Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People"

[philsopheperdue]

Has anybody ever read this piece? Did you like it? Did you not? What do you think were the most conspicuous themes of the piece? According to certain critics, the novel is a "warning" against non-believers, but I think this is a very limited and biased reading. From what I was able to interpret, Hulga is a woman who seems to hide her misery behind her superiority complex of being a learned woman. However, the "Bible boy" teaches her a valuable lesson by humiliating her and bringing her back to earth from the clouds. What do you guys think?

[psburress]

Several million writers, observers and commentators await their turn to tell us what Flannery O'Connor's characters thought and did. This is the work of her cultic followers. These folks are more worried about extolling and elaborating on what O'Connor created in her characters than analysis of what she felt or wrote.
When will someone tell these poor dears that "all is projection?" Her writing is but the projection from her deeply suffering psyche. One does not need to be a psychologist to understand this but it may help. The pain, the suffering from her lupus gave her the motivations to find ways of torturing others to teach herself acceptance and hide her pain.
She thus trapped herself in her misunderstood orthodoxy.
She was teaching her self to accept the suffering that God...not the nihilists... visited upon her. May she rest in peace. Notice she thought it best to maintain a stiff, dogmatic and doctrinaire view of her faith. She often spoke as "from the throne." For her to expose her deep and tortured suffering was to expose her doubts. Her writings and projected pain came from deep within her own soul as with many writers. Her experience was too limited and narrow for what she wrote to come from elsewhere.
The world, then or now, is not filled with the sort of people of which she surrounded herself. She chose to exult a position of superiority, hers, and deflect probing questions and critical comment. From her eyes, she saw only nihilists and people she had to shout at. Pity!
12-23-14 psb