English Language and Literature ETDs

Publication Date

5-12-1975

Abstract

Even though she died at the age of fifty, Carson McCullers' career as a writer spanned more than a quarter of a century. During that period, beginning in the middle 1930s, she gave up an early ambition to become a concert pianist and devoted her talents exclusively to writing. Her musical training, however, had a tremendous impact on her fiction. Not only did she draw from her experiences in and knowledge of the field of music; she also employed her musical background in the treatment of themes, in the handling of structure, and even in the development of her prose style, an unusually lucid and poetic style that has been compared to that of Flaubert and Tolstoy. Her vision of reality, as it emerged from the five published novels that appeared between 1939 and 1961, was personal and paradoxical. The philosophy observable in approximately twenty published short stories was basically the same even though the short story format precluded development of theme in depth: essentially, McCullers saw man as a lonely wanderer, always seeking to love, sometimes succeeding, but almost never achieving the states of lover and beloved simultaneously or for any enduring length of time. The philosophy underlying that vision has definite Platonic and Christian connotations: love unrequited becomes ideal love; it is better to love than to be loved; the lover has complete control over the quality of his love. Carson McCullers' first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, published when the author was twenty-three, was hailed as a remarkably perceptive and precocious work that presaged a great future as a writer. The later novels, including Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and Clock Without Hands (1961) bore out the promise of the first work, although in at least two cases--Reflections in a Golden Eye and Clock Without Hands--critical comment was deeply and justifiably divided between praise and negative reaction. The short stories, in the meantime, did little to enhance her reputation, even though some, including "Wunderkind" and "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud," have been widely studied because of their merits and because they foreshadowed much that was to come in the novels. Thus a broad view reveals overall, if uneven, growth of McCullers' vision and artistic ability, both of which were closely tied to her physical health and seeming incapacity to sustain relationships with people who were important to her. The novels employ Southern settings exclusively. Many of the characters rank as grotesques, expressions of the outré in humanity; their physical, mental, or moral defects, coupled with their endless searches for love--and through love, identity--in a dark world where violence always seems possible if not probable, have, in the eyes of critics, placed McCullers among the “Southern Gothic” school of writers. The present study, taken with other evidence, suggests strongly that she more properly belongs among the front rank of American writers in whose works one finds nostalgia and loneliness reflected against the backdrop of a huge and often alien and violent land. In short, above and beyond the stature she enjoys as one of the best of the Southern writers, Carson McCullers merits a secure place among the leading American authors of the twentieth century.

Degree Name

English

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

English

First Committee Member (Chair)

David A. Remley

Second Committee Member

Mary Bess Whidden

Third Committee Member

James Francis Barbour

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

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