While leaving the home, Pointer invites Joy for a picnic date the next evening, and she imagines seducing the innocent Bible salesman.
[1] In "Good Country People," O'Connor uses irony and a finely controlled comic sense to reveal the modern world as it is—without vision or knowledge.
[2] As in O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," a stranger—deceptively polite but ultimately evil—intrudes upon a family with destructive consequences.
In Joy’s case, despite her advanced academic degrees, she is unable to see what is bad, and her mother's stereotyping perspective proves to be equally misleading and false.
According to Miller, this is reflected in Good Country People by dinner-table suggestions made by Mrs. Hopewell about smiling that lead to Joy storming off while referencing philosophy.
Because the Hopewells are higher-status landowners, Joy is able to pursue intellectualism rather than domesticism, while two lower-class female characters in the story (the Freeman sisters) are portrayed as having no options other than marriage.
[10] Sara Hosey, in an article for Teaching American Literature, examined "Good Country People" from a perspective of disability.
Hosey notes that when talking to the salesman, Joy states that she is 17, rather than her true age of 32, reflected her pretending to be a young woman, which has traditionally been viewed as dependent.