preview

Essay on Carson McCullers

Good Essays

Carson McCullers

Walter Allen said of Carson McCullers; ``Faulkner apart, the most remarkable novelist the South has produced seems to me Carson McCullers" (Allen 208). Her work is marked with the feeling of loneliness coming from her lonely childhood (spiritual isolation is the basis of most of her themes) and the music she always wanted to study. She wrote novels, short stories and dramas. In all she received the recognition of both the public, her fellows writers, and critics.

Carson McCullers is a talented Southern American writer who touched others with her ability to describe human complexity with a touch of poesy.

Carson is a precocious writer considered to be full of talent. She started to …show more content…

She is ``able to persuade us that contemporary reality and legendary story are one" (Graver 209). The worlds she created are imaginary but in their ``depth and variety" can look like the reality (Allen 208).

A lot of critics speak about the poetic aspect of her work and think that ``With her, the Southern tradition of the Gothic novel is refined into a poetic sensibility which has not escaped either imitation or misuse" (Hassan 506). Even if her novels are all in prose and ``not in any obvious sense poetic" (Allen 208), ``from its first appearance, critics have recognized the Lyricism of the McCullers narrative style, which can render even sordid subject matter in poetic terms" (Griffith 209). This come from her first vocation which was music. One can find this constant presence of music in her novels: ballad and Negro song. This is a part of the spirit of the deep South she described in her work.

As she was born in Georgia and most of her novels take place in the South, she is always connected with this region. Some people called her work gothic because of her characters who all have a physical or psychological deficiency. Gothic is a style of writing that grew in the south with authors as William Faulkner, Earnest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She is very often associated with all these well-known writers. ``With a touch reminiscent of Faulkner but peculiarly her own" style (Feld 2373).

Get Access