A Study Of Body Narrative In Carson McCullers’s Novels

Carson McCullers is one of the representative female writers in American southern literature in the 1940s.Her works are permeated with American southern traditions and reflect the common living conditions of humankind.Along her whole life,Carson McCullers altogether creates five novels and she portrays the spiritual loneliness and isolation of Americans in her time through her works,namely,The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,The Ballad of the Sad Cafe,The Member of Wedding,Reflections in a Golden Eye and Clock without Hands.Up to now,although literary criticism of McCullers covers a wide scope of fields including New Criticism,feminism,queer studies and other methods of criticism,seldom does any literary review discuss body narrative in her texts and explore McCullers’s critical views on the southern social problems in her works.Based on a close reading of her novels,the author of this thesis seeks to study the body narrative of the main characters in her novels and reveal the deeper implied meanings of those body images.First of all,this thesis discusses the invisible gaze and discipline of such deep-ingrained ideas as "southern belle",white-supremacy and heterosexuality which are imposed on the bodies of southerners.Among those bodies,there are docile ones which willingly accept and internalize those social norms as well as rebellious bodies which defy the oppression of mainstream ideas.Through the portrayal of those body images,Carson McCullers reveals how the southern mainstream culture inflicts harm on the human bodies.Second,the issue of alienated bodies in the capitalist society is studied.Through analyzing the estrangement among social members,family members and the protagonists themselves,the author of this thesis finds that the industrial civilization increasingly severs the humanity of human beings and people grow more and more estranged from each other.McCullers tells about people’s sufferings by describing the grotesque bodies of the freaks in her novels and reflects on the living plight of the individuals in the southern society.Lastly,this thesis explores the metaphorical meanings implied in the body illnesses of the major characters in the southern society.Leukemia of Malone,stroke and obesity of Judge Clane and tuberculosis of the black doctor Copeland all carry certain metaphorical meanings in the novels,alluding to the conservatism and racism existing in the southern society.In a word,body narrative in Carson McCullers’s novels carries rich connotations.McCullers adopts body narrative as a weapon to reveal the plight of the southerners.Through the description of the disciplined bodies,alienated bodies and metaphorical meanings of body illnesses,McCullers condemned the patriarchal culture,the conservatism and racism existing in the American southern society.