Southerners Wandering At The Crossing

Carson McCullers, one of the prominent female writers in the American Southern Literature, has left behind an impressive literary legacy. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, as one of her successful works, depicts a group of confused, disoriented and lonely beings in the small town of American South. In the light of Gaston Bachelard’s poetic space theory and Michael Foucault’s heterogeneous space theory, this paper aims to offer an interpretation of the spiritual world of the southerners. Carson McCullers, in order to present the different mental states of. southerners, skillfully depicts the southern town as a twofold space-both the space of warmth and the space of estrangement. As a space of warmth, the town, with the quality of tranquility, harmony and coziness, provides the southerners a warm space for poetic dwelling. And as a space of estrangement, the town, flooded with chaos, conflicts and clamors, plunges the southerners into a stifling space. The southerners are thus left at a crossing serving a life sentence of spiritual predicament. With the perspective of the space theory, this paper shows that Carson McCullers, through the switch of two kinds of different and even opposite spaces, makes the spiritual world of the southerners vividly spatialized and achieves her artistic presentation.