Carson McCullers’ Novels In "Gender Performativity"

Carson McCullers (1917-1967), a famous American writer. Her novels——The Song for Sad Cafe, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter have become classics on American southern literature. She built up a wired and isolated Southern world, created many queer and impressive characters and talked about some inherent and unsolved problems.Through "New Criticism" and "Feminism" literary theories, the novels of Carson McCullers’s have been studied more deeply, the themes and contents of novels have been enriched, showing eternal and enduring charming. With the emergence of Queer theory in the 1990s, Carson McCullers’s works will be in a new round of inspection.Judith Butler is a founder of post-structural feminism and the pioneer of Queer theory, whose theories covers politics, racism, gender selections and many other aspects. She inherited views from Foucault and Beauvoir’s structuralism and feminism theory and put forward the more radical "Gender Performativity", arguing that there was no difference between sex and gender, what we called gender was constructed by social regulations and was transformative.Taking Carson McCullers’s novels The Song for Sad Cafe and Reflections in a Golden Eye as the objects of study, this thesis aims to analyze the world of Carson McCullers’s novels under the Queer theory’s "Gender Performativity".This thesis may be divided into six parts, including introduction, four body chapters and conclusion. The introduction summarizes the study of Carson McCullers’s novels and points out the creative views of this thesis. Chapter One concludes Judith Butler’s theory and Carson McCullers experience to find out the importance of queer study on Carson McCullers’s novels. Chapter Two and Three takes The Song for Sad Cafe and Reflections in a Golden Eye as subjects to display the static of queer world from characters, environments and themes. With the "Gender Performativity", Chapter Five analyzes "Amelia" and "Penderton" to show the process of gender selections and transformation.