The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (essay date 1988)
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: "Fighting for Life: The Women's Cause," in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words, Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 104-12.
[In the following excerpt, Gilbert and Gubar argue that The Ballad of the Sad Café dramatizes the retribution exacted on a woman who attempts to rebel against patriarchal social conventions.]
McCullers shows in her dreamlike mythic narrative of The Ballad of the Sad Cafe the culturally determined psychic logic that condemns the autonomous woman as a freak who must necessarily be sentenced to the defeat that is femininity. In fact, like her friend and contemporary Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers seems to stand outside the constructs of gender in order to demonstrate, as Williams did in Streetcar, the pain of what Adrienne Rich has called "compulsory heterosexuality"...
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