Lesbian Gothic: A Subversive Genre-A Lesbian Gothic Interpretation Of Carson McCullers' Three Representative Fictions

Over the fifity years' McCullers's criticisms, who was one of most influential and talented American southern writers, the motif of "spiritual isolation" has constantly appeared as not the key but dominant word in the critical essays home and abroad, which resulted in the sole interpretation of McCullers's fictional world, separating the texts of McCullers from the specific historical background, decreasing the potential value of McCullers' novel and novella. In the different historical periods and based on different ideologies, the critics of McCullers's studies have devoted to interpret McCullers's works at all aspects, trying so hard to make original and innovative exploration and interpretation of the theme Spiritual Isolation, and breaking through the limitation that New Criticism made.Queer theory and lesbian criticism broadened the vision on McCullers's studies, having its breaking-through influence. In Kenschaft's homosexual and relationship: lesbian interpretation of Carson McCullers, he comes up with the idea that to interpret the theme of spiritual isolation in the queer culture background, in which he pointed that the homosexual love appears again and again in McCullers's fictional world. Accordingly, by putting McCullers's fictions into the queer culture background, the theme of McCullers's world will have new interpretation. The one who has homosexual inclination has a better understanding and a more sensitive sensibility of loneliness and the feeling of being isolation. Why McCullers prefers to concentrate on the theme of the adolescent can also be understood according to this. The fear of being lesbian stimulates her to avoid describing the desire of the opposite sex but expressing her contradiction vision against the opposite love through a lesbian's vision. From which her adoption of grotesque may have a reasonable explanation. As in the lesbian cultural situation, grotesque can better reflect the situation in which the group of people lives.Based on the special genre of literature the lesbian gothic, the essay supposed to reinterpret and redefine three representative works of Carson McCullers, combining the lesbian gothic with the lesbian criticism. The entire thesis would explore the two issues. The reason why the writer with lesbian inclination would like to write the gothic novel is the gothic fiction in form may allow the writers to create different space in which the writer herself can express anti-normal opinions, subverting the so called ordinary value. Lesbian gothic fiction belongs to a genre of fiction which subverts the traditional value of the society, ethnic and religion and has its obvious subversive meaning. By giving McCullers various possibility of identities, her fictional world have multiple meaning and interpretation beneath the simple facade, letting the critics have various interpretation and exploration, avoiding the exploration over the simple theme "Spiritual alienation" and " irreparable loneliness".