In the short story “Good Country People”, Flannery O’Connor utilizes the character Joy Hopewell to expose how believing in nothing makes a person isolated and spiritually empty. O’Connor uses Joy’s physical disability, her relationship with her mother, her disbelief in God, and her self-perceived intellectual superiority to take the reader on a journey to “the moment of humiliation [where it is] not an offer of grace, but through the discovery of spiritual emptiness, a realization of one’s dire need for it” (Milder 420).
Joy Hopewell, who legally changed her name to Hulga as a way to assert her individuality, is a thirty-two year old woman who lost her leg in a hunting accident when she was young. She wears a wooden leg and O’Connor writes “she believes in nothing but her own belief in nothing, and we perceive that there is a wooden part of her soul that corresponds to her wooden leg” (“On Theme” 487). It has become the main focus of her life, making her who she is. Miles Orvell tells us “that Hulga has let her wooden leg deform her whole character” (139). Her loss of a leg is less of a handicap to her than the fact that she is spiritually handicapped and uses her wooden leg as a substitute for a soul. Hulga also has a heart condition and “with the best of care … might see forty-five” (O’Connor 459). Again, it is clear that O’Connor wants us to see that the physical heart condition is less important than the fact that she is isolated and out of touch. Robert McCown writes that “in Good Country People”, particularly, we must look beyond the bluff and sparkling wit to the heart of the matter, to the girl’s loss of faith in God’s providence, resulting from her bitter affliction, to the loneliness, to the wasted talent, to the lack of understanding or sympathy in those who surround her, which have driven her
so far into the wasteland of self that she can only be brought back to reality by the scourge of self knowledge and humiliation” (256)....