Comparing and Contrasting Connie and Hulga

There are many similarities between the short stories "Good Country People", by Flannery O'Connor, and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", by Joyce Carol Oates, most notably their characters. Both stories contain a female protagonist and a male antagonist whose confrontations start out relatively normal and progress to more and more surreal and twisted endings. The main characters, Hulga and Connie, are shockingly similar, and yet strangely different. Connie is a 15-year-old wishing to be older and beautiful and Hulga is a bitter 32-year-old, wishing to be younger and ugly. Th…