In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People,” a small household gets a visit from a young door-to-door Bible salesman. One of these women is Hulga Hopewell, who is 32 years old, feels ugly beyond belief, has earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, and must wear a false leg because her natural leg had been shot off in an accident when she was a child. While her mother invites the salesman in and considers him ‘good country people’ like she is, Hulga does not believe in anything and thinks to seduce this young man when he shows the slightest interest in her.
Alison Baker’s short story “Better be Ready ‘Bout Half Past Eight” is about a man having difficulties adjusting to his best friend’s decision to change his sex. These two stories would seem to have nothing at all in common. However, both O’Connor and Baker have illustrated humankind’s tendency to focus on the externals of a person’s identity rather than the more important internal person.
O’Connor presents her main character as having very little in the way of worldly experience, tending to base her understanding of herself and others on their external attributes. Because she has a Ph.D., Hulga believes she is much more experienced and worldly than those with whom her mother associates, but she continues living with her mother and isolates herself from the rest of society. She does this because she considers herself grotesque because of her thick glasses and missing leg, calling attention to it through her heavy step and ‘clumping’ movements.
She and her mother consider Manley Pointer as the innocent young country boy he presents himself to be. Her mother begins to refer to him almost immediately as ‘good country people.’ Although Hulga thinks her mother is supremely naïve for doing this, Hulga also falls into the trap of judging by externals when she relinquishes her artificial leg to him. She “felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain seemed to have stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was not very good at” (O’Connor, 1990, p. 289).
Despite her insistence on loathing the false leg and the thick glasses she depends on to see, in the end, Hulga finds she is literally left without a leg to stand on. She has already learned the danger in placing too much value on the external attributes of a person through the harsh betrayal of the Bible salesman and the story ends just as she is about to learn the rewards of finding internal value as she will need to find these in herself in order to survive.
The main character of Baker’s story, Byron, is demonstrated to be an intelligent, quick-witted mild-mannered individual from the immediate opening of the story. Upon being told his best friend is ‘changing sex’, his responses remain rational and non-judgmental – on the surface. When Zach tells Byron that he is really a woman on the inside, Byron has a difficult time accepting the idea, insisting that Zach is a man.
While he seems to immediately accept the idea that Zach is going to go through the process of changing his physical sex to that of a woman, his inability to cope with the idea that his friend will be the same person on the inside is revealed as he thinks about the announcement later. “Zach wouldn’t be Zach when he came back. He would be a woman Byron had never met” (Baker, 1993: 94). The depth of this belief is brought out again when Zach returns to the office the next day wearing eye shadow and pointing out that he’s been growing breasts for several months now. “All day he tried not to look at Zach’s breasts, but there they were, right in front of him, as Zach bent over the bench or peered into the microscope, or leaned back with his hands behind his neck, staring at the ceiling, thinking” (Baker, 1993: 94).
This obsession continues to grow as Byron attempts to reconcile the idea that his best friend, the man he grew up with, is really a woman inside. This inability to reconcile these ideas, that Zach and Zoe are really the same people and only the external portion of this person has changed exposes the same processes at work that are seen in the O’Connor story – that people are categorized and understood based on the external attributes of their personality rather than their internal realities.
Although these stories are vastly different in terms of plotline and characters, they both explore the same fundamental attribute of human nature – that people tend to make assessments regarding other people based on their external appearance rather than their internal personality.
Hulga felt she was both superior, because of her Ph.D., and inferior, because of her false leg and weak eyes, to other people. As a result, she could not be happy in public or isolated within her mother’s house. Both her mother and she felt the Bible salesman was ‘good country people’, one to assume made no threat and the other to assume she could victimize and both to their detriment. Byron felt he was losing his best friend when he discovered Zach was a woman named Zoe inside. However, once Hulga and Byron were forced to look inside, they discovered where the real value lay.
Works Cited
Baker, Alison. “Better Be Ready ‘Bout Half Past Eight.” The Atlantic Monthly. 1993.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990, pp. 271-91.