NAME
Mr. Ogletree
ENG 1101
26 July 2011
Life Is What You Make of It
Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” is a short story about attitude. One’s overall outlook on life can be the key to achieving happiness or it can be the continuing downward spiral of discontentment. It is said that your success or happiness in life is a result of about ten percent hard work or circumstance and the balance is derived from your attitude. O’Connor’s “Good Country People” is a classic example of how one person’s attitude can affect not only their life, but the life of those around them. Joy/Hulga decided that life treated her bad, so she showed everyone around her just how bad her life was.  ““Good Country People” is fraught with atheism, perversion, blasphemy, hypocrisy, deprivation, escapism, symbolism, disenchantment, anger and enlightenment.” (Hicks).
Joy lost her leg in a tragic hunting accident at the early age of ten; consequently, she felt different about herself and became withdrawn and ill-tempered. Mrs. Hopewell, Joy’s mother, tried to help her daughter see that there was more to life than just thinking she was different because she had a wooden leg by bringing up in conversations that were differences in everyone, there were all kinds of people in the world and good country people were the salt of the earth.
Joy went away to college and, when she turned twenty-one, completed what she thought of as her most creative act; Joy changed herself and her name to Hulga. One of her most major triumphs was that she felt her mother couldn’t turn her dust into Joy; but, she had been able to turn herself into Hulga, a name she had chosen based purely on the basis of its ugly sound. Despite changing her name, her mother would not call her Hulga, she called her Joy. Mrs. Freeman, the tenant farmer’s wife, called her Joy in front of Mrs. Hopewell; but, seeing through her ugliness and rudeness, Mrs. Freeman called her Hulga when Mrs. Hopewell was not within hearing distance. Hulga did not like Mrs. Freeman calling her Hulga, she felt like her privacy had been invaded as she considered her name her personal business.
Blaming her bad heart, Hulga returned home after college. She made it clear to everyone that had it not been for her heart condition, she would have been at the university, lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about. Hulga was not happy to be back at home in the red hills with good country people that she felt she was too intellectual to be around, so she let everyone know how miserable she was with her bad attitude and overt rudeness such as the time she stood up in the middle of a meal and yelled at her mother with her mouth full while her face turned purple.
As a result of Hulga’s constant outrage, all expression had been obliterated from her face which resulted in her achieving the look of someone who had become blind by an act of will and had a determination to stay that way. Mrs. Hopewell excused her daughter’s attitude because of her wooden leg and because it tore at her heart when she thought of her daughter as never having danced or that she never enjoyed normal good times. Mrs. Hopewell wanted Hulga, in a pleasant manner, to get involved in walking the fields with her; however, the girl stood her ground with rigid shoulders and replied that her mother should take her as she was.
She wanted her mother to know how smart she was, but her mother knew that Hulga was just lazy and immature with little common sense despite having earned at Ph.D. as evidenced by the fact that Hulga thought it was funny that that she wore the same old skirt and faded yellow sweat shirt every day. The author writes, “It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less like other people and more like herself – bloated, rude, and squint-eyed” (174). Hulga didn’t like anything: not cats, dogs, birds, flowers, nature or nice young men. Thus, she made it a science of studying, believing and