Carson McCullers

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Carson McCullers American Literature Analysis

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Spiritual isolation is the abiding theme of Carson McCullers’s fiction. At the core of modern life, she saw a tragic failure of individuals to connect with one another emotionally, to return love, or to commit themselves to a socially edifying pattern of shared values. Her characters struggle through agonies of psychic stress to realize the radical loneliness in their lives. Sexual deviation, violence, and sexual initiation in adolescence move them to their personal crises.

Typically, her characters live in perfectly normal surroundings, such as a small mill town or an Army post in peacetime, but her revelation of their inner lives is so penetrating and their psychic turmoil is so grotesque that they seem to inhabit a world of existential dread. Overwrought inward obsessions define characters such as Weldon Penderton, Mick Kelly, or Frankie Addams, though their predicaments may appear absurd to ordinary people. Perhaps no American writer since Edgar Allan Poe has painted the mental landscape as well as McCullers; she has deftly delineated the subtle nuances of psychic states lying along the continuum linking psychosis and neurosis with normalcy.

Her relation to the literary tradition of southern gothic fiction is easily misunderstood. It is true that her characters include deaf-mutes, lunatics, criminals, fanatics, a giant in love with a dwarf, eunuchs, perverts, and variously mutilated, disfigured, and misshapen people; yet, the grotesquery in this gallery was not designed merely for sensational effect or regional humor. McCullers uses her bizarre characters to demonstrate how intricately the usual and the unusual are entangled in human nature, and, as a result, how delicate is that balance of wildly divergent impulses called normality. To overemphasize the grotesquery in her fiction may obscure one of her most valuable insights: Spiritual isolation is a universal condition of modern humankind and not the result of individual eccentricity.

A radical inability to connect meaningfully with others traps McCullers’s most memorable characters within themselves. Her best characters yearn to find meaning in life and to carve out a victorious place in the order of things. Mick Kelly aspires to master the cosmic harmonies of music and find fame on the concert stage. Doctor Copeland works to free blacks from the bondage of segregation. Others seek fulfillment in the rigid patterns of military life or the emotional concord of a good marriage.

Instead, they become deracinated souls, isolated from one another and cut off from the meaning they seek from life. Mick Kelly winds up behind a counter at a ten-cent store. Doctor Copeland is beaten by the police and alienated by his own family. Although some characters and situations in McCullers’s fiction reveal the glories of unselfish love, the warmth of domestic accord, and the capacity for courage in ordinary people, her plots tend to exacerbate rather than resolve antagonisms that divide people, and the prevailing mood is one of existential angst.

A critic once complained that The Member of the Wedding was without a beginning, middle, or end. McCullers’s fiction does depend upon character revelation, a lyrical style, and narratorial bearing more than a story line. Far from being plot-ridden, her stories are musically structured. She once told her publisher that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was composed like a fugue, with theme and countertheme developed contrapuntally as characters interact in mingled harmony. The emotional pace and tone of The Ballad of the Sad Café and The Member of the Wedding are established by abrupt beginnings, long middles, and brief, haunting codas. The sound of music often sets the mood, reveals a character, or makes a point. For example, the rapture of a classical concerto...

(This entire section contains 3518 words.)

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transports Alison Langdon and her houseboy, Anacleto; a deaf-mute’s radio plays unheard; and the harmony of a chain gang’s song lifts each member’s soul.

A distinctive lyrical quality pervades language as well as structure in McCullers’s tales. Simple but intense, humorous yet sympathetic, elegant but never high-flown, her storytelling voice is capable of interweaving an utterly realistic narrative and wild descriptions and preposterous details. An uncanny instinct for colloquial idiom makes her tone ring perfectly clear and sweet, without a trace of sentimentality or judgmental dogma.

Some critics who admire her individual works have been disappointed with her career. They say that she limited her work to a narrow range, sociologically and intellectually, relying too much on characters like herself. Given that she worked within self-imposed limits and against odds beyond her control, however, McCullers achieved spectacular success. Her career was foreshortened by crippling pain and early death, but each of the books she wrote in her twenties sold more than half a million copies, and all were adapted to stage or screen or both. If she focused on the heart rather than the intellect, and on people rather than society, she succeeded nevertheless in illuminating the lonely depths of the souls of modern men and women made tragically incomplete by the failure of love.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

First published: 1940

Type of work: Novel

In a small southern town, four lonely people look to a deaf-mute for understanding and friendship.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was the result of a strange creative process. Bedridden for weeks, McCullers wrote some character sketches. One day, in a flash of inspiration, she announced to her mother that the story would revolve around a deaf-mute named Singer to whom others pour out their hearts. The novel grew organically, without a controlling plot.

In part 1, the five main characters are introduced. Always polite, immaculately clean, and soberly attired, John Singer is oddly paired with Spiros Antonapoulos, a fat, retarded deaf-mute. After illness requires him to stop drinking wine, Antonapoulos develops antisocial habits. Singer offers excuses to the police, but his friend is committed to an insane asylum.

At an all-night café owned by Buff Brannon, Singer meets the radical drifter Jake Blount and the respected black doctor Benedict Copeland, men who hold Marxist views and aspire to revolution. Despite sharing similar views, their personalities are quite different. Blount is, by turns, a well-spoken fanatic and a swaggering, violent drunk. He accuses capitalists of liking pigs more than people, because people cannot be sold as sausage. People in the café, except for Singer and Brannon, dismiss such talk as drunken ranting. By contrast, Doctor Copeland is quite dignified and high-minded and is a well-read student of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Single-mindedly devoted to the “strong, true purpose” of desegregation, Copeland uses his brain rather than his heart and thus alienates potential allies such as Blount and his own family. In their different ways, Blount and Copeland allow fanaticism to dry up their powers of love.

Mick Kelly, a talented yet lonely girl of thirteen, is the most fully drawn character. Her family runs the shabby boardinghouse where Singer lives. To him she opens the “inside room” of her being, confiding in him her innermost feelings and aspirations.

In part 2, frustrations abound. Mick’s experiences are tragically disappointing. To prove that she is like other girls, she throws a carefully orchestrated party but then finds herself delighted when order breaks down and guests go running through the neighborhood.

After her younger brother Bubber accidentally shoots Baby Wilson with a rifle and causes a superficial but bloody wound, Mick compounds Bubber’s agony with talk of a child-sized electric chair awaiting him at Sing Sing. As a result, the boy is never his open, playful self again. Mick then has an embarrassing encounter with the boy next door. At the swimming hole, Mick dares him to strip naked, and he does. She does too, and they have sexual intercourse, only to feel guilt and shame afterward.

Doctor Copeland’s struggle reaches a grim crisis when his son is tortured in prison by being tied up for three days with his legs in the air. Both feet are frozen and must be amputated. Demanding to lodge a complaint, Doctor Copeland is himself arrested, beaten, and kicked in the groin by the sheriff’s deputies. Blount distributes leaflets calling on workers to revolt, but he succeeds only in provoking a race riot that leaves two blacks dead.

Buff Brannon is freed from a loveless marriage by his wife’s death. In a bedroom rearranged not to remind him of her, he smokes his cigars, rocks in his chair, and thumbs the pages of his twenty-year collection of newspapers. Wearing his mother’s gold ring and his wife’s perfume, he retreats from the world of manly assertiveness into passive self-sufficiency.

One by one, these lonely hunters pour out their hearts to Singer, though he does not really understand them and wonders why they share inner secrets with him. The saddest scene occurs in his room, when they visit him all at the same time. He hopes they will enjoy the radio he bought for their pleasure, but they stand around nervously, unable to connect emotionally with one another. Singer’s only friend is Antonapoulos, whom he visits with gifts that go unappreciated. When he arrives at the asylum one summer day, he learns that his friend has died. Heartbroken, he returns to his room and shoots himself in the heart.

Part 3 briefly tells what happens after Singer’s suicide. More baffled by his death than his life, Brannon recognizes his own failure to love. Blount leaves town in the aftermath of the riot with forty dollars given to him by Brannon. Doctor Copeland gives up the struggle and moves in with rural relatives he had earlier scorned. Mick changes her mind about the “inside room” so lavishly furnished with dreams. She decides not to buy a piano, drops out of school, and goes to work at the ten-cent store.

Critics have disliked the novel’s shapeless plot and crushing pessimism, but the author explores deep personal problems against the backdrop of a realistically drawn social landscape.

Reflections in a Golden Eye

First published: 1941

Type of work: Novel

Frustrated by impotence, deviance, and his wife’s adultery, an Army officer murders an enlisted man.

Written in a matter of weeks, Reflections in a Golden Eye demonstrates the range of McCullers’s talent. Here she goes beyond the realism that made her first novel so endearing and delves into a surreal world of dark, psychic impulses. Passions seethe beneath the rigid but fragile surface of military life on an Army post in peacetime. Six characters figure in the story.

Captain Weldon Penderton, an impotent, middle-aged man with homosexual inclinations, is married to the beautiful Leonora, daughter of the fort’s former commander. Leonora is having an affair with a neighbor, Major Morris Langdon. Langdon’s wife, Alison, cut off her own nipples with garden shears while mourning the death of a deformed baby. Morris and Leonora pass the time riding horseback and making love in a blackberry patch, while Alison, a virtual shut-in, spends her days listening to classical music with her Filipino houseboy, Anacleto.

Private Williams, a mysterious young man with an affinity for animals, becomes Leonora’s favorite stable boy. He cares for her high-spirited stallion, Firebird. One afternoon, while Williams is sunbathing nude on a rock in the woods, Weldon, a poor horseman, takes Firebird out for a ride. As Williams looks on, the stallion breaks into a gallop that Weldon cannot control. Losing his balance, he slides out of the saddle and is dragged some distance. When Firebird finally stops, Weldon whips him viciously with the branch of a tree. Leonora soon discovers what has happened to her horse. During a party that evening, she gives her husband a sound thrashing with her riding crop in full view of the guests.

Much of the following action occurs, symbolically, at night. In the grip of a strange attraction, Weldon finds himself following Williams about the fort, gazing in through barracks windows for a glimpse of the youth. One night, Alison sees a shadowy figure entering the Pendertons’ house. Thinking it is her husband, she investigates, only to discover that it is Williams on one of his visits to Leonora’s bedroom, where he silently watches her sleep.

Alison delivers her hysterical report to Weldon, who refuses to believe it. When Alison announces her intention to file for divorce, Morris hastily has her committed to an insane asylum, where she commits suicide shortly after arrival. The story moves swiftly to its bizarre conclusion when, several nights later, Weldon happens upon Williams in Leonora’s bedroom and shoots him. Only too late does he realize that he has destroyed the object of his strange fascination.

The novel explores a nightmarish world in which moral values have been lost. The loutish Morris Langdon, Leonora, and Private Williams live on an animalistic level of insensitivity and stupidity. Even their more imaginative counterparts, Alison, Anacleto, and Weldon, are doomed to destruction by their intensely convoluted emotions, self-loathing, and warped perceptions.

Moral direction and rational thinking have no part in the mad game played by the characters in this black comedy, for their visions of life are too distorted by personal suffering or emotional incapacity. Imagery in the novel plays tricks with perception: mirrors, windows, multifaceted eyes, the blur of colors Weldon sees as he hangs onto Firebird, and the grotesque reflections in the golden eye of Anacleto’s ghastly green peacock. The characters themselves are never developed into fully human creations but remain abstract refractions of tragically incomplete psychic states.

The Member of the Wedding

First published: 1946

Type of work: Novel

To escape the pains of adolescence, a lonely girl dreams of being united with her brother and his bride after the wedding.

In The Member of the Wedding, attention is concentrated on twelve-year-old Frankie Addams, her six-year-old cousin John Henry West, and Berenice Sadie Brown, a middle-aged black housekeeper. Their card-playing, eating, and talking in the kitchen during the last weekend of August constitute most of the action. It has been a bad summer for Frankie. Her best friend has moved away, she is too big to curl up beside her father in bed, and she belongs to no group. A lonely heart, she searches for “the we of me.” In part 1, she latches onto the notion that she can join her brother and his bride after their wedding.

In part 2, she changes her name to F. Jasmine Addams and begins to believe that she belongs. She senses a fellow feeling with everyone she meets in town, including a soldier who buys her a drink at the Blue Moon and makes a date with her for that night.

Back home in the kitchen that afternoon, Berenice argues against Frankie’s plans for the wedding. To show how foolishly people are served by unrealistic ideas of love, she tells of her four marriages. The first had been blissful, but, widowed, she married a succession of no-good men simply because they reminded her of her first husband. The last husband gouged out one of her eyes in a fight. Berenice’s deep voice draws sympathy if not understanding from Frankie. Sometimes they break into song together, with John Henry’s high notes sailing overhead and Frankie’s voice harmonizing in the range between. They take turns pretending to be God. John Henry would remake the world with chocolate dirt and lemonade rain. Berenice would rid the world of war, hunger, and racism. Frankie likes Berenice’s world, but she would also eliminate summer, enable people to change sexes at will, and start a worldwide club with membership certificates.

The long conversation does not resolve Frankie’s inner turmoil. Having kept her rendezvous with the soldier a secret, she meets him at the Blue Moon on Saturday night. He uses a double-talk that is difficult for her to understand, but she accepts his invitation to his hotel room. After he throws her onto the bed, she knocks him out cold with a water pitcher and crawls down the fire escape, wondering if she has killed him.

Early the next morning, Frankie attends her brother’s wedding, but her plan fails, because she cannot find words to ask if she can tag along. Finally, she must be dragged from the car so that the couple can make their getaway. Feeling worse than ever, she runs away that night, making it as far as the Blue Moon before a policeman recognizes her and restores her to her father.

The novel closes with a brief glimpse of moving day, when Frankie and her father go to live with relatives. She has a new best friend, a girl who likes reading poetry and pasting pictures in an art book. Now calling herself Frances, she is unmoved by the hardship that their relocation brings to Berenice and insensitive to the terrible death of John Henry from meningitis. The novel’s ending shows that the girl’s isolation is an ongoing condition, not the result of a dreary summer, a wrecked wedding, or a traumatic first date. With or without a best friend, Frankie remains seriously out of touch with the deepest feelings of those closest to her.

The Ballad of the Sad Café

First published: 1943 (serial), 1951 (book)

Type of work: Novella

A jilted husband returns to ruin his former wife’s love affair with a hunchbacked dwarf.

A weird love story, The Ballad of the Sad Café was dedicated to David Diamond, her husband’s lover. The story elevates elements of their triangular relationship to archetypal significance. Once a dingy old building in the middle of a town where “there is absolutely nothing to do,” the café itself becomes a symbol of the human heart. Like a magic lantern, it may be lit by love—in this case, the love of a tall, muscular woman, Miss Amelia, for an itinerant hunchbacked dwarf, Cousin Lymon. Townsfolk are flabbergasted when Miss Amelia offers him room and board, for she has cared nothing for the love of men and seldom invited them inside except to trick them out of money. After three days, they suspect that she has killed him. When a delegation arrives to investigate, however, they are surprised to find Cousin Lymon strutting around as if he owned the place. Miss Amelia has been completely transformed. Once stingy and shrewd, she now treats them with hospitality and generosity. Love has converted the town from boredom to joy, as the café hums with merriment and fellowship.

Six years later, the lantern is shattered when Miss Amelia’s jilted husband, Marvin Macy, returns from prison. Years ago, their bizarre marriage had scandalized the town. On their wedding night, the bride bolted from the bedroom within half an hour. Whenever the groom came within reach, she gave him a violent drubbing. On the tenth day, he left town, vowing revenge. Before this marriage, Macy had been a terrible character, known as a defiler of young women and a brawler guilty of many crimes. In his pocket Macy carried the salted ear of a man he killed in a razor fight. His love for Miss Amelia transformed him, however, and he became religious and well mannered. His heart has been hardened, however, by his wife’s rebuff.

When he returns, townsfolk expect trouble. To their surprise, Cousin Lymon falls madly in love with him. In fact, he makes a public spectacle of himself, following the handsome wastrel around and moaning when Macy snubs him. Miss Amelia bears this abuse with chagrin, until matters came to a head on Ground Hog Day. Miss Amelia squares off against Macy in a brutal fight. Physically an even match, they grapple destructively but indecisively until Cousin Lymon pounces on Miss Amelia and begins choking her. She is beaten before anyone realizes what has happened. Victorious, the two men wreck her moonshine still, ransack the café, and leave town together.

In humiliation, Miss Amelia’s heart turns cold. She raises the price of everything to one dollar, and customers stop coming to the café. Brooding in solitude, she lets her hair grow ragged and her body become thin. Once again, the town reverts to empty dreariness in which “the soul rots with boredom.”

In a noteworthy passage, the balladeer reflects upon love. At the heart of love’s mystery, he finds a cruel paradox: Love is not a mutual experience, but very different for lover and beloved. The quality of love is determined solely by the lover, as the pairings in the story show. Macy is reformed by love for a woman who rejects him. She is similarly tempered by an unreciprocal feeling for the dwarf, who is himself transmogrified by an unrequited homosexual infatuation. Love proves no cure for radical loneliness of the soul, but rather intensifies its pain.

The story has a haunting, lyrical beauty. Characters are portrayed concretely, not dramatically. There is almost no dialogue, and virtually all events are related in flashback. The story is bracketed by references to the lyrical song of the chain gang. Perhaps Miss Amelia is more imprisoned by loneliness than the convicts are by chains, for their voices rise above their suffering and despair to recognize their unity.

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Carson McCullers Short Fiction Analysis

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