SOURCE: Paden, Frances Freeman. “Autistic Gestures in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Modern Fiction Studies 28, no. 3 (autumn 1982): 453-63.

[In the following essay, Paden contends that by examining the autistic hand gestures of the five main characters in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, “we will see how their hands reveal the alienation that they feel in their unsuccessful quests for love and acceptance.”]

She observed the length and shape of the fingers, their curves in repose, the character of the nails, the smooth cuticles, the veins that made small ridges upon the back of the hand and seemed to swell from wrist to finger joints. She liked looking at rings on fingers, too. They enhanced the beauty of the hand; there was a quality of oneness about them which implied reciprocity.¹

In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers endows her characters with a kind of psychology that is profoundly autistic.² They need listeners, not in order to exchange views, but rather to serve as mirrors in which they can see themselves reflected.³ Although seeming to reach out to others, they are, in fact, trying to get in touch with themselves.

Each of the novel's major figures—John Singer, Jake Blount, Dr. Copeland, Mick Kelly, and Biff Brannon—seeks love or social reform, but each, for one reason or another, is verbally inhibited. Because these people do not communicate easily, they encounter two problems: (1) they have difficulty in achieving their goals and (2) they cannot express their difficulties with verbal ease. As a result, they talk with their bodies, and, as their frustration mounts, their bodily gestures are directed more and more toward their own person. As the autistic gesture patterns begin to dominate their expression, they find it impossible to engage in reciprocal relationships with other people.

The problem originates in the heart, which McCullers uses as a metaphor in the book's title and as a synecdoche within the novel.⁴ The heart as hunter (metaphor) searches for an ideal, be it in love or politics, whereas the heart that represents the whole person (synecdoche) strives for balance and equilibrium.⁵ These two motivations—the force of comparison and the force of contiguity—are in conflict because commitment to love or to an ideal always brings with it the risk of disequilibrium. Because McCullers' characters cannot tolerate disequilibrium, they abandon their dreams and turn in upon themselves. In so doing, they wipe out possible avenues of rapport.

The hand, which looms so large in this novel, works as an instrument of the heart. In examining the autistic gestures of the five main characters, we will see how their hands reveal the alienation that they feel in their unsuccessful quests for love and acceptance.

If we view the society in this novel as a narcissistic one, certainly John Singer is at its center. The townspeople believe that he is omniscient. They make him into a godlike figure, believing that he cares for them and understands their problems. In reality, Singer is more a mirror than a god. As the people reach out to him, Singer reflects rather than absorbs their gestures. As a result, the people unconsciously direct their gestures toward themselves, becoming increasingly less effective as they grow more autistic.

Singer, in turn, has his own god-surrogate. He reaches out to Antonapoulos, who often refuses to communicate. When Antonapoulos dies, Singer experiences the ultimate thwarting. Singer's only recourse, in view of his emotional dependency on Antonapoulos, is to kill himself.

Singer's pyramid dream (p. 215) show Antonapoulos at the top, Singer just below, and the four apostles—Brannon, Kelly, Blount, and Copeland—forming the base.⁶ In this dream, Singer's hands are windmills, and his eyes are fixed on Antonapoulos' hands, which are busily fumbling with an object that he holds over his head. Singer's fascination is not with the object, which the narrator never identifies, but with the hands, the gesture itself.

Singer's hands are especially important to him because he relies on them both for communication and for plying his trade as a silver engraver.⁷ Until Antonapoulos leaves him, Singer's gestures are mostly rapid and purposeful. Only occasionally does he thrust his hands into his pockets. But after Antonapoulos leaves, Singer hides his hands while “thoughts of his friend [spiral] deeper until he [dwells] only with the Antonapoulos whom he alone [can] know” (p. 201).

Even though he serves as the object of Singer's love, Antonapoulos is less responsive to Singer than Singer is to the townspeople. Like Singer, he becomes a mirror: instead of absorbing his apostle's gestures, he reflects them. When Antonapoulos consumes enormous quantities of food and drink and refuses to communicate except for an occasional “Holy Jesus,” “God,” or “Darling Mary” (p. 7), he is behaving autistically.

But once Antonapoulos' cousin commits him to the state asylum, Singer is set adrift. He who had spoken so eloquently with his hands now stuffs them into his pockets. As Singer inhibits his means of communication, he begins a steady withdrawal from the world. At the same time, Brannon, Kelly, Blount, and Copeland deify him. They, of course, do not know of Singer's dependence on Antonapoulos.

The separation from Antonapoulos is lethal to Singer's already fragile ego. He had suffered an early defeat as a deaf child who tried to talk but was wounded by “the blank expression on people's faces” (p. 11). Concluding that his speech was disgusting, he reverted to sign language and thus rejected verbal communication. When, upon the departure of Antonapoulos, Singer begins to conceal his hands, he inhibits the only medium left open to him, the motor component of expression.⁸

Hiding his hands becomes an autistic gesture that characterizes Singer. The narrator draws upon this gesture and its variations to describe Singer's response to the report of Antonapoulos' death. When Singer pays his last visit to the hospital and cannot find his friend, he waits fearfully for an attendant to locate Antonapoulos. As he waits, Singer stands with his hands “down deep in his pockets”; next, his right hand moves in the pocket. When Singer hears that Antonapoulos is dead, he tries, with great difficulty, to get his hands out of his pockets. After he fully realizes what has happened, Singer lets his hands dangle loosely, wanders aimlessly for a while, and almost misses the train home. Once he arrives, he goes directly from the train to his shop where he gets a pistol and thrusts it into his pocket. When Singer returns to his room, he withdraws the pistol and shoots himself (pp. 317-323).⁹

Because Singer had served as a mirror for people in the town, his suicide fragments their vision of themselves, forcing them to change the direction of their energies. Blount and Copeland leave town, Kelly abandons her dreams, and Brannon confronts his loneliness. Each one, maimed in some way, enters a new phase of existence.

Whereas Singer is a passive figure, Jake Blount is an aggressive one. The result of Singer's autism is suicide; for Blount, autistic gestures are an unconscious means of self-defacement.

Blount stumbles into town, spends the fourteen months described in the novel there, and then, after Singer's death, leaves to find a new town. Although he takes a job running the merry-go-round at a carnival, his mission is social reform. Usually drunk or hung over, Blount lashes out at people with his hands and his mouth, blasting the world for its exploitation of workers.

The abundant references to his hands and his mouth are concrete renderings of the link between Blount's words and his gestures. He has read a great deal—Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and others—but, in the process of internalizing what he has read, has distorted the ideas and consequently manifests them in a bizarre manner. Shortly after meeting Blount, Biff Brannon observes: “The words came out of his throat like a cataract. And the thing was the accent he used was always changing, the kinds of words he used” (p. 17). Blount's manner of speaking is expressive of his inner turmoil. His passions struggle for ascendancy, and in the melee he loses control.¹⁰

Similarly, Blount's body is active and very expressive, but when he attempts to communicate, his body language subverts his intention. Frustrated by his inability to reach others, Blount turns his gestures inward. He begins to tear at himself, as if by mutilating himself he could avenge the injustices of the world. When the self-mutilation is unconscious, as it usually is with Blount, the gesture may be described as autistic.¹¹

As if to throw Blount's hands and mouth into relief, McCullers exaggerates these features. Blount is short, but his hands are huge and ugly. Over and over again, he closes a hand into a fist, sometimes digging it into his face; he often rubs his hands across his lips.¹² With his thick, chunky fingers, Blount plays with the change in his pocket or fiddles with his mustache.¹³

Blount's mouth is also grotesque in relation to the rest of his body. His face is boyish except for the “small, ragged mustache” that makes him seem middle-aged. Beneath the mustache, his lower lip hangs down “as though it had been stung by a wasp” (p. 16). When he is lonely or frustrated, Blount's lips tremble, and he bites them, sometimes until they become “scarlet” and “mottled.”¹⁴

McCullers also exaggerates Blount's awareness of his own body, an awareness that is consistent with his painfully self-conscious attitude. Early in the novel, when Blount tells Singer that he is thirsty, he says, “I feel like the whole Russian army marched through my mouth in its stocking feet” (p. 54). Later, we see him gnawing his fingernails, apparently enjoying “the sharp taste of grime” that lingered in his mouth (p. 152).

With mounting frustration, Blount complains to Singer: “I talk. I try to explain to them. But what good does it do?” (p. 151). Like Singer, who felt self-conscious about his attempts to speak, Blount is intimidated by others' reactions to his words. People laugh at his harangues; their laughter “cut[s] him to the quick—he [gets] rough and loud like a sort of clown” (p. 225).

Blount's oral, aggressive behavior is sometimes directed toward others, sometimes himself. At times his gestures are intentional; at other times they are autistic. The autistic gestures give rise to an enormous irony: Blount, whose whole reason for living is to effect social reform, destroys his means of doing so. By damaging his hands and his mouth, he makes communication extremely difficult and painful. His search for reciprocity is futile.

Another person who seeks social reform, especially racial equality in the Southern town, is the Black physician, Dr. Copeland. Misunderstood by his own kin as well as by white people, Copeland pleads with his people to unite, to work together for “the strong true purpose.” When they do not, and when even his own children seem apathetic, Copeland finds that his voice seems “lost somewhere deep inside him” (p. 88). One time when he is alone and meditative, there rises from his throat a “strange sound like a kind of singing moan” (p. 89).

Like Blount, Copeland talks too much and alienates the very people with whom he longs to have rapport. The lack of responsiveness in others makes him nervous, and his hands, although schooled by years of medical practice, betray him.¹⁵ Even when he is idle, his fingers work busily, one hand often cracking the joints of the other.¹⁶ When he feels threatened by defeat, his hands move to his head, where he pushes them against his face or clutches at his throat.¹⁷

When Copeland reaches out, his hands grab each other, his head, or his clothing. As he fusses with his garments, we sense his preoccupation with the outer self, especially with the color of skin. Sometimes it seems as though his anxiety over racial oppression might throttle him. At one especially poignant moment, when Copeland is frustrated by Blount's childish bombast, he “pull[s] the neck of his nightshirt up over his bony shoulder and [holds] it gathered tight to his throat,” while asking, “You believe in the struggle of my people for their human rights?” (p. 300).

Copeland's situation illuminates a larger pattern of frustration in the novel: that is, that masses as well as individuals show the results of continual thwarting. Copeland watches his friends and family, paralyzed by fear, allow his grandson Willie to suffer mutilation by white prison guards. When Willie, who dances his way through the first half of the novel, returns home from prison without feet, people gather to sympathize but seem incapable of revenge or protest.¹⁸ As they intermingle and trade sympathies, their group behavior resembles autism. Instead of trying to communicate with white people, they turn inward in an effort to ease their anxiety with sophistries and cake.

Whereas Copeland is “an old man in an empty house” (p. 142), frustrated by the failure of his lifelong effort to instill racial pride in his people, Mick Kelly is a thirteen-year-old girl, full of creative energy, who exerts herself in a search for her own identity. As she struggles to find her place in the world, she befriends not only John Singer but also her father, Portia the cook, her younger brothers, and Harry Minowitz, who becomes her first lover. Often her efforts to reach out are successful; when she is reinforced, she continues to communicate.

However, Mick also faces the disappointment and disequilibrium that accompany any quest. Her father fails in business, Portia's family is troubled, her brother shoots a child, and Harry Minovitz runs away. To defend herself against the unkindnesses of the world, Mick creates the “inside room,” a secret, imaginary place inside herself where she can be free to dream and to be happy.

Like the other major figures in the novel, Mick turns to John Singer, confides in him, and reads his silence as an affirmation of her innermost dreams. She places Singer in her “inside room,” which, the narrator tells us, is filled with music, with “all the different instruments bunched together for each note like a hard, tight fist that socked at her heart” (p. 118). In the “inside room” Mick plans for the day when she will conduct great music on stage where the curtains bear her initials.

The fists that become instruments in Mick's “inside room” are her weapons against frustration. Early in the novel, Mick sits on the steps, waiting for the upstairs boarder to turn on her radio. The narrator observes:

She thought for a long time and kept hitting her thighs with her fists. Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that.

(p. 52)

Like the other characters in the novel, Mick directs her anger mostly against her own person. When she does so, seemingly unaware of her behavior, her gestures are autistic.

In a later scene, Mick again hits herself with her fists, but this time she is conscious of what she is doing. She crouches among cedars, listening to a symphony on someone else's radio. The music overwhelms her. It arouses desire, but at the same time it reminds her of the limitations of her life. In trying to respond to the power of the music, she deliberately hurts herself:

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. She was limp on the wet grass, and after a while her breath came slow and easy again.

(p. 118-119)

In this second injury to herself, Mick's gesture is a conscious one and so is not autistic. She fully intends to hurt her leg, knowing somehow that the emotions aroused by the music require a physical expression. The only deep feeling that she has known is pain; therefore, she inflicts pain upon herself. She experiences release that is like sexual release.

When she feels frustrated, Mick's behavior becomes self-stimulating; depending on the circumstances, she either consciously intends to communicate with herself or unconsciously engages in autistic gestures. In both cases she seeks to soothe herself, to pull away from the difficulties of the world. Mick's most violent gestures are hitting herself with her fists or biting her knee (pp. 118, 271); in more gentle moments, she rubs her hand on her forehead or pushes her hair back from her face.¹⁹ Some of her gestures are related to pubescence. According to Biff Brannon, she often picks at the front of her blouse “to keep the cloth from the new tender nipples …” (p. 28).

As a child, Mick deals with thwarting by escaping to her “inside room,” but, as an emerging adolescent, she finds even that sanctuary unavailable to her. For the first time, she encounters raw frustration. When her parents' finances fail, she must abandon music lessons and school. She takes a job at a dime store where the work exhausts her and leaves her little energy for imaginative forays.

When Singer commits suicide, he destroys not only himself but also Mick's inside room. Upon discovering his body, she runs “into the dark and [hits] herself with her fists” (p. 349). Later, upon thinking about her circumstances, she says that she feels cheated, “mad all the time. Not how a kid gets mad quick so that soon it is all over—but in another way” (p. 351). Still, she retains some hope that her plans made in the “inside room” were worth something. Over and over, she tries to persuade herself: “And it was too and it was too and it was too and it was too. It was some good” (p. 351).

Mick begins the novel with some degree of innocence, but, by the story's end, that innocence is lost. Without the “inside room,” she is deprived of imagination and for it must substitute rationalization. Although she may recover her dreams, circumstances are working against her. It is more likely that, like the adult characters in her world, she will grow up feeling thwarted, will wrench herself into a grotesque posture, and will allow frustration to draw her hands more and more toward her own heart.

Whereas Mick Kelly's gradual loss of innocence gives the novel its direction, Biff Brannon gives it perspective. More than any other character, he comes to understand the paradox of the heart. Watching those around him fall apart, Biff is determined to maintain balance. By the end of the book, he sees that the heart works not only as a hunter, leading one outside himself to seek love, but also as itself, the central organ that regulates existence. In Brannon the tension between these two tasks—to hunt and to regulate—becomes palpable when he confronts himself in the final chapter. His last gesture, the raising of the awning, is a positive, open one.²⁰

Brannon's perspective has impact because of the particular design of the novel's narration. McCullers presents an omniscient narrator who views events through each of the five major characters as through a lens. She alternates lenses from chapter to chapter, returning to the perspective of each character several times. The narrator introduces Biff Brannon in Chapter Two, returns to his perspective three times, and ends the novel with an account of his epiphany, followed by his purposeful gesture toward the new day.

The narrative technique gains subtlety and interest because, whereas each major character serves as a lens, Brannon works as a double lens. Throughout much of the novel, he stands behind the cash register in his cafe, watching his customers. The reader is in the position of watching Brannon watch other people. The use of the double lens produces an enlarging effect, and because Brannon is often concerned with his own hands and those of other people, it contributes to the grotesque proportions that hands assume in the novel.

As Brannon observes the other characters, he notes their preoccupation with their bodies. He relates their self-absorption to the need for privacy: “in nearly every person there [is] some special physical part kept always guarded” (p. 28). Brannon also observes the opposite inclination: “in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons—throw it to some human being or some human idea” (p. 32). In these two statements Brannon pinpoints the conflicting motivations of the heart that lead the characters in this novel to seek reciprocity and to suffer enormous thwarting when their efforts fail.²¹ The thwarting, in turn, causes them to inhibit verbal expression, an action that gives rise to the autistic gesture.

Brannon is more objective and less ardent than the other characters in the novel; except for Blount, he displays the largest number of autistic gestures.²² Over and over we see him mash his nose with his thumb, or in some way stroke his face with his hand.²³ According to recent psychoanalytic studies, autistic gestures involving the hand and the nose originate in the fetal or infantile periods and indicate unresolved conflicts. The behavior—for both infants and adults—is usually an attempt to dispel tensions within the person.²⁴ It has also been observed that the thumb is the part of the hand that usually expresses the ego.²⁵

Perhaps Brannon, in fondling his face and rubbing his nose, is demonstrating the change that is coming over his own ego. Early in the novel, he hints at his feelings of sexual inadequacy when he says that he no longer thinks of his genitals as a “special physical part kept always guarded” (p. 28). Upon this realization, the narrator tells us, “A sharp line cut into his forehead. His hand in his pocket moved nervously toward his genitals. He began whistling a song and got up from the table” (p. 29). Later, Brannon reveals that he has been impotent for years (p. 234) and that he believes that all people are, by nature, bisexual (p. 131). After his wife dies, he allows his more “feminine” instincts to surface. Adopting her grooming habits, he uses her Agua Florida and douses his hair with her lemon rinse. He longs for children and believes he would have been a good mother.

Brannon describes himself as “old Biff with two fists and a quick tongue—Mister Brannon—by himself” (p. 33). The hand-face imagery depicts the parts of Brannon's anatomy that he uses in both conventional and autistic expression. At the same time, the image suggests male genitalia. Brannon sums up the description with an acknowledgment of his aloneness: “Mister Brannon—by himself.” With his uncertain sexual identity and his penchant for meditation, Brannon distances himself from others. As he becomes more observer than actor, he inhibits his verbal behavior and adopts nonverbal behavior that is often autistic.

At the end of the novel, Singer commits suicide, Blount leaves town, Copeland retires to his father-in-law's farm, Kelly gives up her “inside room” to work at Woolworth's, and Brannon realizes his aloneness. Standing in his empty cafe, Brannon thinks about the other four characters and the events of the past fourteen months. Then he catches sight of his reflection in the counter glass before him:

The silence in the room was deep as the night itself. Biff stood transfixed, lost in his meditations. Then suddenly he felt a quickening in him. His heart turned and he leaned his back against the counter for support. For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who—one word—love: His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. Between the two worlds he was suspended. He saw that he was looking at his own face in the counter glass before him [italics mine]. Sweat glistened on his temples and his face was contorted. One eye was opened wider than the other. The left eye delved narrowly into the past while the right gazed wide and affrighted into a future of blackness, error, and ruin. And he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith. Sharply he turned away.

(pp. 355-356)

As Brannon feels a “quickening” and catches a glimpse of those who labor and those who love, he understands the heart as a lonely hunter. But in his second perception, when he feels “a warning, a shaft of terror,” Brannon senses the need to preserve equilibrium. In showing us that Brannon seeks not only love but also balance, the narrator pulls together the forces of comparison and contiguity. Brannon recognizes that the heart as hunter and the heart as pacemaker work as one to produce the emotional and physical rhythms of life.

When Brannon confronts his image in the glass, the reader's perspective dramatically shifts. Instead of watching Brannon observe others, as we have throughout the novel, we now see him observing himself. We are drawn into the struggle between the actual Brannon and his mirror image, a struggle that includes past and future, radiance and darkness, irony and faith.

Upon recognizing his face in the glass, Brannon objectifies himself and comes to terms with his own paradoxes. What begins as an autistic gesture—finding one's face in a mirror—develops into an epiphanic moment. Brannon confronts his loneliness, and from the confrontation he gathers the courage to turn away, not from the world, as did Singer, nor from ideals, as did Blount, Copeland, and Kelly, but from his own reflection. In the novel's final gesture, Brannon seems willing to embrace experience as he steps out to raise the awning and “to await the morning sun” (p. 356).

Notes

1. Virginia Spencer Carr, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), p. 296.

2. Maurice H. Krout, who originated the term, defines “autistic gesture” as follows: “Autistic gestures, so named, are vestigial responses which are seemingly irrelevant to situations in which they occur, evidently directed to the actor himself (hence, autistic), and not verbally defined either by actor or observer.” Krout derived the term from E. Bleuler, who described “autistic thinking” as a form of thinking that is provoked by internal, rather than external, stimulation. See Krout, “The Social and Psychological Significance of Gestures (A Differential Analysis),” Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology, 46 (December 1935), 385-411 at p. 410, and his full-length treatment, “Autistic Gestures: An Experimental Study of Symbolic Movement,” Psychological Monographs, 46 (1935), 1-126.

3. Horace Taylor discusses mirroring in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: A Southern Wasteland,” Studies in American Literature, ed. Waldo McNeir and Leo B. Levy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), pp. 154-160 at p. 156.

4. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1940). Subsequent references to the novel will be indicated parenthetically in the text.

5. For example, Portia tells Kelly, “Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don't love and don't have peace” (p. 50). Later, the narrator tells us that as Copeland steered his automobile, “his heart turned with this angry, restless love” (p. 195).

6. For a helpful discussion of the pyramid dream and the religious metaphor, I am indebted to Frank Durham, “God and No God in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 56 (1957), 494-499.

7. Durham points out that McCullers' own father, like Singer, was a jeweler (“God and No God,” p. 497). We can extend the point by noting that Mick Kelly, the person in the novel who most resembles McCullers, has a father who wants to be a jeweler but who seems to Mick too big and awkward for the role.

8. According to Krout, “autistic gestures can be explained only on the assumption that there is a shifting of the organismic integration from the verbal to the motor or visceral levels. This shifting always presuppose[s] inhibition of verbal components in the response and the consequent existence of … the abstracted state” (“The Social and Psychological Significance of Gestures,” p. 407).

9. People with suicidal tendencies often keep their hands close to their bodies. This behavior was first demonstrated in experiments by Emilio Mira y Lopez; see his M. K. P., Myokinetic Psychodiagnosis, ed. Leopold Bellak and others, trans. Mrs. Jacques Dubois (New York: Logos Press, 1958), p. 44. Mira's observation is discussed in Ross Stagner, Psychology of Personality, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp. 178-180.

10. For example, Blount, who espouses racial equality, once tells Dr. Copeland that “the only way to solve the Negro problem under capitalism is to geld every one of the fifteen million black men in these states” (p. 302).

11. Blount describes to Singer a conscious (therefore nonautistic) effort at self-destruction. After thinking about Jesus all day, he had attacked his hand with hammer and nail: “My hand was nailed to the table and I looked at it and the fingers fluttered and turned blue.” He then shows Singer the scar in the center of his palm (p. 149).

12. See pp. 54, 60, 61, 68, 285, 301.

13. See pp. 57, 63, 65, 66, 153, 155, 225, 338.

14. See pp. 20, 57, 60, 302, 337.

15. Krout notes that in any individual one set of gestures is suited to a certain kind of message, and that gesture is usually related to occupation (“The Social and Psychological Significance of Gestures,” p. 408).

16. See pp. 71, 73, 141, 144.

17. See pp. 69, 89, 135, 136, 137, 142.

18. It is interesting to note that, upon Willie's return, both he and his mother, Portia, engage in autistic gestures: Portia pulls at her ear lobes, and Willie rubs his stumps (pp. 287-289).

19. See pp. 18, 41, 51, 103, 207, 313, 314, 348, 351.

20. C. Michael Smith, “‘A Voice in a Fugue’: Characters and Musical Structure in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Modern Fiction Studies, 25 (1979), 258-263, makes this point in his conclusion on p. 263.

21. For further discussion and a somewhat different conclusion, see David Madden, “The Paradox of the Need for Privacy and the Need for Understanding in Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Literature and Psychology, 17 (1967), 128-140 at p. 132.

22. According to my count, Brannon engages in autistic gestures 40 times, in comparison to 21 for Singer, 59 for Blount, 31 for Copeland, and 26 for Kelly.

23. See pp. 13, 14, 16, 25, 29, 59, 121, 132, 171, 177, 232, 342.

24. For a case study involving a male patient, see Carl P. Adatto, M. D., “Snout-Hand Behavior in an Adult Patient,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 18 (1970), 823-830.

25. Charlotte Woolf, The Hand in Psychological Diagnosis (London: Methuen, 1951), p. 7.