Otherness: A dynamics of affirmation in the fiction of Carson McCullers

The dissertation addresses the predicament of a varied spectrum of marginalized "others" who people Carson McCullers's novels. I read these "others," who include androgynous men and women, homosexuals, members of minority groups, solitary individuals, as persons engaged in a persistent endeavor to overcome the constraints placed on them by conformist society. Concurrent with their resistance of conformist, unilinear thinking is an openness to all forms of alterity, and I argue that this openness is a consequence of their own marginalized status within conformist society. It is their dialogic bent, in the face of virtually insuperable social odds, that culminates in their stances of positive affirmation at the close of the three McCullers novels I address.; Apart from referring to criticism on McCullers frequently, the dissertation draws on essays and lectures by Jacques Derrida that repeatedly validate "otherness." It uses Michel Foucault's notion of the "epoch of simultaneity" from his essay "Of Other Spaces" to emphasize the validity of the co-existence of multiple viewpoints within a culture rather than the coercive presence of a single controlling vision. As a work on "otherness," the dissertation makes selected use of notions of alterity and dialogism as they appear in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas.; The dissertation addresses three novels by Carson McCullers, namely Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and The Member of the Wedding. Chapter 2, on Reflections, explores the stifling conformity of an army post and focuses on four marginalized characters and their varying degrees of resistance to this conformity. Chapter 3, on Ballad, concentrates on the androgynous figure of the female hero, Miss Amelia, and discusses how her defeat in the novella can be turned around to be read as a triumph of sorts. Chapter 4, on Member, addresses the character of Frankie Addams as the female "other" in rebellion against conformist society. The chapter shows how Frankie's indomitable imagination enables her to survive her successive disillusionments and how she remains ever receptive to alterity.