| Focusing on Mc Cullers’ s best-known work,The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,this paper intends to probe queer elements in the book,which incorporates not only the discussion of sex and gender,such as the description of homo-sociability and hermaphrodite,homophobia and misogyny,and the incompliance to compulsory heterosexuality and other conventional ideologies as well.Main interest in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter held by many former critics is loneliness and isolation of marginal people in society.Nevertheless,there is a far more important topic in her work that touches gender and identity,as well as sexuality.Few studies shed light on how homosexuality and androgyny are intricately portrayed and labeled on the characters in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,and on why the author always attempts to make the abnormal and the bizarre into the familiar and the known.This paper firstly argues that the strange and aberrant bodies of the characters and their deviant gender identity and sexual inclination could not be well understood under the norms of a patriarchal and homophobic society.Then it takes this novel as a queer text and try to analyze how the norms of sex and sexuality are deconstructed and how the diversity of gender is respected in the book.The first chapter tries to reveal the queerness of main characters and point out a way to know this group.Their existence is a combination of physical disabilities and spiritual isolation.Besides that,their vague gender identity and sexual deviancy is another typical characteristic which is innermost and more hidden.The second chapter analyzes the marginality of queers’ existence.On account of the silence they bear,behind which exudes their fears and desires,self-denial and self-erasure estranges them from the outer world.Additionally,homo-phobia in the Southern society worsens their isolated life.By depicting the characters’ gender transgression and sexual deviancy in the heterosexual South,the last chapter explains how the author uses these queers to challenge heterosexual social norms and values,and more importantly,to reconstruct the norms of gender and sexuality.As a queer female herself in Southern America,Mc Cullers also means to challenge gender and sexual norms,and even race and class.This paper reveals the homosexuality,homophobia and hetero-sexism in the novel,but its aim is not to claim the homosexual identity of the characters.Under the guide of queer theory,it tries to follow the author’s intention to give a possibility of imagining a world free from the deep-entrenched social norms,a world rooted in heterogeneity rather than sameness.Thus,it helps to understand queers’ transgression of sexed and gendered boundaries,to give respect to the diversity of gender and sexuality,and to enable a productive reconsideration of normative social relationship. |
