The Flowering Dream

Carson McCullers was a female writer who was regarded as a whiz kid and was one of the most famous writers during the period of 1940s and 1950s in USA. She had suffered from the affliction of illness as well as emotion throughout her life. If her short career of writing was "the flowering dream", a dozen of novellas and novels which she left for the common people could be considered as "the flowers in the dream". This thesis has tried to analyze the major fictions of McCullers comprehensively. On the one hand, this thesis focuses on the content of the fictions to illustrate the two major themes of her works, which are loneliness and incapability of love, and the relationship between loneliness and incapability of love, so as to research into the everlasting charm of the fictions of McCullers; on the other hand, this paper concentrates on the forms of her fictions to analyze the narrative strategies and the uncanny style of her works to grasp the means of artistic expression of the works.According to the description of McCullers, loneliness and incapability of love are the two prominent themes. Love reflects incapability when it meets loneliness and such incapable love intensifies the extent of loneliness. This thesis will analyze her works profoundly and discuss the universal significances of loneliness and the allegorical meaning of this unfailing theme; In doing so, this paper will proceed with sex roles and make use of feminism to analyze the androgyny and the love between the persons of the same sex, so as to indicate the incapacity of love when it encounters loneliness and point out that love can also deepen the loneliness when confronting it.As a representative female writers of American southern literature, McCullers set the south, where she lived, as the background and progressed her fiction writing which contained her own life experiences. This thesis will guide to understand the style of grotesqueness and the Gothic tradition of the works by means of analyzing relationship between the writer and southern literature and the relation between the authoress and other southern writers. In doing so, this paper will continue to discuss the relationship between the individual experiences of the writer and the fabrication of the literature and to expound the writing techniques, the narrative strategies and the relationship between them and the theme.