Characterization of Joy in "Good Country People"

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Joy Hopewell is the thirty-three-year-old maimed child of Ms. Hopewell in Flannery O'Connor's short story, Good Country People." Joy is characterized throughout the story as an ungrateful, childish adult with a bad temperament. Joy's leg has been shot off in a hunting accident over twenty years ago, and it can be presumed that at least some of her behavioral issues can be attributed to the accident. Ms. Hopewell, the eternally helpful and kind character, wakes up at seven each morning to light the heaters in her and Joy's rooms. Joy shows her gratitude by stomping her artificial leg unnecessarily on the way to the bathroom and then slamming the door upon her arrival. She often has outbursts when her mother asks her to walk to the fields. She even changed her name from Joy to Hulga when she was away at college, and her mother is convinced that she "had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language" (364). Joy's mother refuses to call her by her new legal name, although Ms. Freeman, the nosey hired help, has no trouble doing so. Joy views her new name as her "highest creative act" and is irritated when Ms. Freeman uses it (365). Joy is highly educated, with a Ph.D. in philosophy, and yet she appears to have minimal common sense. She goes about all day "in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it" that her mother finds idiotic (365). Joy probably does this simply to aggravate her mother. Joy's degrees in philosophy haven't satisfied her hunger for knowledge. It seems that the only thing Joy takes pleasure in is reading all day long in a chair. Her mother picks up one of these books that Joy spends so much time with and opens to a rand... ... middle of paper ... ... him by showing him where her leg joins on. Joy even shows him how to take the artificial leg on and off, and lets him try himself. She still believes that "for the first time in her life she was face to face with real innocence" (374). Once Manley has the leg off, he places it out of her reach and tries to continue seducing her. Joy resists and the boy packs her leg into his valise and prepares to leave. He explains that he collects prosthetic body parts, changes his name at every house call, and that "she ain't so smart"--an obvious fact now (375). Joy's sour temperament and her introspectiveness have both taught her nothing about the world, people, or how to judge a person's character. All of her degrees have done nothing but push her farther into books and farther away from the world. It is Joy's own qualities that put her in the vulnerable situatio

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