Dialogue, Monologue And Spiritual Isolation: On The Textual Representation Of Loneliness In Mccullers’Works

Carson McCullers is one of the most prominent southern female writers in the20l-century American literature. Her works are mostly concerned with the living condition of the marginalized people with the locale of a small southern town. As a recurring theme of McCullers’works, the spiritual predicament of loneliness of the marginalized people is exposed in the conflicts between the individual and the collective in three of her most representative works, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Throughout McCullers studies, the exploration of aesthetic values and societal implications seem to be incompatible in that the early formalist reviews often neglect the social content of her works while the ideological criticism seldom touches upon the formal issues. Therefore, this thesis employs Bakhtin’s dialogic theory to combine the study of formal features and social implications by analyzing the main characters’ dialogues and voices. The conflicting voices embedded in the main characters’ utterances reveal the confrontation between the free play of individuality and the collective force of traditional social values, which serves as the source of their spiritual isolation and loneliness.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter is the Introduction, which is devoted to the literature review of McCullers studies and the theoretical background of Bakhtin’s dialogic theory. The second chapter offers a focused study of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter to examine dialogic monologues and monologic dialogues among the main characters. While the dialogicality in Biff’s monologue reveals his self construction of gender identity and his opposing voice against the traditional gender norm, monologicality in Jake’s and Copeland’s dialogues suggests Singer’s objectification and reveals the ideological internalization of the workers and the black community as the source of their estrangement and isolation. The third chapter probes into the dialogues between the female protagonist Frankie and the black cook Berenice in The Member of the Wedding. Berenice’s utterances embody the traditional gender values of the southern culture, which results in the suppression of Frankie’s individuality. Frankie’s language mirrors her construction of identity. Her fruitless struggle for self assertion reflects the oppression of female articulation in a patriarchal society. The fourth chapter focuses on the analysis of the narrator’s voice in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. While the narrator’s voice can be viewed as the integration of oral voice and literary voice, the former, with subjectivity and emotional coloring, comes from the narrator as a member of the town’s community and represents the voice of the collective, and the latter, which is objective and transcends the story, comes from the narrator as a ballad singer and challenges the internalized traditional cultural values.In conclusion, her works are a battlefield for multiple voices conveyed by the characters’utterances, fighting against a dominant monological voice which denies free play of individuality. The negative consequence of the overwhelming collective force of dominant ideology in a monological world provokes questions about the well established social rules and cultural values.