of sectarian dispute, fed her violent imagination. . . (Pritchett 1552).
Religion itself is often presented in terms of a form of abandonment, as in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" when the Misfit details how Christ raised the dead and in effect spoiled the natural order of things, or as in "Good Country People" where some aspects of religion are no more than a business, embodied in that story in the bible salesman.
In "Good Country People" it is Hulga who is abandoned as the bible salesman runs off with her wooden leg. Hulga is the central consciousness in "Good Country People." She is the force of intellect in the story, though in the end her intellectual pretensions are shown to be foolish. She does not see through the falseness of Manley Pointer, the bible salesman, and indeed her intellectual aura comes largely by comparison with repetitious cliches of Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman. When Hulga tries to seduce the salesman, thinking him an innocent, she learns otherwise when he steals her wooden leg:
Manley Pointer seems well named for his role in the promised union. He is, as well, a connoisseur of the obscene and adds Hulga's leg to his growing collection of bizarre objects. Hulga's venture into sexual initiation leads her to spiritual rape (Walters 66).
Pointer represents the world of the body for Hulga, and she thinks of herself as the world of the mind. O'Connor's characters tend to express the conflict between mind and body in cruel ways, and that is certainly the case here. Both Hulga and Pointer express a sense of cruelty toward the other during their encounter. None of this cruelty is simply arbitrary, however, and each character lives within a code that may exist only in their own mind and apply only to themselves but that determines their actions just the same. The spiritual is always at large in this world, though O'Connor's character may not achieve it and may be reaching in the wrong direction. ...