The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Panthea Reid Broughton (essay date 1974)
Panthea Reid Broughton (essay date 1974)
SOURCE: "Rejection of the Feminine in Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Café" in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 20, No. 1, January, 1974, pp. 34-43.
[In the following essay, Broughton asserts that the characters in The Ballad of the Sad Café regard tenderness and the expression of emotion as inherently feminine and, for that reason, "weak" qualities. She argues that their attitudes toward the feminine cause them to reject qualities that are essential to the survival of the human community.]
Well over a century has passed since Alexis de Tocqueville astutely observed that compulsive individualism, so idealized in America, might indeed foster personal isolation. Tocqueville surmised that the inescapable isolation of the individual American was as much economic as political and that, though its causes might indeed be material, its ultimate significance was spiritual; for...
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