The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Louise Westling (essay date 1982)
Louise Westling (essay date 1982)
SOURCE: "Carson McCullers' Amazon Nightmare," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3, Autumn, 1982, pp. 465-73.
[In the following essay, Westling argues that while many feminist critics have demonstrated an interest in androgynous characters, the nature of McCullers's Miss Amelia has not been adequately examined. She argues that this character's "freakishness" represents an ambivalence McCullers's part toward female identity.]
Miss Amelia Evans is a monstrous creature, really, and yet Carson McCullers lavished admiring care in picturing her many talents, her forbidding strength, and her control of the squalid village world of The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943). Despite a good bit of critical attention to the novella and recent feminist interest in androgynous characters in literature, Miss Amelia's freakishness has not been seriously examined. It is crucial to the meaning of this grotesque...
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