Patriarchy,Racism And Queer:Southern Gothic Study Of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers is one of the representative writers in American Southern literature.Her writing is characteristic of prominent regional features as it follows the literary tradition of the Southern gothic.In her works,the theme of“spiritual isolation”has been lifted into a symbolic existence in a specialized setting of history and culture.As the mainstream of American literature,the Southern gothic originates from the 18~thh century European gothic literature characteristic of horror and grotesquerie.Deeply rooted in the American literary tradition,Southern gothic evolves into an independent sub-genre.Its distinctiveness not only lies in its poignant display of the Southern environment and customs,cultural and historical heritage,but also its revelation of the spiritual condition of the marginalized Southern freaks.Based on the theory of the Southern gothic,this thesis will render a reinterpretation of McCullers's most representative work The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,from the perspective of South patriarchy,racism and queer.The major content of the thesis can be divided into three parts.The first chapter analyzes the decayed Southern patriarchy in which the revolting hoyden struggles to reconcile her freakish body and masculine ambition with the impending“Southern Belle”criteria.Throughout her maturation into adulthood,she cannot resist the quest for recognition from this male-dominated society and eventually has to fall into the trapping of feminine role and conventions.The second chapter interprets the miserable sufferings of the Copeland in revealing that under the influence of slavery history,African-American who live in a chronic racial violence cannot shake off the haunted fear of the white and their repressed anger has nowhere to place while the internalized racism has evolved into inner violence.The third chapter will explore the depressed state of love-seeking for the queer loners in the religion-soaked South where evangelical heterosexuality rules.The queer romance of Singer and Antonapoulos remains ambiguous to the end.Biff,the impotent,always fantasizes but never acts upon his bisexuality.Even the end of his desexualized marriage doesn't lift him from the constraint of heterosexual anxiety.It's these sexual repression that refrains them from genuine intimacy and entraps them in a hopeless resistance.The thesis asserts that spiritual isolation is an individualized and regionalized sate of existence with indelible mark of the Southern culture and history.Under the scope of the Southern gothic criticism,this thesis makes manifest that these marginalized group has been greatly oppressed by the Southern ideology in the process of identity construction.