Grotesque in Good Country People

This is one of the stories we discussed in my Grotesque class because it hits that uncomfortable crossroads of humor and aversion, and because the imagery is anchored in the body.
Hulga's encounter with Pointer is disturbing, but also humorous in that "I can't believe this is funny-I-feel-a-little-sick-and-uncomfortable-laughing-about-this" kind of way.
The first time I read this story as a freshman, I remember thinking it would be kind of romantic to be a chilly intellectual like Hulga- finish a phD in philosophy and then retire as a sort of hermit to the country. Yet each time I read the story for a new class, I am struck more and more intensely by the perverted nature of Hulga's unsociable behavior. Presumably, she comes home to live with her mother because of a heart condition, and makes no effort to make herself sexually appealing (at least, before Pointer). Her existence is supposedly predicated on her nihilism--she accepts her fate in the country, because she believes that the world is without permenance or meaning. For her, their is no salvation of any kind. With all this in mind then, it seems strange that a nihilist would attach so much psychic energy to a material object as Hulga does with her leg. O'Connor writes that Hulga "took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away" (281). Hulga professes a belief in Nothing, yet when her leg is actually taken from her (when she is left with Nothing, instead of Something), she is faced with a true instance of vacuum--nothingness. Perhaps on an intellectual level she had convinced herself that she believed in Nothing, but Pointer's acknowledgment and theft of her leg rob her of her illusions of a purist's nihilism: her leg is a totem endowed with mystical powers, a fetish that "makes [her] different." Only when she experiences the loss of her leg, "like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his," does she realize that she values Something (perhaps a Something entirely outside of her articulation, but a Something none the less) that can be taken away or lost. The story remains Grotesque in the sense that we cannot resolve what that Something might be, or what the moral consequences of the story might be, for her or for Pointer.