There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

Born in Columbus, Georgia, Carson McCullers was a Southerner by circumstance, but she maintained an emotional and psychological attachment to the South throughout her life. Her choice of a Southern setting with Southern characters for almost all of her works of fiction illustrates that the place off her birth commanded an unmistakable influence on her creative imagination. Therefore, the major Southern themes of place--the burden off the past, the antipathy toward change, the formal versus the formless existence, and the preference for objects rather than ideas-abound in her fiction. She utilizes those themes consistently to establish the significance of physical place in her fiction.Simultaneously, a second concept of place is operant in the McCullers fiction--the metaphysical sense of place. The duality between the physical and the metaphysical is evident throughout the McCullers canon from one of her earliest untitled stories to Clock Without Hands, her final novel. The early story of the girl who stands outside the gates of a convent and dreams of a marvelous party inside is the first manifestation of that duality.The short fiction incorporates an especially stringent duality. Like the convent gates, the boundaries of the South represent a formidable barrier against the outside world. An either/or dichotomy emerges in the short fiction which contrasts the South to non-Southern locales, particularly New York City.Mrs. McCullers' first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter introduces the physical/metaphysical dichotomy of place in which several characters, especially Mick Kelly, find the physical locale undesirable and long for a more satisfying place.Reflections in a Golden Lye presents an extension of physical/metaphysical dichotomy since the rigidly defined boundaries of the army base setting are similar to those of a small Southern town.The lever/beloved dichotomy in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is simply an embellishment on the physical/metaphysical duality.The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers' most realistic novel, comes close to blending the physical and the metaphysical sense of place. Frankie Addams finds an answer to her metaphysical search for place in Mary Little-John.Mrs. McCullers brings the prototype convent story to its ultimate happy ending in Clock Without Hands by resolving the conflicts between the physical and the metaphysical search for place. In the character of Jester Clane, the author presents a happy fusion off the two conflicting philosophies. He proves that one can open the gates of the convent, enjoy the marvelous party, and return to the physical world with new wisdom and commitment. He finds his metaphysical sense of place by conquering the burden of the past, by overcoming the antipathy toward and by rising above his formless adolescence to become formal, fully developed adult who can transcend the coercive codes of the confined community.

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LD2668 .T4 1966 C37 / Master of Science

The succeeding chapters of this thesis are concerned with Carson McCullers' method of handling the Gothic. Their purpose is to describe the modern Gothic elements in McCullers' first three novels: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946) and in her novella: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943).

This thesis has examined some women writers of the 1950s in an attempt to discover if there could be a "women" school of writers as definable as the Black, Jewish or Southern schools which gained recognition during that ten-year period. During the 1950s American literature became fragmented as various minorities began to search into personal histories in order to discover human identities within the framework of race, religion or geography. It was the contention of this paper that women were involved in much the same type of identity search, that through their own literature they were searching out a human identity' within, but not confined to, their sexual role in society.The cliche of the decade is that this was a placid time in feminist history, a time when women docilely sacrificed education and personal talents to return to the in a search for their homes as wives and mothers. However, a study of the works of Sylvia Plath, Carson McCullers, May Sarton and Elizabeth Janeway shows a group of women in active rebellion against the sexual stereotyping so prevalent in the 1950s. Through art these women were rejecting traditional concepts of a "woman's place," and instead were exploring their own talents, strengths and potentials human identity.This thesis has sought to combine a study of the cultural influences operating on society of the 1950s with the literature being written by women during this period in order to more fully understand the female attitude toward herself and her role. This study indicates that the active rebellion of the women's liberation movement a decade later arose from the search for identity found in much literature by women of the 1950s.

This dissertation argues that the four writers named above use the grotesque to illustrate the increasingly peculiar consequences of the assault of modernity on traditional Southern culture. The basic conflict between the views of Bakhtin and Kayser provides the foundation for defining the grotesque herein, and Geoffrey Harpham's concept of "margins" helps to define interior and exterior areas for the discussion. Chapter 1 lays a foundation for why the South is different from other regions of America, emphasizing the influences of Anglo-Saxon culture and traditions brought to these shores by the English gentlemen who settled the earliest tidewater colonies as well as the later influx of Scots-Irish immigrants (the Celtic-Southern thesis) who settled the Piedmont and mountain regions. This chapter also notes that part of the South's peculiarity derives from the cultural conflicts inherent between these two groups. Chapters 2 through 5 analyze selected short fiction from each of these respective authors and offer readings that explain how the grotesque relates to the drastic social changes taking place over the half-century represented by these authors. Chapter 6 offers an evaluation of how and why such traditions might be preserved. The overall argument suggests that traditional Southern culture grows out of four foundations, i. e., devotion to one's community, devotion to one's family, devotion to God, and love of place. As increasing modernization and homogenization impact the South, these cultural foundations have been systematically replaced by unsatisfactory or confusing substitutes, thereby generating something arguably grotesque. Through this exchange, the grotesque has moved from the observably physical, as shown in the earlier works discussed, to something internalized that is ultimately depicted through a kind of intellectual if not physical stasis, as shown through the later works.

The loneliness theme of Carson McCullers' fiction falls into three divisions or levels. And because of her focus on the individual, her general theme of loneliness as it results from human isolation is universal. She develops her "broad principal theme" through an examination of human characteristics common to all human beings. In expressing her concept of isolation as a human condition, however, she presents loneliness as she believes it exists in her own culture, and, for this reason, her works present a loneliness that results from American cultural attitudes and is tempered by a Southern sense of nostalgia. After first establishing an understanding of McCullers' basic theme through an analysis of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, this study analyzes the nature of the Southern tradition and its influence on the criticism of her fiction with particular focus on the problems of determining to what degree her Southern settings inhibit the interpretation of her works beyond a regional perspective. A comparison of thematic elements, events, and characterization in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter to nonfiction critical discussions of American culture in The Image by Daniel Boorstin and The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater shows that the social context and the theme of isolation in the novel reflect a condition of life that is American, not distinctively Southern. The final portion of this study continues the analysis of McCullers' basic theme in Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and Clock Without Hands, comparing elements of these later works to The Image and The Pursuit of Loneliness in order to demonstrate the particularly American loneliness of her characters and the value of her works to the tradition of American novel.

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