On The Gothic Style Of Carson Mccullers’ Works

Between the20s and the60s of twentieth century, in America came the rise of Southern Renaissance. Against the bleak, barren reality of its social economy and construction, the literature of the South reached it’s peak, adding to the history of American literature a chapter of brilliance. Carson McCullers belonged to this movement, and her unique style of grotesqueness, pressing deformity earned for herself a special place in this widespread literary revival. Several themes have been developed during studies of McCullers’works:grotesqueness, loneliness, feminism, racism and queer fiction, etc., Gothic style is one of them, and the focus of this thesis.Gothic, as a literary genre, had once flourished in Europe from the late eightieth to early nineteenth century, and "horror","grotesque", which sat at the core of Gothic fiction, did not die out with the genre, rather found their own role in writings of various times, regions and schools. The writers of Southern Renaissance deeply rooted themselves in the tradition of American Gothic, and at the same time set out to explore the themes of alienation in the transforming South, and in the spirits of entire modern society. In their exploration, the Gothic style enjoyed a great reviving. The first chapter of this thesis analyzed the key characteristics that handed down from original Gothic fiction, discussed the birth of Southern Gothic, and their shared defining features.Chapter two studied the primary expression of McCullers’Gothic style: grotesque figures. The writer created a number of figures who live at the fringes of society, they displayed, physically or psychologically, a degree of grotesqueness: tomboys, transvestite, homosexuals, mutes, etc..The physical deformity was the reflection of their inner incapacity."Spiritual Isolation" was the common allegory, via the distorted body and mentality of this characters, the universal existential dilemma, so dramatically, undeniably appeared before the readers.Chapter three listed and classified the gothic images in McCullers’works. Her gothic, in large part, relied on detailed images rather than abstract ideas. In original Gothic fictions, ghosts, haunted castles, mirrors were mere devices that induced horror. But in McCullers’writings, these images, like those grotesque characters, were all "objective correlatives" of the soul. The hot, poor, isolated Southern town symbolized the imprisonment and desperation of the soul; cafes offered a Bakhtinian temporary relief, but these settings always broke down, forced the characters to return to their self-made prison..Employing the Gothic style, McCullers trivialized the grotesqueness of the characters, and "gothicized" the trivial, ordinary living. With a mixture of reality and symbolic images, McCullers successfully turned the figures, backgrounds, plots and images to metaphors, completed her metaphor of the modern existence.