Masculinities in Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Abstract

This study analyzes Carson McCullers’s The Heart is A Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951), and explores the ways her characters configure paradigmatic and complex masculinities by situating readings of McCullers’s fiction as interpolating such theories as gender studies, masculinity studies, queer theory, and disability studies. From a masculinity studies framework, this study traces the types of masculinities present in McCullers’s fiction, elucidating that gender is performative, participatory, relational, and social in nature and that masculinity is one of the main social forces inhabiting the fiction of McCullers, revealing contradictions, and forms of oppression and discrimination within American society. Commenting on the relationship between masculinity and male identity, performativity, sexual orientation, the female body, and disability, this thesis also demonstrates and highlights the sociological potential in the works of Carson McCullers, primarily through a scrutiny of her representation of fictional masculinities. This thesis argues that McCullers compels her readers to imagine non-hegemonic masculinities that contest hegemonic masculinity and gender hegemony, rendering her fiction relevant in the twenty-first century.