Grotesque Bodies:Gender Suspension In Carson McCullers’s Novels

Carson McCullers is one of the most controversial American writers in the twentieth century. Her exaggerated depiction of unbearable human loneliness wins herself both praise and criticism. Some scholars think she has made an exaggeration of human isolation, others claim her depiction of the cheapness of human life is in an acceptable range. More and more critics show their interests in McCullers and her works due to the controversy. Critics mainly employ Feminism and New Criticism on McCullers’s works mainly focused on, isolation theme and homosexual, etc.This paper, from the body’s point of view, with McCullers’s four major works, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe as target texts, tries to point out the grotesque female and male bodies’freak behaviors, and the phenomenon that femininity and masculinity are interwoven in the same body on the textual base. Meanwhile, relevant theories would be used to testify the reasonability of the grotesque.This thesis consists of five parts, the introduction, three body chapters of argumentation, and the conclusion. The first chapter is an introduction part introduces Carson McCullers and her major works and gives a literature review. The research aims and thesis structure will be pointed out at the end of this chapter.Chapter Two to Chapter Four are the body part of this thesis. The second chapter focuses on analyzing the grotesque female characters Mick Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Frankie Addams in the The Member of the Wedding. Firstly, this thesis points out the two tomboys’disorient behaviors and their depressed heart. Then effort will be attached to the two protagonists’unsuccessful attempt of returning to women identity. Lastly, Mikhail Bakhtin’s unfinished theory would be employed to testify the dynamics of the two adolescents’uncompleted identity. The tomboys still possess the possibility of realizing their boyish dream and live a wonderful life. The third chapter’s significance is attached to the grotesque male characters Private Williams and Captain Penderton in Refections in a Golden Eye and Biff Brannon in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. They flight from woman on the one hand and possess or pursue womanliness on the other hand. Chapter Four, by means of relavant theories, discusses the rationality of the grotesque males and females’uncertain gender identity. The feminists believe that gender is a kind of uncertain performance and gender identity is not born with but socially constructed. The females use gender performance as a way of realizing self achievement, the males pursuing wholeness.Chapter Five is the conclusion part which is aimed at revealing the main ideas and findings of this thesis. On the one hand, the protagonists in McCullers’s fictional world live with an everlasting pain because of their gender ambiguity and uncertainty; on the other hand, they enjoyed their secret perverse desire, which made the scholars and readers rethink about the traditional and binary sexual category. The dynamics of the interwoven masculinity and femininity prove the rationality of the gender indeterminacy. Gender ambiguity provides a new way of thinking and living so as to emancipate women and make room for the marginalized groups like gays and lesbians, which would at last help humans establish a harmonious and diverse society.