Flannery O’Connor masterfully wove elements of the grotesque and bizarre into her narratives, captivating readers with tales that often conclude with dramatic and unsettling revelations. In her story featuring Manley Pointer, the sudden unveiling of his malevolent nature serves as a shocking but apt climax. This surprise twist is particularly impactful given the protagonist, Hulga, who takes pride in her ability to strip away illusions. While a clash between Hulga and Pointer is anticipated, the unexpected dynamics of their encounter leave a lasting impression.

O’Connor's talent extended beyond plot twists; she had an exceptional ear for capturing the nuances of rural dialogue and the mundanities of everyday conversations. This skill is evident in the exchanges between Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, which reveal the layers of role-playing and insincerity hidden beneath the southern landscapes that often feature in her stories. Through the seemingly trivial kitchen conversations of these women, O’Connor subtly exposes the underlying pretense in their interactions.

Moreover, O’Connor skillfully uses minor characters to highlight the contrasts between different life philosophies. Mrs. Freeman’s daughters, Glynese and Carramae, serve as effective foils for Hulga. Unlike Hulga, who shelters herself with lofty philosophical ideas, Glynese and Carramae have no illusions about their circumstances. The earthy, tangible details of their lives, such as Carramae's morning sickness, underscore the stark contrast to Hulga's abstract musings, firmly grounding the narrative in reality.

“Good Country People” takes place on a tenant farm in Georgia, which O’Connor uses to establish a worldview that is narrow as well as hierarchical, for Mrs. Hopewell owns the farm while Mrs. Freeman works on it, appropriately entering Mrs. Hopewell’s house by way of the kitchen door. Dialect contributes to a verisimilitude of setting. For example, a man’s comment about Mrs. Freeman, “If she don’t get there before the dust settles, you can bet she’s dead,” captures the idiom of the rural South. When Manley Pointer tells Mrs. Hopewell, “I know you believe in Christian service,” he communicates a limited Christianity based on words rather than true belief, which is important to people who live there. Manley’s walking across the meadow at the end of the story provides another detail of setting. When she sees him, Mrs. Freeman observes that “he must have been selling [Bibles] to the Negroes back in” the woods behind Mrs. Hopewell’s farm, linking social hierarchy, race, and religion to the rural South of the 1950s.

Within this larger setting are two others: Mrs. Hopewell’s house, especially the kitchen, where the story begins, and the property beyond the gate of the house, where Manley seduces Joy/Hulga. Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman carry on “their most important business in the kitchen at breakfast.” The kitchen, generally thought of as the heart of a home, in this story does not provide such symbolic sustenance because of the insipid talk between the women when they visit there. The fact that Joy/Hulga has “a bad heart” reinforces this emptiness in the Hopewell kitchen. The setting is significant, too, because it is a site of female domesticity, and this is a story about women without men—until, that is, Manley Pointer comes to sell Bibles. His aggressive intrusion into this female space is demonstrated when he falls “forward into her hall” as Mrs. Hopewell allows him into her home. The garden outside the kitchen is also significant, for here the women pull out “evil-smelling onions” when they see Pointer walk off into the distance, as if eradicating his evil essence from their territory.

Outside the safety of the home, Hulga makes a rendezvous with Pointer. She meets him at the gate; walks across the pasture; climbs a ladder to the loft; and from there watches him walk away after he kisses her, removes her wooden leg, and ultimately takes it with him when he leaves. All of these details of place carry meaning. The gate symbolizes Hulga’s introduction to the outside world, and the ladder that leads to the loft signifies the arrogance of her sense of intellectual superiority, her presumption that she is Manley’s (and everyone’s) better—an attitude that proves to be her demise as the story continues.

O’Connor uses Hulga’s view of the setting as a symbol of her transformation as a result of her encounter with Manley Pointer. From the loft, while still wearing her glasses (symbolizing an intellectual way of seeing), she looks to a sky that is “cloudless and cold blue” and later “hollow,” which together represent her philosophy that life has no meaning. However, after Manley removes her glasses, the world looks distorted, unfamiliar. The lakes below appear “green [and] swelling,” and when he leaves her, she sees him “struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.” The water in both descriptions connotes cleansing and renewal but the greenness indicates this water is not fresh but rather contaminated by the serpent-like quality of Manley, for he, though evil, nonetheless saves Hulga by taking away her false belief in nothing. This use of setting is reinforced with her view of Manley walking across the lake, which alludes to yet inverts the miracle of Jesus walking on water.

References
Babinec, Lisa S. 1990. “Cyclical Patterns of Domination and Manipulation in Flannery O’Connor’s Mother–Daughter Relationships.” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, vol. 19, pp. 9-29. Babinec uses theories of “maternal thinking” by Marianne Hirsch and Sara Ruddick to understand the relationship between Hulga and her mother.

Courtland, A. R. 1983. “From Sermon to Parable: Four Conversion Stories.” American Literature, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 55-71. Courtland thinks that not all of O’Connor’s stories result in the redemption of the protagonist, and that “Good Country People” is a story where questions of “achieving grace” are not answered.

Schaum, Melita. “’Erasing Angel’: The Lucifer-Trickster Figure in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 1-26. Schaum understands Manley Pointer as part of the Southern tradition of the “trickster,” who lures Hulga through her own vanity.

Shinn, Thelma J. 1968. “Flannery O’Connor and the Violence of Grace.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 58-73. Shinn argues that O’Connor inherits her understanding of redemption—that it must be achieved through suffering—from her tradition as a Southern writer and her devout Roman Catholicism.

Walters, Dorothy. 1973. Flannery O’Connor. Boston: Twayne. According to Walters, the major theme in “Good Country People” is innocence encountering experience, seen in Hulga’s seduction by Manley Pointer.

Whitt, Margaret Earley. 1977. Understanding Flannery O’Connor. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Whitt examines O’Connor’s fiction in connection with her letters and other biographical information.