A Study On The Image Of Patients With Mental Disorder In McCullers’ Novels

Carson McCullers(1917-1967)is a wunderkind in the 20th century of American literary history.Her novels,The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,Reflections in a Golden Eye,The Member of the Wedding and Clock Without Hands,were successfully adapted into films or Broadway plays and won Guggenheim Fellowship twice.The research of McCullers’s novels mainly focuses on subject research,character image research and artistic characteristic research currently.The character image research focuses on marginal people,including gender deviants,freaks,clowns,Blacks and Southern Girls.Freaks include the physical aberration and spiritual aberration people.Academic community has already studied the spiritual aberration people,that is,psychological disorders.But this paper researches psychological disorders in McCullers novels systematically for the first time.Psychological disorder belongs to perverted psychology,which is generally influenced by biological factors,psychological causes and society,which leads to different degrees of emotional and behavioral changes.It may cause the brain dysfunction,leading to different degrees of cognitive,emotional and behavioral changes in a variety of psychological disorders or mental disorders.From the point of view of abnormal psychology,many of the characters belong to psychological disorders.McCullers deems that literary creators should take on the philosophical responsibility of asking reasons and proposing answers,who has a strong sense of social improvement and owns humanistic care of the weak.Through the dual vision of writers and patients,McCullers poured attention and deep sympathy on these characters,thought about the problems of gender,race and class in American Southern Society,and showed the feelings and heights of being an intellectual.This article is divided into three parts:the introduction,the text and the conclusion,and the main part of which has four chapters.This paper starts from three aspects,such as the reason of topic selection,the research status at home and abroad,the significance of topic selection and research methods.At present,the research of McCullers at home and abroad is mainly divided into writers’ research and work research.The writer’s research mainly focuses on McCullers’s life research,and the work research mainly focuses on the subject,the character image,the artistic characteristic and so on.In the aspect of topic research,the academic circles pay more attention to the themes of loneliness and spiritual isolation.And in the study of characters,the academic circles pay more attention to the image of gender deviant and aberration people in the image of marginal man.In the aspect of artistic characteristic research,the academic circles pay more attention to narrative art and Gothic art.There is still a lack of research on the image of patients with psychological disorders who are also marginal people in McCullers’s novels,and there is a relatively large research space.This paper makes a comprehensive use of psychological criticism,postmodernism theory and criticism,feminist criticism,post-colonial criticism,social-historical criticism and other theories and criticism methods to analyze the image of patients with psychological disorders in McCullers writing,and explore the reasons for the McCullers of disease writing.The first chapter studies the patients with sexual disorders in McCullers’s novels.Frankie and biff,who are both gender identity disorders,have a gender identity or gender sense that is contrary to their biological gender and don’t conform to the established norms of Southern American mythology.Frankie is restricted by the kitchen,bedroom and so on as the representative of the power system.Under extreme oppression,Frankie want to go to Alaska;Biff is bound by the norms and patterns of behavior required by the patriarchal society,so he has to play a male role that run counter to his own psychological gender,but he eventually choose to contend with the established norms of the patriarchal society;Williams suffers from paraphilia,and his libido is repressed and degraded due to sexual taboos in the family and barracks,and eventually release his libido through morbid voyeurism.This behavior eventually lead to his destruction.The second chapter studies the People with mood disorder in McCullers’s novels.Alison is suppressed by the patriarchal society in her married life and eventually become a victim of a patriarchal society;Jack Bronte is soberly aware of the social problems in the United States,such as the poverty and racial inequality,and he keep speaking but is not understood by others,and eventually toward Mania.The third chapter studies the personality disorder patients in McCullers’s novels.Sherman do not know the biological parents,and become the victim of sexual assault by his adoptive father during the childhood.As a half-breed,he is the double other of the white world and the black community,suffering from the pain of family trauma and racial trauma,and eventually become paranoid personality disorder patients;Deaf-Mute Singer has endured the loneliness of the loving and the loneliness of homosexuals,and become silent and alienated.He is unwilling to integrate into any group,and eventually choose to die by suicide.The fourth chapter discusses the reasons for the writing of the disease.The personal reasons are individual experience and the concept of disease writing and creation;Social reasons are frequent war,psychosocial diseases and the writing of diseases in the Western modern society.The conclusion probes into the practical significance of McCullers’s disease writing and its outstanding contribution in the writing of western modern literary diseases.McCullers’s works are very realistic,and the disease of the characters is a metaphor for all kinds of oppression of social reality in the southern United States.Through the image of grotesque people of physiology and mental disorders,McCullers expands the promenade of western modern disease writing characters.