Seduced by Language: The Case of Joy-Hulga Hopewell

NOTES SEDUCED BY LANGUAGE: THE CASE OF JOY-HULGA HOPEWELL Cheryl Z. Oreovicz Purdue University Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" is a remarkable piece of short fiction, a remarkable sample of peculiarly American fiction . O'Connor's concerns, as she plots the tale ofJoy-Hulga Hopewell, touch on or embrace familiar American character types (the alienated hero, the innocent and the apparent innocent, the peddler/con man), familiar situations (the flimflamming of the gull, the hayloft seduction), the humor of inversion, and a delight in playing with language. What draws together these disparate elements is O'Connor's version of America's literary as well as philosophical preoccupation with questions of epistemology. These are questions which dominate American literature from Bradford to Barthelme, and these are the questions O'Connor directly addresses through her major and minor characters in "Good Country People." Not coincidentally, the heroine of the tale holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, a fact that Preston M. Browning, Jr. emphasizes when he argues for reading this story as that of the nihilist reluctantly facing the very real existence of evil in the world,1 and a fact that Josephine Hendin recognizes when she interprets the larger structure of O'Connor's fictive world as a system of conflicts—mind with body, spiritual with physical, and, in the present case, the relation of the "self to the world around it," "of people to things."2 Joy-Hulga's throwaway reference to quasi-Cartesian philosopher Nicholas Malebranche, gently probed, leads Hendin to observe: "The screen of abstractions [Joy-Hulga] has built between herself, her body, and the world is as much an expression of her longing for them as a sign of her blindness. . . . She is able to see things only as though they were at a great distance, phenomena to be studied through a telescope."3 Quality of vision, continues Patricia D. Maida, consistently indicates degrees of moral blindness within the O'Connor population. "Her people project their true selves through the physical qualities of their eyes—through color, shape, and intensity. And their perception of the world is controlled by their limited powers of sight."4 222Notes Implicit in Hendin's "screen of abstractions" is a recognition that by eagerly absorbing the vocabulary of a philosophic system that insists upon a body discrete from the soul ("mind" would no doubt be the character's preferred term) , Joy-Hulga maintains an uneasy truce between self and society, between developed mind and deformed body. The world she needs no telescope to see, her "real" world, is that of the mind shaped and organized not just by the thought but the "truth" of the language and syntax of a Malebranche or a Heidegger. Joy-Hulga's eyeglasses suffice for raising sight to the level of cognition, knowing by seeing, naming, and seizing. Whatever enlightenment she experiences at the close of "Good Country People" originates in this principle. There is no need to move outside the story to the writings of William James, Sapir, Whorf, or Saussure to grasp the mutual influences of perception and language: O'Connor points to this commonly accepted feature of linguistic behavior at the outset of her story when she introduces Mrs. Freeman. Of her three mechanized expressions , Mrs. Freeman generally finds use for only one: "Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it."5 On those rare occasions when her second public gaze, "reverse," is required, Mrs. Freeman too can be said to draw a screen. Though physically present, her receding eyes signal Mrs. Freeman's retreat of spirit. At such times, experience has taught Mrs. Hopewell, argument is idle. Too often her proddings have been met with aggravated silence or responses like " 'Well, I wouldn't of said it was and I wouldn't of said it wasn't' " (p. 169)—equivocal, if not meaningless, replies—or irrelevant observations that fall as naturally from Mrs. Freeman's lips as her "forward" gaze touches the retreating blue-suited figure of the...