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UR
A
MERICA
color has given way, in recent scholarship, to an acknowledgement
of her equal attention to international themes and affairs. Writing
in the turbulent era of the Great Depression and the following
period of international fascism that led to World War II, McCullers
was sensitive to political issues both at home and abroad.
Cosmopolitan imaginaries can be tracked in her fiction. For
example, in the short story “Correspondence,” a teenage girl pours
out her heart to a Brazilian pen pal who never replies. In “The
Aliens,” a story set in 1935, a Jewish refugee arrives in the South
after fleeing the increasing persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.
3
In
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
(2001a), she creates a Greek
character
—
a deaf-mute named Antonapoulos who looks dumb and
coarse, but for some mysterious reason receives the unfailing
devotion and love of the central character, John Singer, a refined
and sophisticated gentleman who is a deaf-mute as well. Another
foreign presence in the nation’s borders is Anacleto, an intriguing
Filipino character who appears in
Reflections in a Golden Eye
(2001c). In
The Member of the Wedding
(2001b), a 12-year-old
tomboyish girl, Frankie Addams, dreams of joining the
globetrotting U.S. Army to fight the Germans and Japanese. These
imaginative capacities to visualize transnational spaces and
characters are important proofs of McCullers’s cosmopolitanism
and bespeak the inadequacy of southern regionalism as the
dominant model to interpret her fiction. We need to seriously
consider the geopolitical significance of McCullers’s characters and
arrive at a more nuanced and expansive
method of interpreting
how the supposedly remote region functions as a suggestive index
that unsettles the normative thinking so often used to theorize her
novels.
In fact, recent works on American regionalism have focused
on the much ignored (at least, in the majority of criticisms in the
(1990: 38).
3
These two short stories are included in
Collected Stories of Carson McCullers
(McCullers, 1987).