A Mirror-phase Approach To The Freaks Of The Ballad Of The Sad Caf(?)

Carson McCullers(1917-1967),a well-known American southern writer in the twentieth century,is renowned as the “wunderkind” amongst the most brilliant American writers.McCullers is good at shaping “freaks and grotesques” to reveal human beings' spiritual isolation and love inability.Published in 1943 as the only novella of Carson McCullers,The Ballad of the Sad Café describes the freaks' psychosis and the complex emotional entanglement of the outlandish triangle relationship.With the novella transcending her own times and the “south”,McCullers aptly digs out the very root of human tragedy and exaggeratedly portrays the freaks and grotesque tales,which reveals the common fate of modern human beings.Based on Lacanian psychoanalysis,the present thesis mainly focuses on the Mirror-phase theory to analyze the three freaks' urgent causes of self-identity construction,the misrecognition during the identifying process with specular images and the tragic denouement of self-identity construction.The urgent causes of three freaks' self-identity construction are shown in the first chapter,namely,the perplexity and uncertainty of their original self-identity.The absence of the mother and the untimely death of the father result in Miss Amelia's indifferent and rootless mentality at a very young age;Both the absence of parents and the inborn malformation lead to Hunchback Lymon's lonesome and bewildered heart;The troublesome childhood and raffish experiences cause Marvin Macy into an immoral and abnormal mentality.Then the present thesis traces the misrecognition of the three freaks' self-identity construction.In a word,their identifying with the fictitious and inappropriate specular images leads to the misrecognition.Miss Amelia endeavors to identify with Macy,an obscure specular image,and Lymon,a malformed specular image,successively to construct her self-identity;Deeply trapped in the Oedipus bar,Lymon is in a dilemma whether to escape from the condition of “the Desire of the Mother” or to identify with the Phallus,namely,“the Name-of-the-Father”;Misrecognizing Miss Amelia as the ideal image,firstly,Macy strives to identify with the ideal image positively and persistently.Then Macy exerts the utmost strength to rupture with the ideal image.The third chapter mainly analyzes the tragic denouement of the three freaks' self-identity construction.Deeply detained in the blocked “Imaginary and pre-Symbolic order”,all of the three freaks are doomed to be rejected by the normal society and cultural life.As a narcissist retreating back to the Mirror Stage,Amelia is neither recharged with self-identity from the misrecognition,nor rewarded with a clear image of the self for her to identify with.Strictly imprisoned in the fringe of Oedipus bar and being devoid of an authoritative father's guidance,Lymon is detained and crucified in the Imaginary order.Floundering in the narcissism morass,Macy degrades himself into a schizophrenic paranoid suffering severely from the discrepancy between the former positively erotic character and the latter negatively aggressive character.Through analyzing the misrecognition and the tragic denouement of the three freak's self-identity construction,this present thesis attempts not only to clear up the mysterious triangle relationship in the text,but also point out McCullers' s constant compassion and humanist solicitude for modern human beings struggling for self-identity,love and communication to get rid of the spiritual isolation.