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able-bodied superiority by casting the female and the feminized
men as deficient, deviant, or inferior. This male-centered attitude is
reflected in his demeaning representations of his frail wife Alison,
his effeminate fellow officer Lieutenant Weincheck, and the
eunuch-like houseboy Anacleto. “Morbidity” is the word that is
conjured up in his mind when he thinks of Alison and Weincheck.
A “big-nosed female Job” (McCullers, 2001c: 339), Alison suffers
from diseases ranging from “empyema, kidney trouble . . . , and . . .
heart disease” (361). However, her husband thinks that her pains
are not real but instead result from a “hypochondriacal fake that
she used in order to shirk her duties
—
that is, the routine of sports
and parties which he thought suitable” (362). After discovering her
husband’s affair with Leonora, Alison, frantic with anger and
frustration, clips off her nipples with the garden shears (327).
Although this “scandal” shocks everybody, it does not deter the
affair, which continues in a more subdued way. A bizarre
friendship even begins between “the wife who has been betrayed
and the object of her husband’s love.” McCullers describes Alison’s
strange emotional attachment to Leonora as “morbid”; it is a
“bastard of shock and jealousy” (328). Throughout the novel,
Alison lies in bed most of the time. She finally dies in an asylum to
which she has been sent by her husband.
Since its publication,
Reflections in a Golden Eye
has been
charged with “morbidity,” a word that in psychoanalytic parlance
is closely related to the feminine gender. According to the Oxford
Dictionary, the word “morbid” is “characterized by an abnormal
and unhealthy interest in disturbing and unpleasant subjects,
especially death and disease.” Tethered to perversity and pathology,
morbidity must be understood as an antisocial affect that is infused
with the death drive. For McCullers’s contemporary critics, her
depiction of her characters’ emotional perversities or failures has
been interpreted as an indulgence in the vagaries of abnormal
psychology. This unwholesome obsession with morbidity offers no
redemption and proves a disappointing limitation in McCullers’s