3), All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep
chair, reading. Sometimes she went for walks but she didnt like dogs or birds or flowers or
nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity
(OCONNOR, 3). Hulga takes pride in being able to have a deeper understanding of life than her
mother who speaks in clichs. In the North, Hulga () , had studied philosophy and come to
the conclusion that there is no God, and that only things like convention and sexual guilt keep us
from seeing through religious illusions and grasping our existential freedom. ( BERCOVITCH,
348), therefore, she makes it a personal goal to open Manleys eyes. But at the end of the day, for
someone that took pride in being so intelligent, she could have known better. And Ill tell you
another thing, Hulga, () you aint so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born
(OCONNOR, 9)

Florescu, 5

Hulgas quest for identity, her fight between her and her mothers Joy, between intelligence and
religion, between the North and the South is not over as the reader is left to imagine an end to it.
At the end, Hulga is left immobile, and without her beliefs, she is left without and defined
identity. As much as she tried by changing her name, departing from home, fighting her mother,
the Southern mentality, God, she didnt manage to define herself as a whole, she lost the quest.
Perhaps because she created some false expectations about herself as those created by her
mother, maybe because, as Mrs. Freeman said at the end of the story, Some cant be that
simple (OCONNOR, 9), and there is always more to the picture that one can see.

Works Cited
Primary Source
OCONNOR, Flannery, Good Country People, WEB,
https://ayersamazingwiki.wikispaces.com/file/view/Good+Country+People+Full+Text.pdf

Secondary Sources

Florescu, 6

BERCOVITCH, Sacvan, The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 7 Prose

Writing 1940-1990, Cambridge University Press, 2008, WEB.
RULAND, Richard, BRADBURY, Malcolm, From Puritanism to Postmodernism, Penguin
Books USA, New York, 1992, WEB
WESTLING, Louise, Flannery OConnors Mothers and Daughters in Twentieth Century
Literature, Vol. 24, No. 4(Winter, 1978), pp. 510-522, Hofstra University, WEB (jstor.org)