SOURCE: Perry, Constance M. “Carson McCullers and the Female Wunderkind.” Southern Literary Journal 19, no. 1 (fall 1986): 36-45.

[In the following essay, Perry investigates McCullers's 1936 short story, “Wunderkind,” as the origin of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and surveys the autobiographical aspects of the novel.]

Carson McCullers's first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), symbolizes her own story of growing up in the thirties as a Southern female prodigy. Like her predecessor Frances Newman, who also wrote a novel about a Southern girl who longs to be an artist, The Hardboiled Virgin (1926), McCullers shows how “social forces” damaged ambitious people, particularly when they were female (“Author's Outline” 129). For example, a humiliating sexual initiation is a central experience for each heroine. Recent discussion of McCullers's novel has examined its connection to other novels about aspiring women artists, treating Mick as the major character (Huf 105-123). In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Mick first appears standing confidently on the roof of a house under construction. Yet by the story's end, she no longer challenges the world from its rooftops. She is frustrated in her attempts to study art, disturbed by what she has learned of female sexuality, and haunted by nightmares in which houses collapse upon her. Spivak and Huf argue that the root of Mick's artistic failure in the novel is her decision to take a job at Woolworth's (Spivak 18; Huf 118-19). However, another root cause of her artistic failure is Mick's devastating sexual initiation. The paramount importance of Mick's sexual initiation may also be asserted if one considers the autobiographical basis of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter as well as a short story that provided the genesis of Mick's character and situation, “Wunderkind” (1936). This short story reveals McCullers's first trial of the theme she fully develops in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: adolescence brings a paralyzing knowledge of inadequacy to the exceptional girl and bars her passage into the world of art. After highlighting biographical details of McCullers's girlhood and then turning to an analysis of “Wunderkind,” I will explicate the passages in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter which illuminate a view of Mick's sexual initiation as her definitive experience in the world of the novel.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a subtly autobiographical rendition of McCullers's youthful failures in love and art. McCullers's biographers have identified correspondences between the novelist and her character, Mick Kelly, a fictional double of McCullers's willowy adolescent self. The newly-married author's surname, McCullers, echoes Mick Kelly, her heroine. Mick is determined to be a musician, which was McCullers's first consuming goal; she wanted to go to Europe and study piano under Dohnanyi (Carr 27). However, striking differences between McCullers's biography and her characterization of Mick Kelly suggest the importance of a further analysis of the author's early life in search of her view of the predicament of the woman artist.

Why would McCullers, a privileged young artist from Columbus, Georgia, compose a novel that features a heroine deprived of every opportunity to develop her talent? McCullers denies to her heroine much that she herself experienced as a developing artist. For example, she deprives her heroine of a nurturing mother. By contrast, Marguerite Smith, McCullers's mother, predicted that her firstborn would be a genius: “she confided to friends that there had … been secret prenatal signs that her child would be precocious and eventually achieve greatness as an artist.” She planned to name the child “Enrico Caruso” (Carr 3). When a daughter was born, Carson McCullers's mother, apparently far from disappointed, appears to have dedicated herself to the daughter and promoted her talent. In further contrast with Mick Kelly, whose family cannot afford piano lessons for her, Carson McCullers was born into a family of comfortable means. When she first expressed an interest in piano playing at six years, a fine family piano awaited her, her mother applauded her improvisation, and the best local instructors agreed to accept the girl as a pupil. At fifteen when McCullers decided her ambition was to be a writer rather than a concert pianist, her father bought her a typewriter. Unlike timid Mick Kelly, McCullers boldly mailed a copy of her first play to Eugene O'Neill. When McCullers wished to go to New York, Mrs. Smith raised money for the trip by summoning her friends to Carson's lectures on musical appreciation. The daughter known as “Little Precious” to her family took this money and more from the sale of family heirlooms, arrived in New York at seventeen, entered writing classes, and published her first fiction in Story magazine when she was eighteen (Carr 4-40). By twenty-three, McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was accepted by Houghton Mifflin. Carson McCullers's story of precocious success seems extremely removed from her heroine's story of failure. Yet in addition to the array of privileges and successes McCullers achieved, she was also precociously acquainted with the deprivation of passionate love and with artistic failure.

In one important way McCullers was unlike many aspiring women artists of her generation. She had a woman as her mentor and teacher, one who had been a concert pianist. At thirteen, Carson McCullers was accepted as Mary Tucker's only pupil after the pianist arrived in Columbus. For four years, McCullers studied with Tucker, who believed her pupil would eventually attend Juilliard and make her own career in concert performance. When McCullers was fifteen, however, she became ill with pneumonia and spent several weeks convalescing in a sanitarium. Afterward the young artist evidently doubted whether she possessed the physical and emotional strength to sustain a musical career, but she did not confess her misgivings to her teacher (Carr 26-29). Instead, she began to spend time writing in addition to practicing for Tucker. According to Virginia Carr, McCullers's intense but repressed love for her teacher prevented her from stopping her lessons: “From Mary Tucker, Carson craved … a demonstrable love. She could never articulate such feelings to her teacher, however, whose firm demeanor and demanding standards and discipline in music unwittingly created a barrier between them” (26-27). Suddenly McCullers learned that the Tuckers would be leaving Columbus shortly. With angry feelings of abandonment, McCullers visited Mary Tucker, who was at that time seriously ill, and announced her own intention to abandon the piano. The rupture between teacher and pupil, lover and beloved, remained until McCullers invited the Tuckers to see her Broadway production of The Member of the Wedding ten years later (Carr 36).

The secret affinity McCullers felt for Mary Tucker is enacted both in Mick Kelly's feelings for Singer and in the barriers to intimacy with him. Mick Kelly becomes passionately devoted to Singer because he alone listens to her musical ambition. Yet the barriers of Singer's physical impairment, age, and homosexuality frustrate Mick's longing to communicate her feelings just as Mary Tucker's professional demeanor, age, and marriage thwarted McCullers's avowal of her love. Because her passion was unrequited and certainly confusing for a teenage woman, McCullers appears to have felt personally damaged and artistically frustrated. Her musical career, like Mick Kelly's, no longer seemed possible after the intrusion of adult sexual feelings. This autobiographical conflict between a young person's developing talent and her emerging sexuality dominates McCullers's first literary works.

McCullers's first published story, “Wunderkind” (1936), is clearly a preview of Mick Kelly's characterization and situation in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Fifteen-year-old Frances has earned a reputation as a “Wunderkind,” but suddenly finds her ability daunted by a trio of male faces—her piano teacher, Mr. Bilderbach, his associate, Mr. Lafkowitz, and a young violinist, Heime. Most of all, Frances is disturbed by her sense that her teacher is “looming” over her, “urging” and “insisting” that she perform in a musical world she feels has already shut her out. Mr. Lafkowitz wounds her also when he sarcastically suggests that she cannot play Beethoven with passion, the passion of an artist who fathered twenty children. Male sexuality becomes associated with musical ability as Frances watches her teacher and Mr. Lafkowitz play a duet, “the two of them playing, peering at the notations on the piano, lustfully drawing out all that was there” (“Wunderkind” 77). Recoiling from their masculinity, Frances is unable to express any musical feeling whatsoever. A show of feeling would risk exposure of her inadequate femininity. McCullers's own youthful confusion of musical feeling and sexual feelings for her teacher, Mary Tucker, are recreated in Frances's sexual embarrassment and feeling of exclusion from the world of music. Like young McCullers, the character Frances quits her lessons.

By contrast, Heime, Frances's double in the story, succeeds at fifteen in capturing the admiration of Carnegie Hall. Having begun violin lessons at four, and been privately tutored, Heime makes a happy transition from his Wunderkind adolescence to adult masculinity, becoming “young master Israelsky” while Frances is doomed to be a Wunderkind and never an artist (“Wunderkind” 76). In the end, Frances's hands refuse to perform; they tremble and throb uncontrollably as she inwardly wrestles with the dilemma of identity. When her teacher patronizes her, in the voice “he used for children,” saying she should play “The Harmonious Blacksmith” if she can no longer master the Beethoven sonata, she flees from her degradation and never returns to the musical studio (“Wunderkind” 85). Her realization that she cannot match Heime's success so alienates her mind from her body that she can no longer command herself to play. Like Mick in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Frances's ability and desire to be a musician collapse when she realizes that her gender probably thwarts her chance for a success like Heime's in the world of art.

In Part I. of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers characterizes Mick Kelly in a few scenes which foreshadow her sexual trauma. One of Mick's first gestures in the novel is the famous inscription of graffiti on the inner walls of a house under construction. In addition to her list on one wall of notable men—Mozart, Edison, Dick Tracy, and Mussolini, she writes on an opposite wall “a very bad word—PUSSY” and her initials, M. K. (37). At this point, she has ambitious fantasies about being an artist. She longs for the power to inscribe her initials, her identity, on handkerchiefs, underwear, cars, stage curtains, and eventually, her musical compositions. The symbolism of rooms at the novel's outset becomes important again when Mick begins to write songs. As a defense against her noisy, crowded household, she imagines herself composing in an “inside room,” the spacious dimensions of her imagination. Yet Mick Kelly, unlike her creator, who read many biographies of famous women as a child, knows of no intelligent women who are admired in her world (Carr 27). Not surprisingly, she chooses to ignore her femaleness and identify with men. She tells her sisters she would “‘rather be a boy any day,’” as her name, her clothing and cropped hair all testify (42). Ironically, Mick's graffiti—“PUSSY M. K.”—prophesies her ignominious fate in a culture where femaleness disqualifies genius.

According to Louise Westling, Mick's paintings from an art class also show her being suffocated by her environment (343). Mick's paintings, like those of Jane Eyre, or like Louie's stories in The Man Who Loved Children, offer clues to her personality. Her paintings all depict disasters—sinking ships, fires, and riots. And her painting of the townspeople battling remains her favorite. In the painting, Mick shows her desire to destroy the town that is stifling her already: “There wasn't any fire or storm or reason you could see in the picture why all this battle was happening. … This was the best one, and it was too bad that she couldn't think up the real name. In the back of her mind somewhere she knew what it was” (44).

This painting of the town fight is also mirrored in a nightmare she describes to her brother, Bubber:

It's like I'm swimming. But instead of water I'm pushing out my arms and swimming through great big crowds of people. The crowd is a hundred times bigger than in Kresses store on Saturday afternoon. The biggest crowd in the world. And sometimes I'm yelling and swimming through people, knocking them all down wherever I go—and other times I'm on the ground and people are trompling all over me and my insides are oozing out on the sidewalk.

(39)

In this dream, McCullers symbolizes Mick's inarticulate dread of her fate. In addition, the image of Mick desperately swimming reappears on the afternoon when Mick and Harry Minowitz go swimming before their mutually disastrous sexual initiation.

Mick's nightmare in which she is a victim of mob violence never becomes a reality for her, although at the end of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter a race riot explodes in the town. Instead, the major form of violence in the novel is that which characters inflict upon themselves in response to frustration. When Portia, the Kelly's black servant, cannot retaliate against the injustices wreaked upon her family, she gets drunk and beats her head upon the table. When Blount, the labor agitator, stands alone in his anger over the oppression of laborers in the South, he gets drunk and beats his fists and head against a brick wall. But the character whose self-torture most reveals the oppression of this setting is Dr. Copeland's patient, Lancy Davis. After his sister is raped by her white, middle-aged employer, Lancy Davis tries to express his hatred of whites by destroying the masculinity he shares with the white man—Lancy tries to castrate himself. His anger is paradoxically transformed into a grotesque act of self-mutilation. Against this background of race and class oppression, McCullers projects Mick's experience of sexual victimization. Like Lancy Davis, Mick tragically wishes to efface her sexual identity. She tattoos her anger at her artistic frustration upon her own flesh which she hates for being female. The first example of his reaction occurs after she fails to build a violin from a cracked ukelele: “She thought a long time and kept hitting her thighs with her fists. … The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know” (52).

Mick's desire to hurt herself as a response to frustration occurs again after her disappointing prom party. She flees her home and walks into the suburbs where she often listens to radio programs emanating from the open windows of luxurious homes. For Mick “the realest part of the summer” becomes “listening to this music on the radio and studying about it” (102). She comes to realize, however, that others participate fully in a musical world she can only enter vicariously.

The music to which Mick listens after the party is the Third Symphony by Beethoven, the artist who epitomized male creativity in “Wunderkind” as well. The music expresses her yearning for artistic power: “This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her” (117). The intensity of her reaction batters her as “each note like a hard, tight fist … socked at her heart. … She sat with her arms held tight around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard” (118). Yet she is inevitably reminded, as she crouches beneath the bush, that she will probably never be an artist. She has no musical background and no avenue of escape. Thus, “wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. … The music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness” (118). Trapped, Mick painfully strikes her thigh with her fist as she had earlier in the novel. But she then wounds herself horribly:

Suddenly Mick began hitting her thigh with her fists. She pounded the same muscle with all her strength until the tears came down her face. But she could not feel this hard enough. The rocks under the bush were sharp. She grabbed a handful of them and began scraping them up and down on the same spot until her hand was bloody. Then she fell back to the ground and lay looking up at the night. With the fiery hurt in her leg she felt better.

(118-119)

Gayatri Spivak suggests that in this setting, Mick's impassioned listening to music is autoerotic (17). If we extend this interpretation, Mick's slashing of her thigh with the rock may be a symbolic violation of her sexuality. Mick's artistic awakening reveals the gulf between her young female self and the composer's powerful maturity and masculinity. She realizes that the composer's world is barred to her.

For Mick the crucial event in the novel is her sexual initiation with Harry Minowitz. After the intrusion of adult sexuality into her world, she also loses her identity and her artistic dreams. Mick and Harry have become confidants, but their sexual initiation is not premeditated. On a March day, they bike into the country to a swimming hole, and Mick spontaneously dares Harry to swim nude. When they undress, the playful mood vanishes as they confront the exposure of each other's adult bodies. Mick seems equally shocked by the disclosure of her own femaleness and by Harry's nudity. As if testing each other to see who will take the dare further, they have intercourse. Their reaction to the episode is complete rejection of one another and tremendous fear.

McCullers describes Mick's physical reaction to intercourse: “It was like her head was broke off from her body and thrown away” (272). Mick's image of decapitation powerfully suggests her refusal to surrender emotionally to what is occurring and her rejection of it, not that she is experiencing orgasm as one critic suggests (Spivak 17). Mick admits to Harry as they return despondently to town, “‘I didn't like that. I never will marry with any boy’” (273). Mick fears and resents the change that seems to be arbitrarily imposed on her because of an isolated sexual act: “She was a grown person now, whether she wanted to be or not” (274). However, her feeling is not really of adulthood, for that implies status and privilege. Rather, she is experiencing what it means to be female and inferior in her culture.

Harry runs away that night and in the days that follow Mick is possessed by fear. Her fear is not that she is pregnant. Instead, she thinks that in becoming an adult woman, she has somehow annihilated her artistic identity. Harry's guilty flight from his sexual intimacy with Mick, and indeed from the town itself, forces Mick to realize that to be female is to be somehow shameful and obscene. McCullers suggests that this identity has been symbolically awaiting Mick from the novel's beginning in a dim, unfinished room where she ironically prophesies her fate as “PUSSY M. K.” The symbolic room now haunts Mick, particularly at night, when she is tortured by sensations that her room is collapsing upon her, walls and roof smothering her:

She knew the night-time again. But not the same as in the last summer when she walked in the dark by herself and listened to the music and made plans. … In bed she lay awake. A queer afraidness came to her. It was like the ceiling was slowly pressing down toward her face. How would it be if the house fell apart? Once their Dad had said the whole place ought to be condemned. Did he mean that maybe some night when they were asleep the walls would crack and the house collapse? Bury them under all the plaster and broken glass and smashed furniture? So that they could not move or breathe?

(308-309)

Mick has entered her nightmare in which the town or her environment is “trompling all over” her and her “insides are coming out.” Her “inside room,” the dwelling of her future destiny, has collapsed.

Failure appears to be the collective outcome of McCullers's characters. The Woolworth's job Mick takes in order to help her family imprisons her vigor, ambition, and genius. Singer commits suicide. Dr. Copeland retires to a purgatorial life among uncomprehending relatives. Jake Blount simply runs away as the town erupts in a riot of black against white rather than workers against mill owners.

Yet Mick is surely slated to continue her rebellion. Whether that rebellion is constructive or self-destructive remains ambiguous in the novel. In her outline of the novel, McCullers suggested, perhaps wishfully, that Mick would survive the eclipse of her dreams: “She is defeated by society on all the main issues before she can even begin, but still there is something in her and in those like her that cannot and will not ever be destroyed” (“Author's Outline” 131). Mick's final fantasy in the novel suggests the tenacity with which she will cling to her desire for music. She plans to save a portion of her salary to make payments on a secondhand piano. She worries, however, that it might be repossessed as was the bicycle Bubber received for his birthday. But if any men come to take the piano, Mick plans to react far differently than Bubber who merely gave the beloved bicycle a parting kick as the men wheeled it away. Mick plans “to meet them at the front door. And fight. She would knock down both the two men so they would have shiners and broke noses and would be passed out on the hall floor” (351). Behind Mick's cartoon-like battle lie genuine anger and zeal that seem destined to expand rather than diminish as she matures. In the past, she beat herself with her fists, but she now dimly sees that she must strike out against those figures of power who would deny her dream. Yet just as the odds in the imaginary battle weigh against her, so in reality the achievement of her ambition without knowledge of her predecessors, without mentors, and without wealth or education seems fanciful.

As Louise Westling has shown, the essential conflict for the McCullers's Wunderkind is how to react to the pressures and distortions of adult sexuality. In the story “Wunderkind,” the world of art is a male world. Consequently, the passion expected of an artist is sensually masculine, related to virility and dominance. No wonder Frances, the story's budding adolescent girl, quakes before the piano. Mick's sexual initiation proves central to the outcome of her characterization in the novel. Mick finds it impossible to be both a confident artist and a sexually adult female because in her culture female sexuality is shameful and dirty, meant to be mocked in graffiti. Her choices then are to abandon her artistic dream for the safety of conformity or to carry on the dream at the risk of appearing foolish and inadequate. For Mick and Frances, it is safer emotionally to give up the desire to be an artist before they reveal their sexual inadequacy and shame. By the time McCullers created her first novel's heroines, the young author had achieved sexual and social acceptance as a woman by marrying and moving with her husband away from home. From her temporary vantage point, she could look back and create Mick, an autobiographical heroine. For Mick Kelly, like Frances Newman's Katharine Faraday and Sylvia Plath's Esther Greenwood, her first sexual experience crushes her confidence for an artistic life.

Works Cited

Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Garden City: Doubleday, 1975.

Huf, Linda. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as a Heroine in American Literature. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983. 105-123.

McCullers, Carson. “Author's Outline of ‘The Mute’ (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter).” The Mortgaged Heart. Ed. Margarita G. Smith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. 124-49.

McCullers, Carson. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940.

McCullers, Carson. “Wunderkind.” The Mortgaged Heart. Ed. Margarita G. Smith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. 74-87.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Feminist Readings: McCullers, Drabble, Habermas.” Union Theological Seminary Quarterly 35 (1979-1980): 15-34.

Westling, Louise. “Carson McCullers's Tomboys.” Southern Humanities Review 14 (1982): 339-350.