Good Country People
Andalusia, Milledgeville
It is difficult to feel. So many things seem fraught with the capacity to overwhelm us that the temptation is to banish feeling, or else to control it such that the pity and terror evoked by the endless tableaux of human suffering cannot consume us. Like the ploughman and the shepherd and the shipmates of Brueghel’s Landscape, we keep our hands to the labor, our eyes to the unembarassing skies, our sails bellied with wind, leaving the boy who has fallen from the heavens to subside into blue silence.
Feeling is of course among the many affordances of literature. In Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, in Dante and Morrison and McCarthy, we are allowed to feel again. More than this, we are allowed to learn to feel rightly. If there is an ethical element to the written word, then this is surely one of its most salient components. For if the ethical is more finally concerned with action than with feeling, how we feel is often intimately connected with how we act, as Aristotle plainly saw. And if what Christ says about the one who looks at a woman with lust in his heart is true, then we must learn to feel and feel aright.
Shouting to the half-deaf world, Flannery O’Connor most assuredly concerned herself with feeling, and not, in the main, of the pleasant variety. Often her fiction seems an endless catalogue of ugly people doing ugly things in an ugly world. Hers is a world apparently designed to evoke, that is, our contempt, our disgust, our terror, with only on occasion a glimmer of pity.
Manley Pointer, the Bible selling, magpie adventurer of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” styles himself so simply as to incur his interlocutors’ pity and induce his victims’ incredulous terror. “I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple,” sighs Mrs. Hopewell at the retreating sight of this apparition, while Mrs. Freeman, awash in evil onion fumes like a rustic Pythian oracle, disavows the possibility of any such simplicity for herself. Meanwhile the Ahabian Joy-Hulga, having struck at the pleasant mask of Pointer and reached again the nothing that haunts her, the nothing which she took to be the earnings of long suffering and study, lies alone in a hayloft, her eyeglasses and her wooden leg borne off between two Bibles across the sweating fields in our simpleton’s black valise.
One of the delights of reading O’Connor lies in the characteristic unity of her works. She does not forgo allusion, does not isolate herself against the conversation that is the tradition. But allusion in her hands exerts a centripetal force, winding outside influences into the fabric of her characters and the drive of her plot. O’Connor does not, like Joyce, send us incessantly to the bookshelf and the dictionary. In Joy-Hulga’s life and work, for instance, we learn precisely as much of Malebranche and Captain Ahab as we need learn for O’Connor’s purposes.
Then, too, O’Connor at times imbues her texts with echoes of literary landscapes which do not so much tack her characters to traditional correlates as establish a mood whereby they might be better understood in light of the tradition.
Consider, for instances, the several hints of Malvolio, the ill-willed valet of Twelfth Night, operative within “Good Country People.” Perhaps the most obvious lies in Pointer’s “yellow socks that were not pulled up far enough.” Ah, for a good cross-gartering! But yellow stockings are not solely the province of Malvolio. And neither is his ghost to be caught solely in those slack yellow socks.
In fact, it is more in Hulga than in Pointer that we spy the yellow-stockinged specter, beginning with Mrs. Hopewell’s remark to her daughter that “a smile never hurt anyone.” It is this remark that elicits Hulga’s stream of Malbranchean invective and simultaneously induces in the reader a kind of sickly sympathy for this mother-daughter pair. Mrs. Hopewell’s suggestion recalls the tragic closing of Maria’s false note to Malvolio: “If thou entertain’st my love, let it appear in thy
smiling; thy smiles become thee well.” Much as we might dislike Malvolio, we nonetheless find him here to be an object of pity, a man whose smile is an object of mockery. The irony grows even more poignant in the case of the Hopewells. For who can have less cause to smile than Joy-Hulga? And who more deeply feels the pain of an unsmiling child than her mother?
But perhaps Mrs. Hopewell has too long endured the vagaries of good country living for such feelings. Perhaps she has taken on the opacity of her axioms, steeped herself too deeply in her “That is life, and other people have there opinions, and nothing is perfect” mentality to savor anymore the iron tang of her suffering. Perhaps she has grown sand blind—even gravel blind.
Indeed, blindness is suggested throughout the story, as sure a malady, both physically and materially speaking, as Joy’s blasted leg.
The story begins and ends on Mrs. Freeman’s gaze with its three catch-all expressions. Over the course of the tale, variants of the word “see” appear no fewer than 38 times. “Look” is used 44 times. Dozens of references to squints, states, gazes, and expressions peer up at the reader throughout. By contrast, blindness is named only twice, as when Joy-Hulga stares just to the side of her mother’s face “with the look of someone who had achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep it” and when Joy remonstrates with Manley that “‘We are all damned…but some of us have taken off our blindfolds’.” And how much the more pitiable Joy becomes when, stripped of her glasses and her leg, she finds herself trapped in the hayloft, like Malvolio in his dark chamber, with the world outside conspiring to convince him of his blindness.
Unlike Malvolio, Joy-Hulga does not emerge to swear her revenge on the surrounding world, does not have a last word with which to call forth our pity or our contempt. O’Connor leaves us instead with Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, watching from afar as the “nice dull young man” vanishes over the hill.
What has O’Connor led us to feel here? The pity and the terror of the tragic? The smiling unease of the comic? Or is it the case that in showing us a world so decidedly distasteful, she has bid us adopt Pointer’s cold, sweating-faced contempt, so that we rejoice to hear his parting salvo to Joy and watch gleefully his final dead-wrong assessment by the ladies at their onions? Perhaps O’Connor’s world is simply too ill-starred, too ugly, too thick with wayward marl for our pity.
And yet it is possible that in bringing us so far down the road of human ugliness, O’Connor has in fact led us to the foot of the cross, has invited us at last to view the whole scene of human toil and travail with the eyes of the Son, before which parade all the pageant of sin and death. In musing on the little girl who lost her leg, on the woman who lost her husband and watched her daughter plod on through the dark, on the boy believing in nothing since the day he was born, we are invited to feel beyond human feeling. We are invited into the divine pity which alone can make sense of it all, the feeling and the act made one forever on Calvary, toward which all great words guide us with something like hope.
