Carson McCullers’s short novel, The Ballad of the Sad Café, brings the uncanny to the fore. Three bizarre main characters populate the dreary southern landscape to advance McCullers’s recurrent themes of isolation and loss. The female Amazon figure, Miss Amelia Evans; ex-convict and Miss Amelia’s ex-husband, Marvin Macy; and the hunchbacked dwarf Cousin Lymon, come together in a chaotic and grotesque depiction of male domination that, in the end, leaves Miss Amelia “sprawled on the floor, her arms flung outward and motionless” (454).

McCullers demonstrates male incursion in the text through the unusual alliance of Marvin Macy and Cousin Lymon—despite Marvin Macy’s cruel treatment of the disfigured stranger and Miss Amelia’s generosity toward him. The reader learns that women who transgress typical gender roles are put in their place by a strict southern patriarchal system that resists change—especially change that shifts the social hierarchy to support women.

Although Miss Amelia enjoys financial independence, doctors the townspeople with folk medicine, and distills the best whiskey in the county, in the end she pays dearly for having entered stereotypically male arenas. While Miss Amelia is an imposing figure and feared by many townspeople, she loses her commanding presence after Marvin Macy and Cousin Lymon join forces against her. The men demonstrate the freedom with which they move about in the world—despite their shortcomings—while Miss Amelia is criticized and beaten down despite her strength.

McCullers initially presents a world with an inverted hierarchy in which a strong woman prevails, having embraced traditionally male roles. But the men reject this role reversal, and Miss Amelia gets her comeuppance before the eyes of her community.

As we often see in McCullers’s novels, the text opens with a focus on the local community.

“The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long” (397).

The reader gets an immediate sense of the desperation of the landscape, which, as we witness, extends to its inhabitants. Miss Amelia’s house, located in the center of the town, is the town’s largest building. But, like its owner, it is misshapen and peculiar-looking; it “leans so far to the right that it seems bound to collapse at any minute” (397), foreshadowing Miss Amelia’s collapse at the end of the story.

Also, “[t]here is about [the house] a curious, cracked look that is very puzzling until you suddenly realize that at one time, and long ago, the right side of the front porch had been painted, and part of the wall—but the painting was left unfinished and one portion of the house is darker and dingier than the other” (397). The lack of symmetry and the overall peculiarity of the house are analogous to the grotesque bodies that loom large in the characterization of both Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon. Further, gender traits are inverted; Miss Amelia’s physique takes on stereotypically masculine qualities.

She was a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man. Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead, and there was about her sunburned face a tense, haggard quality. She might have been a handsome woman if, even then, she was not slightly cross-eyed. . . . Often she spent whole nights back in her shed in the swamp, dressed in overalls and gum boots, silently guarding the low fire of the still (398).

Clearly, Miss Amelia not only resembles a man in her outward appearance but also enjoys activities that are typically reserved for men. McCullers hints at the grotesque here by the reference to Miss Amelia’s crossed eyes. But Miss Amelia pays heavily for crossing over to male territory.

Like McCullers’s tomboy, Frankie Addams, from The Member of the Wedding, Miss Amelia is male-identified in that she is motherless and was raised alone by her father. While older than Frankie, and having been married to Marvin Macy for 10 days, Miss Amelia resembles Frankie in her rejection of all things sexual.

When Frankie accidentally witnesses her family’s boarders, Mr. and Mrs. Marlowe, having intercourse, she tells the housekeeper, Berenice, that she thinks Mr. Marlowe is having a fit. And when the red-haired soldier tries to take Frankie to bed, she hits him over the head with a glass pitcher.

Similarly, Miss Amelia never allows her marriage to Marvin Macy to be consummated. Instead, on her wedding night, dressed in pants and a khaki jacket, she relocates to a downstairs room, reads the Farmer’s Almanac, and smokes her father’s pipe. Even Miss Amelia’s healing methods remind the reader that she rejects female sexuality, and, by extension, female reproduction:

“If a patient came with a female complaint she could do nothing. Indeed at the mere mention of the words her face would slowly darken with shame, and she would stand there craning her neck against the collar of her shirt, or rubbing her swamp boots together, for all the world like a great, shamed, dumb-tongued child” (409).

Having set herself outside the plot of female romance, Miss Amelia welcomes Cousin Lymon into her home, shares her hospitality with him, and opens a café to the townspeople at his insistence. Cousin Lymon’s childlike body poses no sexual threat to Miss Amelia (Westling, 123). But Miss Amelia’s deviation from the typical domestic script assigned to women in the South leaves her disembodied and bereft at the end of the story.

How is the reader to interpret the coda that McCullers includes to close the novel? The 12 mortal men on the chain gang form their own community and, like Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy, are regarded as socially peripheral. But the 12 mortal men remind us of the types of prisons that exist and the ways we struggle to escape them.

SOURCES

McCullers, Carson. Complete Novels. New York: The Library of America, 2001.
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Westling, Louise. Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

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