This is O’Connor showing us the absolute hypocrisy of Hulga. Even still, she is constantly decrying her mother’s hypocrisy, “ “Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not?”(375), while constantly failing to see the hypocrisy of her own existence, a revelation we now know will come at the end of the story.
Hulga is an ideologue who is nominally committed to the truth, exploring our world, and not accepting things based solely on faith. But she has done exactly this. O’Connors commentary on secular intellectualism is scathing in this instance, she points out that Hulga criticizes her mother for the same hypocrisies and flaws that she has. Hulga seems to despise people that are not open to the boundless possibilities offered by philosophy, but at the …show more content…
She is deeply entrenched in her ideology and it makes her bitter, disagreeable and in some cases just downright nasty. These flaws come to light when the Bible salesman lulls her into a false sense of superiority, and then, poetically, steals the only ‘leg’ she can stand on. This is representative of the intellectual dishonesty exhibited time and again by Hulga. She has no moral leg to stand on, and it takes the Bible salesman, who exudes a moral code that while truncated and morally bereft, does at least have some coherence, continuity and integrity to it in the sense that he is consistent. He does what he wants and that is it. O’Connor is implying that the Bible Salesman and his lifestyle are the logical conclusion to Hulga’s secular philosophy and while she felt so high and mighty, she ultimately is maimed not only by her missing leg, but also the fundamental contradiction of her moral philosophy. O’Connor is making a commentary on secular intellectuals, how their points of view are contradictory to their behavior, and that their ideology paves the way to