The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Joseph R. Millichap (essay date 1973)
Joseph R. Millichap (essay date 1973)
SOURCE: "Carson McCullers' Literary Ballad," in The Georgia Review, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, Fall, 1973, pp. 329-39.
[In the following essay, Millichap argues that the musical ballad form provides the key to understanding The Ballad of the Sad Café.]
Carson McCullers' novels, particularly The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and Member of the Wedding (1946), often have been misread as Gothic and grotesque fictions, categories derived by critics from her works in these modes, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and Ballad of the Sad Café (1943). Strangely enough, the same critics, intent on demonstrating their Procrustean theories in all of her work, often misunderstand Ballad by insisting on the universality of elements which are obviously peculiar to the point of aberration. The use of the bizarre theory of love offered by the narrator of...
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