Nothing is Perfect

In Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” the people who are supposed to be considered “good” turn out to have some very questionable morals. Even though Mrs. Hopewell seems to think she has surrounded herself with good country people, O’Connor makes the story highly ironic by showing the faults and questionable morals in the various characters. I found O’Connor’s depiction of Mrs. Hopewell to be very interesting. He writes, “Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack” (446). This sentence alone makes Mrs. Hopewell seem manipulative and stuck up. These are not usually considered to be very “good” qualities. Since the reader gets this impression of Mrs. Hopewell right away, the overall irony of the story is increased because Mrs. Hopewell is the main judge of “good country people” throughout the rest of the story.

The first people whom Mrs. Hopewell deems to be “good” are the Freemans. Mrs. Hopewell “realized that nothing is perfect and that in the Freemans she had good country people and that if, in this day and age, you get good country people, you had better hang onto them” (446). The Freemans are probably the closest to “good country people” out of any of the characters in the story. Mrs. Freeman is quite the gossip and one of her daughters is married and pregnant at the age of fifteen, but they seem to have an overall sense of what is right and what is wrong. Mrs. Freeman especially seems to have very good intentions towards Hulga because she calls her Hulga instead of Joy which is what Mrs. Freeman thinks Hulga wants.

The biggest mistake Mrs. Hopewell makes in calling someone a “good country person” is the boy who comes to sell her a Bible. He appears to be an honest, hardworking, Christian boy, but turns out to be a lying, cheapskate with the worst intentions. Hulga sees what he is really like at the end of the story when she says, “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all—say one thing and do another” (458). The contrast between how the boy treats Hulga and how Mrs. Freeman treats Hulga is the biggest indicator of what makes “good country people.”