Baby
One of the great things about a meticulously crafted novel like The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is that readers get to watch it unravel slowly, feeling secure with its sense of order, knowing, even during those passages where they cannot see the grand scheme, that the author is in control and most likely is not wasting her readers’ time. Another great thing about reading the work of a structure fanatic is that they often plan early what the novel is going to do, where it is going to go, what the characters are going to be like and what their significance will be. Writers usually have some idea of what is going to happen, and sometimes they write their ideas down, although they often, when asked, just tap their foreheads, nod, and say, “I’ve got the whole thing worked out up here….” I do not believe I have ever seen a set of notes as complete as Carson McCullers’ “Author’s Outline of The Mute.” I do not know the circumstances under which she would have written such a thorough treatment of the uncompleted book; she might have been just that conscientious, although I suspect that it was written to apply for the grant that eventually won her a publishing contract. I do know that the book that turned out to be The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was very close to The Mute in symbolism, themes, and backgrounds of the main characters, but that there are enough differences to see that it was indeed a work in progress. In other words, this is not a summary of a work that is already completed, where the author just describes the actual and symbolic importance of what happened. This is a working plan for things that McCullers intended to happen in the book.
Most of the changes were incidental: Harry Minowitz was originally the non-Jewish Harry West, which would have left out the opportunity to bring up the war in Europe and the rampant anti- Semitism that defines it in this book; Willie Copeland was arrested as a white boy’s dupe during a robbery in this version, rather than in a knife fight; Mr. Simms was originally a key player in Biff Brannon’s life, not Jake Blount’s. Any one of these changes is worth speculating about, because speculating offers readers some insight into the decision- making process, which itself opens the window to the author’s intent just a little bit wider. The one that interests me most, though, is the absence of the shooting of Baby in the original plan. It clearly was not in the work at this stage—there is no mention of Baby or anyone like her with another name in the “Outline,” and Bubber had no specific shining moment planned for him at that time. In fact, in the section named “Subordinate Characters,” under “The Kelly Children,” Mc- Cullers states directly, “No great interest is focussed on any of these children individually.”
I would not presume to second-guess whether adding the “Bubber shooting Baby” episode was a good idea or not. Reviewers have pointed to this as one of the novel’s (just slightly) weak points, and critics in general, when they single it out, mention this episode as something that does not fit cleanly into the grand scheme. But the book as a whole works, and it works to an astounding degree, so I think it would just be rude without being productive to question the author’s instincts. If I can’t ask whether it works, I think my curiosity would be just as well served if I...
(This entire section contains 1809 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
can askhow it works: what about the shooting of Baby adds just the right spice to this tale, and helps the novel define itself?
My first assumption is that Bubber’s role would have been beefed up anyway, even without the shooting of Baby. In the “Outline,” McCullers alludes to him while describing Mick: “Her family does not own a radio and in the summer she roams around the streets of the town pulling her two baby brothers in a wagon and listening to any music she can hear from other people’s houses.” There’s nowhere but up for Bubber to go from this slight, vague inclusion as one of the baby brothers. Later in the “Outline,” a distinction is made when talking about Mick’s responsibility to watch over “Bubber and the baby,” at least elevating him to individuality. That same section goes on to include a paragraph that actually made it into the finished book, about how hard it is for younger siblings, including the phrase, “Bubber—he looks sick but he’s got guts underneath that.” My assumption is that she was using her words loosely when she referred to seven-year-old Bubber as one of two baby brothers. Then, too, is the possibility that Bubber already started to develop a personality during the course of writing this outline. One can see how Mc- Cullers could write a paragraph that comes out so clean and solid that it deserves being kept, and how, from that paragraph, the seeds of identity can grow. A sickly-looking kid with guts can prove a useful tool in drawing out aspects of Mick’s personality, given how much she puts into covering her artistic sensibilities up with toughness.
If Bubber, then, was to be a mirror for Mick, a good function—the function that he takes on in the finished work—would be to show how excessive swaggering can get him into trouble. In Mick’s case, tough posturing only serves to make her obnoxious, alienating her further: real trouble would prevent the tragedy of her life, in the end, becoming mundane. In a secondary character, though, trouble could be made to stick, frightening her and softening her up. These facts, of course don’t even take into consideration the fact that the author needed something to ruin the Kelly family financially.
Enter Baby. Four years old, Baby presents the unlikely hope of her mother, Lucile, for a better life: she plans to give Baby a permanent, gives her dancing and expression and piano lessons, and tells Biff, the child’s uncle, “I feel like I got to push Baby all I can. Because the sooner she gets started on her career the better it’ll be for both of us.” At this point, Baby is a part of Biff’s life, functioning to show us the kind of idealistic dreamer he would attach himself to—his fondness for Baby helps redefine just what kind of “freaks” he is attracted to. Baby is such a strange character in her physical beauty that it is plain to see this early that she will either succeed spectacularly, in a triumph of vacuous prettiness over the strong defeated characters with way more substance, or she will fail, flattening her mother’s dreams in a town where dreams just get flattened. The potential for tragedy is heightened by the fact that Biff delights in her so much, which bodes poorly for Baby because this book is an exercise in the ways that its main characters, unable to express themselves, suffer. The tragedy that Baby Wilson seems headed for is one of her mother’s doing, and it looks like one that we would look back on at the end and feel that Biff should have put a stop to things before they went so far.
The reason some critics disagree with the shooting is that it seems unprepared by the story. The point is well taken, considering that everything else is so carefully prepared and metered. A certain segment of the population would also say that the randomness of the act is good, that it mirrors the unpredictability of life, that it breathes some fresh air into a book too tightly woven. “Life-like” is not the virtue in a stylized piece like this that it would be in another piece of fiction, but the capacity to surprise readers should always be considered a good thing.
The surprising thing about the shooting is that it comes from a secondary character and draws more attention to Bubber than anyone but the five main characters generally earn in the novel. As I have mentioned, it is better for the book that a character near Mick plunge into trouble without the trouble actually threatening Mick’s future bland career at Woolworth’s. Bubber certainly jumps, with that one shot, from a tiny, nearly anonymous role, past Willie and even past Portia, to a status almost as vivid as the foggiest of the main characters, Biff. He introduces a scary element of violence in the book, and not even intentional violence, but a destructiveness that can well up in a child at the same time that he is admiring something’s beauty. The same mixed emotions are alluded to earlier in the book, when Mick writes on a wall the names of the artist, Mozart, and the dictator Mussolini, and then “a very bad word—PUSSY, and beneath that she put her initials, too.” Oddly, not much is made of the psychological aspect of Bubber raising a gun against another child, just of the social aspect, with the “end of childhood” that he undergoes by changing from his nickname to “George” foreshadowing the end, where Mick the tomboy worries over a run in her stockings. Some critics have referred to the shooting as “an accident,” although it seems he had a good long time to put the gun down and it’s clear that his finger went to the trigger deliberately. The book’s about alienation, and the whole mood might be spoiled if anyone cared to find out what was running through someone else’s mind, so Bubber’s destructive impulse is written off as just one of those childhood things.
The last we see of Baby, we have come to understand what this incident means to her: she could not participate in the soiree, so she “began to yell and cut up during one of the dances” until she is taken outside and spanked. Finally, she seems to be finding her place in this miserable town, with Jake and Mick and Dr. Copeland, who all raise their voices in disappointment. There is no place in this town for the fortunate, the blessed, or the beautiful. Under other circumstances, she might have been a good character to have lurking around in the corners, just for contrast, to show that there are people who don’t end up shouting to vent their souls, but this is the human condition that McCullers is examining here, and no one, especially not a little talent-show princess, is going to escape it.
Source: David J. Kelly, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.
The Conventions of Counterpoint and Fugue
The influence of music manifests itself in a number of ways in Carson McCullers’ fiction. While critics in general note the frequent direct references to music in her works, most of them focus on the way music functions as a “minor symbol” and as an “extended correlative” or mirror of theme and character. Few critics, however, have examined music’s role as “architectural framework,” as Barbara Nauer Folk [in “The Sad Sweet Music of Carson McCullers,” Georgia Review, 16, 1962.] calls it. This omission is surprising since, as Virginia Spencer Carr [in her book The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers, 1975] points out, McCullers herself in later life came to acknowledge her musical studies as the source of the excellent “sense of form and structure” admired by students of her fiction.…
The work by McCullers in which the sense of musical form seems strongest is The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a novel in which direct references to music abound Willie’s harmonica tunes, the music from Biff’s mandolin, the mechanical music of the flying-jinny, and the “singing moan” of Doctor Copeland’s voice accompany the classical music Mick enjoys in the dark and composes in her “in- ner room.” To speak of the novel’s structure using the analogy of music does not seem unreasonable since in her outline for “The Mute” (later published as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) McCullers herself [as recorded in her book The Mortgaged Heart, 1971] employs musical terminology in discussing her plans for the novel’s form:
This book is planned according to a definite and balanced design. The form is contrapuntal throughout. Like a voice in a fugue each one of the main characters is an entirety in himself—but his personality takes on a new richness when contrasted and woven in with the other characters in the book.
In using technical language to refer to counterpoint in general and the fugue as a more specific pattern or style of counterpoint, McCullers sets up certain expectations. Counterpoint, based upon a Latin phrase meaning “note against note” or “melody against melody,” consists of two or more melodic lines that are played at the same time. Fugue, a more specific term, refers to the “mature form of imitative counterpoint” perfected by J. S. Bach [Willi Apel, The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 1972]. Counterpoint and the fugue, in particular, are associated with a number of conventions. When the completed novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is considered in light of these conventions, it is clear that McCullers, for the most part, faithfully followed the original plan of her outline. In fact, the novel’s conformity to many of the conventions provides a key to the structure and meaning of the novel.…
Perhaps the most obvious convention of counterpoint followed in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the independence of musical voices. Counterpoint, including the fugue, consists of a number of separate voices or melodic lines. Each of these lines must be musically sound, interesting and, most importantly, independent in terms of rhythm and movement. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, each of the five main characters or “voices”—John Singer, Biff Brannon, Jake Blount, Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, and Mick Kelly—is interesting enough and his story complete enough to have been developed into its own novella. For example, the story of Dr. Copeland’s struggle to lead his people out of oppression and face the reality of his own children’s fates does not depend upon the other characters’ stories for its development. Instead, it stands as an intriguing tale in its own right. Furthermore, McCullers gives each of the five individuals a unique character that goes beyond the obvious differences of race, age, profession, sex, and physical ability. Such distinctness of characterization is evident in idiosyncrasies such as Dr. Copeland’s studying the philosopher Spinoza and Biff’s wearing his deceased wife’s perfume. The uniqueness of the five characters is underscored by the distinct narrative styles McCullers develops to suggest the “inner psychic rhythms of the character” [as recorded in her book The Mortgaged Heart, 1971]. Biff’s “voice,” for instance, can be heard in the section in which McCullers introduces him:
The place was still not crowded—it was the hour when men who have been up all night meet those who are freshly wakened and ready to start a new day.… The mutual distrust betwen the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.
The style of this passage could hardly be mistaken for that used by McCullers to focus on Mick:
When Mick had finished half of the cigarette she smashed it dead and flipped the butt down the slant of the roof. Then she leaned forward so that her head rested on her arms and began to hum to herself.
The distinctness and independence of each character are also ensured by McCullers’ introducing each character individually in the novel’s first part. Like the staggered entrances of voices typically used in counterpoint, each character, beginning with John Singer, is introduced in a separate chapter, which, as McCullers’ outline suggests, presents the “salient points of each person.” Mc- Cullers conforms to this contrapuntal convention of independence of voices in order to emphasize and even enact her theme of the insurmountable isolation of human beings. Thus, from the outset of the novel through its concluding treatment of the surviving four characters in isolated chapters in part three, McCullers, as Richard Cook [in his book Carson McCullers, 1975] suggests, “preserves the separateness of each person even as she holds them together in a lonely community of suspicion and misunderstanding.”
Conventional counterpoint is also characterized by imitation among voices. In the fugue, this imitation involves recurrent motifs as well as the imitation of the subject or theme—that is, a short melody introduced by “one voice alone, being taken up (‘imitated’) by the other voices in close succession and reappearing throughout the entire piece in all voices at different places” [Willi Apel, The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 1972]. Such an imitative technique occurs in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in which, as Dayton Kohler suggests, “themes and character motifs appear early in the novel, only to be dropped and later resume.” In the first chapter of the novel, McCullers uses John Singer’s relationship with Antonapoulous to introduce the novel’s central theme—the persistent attempt by the individual, in the face of the one-sided nature of love, to overcome the isolation of the self. In the next four chapters of Part One, McCullers “imitates” this theme by presenting the reader’s first glimpses of Biff, Mick, Jake and Dr. Copeland in the context of their failed relationships and their resulting states of isolation. The theme reappears in all the “voices” throughout the rest of the novel as the various characters unsuccessfully attempt to communicate with other human beings. Of course, the most exact imitation in the novel results from the way in which each of the four characters’ onesided relationship with John Singer mirrors Singer’s relationship with Antonapoulous. As Mc- Cullers herself suggests in her outline for the novel, the way each of the four characters creates an understanding of Singer “from his own desires” and makes Singer “the repository of his most personal feelings and ideas” has an “exact parallel” in Singer’s imputing great dignity and wisdom to Antonapoulous.
McCullers also uses imitation in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by associating distinctive motifs with certain characters and causing those motifs to reappear in other “voices.” For example, Dr. Copeland’s blindness to the potential for human communion in the form of Portia as he attempts to reach all of the black community is echoed in Mick’s desire to bring her brother Bill and John Singer into her “inner room” while letting her potential relationship with “Bubber” be destroyed. This motif reappears in Singer’s failure to take advantage of the accessible and potentially gratifying relationships with his four “disciples” because of his obsession with Antonapoulos. McCullers introduces another motif through Mick’s figurative movement back and forth between her “inner room” of the self and the outer world of human interaction. This motif is repeated and objectified in Biff’s movement between the upper room where he reads and plays his mandolin and the public café as well as in Singer’s wanderings from his boarding- house room through the streets of the town. These motifs and the imitation of the central subject or theme unify the novel and give universality to the independent characters of the novel by suggesting that the continued struggle to break out of the isolation of the self is part of the human condition.…
Despite the existence of both social and individual considerations in the novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is also analogous to counterpoint in its emphasis on the horizontal rather than the vertical elements of structure. While homophonic or harmonic music focuses primarily on the simultaneous occurrence of sounds in pleasing and harmonious combinations, counterpoint is more concerned with the melodic line of each voice. Thus, vertical relationships among notes are incidental. Dissonance or clashing of notes occurs as often as consonance and harmony. In the same way, Mc- Cullers focuses on the actions and perceptions of individual characters rather than their collective attempts at interaction or communion. Except for those occasions when other characters seek out Singer for “conversation,” the encounters between the central characters are random, as when Jake and Dr. Copeland collide and exchange angry glances on the stairs. The encounters that do occur—Biff’s attempts to talk to Mick in the café, the bedroom confrontation between Jake and Dr. Copeland—are generally discordant. In fact, the two occasions in which all five of the “voices” are brought together— their first meeting in Biff’s café in Part One and their later accidental meeting in Singer’s room—are among the most tense and dissonant scenes in the novel. Even the interaction between Singer and the other four characters, whether in Singer’s room, in the café, or at Dr. Copeland’s party, is markedly one-sided, more like unison music than harmony among separate voices. This linear focus, in which each “voice” remains a “stranger in a strange land,” underscores a pervasive loneliness in the novel.…
Perhaps because of this linear structure, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter has a texture that resembles the typical texture of four-and five-voice counterpoint. Because the listener is unable to follow four or five lines of equal importance for any length of time, the composer of counterpoint uses a variety of strategies to vary the texture of the music: temporarily eliminating or subordinating one or more voices and shifting the focus of attention from one voice to another. In a similar way, each chapter of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter centers on one of the five central characters, the focal character being indicated not only by the character’s name being mentioned normally within the first sentence or paragraph and the action’s centering around him but also by a shift to the narrative style associated with that character. But, like most contrapuntal music, McCullers’ novel does not (except possibly in Singer’s chapters) allow the texture to be reduced to a single “voice.” Even when the action centers on a single character, the reader gets enough glimpses of other central characters—through Harry Minowitz’s mentioning Jake Blount to Mick or Singer’s appearing at Dr. Copeland’s party or Mick’s stopping by Biff’s café for a sundae—to remind him that their lives or “melodies” are continuing, though temporarily subordinated, in the background.…
In describing the form of McCullers’ novels in general, Marvin Felheim [in “Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers,” Contemporary American Novelists, 1964] speaks of a typical movement from order— through an opening that is an “exact, economical” statement of “what is going on”—to disorder. This disorder, which occurs in Part Two of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, corresponds in musical terms to the development section of the fugue—generally a freer, longer section in which episodes alternate with complete or partial restatements of the theme and, thus, heighten the listener’s interest. In Part Two, which is nearly three times longer than Part One, the length of the chapters and the appearance of the five central “voices” follow no regular pattern. Furthermore, the actions of outside forces—Harry Minowitz, Baby Wilson, the prison officials guarding Willie—intrude upon the lives of the central characters and often increase their sense of alienation. In the face of this greater loneliness, the central characters continue vainly to reach out to other people, most often John Singer.
Part Three of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, while not a full recapitulation of Part One, creates a return through a sense of balance and completion. True to the plan of McCullers’ outline for the novel, the “technical treatment” of the final section is quite similar to that of the first part. Each of the four surviving characters is allowed a chapter to restate his or her variation of the subject or theme, and, as Edgar MacDonald [in “The Symbolic Unity of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter,” in A Festschrift for Professor Marguerite Roberts on the Occasion of Her Retirement from Weshampton College University of Richmond, Virginia, 1976] points out, these final chapters precisely reverse the Part I order of appearance of the four mourners.” Smith [in “A Voice in a Fugue,” Modern Fiction Studies, 1979] goes even further to suggest that the brevity of each chapter and, thus, the “rapid succession” of “voices” as they repeat the theme are analogous to stretto, a technique often successfully used in the concluding sections of fugues.…
The particular ways in which McCullers deals with the demands and conventions of counterpoint and the fugue make The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter a less than pessimistic treatment of man’s struggle as a “lonely hunter” to come to terms with his inevitable isolation and disillusionment. Through the use of the contrapuntal fugue with its linear but imitative treatment of individual voices and its varied texture, McCullers is able to represent five distinct characters struggling in touchingly similar ways to break out of the lonely inner room of the self.
Source: Janice Fuller, “The Conventions of Counterpoint and Fugue in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” in The Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Culture, edited by Robert L. Phillips Jr., Mississippi State University, 1987–88, pp. 55–67.
The Paradox of the Need for Privacy and the Need for Understanding
The theme of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter could hardly be more vital and universal: the immemorial, individual dilemma of loneliness, the spiritual isolation of human beings. It is not a realistic novel about the modern South, nor is it, despite certain critics or whatever McCullers’ original intention may have been, a political polemic against capitalism and racism. The memorable characters are all exruciatingly real, but they retain a poetic simplicity which raises them to the level of universal significance. I do not mean “spiritual” in either the religious or even the mystical sense. I, and I think McCullers, mean that inexplicable force in each man which makes him ask why, which compels him to go deeply beneath the surface complex of himself into a more intensive, extensive reality. The validity of McCullers’ vision of the psychic realm of her characters, or of man, depends a great deal upon the accuracy and consistency with which she achieves a very acute psychological understanding of her characters and of nature of loneliness which moves them so grotesquely.…
McCullers was only 21 when she wrote this book, but she was too mature to condemn abstractions either, although it is a rather abstract, paradoxical conflict that she is primarily concerned with: everyone hungers for human understanding while simultaneously desiring an inviolable privacy.
The need for privacy is no less crucial than the need for understanding, but in the context of society both needs are frustrated, or, in the desperate attempt to satiate one, the other is neglected or deprived.…
Mick [Kelly] is a unique, individual adolescent and will be a neurotic, bitter woman; Biff is already neurotic. Copeland, obsessed with the one true purpose, and Blount, obsessed with the gospel of social reform, are both subject to monomania, and it is in this light that we see them.
The portrait of Mick is complete. We see her in various situations, reacting variously, exhibiting in her own eccentric way all the characteristics of an adolescent girl trying to achieve womanhood, but fearing to succeed. Unable to identify with her unsympathetic, older sisters, who ignore her, Mick used to follow, take her cues from her older brother Bill. But when the novel opens, she realizes, “Sometimes she hated Bill more than anyone else in the world. He was different entirely from what he used to be.” In growing up, he has failed her. The mother is too busy to answer questions, and one assumes that Portia, the Negro cook, is the only adult female from whom Mick can learn what a girl must do.…
But Mick knows “that always there had been one person after another… But she had always kept it to herself and no person had ever known.” There had been male and female schoolmates and female teachers whom she had secretly loved. Now all she has is Bubber, her little brother, Mr. Singer, and her father. There is a fine scene between Mick and her father in which their mutual longing for familial love and sympathy very nearly achieves satisfaction. “Yet for some reason she couldn’t tell him about the things in her mind — about the hot, dark nights.”
More than any of the other characters, Mick needs solitude, privacy. “Some things you just naturally want to keep private. Not because they are bad, but because you just want them secret.” But when they are about to “poison” her, she “throws” them at her “idea” of Singer; she responds to his impersonal air as she could not respond to her father’s intense personal need. Having no physical room of her own, she imagines one as existing in her own mind. The only person allowed in that room is Mister Singer. It is filled with dreams of the future, with music she has heard or imagined herself.
Mick not only writes music and spends her lunch money for private piano lessons, but she also paints very imaginatively. She is trying to make a violin, which, along with other fragments of things, she keeps in a special box. (When she is famous, she will print M. K. on all her possessions.) She takes long walks at night, where ordinary girls would be afraid to go, and one time she sits under a window, thrills to a Beethoven symphony, coming over the radio. “Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be.” To divert herself from it, she subjects herself to physical pain by scraping rocks against her thigh until her hand is bloody.
Always now she is aware of a feeling of change. “All the time she was excited. In the morning, she couldn’t wait to get out of bed and start going for the day. And at night she hated like hell to have to sleep again.” She daydreams of herself as a heroine, saving Mr. Singer from disaster, conducting an orchestra with all her heroes and friends in the audience. Refusing to wear her sister’s castoff clothes, she also refuses to take the same courses in school; she takes mechanical shop. She has in her mind plans (as strong as those for music) for belonging to one of the “bunches” of kids in school. She decides that a party will help. She is surprised when the seemingly grown-up kids respond gaily to the party-crashing antics of the younger kids in the neighborhood, but relieved, too. “And about the bunch she wanted to be with everyday. She would feel different in the halls now, knowing that they were not something special but like any other kids. It was O.K. about the ruined party. But it was all over. It was the end.” Realizing this night that she has changed, she dismisses the party and dresses for the last time in her tomboy clothes.
“Mick, I come to believe we all gonna drown,” says Bubber, watching the relentless rain. What he says is very true, certainly; this is what is happening to all Mick’s plans. First, she loses Bubber’s companionship when, with childlike cruelty but more out of her extravagant imagination, she frightens him with the prospect of the electric chair in Sing Sing for having shot Baby Wilson. That night, Mick, sorry, kisses his little body desperately. But “After he shot Baby the kid was not ever like little Bubber again.” Everyone began to call him by his right name, George. McCullers’ insight into George’s behavior, his change suddenly from a quiet, sweet child to an introverted, solitary premature adolescent, is frighteningly real. “But he was a different kid—George—going around by himself always like a person much older and with nobody, not even her, knowing what was really in his mind.” She retreats further into the “inside room.”
Mick’s self-respect becomes insidiously impaired as the family grows poorer. “They were nearly as poor as factory workers. Only nobody could look down on them.” She follows Mr. Singer, talks to him. “For some reason it was like they had a secret together. Or like they waited to tell each other things that had never been said before”, except that he tells her nothing. She imitates his habits. Ironically, she believes that Brannon hates her because she and Bubber once stole some candy from the café. Actually, he is one of the few people with whom she might have freely, naturally talked. Harry, her Jewish neighbor, is her friend; they talk, play together and plot to kill Hitler. Harry has a crush on Jake Blount, whose raging against society gives Harry, who is hypersensitive about his Jewishness, new ideas.
McCullers subtly builds up the process of sexual awakening. Sitting on the steps talking to Harry, Mick notices that “There was a warm boy smell about him.” Confused, she reverts to their early childhood horse-play, but in the midst of it they become aware of each other’s bodies.…
When they go swimming in the country, Mick suggests that they swim naked. Facing each other’s nudity, they are suddenly very bashful. But lying on the grass, they naturally succumb to the urges within them. Afterwards, Harry thinks they have sinned, so he runs away to work in Birmingham. “She felt very old, and it was like something was heavy inside her. She was a grown person now, whether she wanted to be or not.”
Later, although her family kindly forbids it, she is obliged to work in the ten-cent store. Once, in need of Mr. Singer, she goes to look for him but is frightened by the darkness that as a child she had loved. After Singer’s suicide, she feels trapped into womanhood and servitude.…
Educated in the North, Doctor Copeland returned to the South to lead his people out of sickness and servitude. He has read the great writers on spiritual and economic freedom and named his children after them. To them, “He would talk and talk, but none of them wanted to understand.” He was almost Calvinistic in the way of life he wanted to prescribe for his family: “He knew how the house should be. There could be no fanciness—no gaudy calendars or lace pillows or knick-knacks— but everything in the house must be plain and dark and indicative of work and the real true purpose.” But his wife, Daisy, taught them meekness, submission, superstition. Years later, Portia says,
“Us talk like our own Mama and her peoples and their peoples before them. You think out everything in your brain. While us rather talk from something in our hearts that has been there for a long time. That’s one of them [our] differences.” “You all the time using that word—Negro,” said Portia. “And that word haves a way of hurting peoples’ feelings …”
When her talk hurts his feelings, he refuses her gentleness: “No. It is foolish and primitive to keep repeating this about hurt feelings.” His stern dedication to his “true purpose” has alienated all his children but Portia; yet between them no understanding and mutual sympathy is possible.
Meeting his son for the first time in a long time, he can not submit to his
desire for common emotional expression, can only reproach him for not becoming
the ideal leader of his people Copeland had tried to teach him to be. All his
life Copeland has carried within him the hurt and humiliation of the white
man’s domination. To protect himself from the excessive emotional responses he
naturally feels compelled to make, he has adopted a stoic attitude. The fervor
of his dedication to ideas, “to the one strong true purpose,” his obsession
with his mission, his really valiant devotion to his duty as a doctor, divert
his thoughts and energies and become media for sublimation of violence and
forces of repression upon the real violence, the genuine Negro feelings
smouldering inside him, that cause him such frustration and anxiety. Dying of
TB, he realizes that he has failed, but actually he has probably saved himself
from the gallows. When he was young,
The feeling that would come on him was a black, terrible, Negro feeling. He would try to sit in his office and read and meditate until he could be calm and start again.… But sometimes this calmness would not come. He was young and the terrible feeling would not go away with study.
When he is old, the Negro blues of his people, that wonderful emotional cathartic, tries to come out of him: “it happened that he began swaying slowly from side to side and from his throat there came a sound like a kind of singing moan.” But even the singing he suppresses, does not surrender to. One time, years ago, he struck down his wife with a poker. Then “He wrestled in his spirit and fought down the evil blackness” with very hard work and a lofty, impossible ideal. When, with the dignity of a white man, he goes to the court house to object to the atrocity perpetrated upon his son, Willie, in prison, he is beaten as though he were a lowly “nigger.”
He waited for the terrible anger and felt it arise in him … he broke loose suddenly from their grasp. In a corner he was surrounded. They struck him on the head and shoulders with their clubs. A glorious strength was in him and he heard himself laughing aloud as he fought.… He kicked wildly with his feet … even struck at them with his head … Someone behind kicked him in the groin and he fell to his knees on the floor.
The old, suppressed violence finally came out and was suppressed again by other forces.
Copeland and Blount are afflicted with the same problem. They try to sublimate their personal frustrations into public causes and their manner of fighting for these causes further intensifies their neuroses by alienating the very people they wish to convince; this increases their own loneliness, and the poison of narcissism festers in their spirits. Copeland is happiest when he is being listened to even though he knows it will do no good; his joy comes from the feeling of being respected, of being unlike other Negroes, of having a part of himself become absorbed into the minds of his listeners. “In the room there was a murmur. Hysteria mounted. Doctor Copeland choked and clinched his fists. He felt as though he had swelled up to the size of a giant. The love in him made his chest a dynamo, and he wanted to shout so that his voice could be heard throughout the town.”
That he might have found a friend in Blount is indicated in the scene in which they talk all night, but finally end in disagreement. Although the torment in their souls is similar, their ideas and their race ultimately conflict. More than the success of their reform programs, they need friendship, an end to loneliness. “Yet now he [Copeland] could not clearly recall those issues which were the cause of their dispute.” Copeland was more at peace when he could talk to the uncomprehending deaf-mute, Singer. Even when men have the opportunity to admit into their solitude a kindred spirit, the habit and nature of introversion prevent it. Copeland goes, a sick, broken failure, to his wife’s father’s farm where he will die alone in a house full of his own people. Hope, a feeble hope that the future will be better is all any of them have. “I will return soon,” Doctor Copeland says. The reader is less optimistic.…
Source: David Madden, “The Paradox of the Need for Privacy and the Need for Understanding in Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” in Literature and Psychology, edited by Leonard F. Manheim and Morton Kaplan, University of Hartford, Connecticut, 1967, pp. 128–140.