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Desiring Brotherhood
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A Georgia-born novelist renowned for her sensitive portrayal
of southern people and their spiritual isolation, Carson McCullers,
until recently, was predominantly regarded as a regional author
whose concern with racism and homophobia reflects her daily
witness of violence and injustice in the South.
1
Critics praise her
use of Gothic symbolism and attribute this tendency to her
southern inheritance; McCullers herself is also aware of her
inheritance of this Gothic school of southern writing. As she wrote
in 1940, the Gothic, a kin of the Russian realists’ tradition of
“moral realism,” equipped southern writers to “transpose the
painful substance of life around them as accurately as possible”
(McCullers, 2005: 258). The surfeit of grotesques, eccentricities,
loners and outcasts in her decadent tales has been interpreted as an
epitome of the southern literary tradition’s penchant for cruelty
and depravity.
2
However, this emphasis on McCullers’s regional
1
For instance, McCullers’s biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, considered to be an
authority on McCullers studies, remarks that critics tend to compare and contrast
McCullers’s work with other southern or regional writers such as Eudora Welty,
Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe
and Sherwood Anderson. For details, see the first chapter in her
Understanding
Carson McCullers
(1990). In
Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens
(1985), Louise
Westling explores how southern writers such as McCullers, O’Connor, and Welty
reacted to the violent and hypocritical world of patriarchy. Another specialist in
McCullers criticism is Jan Whitt, who analyzes the religious backdrop (i.e.
southern Protestantism) in McCullers’s works in
Allegory and the Modern
Southern Novel
(1994). In this book she engages with Faulkner, McCullers and
O’Connor, pointing out the importance of Christian symbolism in a study of the
literature of the American South. All these critics rely heavily on regionalism to
explore McCullers’s fiction.
2
Tennessee Williams has linked McCullers’s use of “symbols of the grotesque and
the violent” to her affinity with the Gothic school of southern writing. In defense
of McCullers’s “morbid” taste, he writes: “
Reflections in a Golden Eye
is one of
the purest and most powerful of those works which are conceived in that Sense of
The Awful which is the desperate black root of nearly all significant modern art”
(1986: 15). Virginia Spencer Carr has likewise noted McCullers’s penchant for
grotesques. She interprets the novelist’s preoccupation with freaks and misfits as a
kind of existential angst, a sense of alienation and the profound anguish
experienced by McCullers and her characters in the specifically southern setting