Good Country People and Those

Good Country People and Those Who Hate Them In Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People," the protagonist Hulga, spends her entire adult life doing her best to deny and rebel against her mother's optimistic attitude. Hulga is a highly educated southern woman who lost her leg in an accident at the age of ten and suffers from a heart ailment. Due to these hardships, at thirty-two she still lives with her mother, and is very negative …

…ony and humiliation (O'Connor 118). Whether or not she learns from this painful experience is a question left unanswered. There is hope for her if she sheds her air of intellectual superiority and realizes that no one person has all of the answers to life's questions. Her life certainly would have been less miserable Sines 4 if she herself had learned the lesson she has tried to teach her mother: "We are not our own light" (O'Connor 109).