Women 's "Restricted" And "Escape" In Carson McCarthy' S Novels

Carson McCullers is one of writers on behalf of the Southern literary in the United States whose works have a strong southern flavor. Because of its unique status of a woman writer, the creation is different from other Southern writers. Women unconsciously become the object of her attention. This paper attempts to show the living conditions of the female characters in her main work including Reflections in a Golden Eye, Members of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and two representative short stories of restless child and family dilemma, analyzed widespread phenomenon of the paradox of "limit" and "escape" in Carson’s works, revealed lack of spiritual life of women in the background of economic and cultural backwardness in south of America compared to the North and reflected women living condition in south of America.In McCullers’novels, the female characters are all alive in "abnormal" state, above-mentioned female characters can be divided into two kinds underage girls which represented by Frank and Mick according to their growth stage, and mature females which represented by Emily, Leonora and Alison. They are all limited by space and time more or less, under the social condition of weak resistance, only by escaping from their own female identity to obtain the false escaping, but this kind of escaping is always in vain. This paper is based on intensive reading, and interpreted the creation themes of "limit" and "escape" in above McCullers’six works using relevant contemporary western literary theory. This paper is divided into three parts: the first part analyzes the relevant study on McCullers’novels at home and abroad, and then classified on these study. The second part is given priority to "limit" phenomenon, and takes two heroines Leonora and Alison in the Reflections in a Golden Eye as representative to analyze the female’s limitation to their body; then based on intensive reading of Members of the Wedding, restless child and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, found the limitation of the female body coming from space and time."Limit" and "escape" is one pair of interconnected contradictions, if there has limitation, there will have escaping, in the third part escaping will be divided into young girl’s fleeing and mature female’s fleeing, the escaping represented by Mick reflects a way of young girl’s fleeing, represented by Alison reflects a way of the mature female’s fleeing. Whether they are girls or mature women, the fleeing results are failed.Carson McCullers’novels showed a twisted world, it reflects women’s spiritual crisis under the southern morbid society. In the themes of "limit" and "escape", every novel is like a sharp knife which directly hitting to women’s survival plight. She awakens attention to female’s spirit and psychology from human society through revealing the character’s inner distorted and variant morbid psychological intention, and urges women to face their own female identity at the same time, the behavior of denying female identity and trying to escape the spiritual predicament by savior is meaningless.