ASSIGNMENT 29:
Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People"
Alice Walker, "Everyday Use"

When most people think of Southern literature, they call to mind the Southern Renaissance, the period between the two World Wars that produced such authors as William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and Robert Penn Warren. However, in the decades since the 1930s Southern literature flourished in writers such as James Dickey, Barry Hannah, and Walker Percy, all heavily influenced by the writers of the Southern Renaissance. Moreover, a prominent women's tradition in Southern literature has become especially strong because of the fiction of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and many others.

In a part of the country dominated by Protestant Christians, Flannery O'Connor was Roman Catholic. Her characters are often alienated from themselves, from their culture, and from their God. In "Good Country People" O'Connor uses common speech, common places, and common things to produce grotesquely comic and absurd effects to examine her religious concerns. Thirty-three year-old Hulga, who got her leg shot off in an accident when she was a child, may actually be on some kind of spiritual search in spite of her denial that God exists. Though she has earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, she seems to lack common sense. She is fooled by a young man named Manly Pointer who makes her think he is a simple religious country bumpkin way beneath her. But Manly is much more worldly than Hulga; he seduces her, and she is left sitting alone in a hay loft without her glasses (she was not seeing very clearly anyway) and without her wooden leg.

Alice Walker is perhaps best known for her 1983 Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Color Purple. She grew up in the rural South in the town of Eatonton, Georgia, attended Spelman College in Atlanta, and then Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Returning south after college, she joined the civil rights movement and worked against segregation. Not surprisingly, Walker's publications have been infused by her signature call for strength from African American women. Walker introduces us to two such women in her short story "Everyday Use," a comic story from a time when many African Americans were reconsidering their complex heritage and experimenting with the expression of that heritage--in political action, in dress, in the selection of names. Walker presents a clear conflict here between the traditional world of the narrator and the fast-changing style of one of her daughters.

Reading Assignment

1. Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People" (pp. 2020-2038).
2. Alice Walker, "Everyday Use" (pp. 2274-2280).

Writing Assignment

1. In "Good Country People" Mrs. Howell says, "Everybody is different.... It takes all kinds to make the world," but she doesn't really mean it. She would prefer that all the world, especially her daughter, be "good country people" like herself. What would it mean for Hulga to take her mother as her model? What makes her unforgivably "different" to her mother?
2. Hulga is a proud intellectual and has little doubt of her existentialists beliefs. However, by the end, she has fallen prey to the same naive stereotypes as her mother. Do you think her beliefs are based on reason, or on the desire to distinguish herself from the ignorance which is all around her? What is the story's final betrayal? Is it possible for Hulga to escape being her mother's daughter? Discuss in several paragraphs.
3. What is Hulga looking for in Manley Pointer? What does she find? Look at the mother-child imagery in of Pointer's "seduction." What do Manley and Mrs. Hopwell have in common?
4. In the story both Hulga and the Bible salesman wear masks over their true natures. However, their final confrontation reveals the salesman to be a cunning atheist while Hulga is exposed as a girl who's naivete sharply contradicts the nihilistic cliches she vents. Describe the contradictions between what appears to be on the surface and what actually is.
5. Turning now to "Everyday People," how are Dee and Maggie different? Are they presented as stereotypes of the old-style and new-style African American woman? If not, how is each distinguished from that stereotype?
6. The conversation between Maggie and her mother eventually turns to quilts-a longstanding family art. Dee calls them "priceless"; the narrator values "everyday use." Beyond or beneath this matter of quilts, what are they really debating about?

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