SOURCE: Carr, Virginia Spencer. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” In Understanding Carson McCullers, pp. 15-36. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Carr discusses thematic and stylistic aspects of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.]

Carson McCullers worked on the manuscript that eventually became The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter under the influence of Sylvia Chatfield Bates, her creative writing teacher at New York University who had recommended her to Whit Burnett's short-story writing course at Columbia University. Believing in the young student's potential, Bates encouraged McCullers to submit a short story she had written in her class, “Wunderkind,” to Story magazine, edited by Burnett. He bought the tale for publication in the December 1936 issue of Story and listened, also, to the long rambling plot of a novel that his young pupil explained had been gestating for almost a year.¹

Several months later, while home in Georgia to recuperate from a rheumatic fever attack, McCullers wrote Burnett that she was working hard on her novel every day, but that it made no sense because her protagonist kept changing. She envisioned him first as John Minovich, a man in a small southern town to whom various people kept talking and relating their troubles; then she made him a Jew and called him Harry Minowitz, but the new characterization had no significant effect on the story line either. At last, suddenly and inexplicably as she paced a hooked rug in her living room—stepping on some designs and purposefully avoiding others—a wholly new protagonist emerged. “His name is John Singer, and he is a deaf mute,” she exclaimed to her mother in the next room. When Marguerite Smith asked skeptically about the number of deaf mutes her daughter had known in her life, McCullers replied, “I've never known one, but I know Mr. Singer.”² A few weeks later when her husband read that a “deaf and dumb convention” was being held in nearby Macon, Georgia, and suggested that they attend so that she could “see what a real deaf mute is like,” McCullers was horrified by the mere suggestion. “Oh, no, there is nothing those people could tell me. I have already written that part of the novel,” she insisted.³ McCullers would not risk having her imagined image of John Singer jarred by confrontation with reality.

A comparison of the novel with McCullers's outline and synopsis submitted to Houghton Mifflin in 1938 confirms that her major characters and everything significant to the story line remained as she originally conceived them.⁴ McCullers made it clear in the general remarks prefacing her outline that the story focused upon “five isolated, lonely people in their search for expression and spiritual integration with something greater than themselves.”⁵ She told editor Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the novel's theme and characters unmistakably reflected her view of the conscience of the South: “The human heart is a lonely hunter—but the search for us Southerners is more anguished. There is a special guilt in us … a consciousness of guilt not fully knowable or communicable. Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just—when all along we knew that it wasn't.”⁶

John Singer, the deaf mute and pivotal character of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, is an apt vehicle for the author's perception of the abject loneliness and solitude inherent in the human condition. More important to the novel's plot and development of theme than Singer, however, are the other major characters: Mick Kelly, a tomboyish adolescent who shuts out the real world with music and dreams of fame and distant lands; Biff Brannon, the quietly observant and sexually impotent proprietor of the New York Café; Jake Blount, a fanatical carnival worker who seeks to redress the ills of the townspeople; and Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, a proud, black physician whose people reject his Marxist ideals and fail to understand his ineffectual attempts to improve their lot. Each character is isolated from meaningful social discourse, and each sees his salvation in the mute. When Singer's world topples upon the death of his retarded companion, Spiros Antonapoulos (who is also a deaf mute), so, too, does theirs.

Had McCullers not had a strong background in musical theory, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter doubtless would have been a very different work. She viewed the novel's intricate, three-part structure as a fugue, explaining that part 1 announces the broad theme of “man's revolt against his own inner isolation and his urge to express himself as fully as possible” as one voice, first through Singer, then through the other major characters, whose unique voices are introduced and developed contrapuntally in balanced order.⁷ Each character takes on new texture and color as his presence and actions become interwoven with the others. McCullers adapted her writing style to approximate the different “inner psychic rhythms” of each character who commands his own chapter or whose point of view is being presented.⁸

Part 1, which opens with Singer, also closes with him. The four intervening chapters introduce the troubled lives of the other principal characters. Singer's dilemma is presented in a straightforward narrative marked by clean, sparse prose, and his two sections are almost pure exposition. Although the point of view appears to be rendered objectively through an omniscient narrator who is not a part of the tale itself, McCullers managed to convey a sympathetic portrayal of each character. The syntax and rhythms are marked by an Old Testament cadence, an absence of contractions, and many short, one-sentence paragraphs that announce and summarize, such as “And then the final trouble came to Singer” and “In the spring a change came over Singer.” The style is reminiscent of a parable and, despite its austerity of language, is hauntingly lyrical. Like Singer himself, the tone of chapter 1 is quiet and muted, the action understated. “But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone,”⁹ the opening chapter concludes.

Part 2, which constitutes more than half the book, utilizes contrapuntal techniques as McCullers developed the anguished searches of Singer's satellites (the author's term for the characters who revolve around the mute) for some inexplicable connection, for love, compassion, and fulfillment of purpose. This section demonstrates that the inevitable failure of each person is brought on by a combination of free will and environmental entrapment. Fifteen chapters comprise part 2: five are devoted to Mick Kelly, two to Biff Brannon, four to Dr. Copeland, two to Jake Blount, and two to John Singer.¹⁰ The characters interweave throughout this section, which concludes with Singer's death and defines what McCullers called the “main web of the story.”¹¹

Part 3 functions as a formal coda to the composition. In it the satellite characters, who have been set into orbit when their savior figure (Singer) commits suicide, return momentarily to voice their lamentations in mini-codas of their own (labeled morning, afternoon, evening, and night) that bring the fugue to a close. Their aggrieved situations—as well as the plight of the townspeople as a whole—are ultimately far worse than they were when Singer inadvertently entered their lives.

In an article entitled “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: A Literary Symphony,” Barbara Farrelly argues convincingly that it was, in fact, Eroica, Beethoven's Third Symphony, which inspired McCullers to write such a novel. “[McCullers] heard what Beethoven heard. She heard ‘the whole world’; she heard a novel, and then set it to literature.”¹²

Although the broad setting is an unnamed, stagnant mill town in the Deep South in the late 1930s, most of the action in which the major characters come together contrapuntally occurs in Biff Brannon's New York Café or in John Singer's room. Their paths criss-cross throughout the town—and each goes off his separate way for a time—but all are drawn repeatedly back to Singer, from whom they derive their spiritual and emotional enrichment, just as they are drawn again and again to the all-night diner for their physical nourishment. Ultimately, their spiritual and material needs—and the nurturing that ensues temporarily—become so enmeshed that the characters have little identity apart from each other.

The novel opens on the passive Singer, who is a silverware engraver, and Antonapoulos, his Greek companion with whom he has lived for ten years. The narrator informs the reader that they have no other friends and that nothing intrudes upon their routine of eating alone in their sparsely furnished two-room dwelling in the upstairs of a small house, going weekly to the library so that Singer could check out a mystery book, attending a Friday night movie, and having Antonapoulos's picture taken every payday in a ten-cent photograph shop. However, when Antonapoulos begins stealing ridiculous objects that he does not need and his habits become obscene, he is committed to the state asylum by his cousin, in whose fruit store he works. Alone and utterly desolate, Singer thinks only of his friend. Finally, the rooms themselves that they have shared become intolerable, and Singer moves to the Kelly family's makeshift boardinghouse near the center of town and begins taking his meals at the New York Café. It is at this point that the lonely mute becomes the pivotal character of the novel and the action rises.

Mick Kelly, Jake Blount, and Benedict Mady Copeland see in the thin soberly dressed mute a certain “mystic superiority” and ascribe to him in a kind of mirror counterpoint the qualities that they would like for him to have. He becomes, in effect, a repository of their own illusions and stored-up anguish. Although Singer appears to take an interest in his interlocutors, his inner life is inviolate. The others have no way of knowing that the mute's emotional life is rooted firmly in his feelings for his obese friend, Antonapoulos, or that Antonapoulos even exists. Moreover, the Greek is as incapable of perceiving Singer's love for him as Singer himself is in perceiving the admiration of those drawn to him.

Biff Brannon, McCullers's point-of-view character—who proves to be one of the most sympathetically drawn characters in McCullers's canon—has sat day and night for twenty-one years behind the cash register in his café, quietly observing his unhappy and frustrated customers and analyzing everything he sees. Despite his bizarre behavior, Brannon is probably the most balanced of all the characters in the novel. In her abstract of the book, McCullers wrote of the café proprietor's extravagant need to ingest details and of his “faculty for seeing the things which happen around him with cold objectivity—without instinctively connecting them with himself.”¹³ Consequently, Brannon's appearances in the novel are marked by a combination of simple exposition, straightforward narration, cryptic dialogue, and an objective reporting of his observations and habits, recollections, and interpretations. At times the storytelling method almost slips into a quasi-stream-of-consciousness technique with little distance between the omniscient narrator and Brannon himself. The reader becomes aware, also, of the theatricality of scenes in which this character appears, even though most of the action concerning Brannon is internal.¹⁴

A significant aspect of Brannon's social and moral separation is his alienation from Alice, his carping wife with whom he lives in a room above the café. Brannon is fascinated by freaks (much to Alice's dismay), and the more deformed they are, the more generous he is with the liquor in his café: “Whenever somebody with a harelip or T.B. came into the place he would set him up to beer. Or if the customer were a hunchback or a bad cripple, then it would be whiskey on the house. There was one fellow who had had his peter and his left leg blown off in a boiler explosion, and whenever he came to town there was a free pint waiting for him” (17-18).

Throughout the tale Brannon is attracted to the gangly, androgynous Mick Kelly, who, more than any of the other characters, most engages the reader. Brannon mistakes Mick for a boy when she comes into the café after midnight to buy cigarettes. She is thirteen at the opening of the tale, and she smokes to stunt her growth.¹⁵ Brannon thinks uneasily of Mick's “hoarse, boyish voice and of her habit of hitching up her khaki shorts and swaggering like a cowboy in the picture show” (17). The next year, when she is a student at Vocational High and her daily garb is a red sweater and blue pleated skirt, he observes that she still “looked as much like an overgrown boy as a girl” and asks himself why “was it that the smartest people mostly missed that point?” Brannon has concluded that “by nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means. The proof? Real youth and old age” (103).

He is troubled, nonetheless, by his ambiguous sexuality. There are times when he wishes that “Mick and Baby were his kids” and that he was their mother (103). Brannon's sister-in-law, Lucille Wilson, insists that he would have made a good mother, and after his wife dies (in part 2), he imagines himself adopting a little girl with “round cheeks and gray eyes and flaxen hair” and sewing dresses for her of “pink crêpe de Chine” with “dainty smocking at the yoke and sleeves.” The café owner's desire for omniscience is evident throughout the novel. He sees himself, also, as the adoptive father of a dark-haired little boy who walks at his heels and copies everything he does. The imaginary children think of him as “Our Father” and come to him with questions that they are sure he can answer (180).¹⁶

Mick's father is a watch repairman who sits at home in a world of imagined business that is clouded by alcohol. “I got so much work to do I don't know where to begin,” he tells Mick, with whom he longs to communicate, despite his being unable to make a meaningful connection. Her mother is too busy trying to satisfy the demands of her paying boarders to provide emotional nourishment for her children. Portia Copeland, the family's black servant, tries, but is equally incapable of meeting their needs.¹⁷ Because of their parents' preoccupations, the two younger Kelly children depend on Mick for their routine care and entertainment, while Mick, in turn, remains aloof from her two older sisters, whom she resents. When her sister Etta tells her that she is sick of seeing her wear “those silly boy's clothes,” Mick retorts: “I don't want to be like either of you. … I'd rather be a boy any day, and I wish I could move in with Bill” (33). Mick's brother Bill (who has outgrown his sister and become obsessed by his own sense of freakishness) lets her keep her drawings and paintings in his room since she has no room—or closet—of her own. Mick's pictures reflect her view of the world as a chaotic and unreasonable place in which she does not fit. They are full of people whose bodies are distorted and who behave irrationally or flee for their lives.¹⁸

Mick longs for a piano and thinks that nothing is as good as music. “If we had a piano I'd practice every single night and learn every piece in the world,” she vows. She tries to develop a musical score on paper, secretly spends her lunch money on piano lessons, and tries to fashion a violin from the bridge of a broken one and a cracked ukulele. Mick swings like a pendulum between dreams and reality, and her every venture into the real world in which a dream is at stake ends unhappily. Symptomatic of her distress is a song that she wanted to compose entitled “This Thing I Want, I Know Not What,” but she could not write the song itself. McCullers made explicit in her outline of the novel that music is for Mick a “symbol of beauty and freedom.”¹⁹ To see snow—like music, a symbol of escape for Mick—becomes her great urgency. Ironically, snow is the defining image when she loses her virginity to Harry Minowitz.

Mick's simplistic world consists of her private “inside room” (filled with thoughts of John Singer, music, snow, and distant lands) and her “outside room” (in which she reflects on school, family, and her immediate environment, including Singer, whom she bids at will into both rooms). She pictures Singer in a long white sheet in much the way that she imagines God, yet admits that she does not believe in God any more than she does in Santa Claus. Singer is baffled by Mick's apparent devotion, but in his passivity is powerless to repudiate it. He asks nothing of her or of the others and makes no commitment. He is their illusion. Critics have been quick to suggest that Singer is a “false god” to everyone but Brannon, who has seen through him from the beginning.²⁰ McCullers implied throughout the novel that each character must be responsible for himself alone, and in the novel she made explicit her conviction that man's tendency to create a personal God inevitably results in an inferior creation.²¹

Vital to Mick's maturation and self-awareness are her prom party, her loss of innocence, and, ultimately, the death of Singer. A year after the opening of the narrative (the novel spans fourteen months), Mick teeters on the brink of change and laments that she is not a “member of a bunch.” In an attempt to remedy the situation, she gives a prom party and invites twenty of her new classmates at Vocational High, but the event goes awry when it is raided by the younger children of the neighborhood. Mick's guests join the interlopers in their wild antics, a disruption that foreshadows her sexual initiation a few weeks later (the teenaged boys at the party chase the girls with the spine-tipped leaves of Yucca plants—Spanish bayonets—growing in the neighborhood, an image fraught with Freudian overtones).²² In her outline of the novel, McCullers insisted that the sexual encounter between Mick and Harry after their naked swim in the country “be treated with extreme reticence” since both were “stunned by a sense of evil.”²³ In the novel, Harry—a virgin, too—tries to take the blame for their encounter and offers to marry Mick. However, she tells him that she will never marry “with any boy,” and Harry runs away that night to Birmingham (210).²⁴

Mick's haven, the “inside room” of her imagination, breaks down when Singer commits suicide. She tries to convince herself that her dime store job is temporary, yet knows that she is trapped into womanhood and servitude without choice and has no one to “take it out on” (269). Similarly, she feels cheated by the loss of her virginity, but does not blame it on Harry; it simply happened. The sense of being “cheated” without opportunity for recourse runs as a leitmotif throughout The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a misfortune that plagues every major character, as well as Mick's younger brother Bubber (who shoots another child in the head with his father's rifle), Dr. Copeland's son William (who loses his legs in the penitentiary), Mick's father (who was a carpenter until disabled from a fall), and several other secondary figures in the novel. Only Biff Brannon and Portia Copeland survive without lamentations of fraud or swindle.

For Singer, the death of Antonapoulos is the ultimate deceit. When Singer travels to another state to visit his friend and learns that he has died, he returns vacantly to his hotel and tries to play the slot machine in the lobby, but it jams, and he is enraged at being “cheated.” Although Singer gets his coin back, he recognizes that he has lost his chance to win, just as his friend is forever lost to him. As though to seek redress, Singer steals from his room the towels, soap, toilet paper, a pen, a bottle of ink, and a Bible, his behavior reminiscent of Antonapoulos's wanton shoplifting. The jammed slot machine and Singer's ineffectual response serve as an apt metaphor for his misery upon discovering that Antonapoulos—his personal savior figure—is dead.

Again and again in her fiction, McCullers depicts an inchoate world in which its people are haplessly caught. Their search for wholeness is unsuccessful because their capricious Creator has “withdrawn His hand too soon” (as Big Mama, the mother of Honey Brown, explains it in McCullers's next full-length novel, The Member of the Wedding). Because their deity has failed them, they invariably come up with other gods (self-images) of their own. Important to the author's treatment of “homemade gods” in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is Singer's dream depicting a spiritual hierarchy of gods that collapses and foreshadows his own fall.²⁵ Each major character appears kneeling in Singer's dream, just as Singer himself kneels before the disinterested Greek. Whereas all of Singer's satellites are disciples of sorts, taking their text from him and feeling abandoned, cheated, by his suicide, Singer thinks only of Antonapoulos and is incapable of living without him.

Similarly, Jake Blount feels betrayed by the mute's suicide as he remembers “all the innermost thoughts that he had told to Singer, and with his death it seemed to him that they were lost. … He had given Singer everything and then the man had killed himself. So he was left out on a limb” (260, 263). Blount, too, suffers from the inability to communicate or even to find a common sentiment. Obsessed with one idea—social justice and equality—he hates the inequities in the working conditions of the victimized mill workers whom he tries to incite to strike for higher wages and better working conditions. Their indifference and hostility toward him confirm his sense of powerlessness.

Blount's dreams mirror his frustration. In one, he walks through a starved, silent crowd with a large covered basket (“the burden he had carried in his arms so long” [265]) that he cannot put down. His compulsive monologues convince Brannon that he is “a man thrown off his track by something. … Talk—talk—talk. The words came out of his throat like a cataract” (14). Despite his first impression, insists Brannon, Blount is not a freak: “It was like something was deformed about him—but when you looked at him closely each part of him was normal and as it ought to be” (17).²⁶

Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, too, is an alien in a strange land. Born in the South but educated in the North, he has returned to Georgia to rear his family and to lead his people out of sickness and servitude. He dreams day and night of racial equality, but blames his own race for most of its problems. When his daughter Portia tells him that her brother William and many others of their race have been swindled by a black con artist, he replies, “The Negro race of its own accord climbs up on the cross on every Friday” (60). A disciple of Marx and Spinoza, Copeland had named his children for them and planned their lives according to his dreams, but they are grown when the novel begins, and not one has followed the career he dictated. Portia tells him that a “person can't pick up they children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they wants them to be” (61). He must not, in effect, try to play God, she insists. Like Blount at the peak of his frustrations, the doctor abuses himself physically, drinks strong liquor, and hammers his head upon the floor. At the family reunion, he sits alone, angry and frustrated, as the others listen to his father-in-law's discourse on Resurrection Day, when they will be made “white as cotton” (114). Also like Blount, Copeland is plagued by an inability to communicate and to cope with his moral isolation and estrangement from society. When he hears of William's mistreatment in prison and goes to the courthouse to see the judge, he is accused of being drunk and is ridiculed, beaten, and thrown into a crowded, filthy jail that mirrors everything he abhors about the conditions of his own race. Finally, dying of tuberculosis, Copeland retreats to the family farm, wondering, as he lies in his father-in-law's wagon, how it was possible that “all remained to be done and nothing was completed.” Although he cannot pull himself upright to talk, he feels the “fire of justice” alive within his disease-ridden body and vows to return “after only a month or two,” unwilling to relinquish his illusions (255).

Ultimately, it is the androgynous Brannon who best expresses McCullers's own feelings when he sits alone in his café and is startled by a vision of the power of love and the inevitability of isolation and despair:

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 the 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. … 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.

(273)

Brannon is not allowed a total vision, however. He accepts that he will never again love just one person—but “anybody decent who [comes] in out of the street to sit for an hour and have a drink”—yet he represses full knowledge. To know more is to know too much, Brannon concludes. Unlike Singer, Brannon accepts and endures his suffering. Brannon, rather than Singer, emerges as the Christ figure. It is with Brannon in a tableau of affirmation that seems frozen in time that McCullers closes her novel.

Upon publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter on June 4, 1940, early reviewers greeted the book and its young author with high praise. Rose Feld, writing for the New York Times Book Review, observed that McCullers had “an astonishing perception of humanity,” and that her imagination was “rich and fearless.”²⁷ Ben Ray Redman declared to readers of The Saturday Review of Literature that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was an extraordinary novel “in its own right, considerations of authorship apart.”²⁸ Richard Wright thought McCullers's quality of despair in the novel was “unique and natural … more natural and authentic than that of Faulkner.” Wright said that he was impressed most by the “astonishing humanity” that enabled 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.”²⁹ The subject of numerous critical studies over the nearly fifty years since its publication, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter remains, in the opinion of many critics, one of only a handful of truly distinguished first novels by major American writers of the twentieth century.

Notes

1. Whit Burnett also bought a second tale, “Like That,” which remained unpublished until McCullers's sister included it in the posthumous collection, The Mortgaged Heart, ed. Margarita G. Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 64-73.

2. For another version of McCullers's illumination regarding the transformation of Harry Minowitz into John Singer, see McCullers's essay, “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing,” Esquire 52 (Dec. 1959): 162-164; reprinted in The Mortgaged Heart, 275. This version is part of an unpublished manuscript identified only as “A speech on her first public appearance.” Oliver Evans Collection, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.

3. Virginia Spencer Carr, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), 19.

4. McCullers's working title was “The Mute.” The book was retitled The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter just before publication upon the insistence of McCullers's editor, Robert Linscott. The new title was taken from a phrase in the poem “The Lonely Hunter” by William Sharp (Fiona MacLeod): “But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts / on a lonely hill.” See Fiona MacLeod, Poems and Dramas (New York: Duffield, 1914), 27.

5. Carson McCullers, “Author's Outline of ‘The Mute’” in Oliver Evans, Carson McCullers: Her Life and Work (London: Peter Owen, 1965), 195-215; further citations to “Author's Outline of ‘The Mute’” are from the The Mortgaged Heart, 124-149.

6. Ralph McGill, The South and the Southerner (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 217.

7. “Author's Outline of ‘The Mute,’” 124, 148.

8. “Author's Outline of ‘The Mute,’” 148.

9. McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), 12. All page references within the text are to this edition.

10. Mick's chapters are 1, 5, 9, 11, and 14; Brannon's chapters are 2 and 8; Copeland's chapters are 3, 6, 10, and 13; Blount's chapters are 4 and 12; Singer's chapters are 7 and 15.

11. “Author's Outline of ‘The Mute,’” 138.

12. Barbara A. Farrelly, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: A Literary Symphony,” Pembroke Magazine 20 (1988): 16-23.

13. “Author's Outline of ‘The Mute,’” 137.

14. In Thomas Ryan's screenplay of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Brannon was eliminated as a major character on the grounds that he was the “least dramatizable in the book.” Thomas Ryan to Carr, letter, 8 Oct. 1970.

15. McCullers herself was thirteen when she began smoking, convinced that if her growth rate continued she would be eight feet tall in a matter of months and no different from the freaks who came annually to Columbus, Georgia, with the midway of the Chattahoochee Valley Fair. Carr, The Lonely Hunter, 30.

16. Although Brannon plays the role of parent only in his fantasies, there are, in fact, many actual fathers and mothers portrayed in McCullers's later fiction. Yet not one exerts any positive influence upon his or her children. Some are dead (through childbirth or suicide); the rest are either passive and weak or too concerned with gaining identity and personal fulfillment through their offspring (or with finding some shred of meaning in their own wasted lives independent of their children) to provide more than the rudiments of a family structure or to demonstrate real affection, compassion, or love. The children repeatedly look elsewhere for someone to fulfill their insatiable needs.

17. Portia Copeland is modeled in part upon Vannie Copland Jackson, a cook in the Smith family household. Vannie Copland Jackson to Carr, interview, Columbus, Ga., 16 Oct. 1987.

18. For an excellent discussion of the child's search for his/her place (and his/her sexual identity) in the adult world, see Louise Westling, “Carson McCullers's Tomboys,” Southern Humanities Review 4 (1982): 339-350; and Constance M. Perry, “Carson McCullers and the Female Wunderkind,” The Southern Literary Journal 19 [1] (Fall 1986): 36-45.

19. “Author's Outline of ‘The Mute,’” 128.

20. See, especially, Frank Durham, “God and No God in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” South Atlantic Quarterly 56 (Autumn 1957): 494-499; Ihab Hassan, “Carson McCullers: The Alchemy of Love and Aesthetics of Pain,” Modern Fiction Studies 5 (Winter 1959-60): 311-321; Wayne D. Dodd, “The Development of Theme Through Symbol in the Novels of Carson McCullers,” Georgia Review 17 (Summer 1963): 206-213; Chester E. Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963) 247; Klaus Lubbers, “The Necessary Order: A Study of Theme and Structure in Carson McCullers' Fiction,” Jahrbüch für Amerikastudien 8 (1963): 187-204; and David Madden, “The Paradox of the Need for Privacy and the Need for Understanding in Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Literature and Psychology 17 [2-3] (1967): 128-140.

21. “Author's Outline of ‘The Mute,’” 124.

22. See also Irving Buchen, “Carson McCullers: The Case of Convergence,” Bucknell Review 21 (Spring 1973): 15-28; and Jack B. Moore, “Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Timeless Hunter,” Twentieth Century Literature 11 (July 1965): 76-81.

23. “Author's Outline of ‘The Mute,’” 129, 130.

24. Constance Perry (in “Carson McCullers and the Female Wunderkind”) argues convincingly that Mick's admission that “she was a grown person now, whether she wanted to be or not” (274) marked her recognition that in her culture to be an adult woman was to be inferior, “somehow shameful and obscene” (42-43); Perry concludes that with “the intrusion of adult sexuality into [Mick's] world, she also loses her identity and her artistic dreams.”

25. Durham (in “God and No God in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”) treats the novel as an “ironic religious allegory” and sees both Singer and Antonapoulos as Gods who neither understand their suppliants nor communicate with them. Dodd (in “The Development of Theme Through Symbol in the Novels of Carson McCullers”) suggests that in McCullers's depiction of an endless progression of gods there is a “pseudo-metaphysical basis” for the “total lack of understanding and communication between man and man.” See also Mary A. Whitt, “The Mutes in McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Pembroke Magazine 20 (1988): 24-29. Whitt addresses the roles of the two deaf mutes and analyzes the religious overtones apparent in the “godless” society in which the characters of this novel live.

26. See Frances Kestler, “Gothic Influence of the Grotesque Characters of the Lonely Hunter,” Pembroke Magazine 20 (1988): 30-36.

27. Rose Feld, “A Remarkable First Novel of Lonely Lives,” New York Times Book Review (16 June 1940): 6.

28. Ben Ray Redman, “Of Human Loneliness,” The Saturday Review of Literature 22 (8 June 1940): 6.

29. Richard Wright, “Inner Landscape,” New Republic, 103 (5 Aug. 1940): 195.