SOURCE: McDowell, Margaret B. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940).” In Carson McCullers, pp. 31-43. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

[In the following essay, McDowell delineates the defining characteristics of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.]

I. ISOLATION AS MAN'S FATE

The principal theme of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Carson McCullers declared, lay in the first dozen pages: an individual's compulsion to revolt against enforced isolation and his or her urge to express the self at all costs. She thought of the work in 1938, even in one of its earliest forms in The Mute, as consisting of variations on this principal concept. Thinking of her projected novel as analogous to a work of music, she enumerated in her proposal to Houghton Mifflin, five “counter-themes” that would, each of them, elaborate upon the central theme: the need for a person to create a unifying principle or god; the likelihood that any god that man creates will be chimerical or fantastic; the likely suppression by society of the individual; the deflection by social pressures of man's natural urge to cooperate with others; and the impressiveness of the heroism which occasionally appears in ordinary individuals. At times, these subsidiary themes would be obvious; at other times, they would be more difficult to define:

These themes are never stated nakedly in the book. Their overtones are felt through the characters and situations. Much will depend upon the insight of the reader and the care with which the book is read. In some parts the underlying ideas will be concealed far down below the surface of a scene and at other times these ideas will be shown with a certain emphasis.¹

When she wrote her abstract in 1938, she had completed Part I of the novel, had worked for over a year on the book, and had already made drastic changes in her central characters. A principal change from her projected plan is evident in the last section of the published novel. She had declared that, as with recurring motifs in a symphony, she would draw her major theme and all the counterthemes sharply together for an integrated finale. Actually, she did not do this.

Because her emphasis shifted as she worked on the novel, she gave greater importance by the end of the book to a young black woman, Portia Copeland, than she had first intended. Also thirteen-year-old Mick Kelly, one of the four characters originally envisioned as surrounding John Singer, develops more fully than the other three members. She becomes possibly even more significant in the novel than the mute, John Singer. McCullers' involvement with Portia and Mick modulates the pessimism of the concluding sequences of the book to a qualified optimism as these women reach out with some hope to the future. The finale was to have been one combining the four voices of Mick, Dr. Copeland, Biff Brannon, and Jeff Blount, as the death of Singer affects them deeply but draws them together harmoniously. Instead, Mick's voice rings in the finale above the voices of the other three, who remain locked in their despair. Mick has a vision of a future for herself, even if the way to fulfillment will be arduous. Portia, whose rancor against her father has been supplanted by a vision of self-sacrifice for the welfare of her father, her husband, and her brother, and who dreams of a simple, pastoral existence, complements the strident negation of the other characters. The ending intermingles a fleeting vision of a brighter future with the bleakness dominating the characters who react most intensely to Singer's suicide.

At the end of the short Part I, John Singer, a deaf-mute, mourns his separation from another deaf-mute, Antonapoulos, with whom he has lived. Singer has strongly opposed committing of the mentally retarded and overweight Antonapoulos to an asylum and has tried for months to conceal his friend's increasingly bizarre and mildly antisocial behavior. During the fourteen months covered by Part II—the major section of the novel—Singer lives in a shabby boarding house run by Mick Kelly's parents. His attentive silence and his thoughtful eyes draw four people close to him: Mick Kelly, a girl burdened by the care of two younger children, by poverty, and by frustration of her ambition to become a musician; Biff Brannon, who operates an all-night cafe; Jake Blount, an itinerant Marxist, who presently works for a carnival; and Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, a proud and bitter black physician whose intense commitment to Marxism as the only means of raising the status of blacks has alienated him from most of his friends and relatives.

Though both Blount and Copeland are Marxist reformers and though Blount seeks to persuade Copeland to join him in overt political agitation, the two men differ greatly. Copeland resents the clumsy efforts at comradeship made by Blount, whose illiterate harangues are emotional and incite to physical violence. Blount even injures himself by beating his hands and head against a wall when Biff's customers in the restaurant ridicule his pleas for social change, for friendship, and for understanding among people. His speech registers only as the rantings of a drunk man. In turn, Dr. Copeland has his disappointments. He has to control his intense anger when his political talks at his Christmas party for blacks prove ineffective. When with great dignity he presents his annual scholarship to a gifted black youth, he seeks to persuade his listeners to engage in revolutionary action, but they simply nod or mutter “amen.” He ends his day in his darkened parlor, exhausted and spiritually desolate. In his passion to bring about radical social change and to better his people, he alienates most of them and even his own family.

At the close of Part II, Antonapoulos dies, and Singer, in reaction to his loss, commits suicide. In Part III, the four people who have made Singer their confidant adjust to his death, still isolated from one another, and still lonely hunters for a selfless love and a spiritual understanding which eludes them. Throughout the novel, each of them talks uninhibitedly to Singer and imagines himself as understood completely by this man with alert, thoughtful eyes and intent attitude. Described by McCullers as “spokes” in a wheel—with Singer as the hub—the four do not grow closer to one another through their association with Singer. For example, when Singer buys a radio for his new friends to hear, they stand about awkwardly in his room, unable to converse with one another. Singer's response to the four is not the altogether intuitively wise one that they imagine it to be. In a letter to Antonapoulos, he expresses bewilderment, if not amusement, at the interest these people have displayed in him. Consequently, each character, except for Mick, is as defeated and isolated at the end of the book as at the beginning.

If Singer creates in his mind an illusory Antonapoulos who is worthy of his great love and grief, Biff, Jake, Mick, and Dr. Copeland create in Singer an illusory figure who possesses great virtue and wisdom. As such, he exists mostly in the imaginations of those who find in him solace and understanding. He is the god created as “unifying principle” and, as such, he is, in McCullers' words, “chimerical and fantastic.” The inability of Singer to speak both symbolizes and dramatizes the lack of understanding and the lack of communication among the characters. Ironically, the characters who are most articulate—Blount and Copeland—are no more effective than Mick and Brannon. All fail to establish satisfying social relationships as Portia Copeland is able to do. Both Jake Blount, who wants to be a messiah for the workers, and Dr. Copeland, the exponent of justice for blacks, are fanatical in their one-sided vision, whenever they express their intensely held views and try to find common cause with their listeners. Their fanaticism undermines their sincere attempts to communicate with others and to influence them.

If, in this first novel, McCullers presents love as the only available anodyne to isolation, none of her characters except Singer is really unselfish enough to love others with entire sincerity. None of them can love enough to deserve the love they crave. Singer does love selflessly the retarded deaf-mute, who can only respond to affection instinctively, as a pet or a baby might. The attention Singer offers to the other four characters appears to be love and is partly love, yet he does not comprehend their needs fully nor do they regard him as a person who might also need reassurance. They only “sing” of their needs and thoughts to Singer, who, in spite of his name, cannot really “sing” or express himself adequately. Ironically, no true communication takes place between Singer and his disciples, who all remain egoists. Singer inadvertently furthers their narcissism by providing with his eyes the mirror wherein they seem to see reflected what they themselves wish to see, irrespective of whether he actually understands them.

Portia, Dr. Copeland's married daughter, who is a cook at the Kellys' boarding house, loves generously, maternally, and uninhibitedly, but Portia, through much of the book, is less central than the “quartet” and Singer. Portia's love also is sentimental to the degree that it obscures the evil in the social order that threatens the stability of her existence with her husband, Highboy, and with her brother, Willie. A society motivated by prejudice prevents her from building a secure relationship with her father, and it eventually even negates her hopes for the attainment of a pastoral happiness on her grandfather's small farm. Copeland and Blount both express an abstract love for the working class and for blacks in their efforts to secure social justice, but Blount simply ends up brawling with laborers and Copeland has driven away even his family. Love in McCullers' first novel is difficult to come by and is transient in most instances.

II. THE QUARTET—THE “SPOKES OF THE WHEEL”

The quartet of people who surround Singer and become his disciples, as it were, are central in this novel. The least communicative of them is forty-four-year-old Biff Brannon, who, like Singer, is unemotional, disinterested, and observant. For eighteen years he has systematically collected in a back room of his cafe issues of the daily newspaper of the town, but he does not refer to the papers he saves. He never analyzes the news, but merely notices the day's happenings and then files each paper neatly and methodically. Similarly in his own life, Biff never philosophically integrates past, present, and future. He repeatedly recalls the same few memories but does not relate them to one another or to his life in the present. He only responds as necessary to individual, separate occurrences and never shapes his own life creatively through an active participation in the life surrounding him.

Typical of Biff's failure to connect incident and emotion is his and Alice's established mode of addressing each other as “Mr.” and “Mrs.”—a pattern begun impulsively years before, after a trivial argument. The distance implicit in such a mode of salutation also suggests the impersonal quality of their twenty-three-year marriage. For the reader, Alice remains in the background, as she probably does for Biff. In the early morning, Biff closes the restaurant and goes upstairs, as Alice arises, and they converse briefly. He neatly remakes the bed, undresses, and in his turn retires to sleep. Later in the day, at work in the cafe, they still remain remote as their lives routinely parallel but never merge. She supervises the workers while he handles the cash register and menus. Occasionally he wishes they had had children; he admires “Baby” Wilson, his pampered five-year-old niece, and he fantasizes at times about what life would be like if some of the Kelly children, particularly Mick, were his own.

Although Biff's anxieties are explicitly sexual, their exact nature remains a secret to the reader. The narrator makes what seem to be unconnected observations about Biff, and the reader is left to synthesize these remarks. Biff, like Singer, essentially observes the world but does not allow it to enter his life and change or reorganize it. The reader sees Biff, as he must perceive himself, as an unintegrated person. His social and private life, his intellect and emotion, his marital relationship and his sexual life, his family life with his mother and his present family life, his life upstairs in his apartment and downstairs in the restaurant, his past, his present, and his future—all are kept essentially separate. He organizes his time in routine activities, but his inner life is completely composed of separate parts never fitted together by an attempt to see himself as a total human being.

For example, we learn of his sexual views at several different points in the book. He is apparently impotent, at least with his wife, and seems incapable of sustained and growing emotional relationships. Memory of his “godly” mother may inhibit him. At one point long ago, he chivalrously defended Alice's sister against her drunken husband, and he platonically enjoys her companionship after Alice's death. He feels, late in the book, some slight attraction to Mick as she develops into adolescence. Generally, however, protective and kindly behavior toward women has replaced whatever sexual pleasure he enjoyed with a few prostitutes in a distant past. After Alice's sudden death, he expresses what might seem to be an unconventional “feminine” aspect of his personality as he sews and begins to use Alice's perfume. At the same time, with monklike austerity, he removes all the “feminine frills” from the apartment. The narrator never states that Biff has had homosexual experience, although he apparently has latent homosexual elements in his personality.

The vague and somewhat paradoxical aspects of Biff's personality suggest that he is unable to integrate conflicting impulses. If he is a “lonely hunter,” he formulates his questions too vaguely to be able to find convincing answers. Perhaps the most thoughtful philosophical connection Biff makes occurs one morning as Alice memorizes the text for her Sunday School lesson: “All men seek for Thee.” The verse briefly reminds him of his mother's religiosity, but he also uses it to soften Alice's demand that he evict Jake Blount, whom Biff has befriended, in a routine and emotionless way. The validity of a search for truth through religion is never emphasized in any of McCullers' work. But the human being locked in his solitariness seeks always more than can be found. If he seems to apprehend peace in human love or in relationship to a god, the hope exists only in his imagination and the satisfaction is momentary.

The dream Singer has toward the end of the book suggests that it may be interpreted as religious vision. In it, Spiros Antonapoulos stands near the top of a stairs, Singer reaches up toward him, and Mick Kelly, Biff Brannon, Jake Blount, and Benedict Copeland, in turn, look up toward Singer. Antonapoulos holds an unrecognizable object. But the symbolism is so indefinite that the passage is baffling. Perhaps it implies that no clear answers to elemental questions exist. The sequence underlines the confusion and futility of human search for truth. Irony exists where the Divine Presence is one who cannot speak to those who reach up to him. That man creates god in his own image is ironically emphasized in this situation where a mute human being envisions a mute god. Even further irony lies in the fact that all are reaching up for wisdom from a man who himself reaches up to a mentally deficient being. Perhaps McCullers saw this as the extreme revelation that God must exist in many forms to answer the needs of so many “lonely hunters,” who apparently have among themselves little sense of communion.

If in the dream Biff appears to recognize the need for religious experience to integrate human experience, and if he momentarily on one Sunday morning links a Bible verse to his memory of his mother, certainly McCullers does not follow this line of thought in revealing his character in the rest of the novel. His contact with others remains objective, orderly, and routinely scheduled. He tends to think only of the single day that he is living, and he never allows his identity to become deeply entangled with the lives of others as a result of recognizing a common element in their search for a god. His cafe, however, does provide a place where—as in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe—people are treated as if they have worth, even though they are freakish. Though little true fellowship is found in the cafe, the seekers do, in a sense, break bread together and the cafe is open both day and night for the lonely hunters.

The second member of the quartet, Jake Blount, twenty-nine, is confused in his socialist commitment. His plans for action are elaborated upon most vociferously when he is drunk. Always he claims the center of the stage. He will fight to defend a social reform until he is knocked unconscious, though neither he nor the workingman with whom he quarrels understands the theory over which they fight. A worker's resistance to, or fear of, revolt baffles Jake, because he assumes a worker deliberately rejects his salvation in rejecting active social protest. Jake clumsily demonstrates his interest in securing justice for black people when he blatantly patronizes the third member of the quartet, Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland. Jake embarrasses and offends the dignified, fifty-one-year-old physician. Neither fully recognizes the other as a fellow reformer. Copeland's Marxism is so highly intellectualized that he communicates his theory no more effectively than does Jake in his drunken rambling. By his harshness and inflexibility, Dr. Copeland has long since driven away his wife and four children. He trusts Singer as a kindly white person, but his companionship with him tends to be superficial. Early in the book, on a hot night he sits, cold and shaking with fever, in his darkened house. His daughter, Portia, tries to draw him closer to herself, to his family, and to other black people. Portia, Willie, and Portia's husband, Highboy, are at that point a happy trio living together, sharing expenses, and enjoying weekly Saturday night outings. Because they accept the position society unfairly assigns them, Willie and Highboy hesitate even to enter Dr. Copeland's house because he ridicules them, with their compliant behavior, as “Uncle Toms.”

Willie's harmonica music always signals his presence, but it is a remote presence. Willie is arrested one night and prison guards allow him and two other prisoners to suffer in such a cold cell that their feet freeze and require amputation. After his tragedy, the harmonica is silent. His father takes him in and bitterly seeks vengeance for his son's maltreatment. But when Jake tries to publicize the tragedy as a dramatic example of capitalist oppression, Willie is too frightened to cooperate, and Dr. Copeland is indignant at what he considers the exploitation of Willie's misfortune. Copeland feels revulsion that his son should be an object of pity. Instead, he wants all blacks to become proud, educated, strong—to demand their rights.

Mick Kelly, with her rebellious and courageous spirit as she moves from childhood into adolescence, dominates Part III of the novel. While John Singer provides the structural center for the book, McCullers knew—even when she had completed only Part I and wrote her proposal to her publishers—that Mick, rather than Singer, might seem to some readers the principal character, one of the “heroic, though ordinary” figures to whom McCullers referred in her initial outline of The Mute. Throughout the book, Mick's pursuit of music symbolizes both her energy and her love of beauty. She listens to concerts on the radios of families who happen to leave their windows open, and later on she listens to the radio Singer buys for his friends' pleasure. This music she stores in the “inner room” of her personality into which she allows only Singer to enter. The mundane she keeps at a safe distance from her inmost self in what she conceives as her “outer room.” Mick's plans to build her own violin from an old mandolin, for example, arise in her “inner room.” Consequently, the frustration which accompanies failure in this project is far more bitter and violent than if the idea had grown in her “outer room.”

Fortunately, her sexual initiation, when she bicycles into the country with Harry Minowitz, her shy neighborhood friend, merely baffles her in its suddenness and brevity, rather than producing psychic trauma. The impact of the experience is even more completely wiped out of her memory by greater violence when she returns home to discuss the event with Singer and discovers him dead. Harry, on the other hand, is shocked that he has violated a virgin—and has been himself defiled by contact with a gentile. He goes to another city to take a job there.

McCullers emphasized in her outline of the novel that she must deal with this sexual initiation lightly and with “extreme reticence.”² It is clear that she did not want to convert Mick into a sexually sophisticated adult, nor did she wish to give either Mick or Harry any sense of either one's having found true love. The exuberant Mick, who savors life fully when she opens the door dividing her inner room from the outer room, is not to be found at the moment she loses her virginity. One sees her at her most vital moment when she climbs to the roof peak of an unfinished house and sits astride it, singing to the whole world.

Mick is ultimately a positively conceived character, though she also reveals many complicating limitations. At her worst, Mick cruelly taunts Bubber, her younger brother, the night he hides in a tree after he has accidentally shot “Baby” Wilson in the head. She tells him the police are searching for him, though she knows “Baby” is only superficially hurt and that it is only the hospital bill about which her parents must now worry. After the experience, Bubber is never again trusting, easily affectionate, and lighthearted. The change in him echoes the inhibiting and deadening one which takes place in Willie Copeland after his feet are amputated. Too late, Mick yearns for her little brother's companionship and for the loyalty she has destroyed in the one playmate she could count on to admire her.

At her best, Mick is heroic in offering to quit high school to support her family by working in the dime store—especially since this decision means she can no longer teach herself to play the piano in the school gym. Her defiant final words, “O.K. Some good!” show that she is still above despair and that she will battle the society that demands of her so unfair a sacrifice. Her inner world remains intact. She refuses to give up her ongoing sense that a meaningful pattern underlies the bitterness of her recent experiences.

Isolated, Mick fantasizes limitlessly to escape her parents' crowded boarding house. She possessively clings to privacy, symbolized by the assortment of treasures she keeps in a box under the bed in the room she must share with her disagreeable older sisters. She leaves unfinished her song, “This Thing I Want, I Know Not What,” but she energetically moves through exciting visions of herself as celebrated composer, traveler, and inventor. If Singer's death unnerves her and she is bitter about giving up her piano lessons and school, this anger in itself reinforces the rebelliousness which will enable her to defy the fatality that overcomes her.

III. THE USE OF BLACK CHARACTERS

When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter appeared in 1940, Richard Wright, whose Native Son also appeared that year, declared that the “most impressive aspect” of the book was “the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.”³ In his comment Wright might have been thinking of both Portia and Dr. Copeland. Portia strongly expresses her emotions and strongly revolts against isolation—particularly of one black from other blacks. Dr. Copeland expresses anger at the failure of blacks to demand their rights and, to some degree, accepts isolation from his own race as well as from whites as a political gesture.

Unlike her father, whose intellectual commitment to socialism destroys his close personal relationships, Portia expresses genuine feeling toward all of her associates. Fluently and gently, she expresses her affection for her father, but repeatedly she chides him for his moroseness and self-pity. She loves him freely—in spite of what he is, rather than because of what he is. She also surrounds with her secure love her insecure husband, Highboy, and her vulnerable brother, Willie. Portia mothers all of the Kelly children at the boarding house where she cooks and anxiously but submissively waits for her wages when the Kelly family is low on money. Her anger flares only in her anguished question: Why did Willie let a “no good” black woman get him into trouble?

To Portia, a reunion of the whole family at her grandfather's acreage would represent the ideal experience. The closest she comes to such harmony is in the careful management of a household to which she, Highboy, and Willie contribute equally; all of them look forward to the joys of Saturday nights together. At the close of the book, Willie is frightened and crippled by his prison experience, and Dr. Copeland, half-dead of tuberculosis, is carried in a farm wagon to spend his last days on the acreage which represents to Portia an idyllic haven but which represents to him the Negro's unnecessary and docile acceptance of rural poverty.

IV. A “CONTRAPUNTAL” NOVEL

At the time she outlined her book, McCullers assumed that John Singer, to whom the other four main characters would relate, would perplex them until his suicide at the end of Part II. At the point of Singer's death, however, they would begin to understand him, and, by extension, they would begin to understand themselves and each other. Actually, however, Singer's death baffles the characters more than did his life. Because his life was mysterious, its blurred outlines had allowed each person to create or define Singer as they wished him to exist. His suicide harmonized with no one's previous conception of him. No one knew the single-mindedness of his love for Antonapoulos or his longing for understanding. Singer, locked into his world of silence, actually is a static character; he does not respond to the other characters, whom he regards with eyes “cold and gentle as a cat's.” He remains remote from them and simple in his daily life and in his love for one man. Only through their romantic creation of him, does Singer gain dramatic complexity. Because his suicide does not enhance the understanding of the four individuals or draw them together in community, the integration of themes for a dramatic finale cannot occur as McCullers had outlined it. Each experiences his bewilderment and grief alone.

McCullers again used musical terms to describe the style of her projected book as “contrapuntal throughout.” Each character, she said, would be a voice in a fugue—a voice complete in itself but also enriched by contrast with the voices of other characters and by the subtle interweaving of his voice with the voices of the others. The contrapuntal effect would arise, she assumed, from her effort to establish a distinct style for each of the four characters who sought Singer's support. A fifth style, possessing the tone of a legend and the simplicity of a parable, she would use in presenting Singer. The differences in dialogue, pace, and tone which she achieves in the treatment of her five principal characters is remarkable. Because the style used for each character would subtly reflect his or her “inner psychic rhythm,” McCullers thought it unnecessary for her to delve more explicitly into the “unconscious” of each character. Thoughts and feelings are revealed almost entirely through explicit action and direct dialogue. Relatively little reference is made to the past of each character, since it only minimally informs or determines his or her present behavior and thought. The narrator divulges only enough of the history of Biff Brannon and Dr. Copeland to intensify the impression of their present isolation. Almost nothing of the past lives of Mick Kelly, Jake Blount, or John Singer enters the novel.

Singer's total deafness suggests a pervasive silence which sets off every conversation and movement and contrasts with whatever noisy or violent action occurs, such as the street fights Jake Blount gets involved in or the riot at the carnival after the symbolic silence of Singer's death has entered the novel. This portrayal of silence is difficult for most authors. Perhaps McCullers' ability to make the reader “hear silence” arose from the sensitivity to sound which she gained from long musical training and from her habitual listening to recorded music whenever she wrote.

V. THE SENSE OF VIOLENCE HELD TENUOUSLY IN CHECK

Apart from its allegorical implications, the novel succeeds simply in terms of realistic narrative. Humor occasionally adds to the effect, particularly in Mick Kelly's tough arguments with the world. The sordid dullness of the town seldom rises to the surface of the reader's consciousness, but when it does, it reinforces the oppressive monotony of the lives of the characters. The monotony of the quiet lives of the characters contrasts with a number of episodes of violence which subtly build to cumulative effects.

In her book Violence in Recent Southern Fiction, Louise Gossett suggests that McCullers, even more than most contemporary Southern writers, portrayed with effectiveness that kind of violence which brings a “sickening sweep into the oblivion of complete isolation.”⁴ In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter the accidental shooting of Baby Wilson by Bubber Kelly is superseded by the greater violence of Mick Kelly's taunting Bubber about the punishment he will receive in the electric chair, after she has found the little boy hiding in a tree in the dark. While Mick in her “inner room” dreams of beautiful music, she energetically paints and cherishes pictures of plane crashes, fires, and destructive storms. She is perversely ecstatic when her carefully planned formal party breaks up into a debacle as the guests chase one another across yards in the dark. The amputation of Willie Copeland's feet in prison is followed by the greater violence of Dr. Copeland's reaction not only to the brutality of the white prison guards but also to the gentle black people who, like his own wife and children, have accepted their suffering and oppression rather than fighting against it. Jake Blount's drunken fights and his beating in the carnival riot that makes him leave town are, McCullers suggests, a prelude to further violence. The shock of Antonapoulos's death leads to the greater violence of Singer's suicide as he grieves for his only companion. The shock reverberates in the lives of the four people who have surrounded Singer with their trust.

Perhaps most violent of all is the schism within the personality of Biff Brannon, who finds himself at the close of the novel suspended between male and female identification and between the past and the future and possessing little understanding of himself and of the present moment. Yet Biff appears to be, through routine discipline of himself and his daily schedule, in perfect control of a highly organized existence. The control of violence seems so tenuous in the lives depicted in this novel that McCullers communicates the terror that Flannery O'Connor once referred to as the slight “sense of suffocation” one feels upon awakening at the edge of a nightmare.

While The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter may not be McCullers' greatest work, it was a strong enough first novel to establish her in the very forefront of young American artists. It is essential to an understanding of the themes and techniques she was to develop more fully in her later work.

Notes

1. “Author's Outline of The Mute,” The Mortgaged Heart, p. 124.

2. Ibid., p. 129.

3. New Republic, 103 (Aug. 5, 1940), 195.

4. Durham, 1965, p. 162.