Because of the novel’s shocking homosexual theme, critics tend to read it as McCullers’s inheritance of the Gothic school of southern writing. This paper examines Carson McCullers’s second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, a strange tale that received accusations of morbidity when it was published in 1941. Indeed, in presenting my thesis this way I believe I speak directly to the isolated chapters of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’s contrapuntal structure. Aspects within each inform the other and the thesis therefore works as a whole. As critical chapters need not be read in succession, I’ve chosen to interleave the creative and critical, in alternating chapters. This thesis features creative aspects even within critical sections. It speaks to my critical thesis by using language which creates cadence for mood and aestheticizes my characters’ pain. My creative work is informed by pain and experiments with “Story” by using tropes that create an obviously fictionalised narrative. By performing a textual analysis on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter this thesis examines how McCullers crafted her work like contrapuntal music, creating “Story” in a stylised, structured way which aestheticizes pain, making it bearable. Her novels spoke to the experience of pain. She suffered strokes from a young age and learned early what it means to suffer. An androgynous bisexual living in America’s Deep South in the 1940s, Carson McCullers experienced hostility because she was different.
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