Good Country People, or Hulga's First Date

My paper is supposed to be about the stranger as a vehicle for redemption, and I'm hoping to come at that topic from the side by exploring things in this story which interest me more than tackling that idea head-on.

On Mrs. Freeman, the car:
That Mrs. Freeman is described as a car is nothing new or exciting; she has three expressions -- neutral, reverse, and forward, that last of which is "steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck;" her "gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared."

But why is Mrs. Freeman - or I guess, Mrs. Freeman's look - described as a car in context of the other cars in O'Connor's fiction? In Wise Blood, Hazel Motes's car is both pulpit and weapon, pen and sword; it makes him powerful; it makes him free. Tom T. Shiftlet (of "The Life You Save...") ruins lives to keep mobile and get to Mobile, liberating himself from the ball-and-chain that was only a few hours long. Both men get free, and she is Mrs. Freeman.

There seems to be some kind of disconnect between car = freedom, Freeman = car. It's a poor pun and a worse paper. What am I missing?

On Mrs. Freeman, the proxy:
Meagan points out, "Mrs. Freeman has a weird fascination with people with deformities! Just like Manley Pointer." O'Connor takes it further: "Mrs Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections . . . assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable."

Pardon my scholarly sin, but this sounds a boatload like O'Connor herself. Maimed characters, raped characters, retarded characters (and otherwise idiot children)...Mrs. Freeman's "special fondnesses" resonate, at least to this O'Connor reader, as the "large and startling figures" that mark the relationship between this fiction writer and her country.

Or is O'Connor taking a break from slapping around intellectuals (poor Hulga) to slap around the people who are drawn to her work -- "If you want it, here it is - LIKE IT IS." The freaks and weirdos, and especially the author of Michelle's elusive abstract "that said that O'Connor's own battle with lupus, "makes its way into her fiction not only literally -- through images of blood, disease, death, and twisted parent-child relationships -- but figuratively as well.”" O'Connor, notoriously sensitive about her disease, brushed off accusations of her fiction as a kind of exorcism of its effect on her severally, though of course I can't find any of those letters now. (No index listing for "lupus".) Mrs. Freeman's fixation on disease - O'Connor's readers' fixation on her's - Mrs. Freeman's laughable simplicity - revenge?

On Names:
Brad made a post about names when we first read this story, and what I want to latch onto from that is this point on the Joy-Hulga dynamic: "I am reminded of "The River" and how there as well, the narrator seemed to be making a very conscious choice of calling the boy not by his God-given name." Brad noticed that after the breakfast scene, "for the rest of the story, the narrator's voice only uses Hulga or "the girl."" I definitely think he's on to something; once they go off on the picnic, Pointer and Hulga become "the boy" and "the girl," "he" and "she." Only the characters themselves call each other by their names; the narrator is hands-off about it.

Could it be because the narrator doesn't know what to call them? Pointer says his name is Pointer, and then he says it's not; Joy says her name is Hulga; who's to be believed?

I can't help but draw comparisons between Shiftlet and Pointer. "And you needn't to think you'll catch me because Pointer ain't really my name." "I can tell you my name is Tom T. Shiftlet and I come from Tarwater, Tennessee . . . How you know my name ain't Aaron Sparks, lady, and I come from Singleberry, Georgia, or how you know it's not George Speeds and I come from Lucy, Alabama, or how you know I ain't Thompson Bright from Toolafalls, Mississippi?" If names are so fluid, how can you know a person? How can you tell this Tarwater from that Tarwater? (With great difficulty... Which is which Lucynell Crater? Like Brad said, there's Joy-Hulga, Harry/Bevel (who I propose is actually just Bevel/Bevel, or 1), and my favorite, the confusion of Heads. From "The Artificial Nigger": "Mr. Head meant him to see everything there is to see in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life. He fell asleep thinking how the boy would at last find out that he was not as smart as he thought he was." There's the male we do read as "he" and then there's the ambiguity of who we can read as "he" (and then of course there's the "He" we have to read, for class, tomorrow) and it's so mixed up I can't help but be mixed up for it. Of course, this ambiguity is avoided in the barn scene of "Good Country People" by the difference of sexes -- "the boy" and "the girl", "he" and "she".

So I guess my question is a reiteration of Ashley's - "what makes them them?" And it's also, who's who? And if that question is even answerable -- is it important? When O'Connor makes one character unremarkable from another in any way, does that just highlight their differences all the more? Does it join them in something common to each? How does it matter?

("'I like girls that wear glasses,' he said." Had Hulga read Dorothy Parker, we could have avoided this mess altogether.)