Abstract
Downey offers a reading of the novels of Carson McCullers, especially The Member of the Wedding and Clock Without Hands, via the dual lenses of the Southern grotesque and the Gothic. Seeing the Southern Gothic as an extension and reworking of conventional Gothic plots, familiar from Radcliffe and her inheritors, Downey illustrates the ways in which McCullers’ use of Southern Gothic plays conventional Gothic tropes against the more optimistic version of the grotesque theorised by Mikhail Bakhtin. Specifically, she reads McCullers’ novels in the context of the Southern obsession with an idealised but highly troubled past, one fraught with racial, social, and sexual tensions, producing an intolerant society in which her protagonists often feel themselves to be outsiders and ‘freaks’.
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Further Reading
Gleeson-White, S. (2003). A peculiarly southern form of ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Southern Literary Journal, 36(1), 46–59. Print. Discusses Southern womanhood and the body.
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Richards, G. (2002). “With a special emphasis”: The dynamics of (re)claiming a queer southern renaissance. Mississippi Quarterly, 55(2), 209–229. On homosexuality in Southern writing, including Clock without Hands.
Thurschwell, P. (2012). Dead boys and adolescent girls: Unjoining the Bildungsroman in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding and Toni Morrison’s Sula. English Studies in Canada 38:3/4 (Sept-Dec 2012), 105–128. On the relationship between adolescent girls and younger boys in The Member of the Wedding and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
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Downey, D. (2016). The Gothic and the Grotesque in the Novels of Carson McCullers. In: Castillo Street, S., Crow, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47774-3_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47774-3_28
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