"The Sojourner" In The South

Carson McCullers born in Columbus,a small town in Georgia,establishes her reputation in the twentieth-century American literary history.A bitter controversy over "a Southerner or a non-Southerner" of McCullers's literary identity has been aroused by critics since her debut burst upon the literary scene in 1940.Shuttling back and forth between her birthplace and the outside world as a"sojourner",McCullers devotes herself to writing with ambivalent feelings about the South.In the context of society,history and culture,the dissertation attempts to explore her literary identity by the scrutiny of the "Southernness" of her works in terms of initiation,space,gender and race.At the very outset from the largely autobiographical initiation stories by McCullers,the dissertation focuses on Mick and Frankie to discuss the adolescent fear,the liminal phase of initiation and the transgressions of growth.McCullers's self-located sense of uncertainty is echoed in a writing of reflexivity which heralds a journey of self-knowledge for herself.With a strong sensitivity to space,McCullers employs the spatial narrative to demonstrate her perception of the power and ideology in the modern society of the South.Some typical images in her works,such as the mirror,the New York Cafe,the Sunny Dixie Show and a nameless small town in the South,are the apt vehicles for the crisis of existence of the marginalized people.McCullers's blurring of her gender identity is the motive for her to concentrate on some freakish men and women in writings,including the feminine impotent men,the unconventional Southern women and the masculine amazon who break with the gender conventions of "the Southern family romance".To expose the subversive nature inherent in these morbid men and women,McCullers reflects upon the upheavals and the modernization of the South.Keeping a close watch on the race issue of the South,McCullers writes about some characters of the ethnic minority groups,such as a mulatto,a Jew and a Filipino boy in her novels.From the perspective of a "sojourner" who offers doubling views of both an insider and an outsider,McCullers elaborates the acute racial conflicts and the worsening racial politics of the South.All in all,writing is a form of genuine self-expression for McCullers.Taking herself as a "sojourner",to a great extent,McCullers is an exile or a wanderer when she writes about the South in view of initiation,space,gender and race.The dissertation comes to a conclusion that her writings strike a delicate balance between regionalism and universality.