A Discussion On The Disease Of "Loneliness" In The Novels Of Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers is one of the representative personages of the American southern literature in twenty century. Five masterpiece novels of her, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of Sad Cafe, The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye and Clock without Hands, revealed the sense of extreme loneliness and the statement of mutual spiritual isolation deep inside American heart during forties and fifties of last century with her subtle and refined writing technique.By intensive reading as well as in-depth analyzing the lonely characters from McCullers's novels, along with the comparison of McCullers'personal experiences, this thesis is mainly focus on investigating the reason for the infectivity of McCullers-ize loneliness from the angle of concerning it as a disease of loneliness.This thesis is composed of four chapters.The first chapter is introduction, it mainly introduces the background details of the writer and her five novels, summarizes the statement of the current academic study of McCullers both in China and the worldwide, demonstrates that the innovation of this thesis is to anatomize the loneliness of McCullers under a new disease angle which bestows a fresh new literature psychotherapy meaning to the study of Carson McCullers. Meanwhile it also explains the reason for the popular of McCullers in China at present. Then it defines the "McCullers-ize loneliness" as a pathology mental disease which featured a disease with a strong sense of loss as the major symptom which caused by the physical and mental interacts.In the second chapter, it reviews the representative characters with "McCullers-ize loneliness" in all aspects by perused the text meticulously. By depicts the fates and the mental state of all the "McCullers-ize loneliness" patients it revealed the inevitable loneliness karma.In the third chapter it dissects the "McCullers-ize loneliness" as a pathology mental disease from the physiological and psychological level. Physically, the McCullers-ize Loneliness patients turned out to be grotesque, distortion, sexual perversion and disparity in the growth of the body and mind. Mentally, they all suffered the crisis of spiritual isolation and the loss of faith. Then it studied the transmission place and form. It considers that small and enclosed spaces like the cafe is the common transmission place while the disparity love between the love/loved as a way to get along is the transmission form.In the last chapter, it explains the emergence of "McCullers-ize loneliness" from the view of illness aesthetics, and it investigates the relation between the "McCullers-ize loneliness" and the personal experience of the writer which included the lonely childhood of a wunderkind, the complicated relationships and sexual identity problems during the adulthood as well as the life-long heavy diseases that all effected her writing. In Addition, the thesis also discusses the influence of sense of illness aesthetics in art history that help McCullers formed her loneliness as a disease. The thesis points out that McCullers's sense of illness aesthetics included "loneliness to ill" and "loneliness as beauteousness" the two aspects, and the drives of the forming of such idea should be traced the original sense of illness aesthetics in art history and the American southern gothic literature's influence. In the end, the thesis makes a conclusion of the aesthetics meaning as well as the realistic meaning of "McCullers-ize loneliness" as a disease.