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摘 要

自从上世纪80年代以来，女权主义思想得到广泛传播，越来越多的学者将中心放在各种性格角色的研究上。渐渐地，随着男性和女性关系的日益复杂以及男性，女性地位和行为的巨大差异，更加复杂的性别观挑战传统的性别观。因此，双性同体性别观成为了研究的中心。依照分析《伤心咖啡馆之歌》中双性同体的理想性思路出发，这篇论文分为四个大部分，其中第三部分为论文的重点。该论文的第一部分简单介绍了《伤心咖啡馆之歌》的作者及其这篇论文的重要性。论文的第二部分探讨了双性同体理论的发展以及其在《伤心咖啡馆之歌中》的应用，从而使其他人对双性同体理论有个清晰的理解。论文的第三部分详细地分析了双性同体思想在卡森·麦卡勒斯的《伤心咖啡馆之歌》中的应用。通过对作品中人物双性同体的探索和对他们面临的悲剧人生的挖掘，这篇论文意在展示该作品中性别角色对个体发展的伤害。论文的第四部分是总结，暗示要追求平等的性别观，而不是模糊的性别观。沉闷、孤独、孤立主题的《伤心咖啡馆之歌》淋漓尽致地展现了人们内心深处的冷漠和孤立。关键词：卡森·麦卡勒斯 女权主义者 “双性同体” 孤立 强势

1. Introduction

1.1 Achievements and writing features of Carson McClluers

Carson McCullers (1917-1969) was an outstanding American southern writer in the twentieth century after William Faulkner who had been considered one of the greatest American novelists. McCullers was versatile and prolific and her works were usually labeled as “Southern Gothic” because most of her novels were set in south in which the loneliness, alienation and human love became the focus of her fiction, which has a direct connection with her confused and miserable personal life in which she suffers a lot.

When Carson McCullers was young, she had a rich imagination and wanted to become a writer. In 1940, her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter brought her great success and she was instantly recognized as one of the most promising writers of her generation. The novels that followed brought her fame as a master of Southern Gothic.

Mrs McCullers once said of her work “my central theme is the spiritual isolation, certainly I usually feel lonely.” Meanwhile, McCullers’ characters are often androgynous, revealing the inadequacy of physical love to fulfill basic human emotional needs. The Ballad of Sad café is generally considered one of McCullers’ best works of fiction and her most successful exploration of her signature themes: loneliness and the effect of unrequited love.

1.2 Brief introduction to The Ballad of Sad café

The Ballad of Sad café was set in a remote town in Georgia, an unnamed Southern town and it had three eccentric characters. Miss Amelia Evans was a strong woman whether in appearance or in her capable ways of working. She is indeed a successful and independent woman. However, she lived in women’s world without trying to communicate with man. Since the arrival of Lyman Will, she changed a lot, even turned her shop into café and meanwhile she became sociable. But when Marvin

Macy who was said to be a killer and served in prison reappeared, all things changed.

The feminine cousin Lyman Wills followed around Marvin like a dog and aroused his latent love for Macy. Love is important for them but their problem is Insoluble. Amelia and Lyman were in essence bisexual and they ended in pain and effortlessness.

1.3 Significance of the study

With the development of the feminist criticism，Amelia Evans，the heroine，has been redesigned from the feminist point of view as to reveal the positive value in characterization．In the 1970s，many comments on this novella began to highlight the problem of gender in the story．Panthea Reid Broughton in“Rejection of the Feminine in Carson McCullers’The Ballad of the Sad Cafe”penetrates the depreciation of femininity from the mainstream of this town．She further points out that the negative effect of this ideology is that people who abandon their true gender will be confronted with frustration and lose the ability of love at last．Mary Roberts in“Imperfect Androgyny and Imperfect Love in the Works of Carson McCullers”( 80) , talks about the conflict of femininity and masculinity on Amelia who is just an imperfect androgyny without the perfect amalgamation of both genders．

So this thesis tries to study this novel from the perspective of androgyny because after a deep digging into her novel we can find that in the Ballad of Sad café, main characters all have problems with their own gender identity. With the awakening of Feminist in male-dominated society and the widespread of homosexual phenomenon in western country, it is of great significance to conduct an analysis of the Ideal Gender in Androgynous Characters in the Ballad of the Sad café. By doing so, readers can comprehensively dig the true social meaning in McCullers’s works and can also understand the necessity of reading McCullers’ works from multi-perspectives.

2. Literature Review

2.1 The development of “Androgyny” theory

The term “androgyny” was first appeared in Symposium by Plato (105) and got popular in nineteenth and early twentieth century. For human, it is used to describe a person who does not fit into the typical masculine or feminine gender roles of their society.

With the development of the western feminist theory, the related study of social gender characters also received much attention. Virginia Woolf firstly bravely introduced her theory of androgynous mind in A Room of One’s own (67) and the theory caused great attention among critic with mixed feelings. Her ideal stated alternated traditional ideology between male and female. “Androgyny, for Virginia Woolf, was a theory that aimed to offer men and women the chance to write without limitation in sexes.”(Elizabeth Wright 1)

Though at first Woolf’s concept seemed to challenge man especially in the male-dominated society where women were controlled by men and had no right to vent their voice, but gradually her theory gained wide spread among many female writers and as a result, under the influence of this theory, there emerged a large successive female writers and their distinctive works. Since last century, a large number of scholars have started to study this theory and achieved fruitful results.

2.2 The androgyny theory employed in The Ballad of Sad café

Recent years, more and more scholars have tended to study Androgynous Characters, in well-known works like Gone with the wind and Jane Eyre. Only a few paid attention to McCullers’ The Ballad of Sad café both at home and abroad.The study of McCullers has been flourished since the 1940s. Her novella The Ballad of Sad café first came out in serials in Harpers Bazaar in August 1943. In later years，comments on The Ballad of Sad café, came out graduallyNew Criticism is one of the literary theories applied to McCullers's works. She herself claimed in The Flowering Dream，“Spiritual isolation is the basis of most of my themes( McCullers，1999: 162) ．Consequently，spiritual isolation has become a key word in the comments on her．As the studies on her other works，the early study of this novella mainly concentrated on the theme of spiritual isolation or the grotesque figures．Oliver Evans comments in“The Theme of Spiritual Isolation in Carson McCullers”( 1961) that the tragic atmosphere in The Ballad of Sad café is more serious than that in her other works; Kenneth D．Chamlee's article“Cafes and Community in Three Carson McCullers Novels”( 1990) is remarkably more strident in his categorization of the author's characters as grotesque and aberrant. Just like the study on her other works，this early study pays more attention to the theme without considering their social and historical significance, and the impacts of the prejudice between two genders are always ignored when interpreting the spiritual isolation.But there still exists some important works about androgyny in The Ballad of Sad café.In Rejection of the Feminine in Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of Sad café, Ranthea Reid Broughton described androgyny theory in a direct manner that “Sexual characteristics, there, are so rigidly dichotomized that they cannot be held in balance, one is either, servile and feminine, or preferably, dominant and masculine.”(38)In China, many scholars studied the work -The Ballad of Sad café too. They seemed to have more clear perception of what androgyny meant in The Ballad of Sad café. Zhang Yun carefully studied this theme from the perspective of female failure in male-dominated society. She thought though Amelia was a mixture of man and woman. Moreover, she maintained that when a male is between man and woman, he is doomed to be abandoned and betrayed by the whole society (2). At the same time, in “ Analysis of Androgyny in The Ballad of Sad café”, Xi-wen Li gave a complete analysis of androgynous characters. She concluded that McCullers wished to convey her idea that every man and woman should live in a proper harmony, or they will suffer like Amelia and Lyman.

3. Androgynous Characters in The Ballad of Sad café

3.1 Androgyny reflected in Amelia Evans

There is no female adult in her childhood to act as a model for her．Her father is the only person she can learn from and imitate．As a result，she turns to be a copy of her father. She subconsciously or unconsciously recognizes herself as a man，holds upon her masculine character and loses her feminine nature. Her daily habits，her economic independence，her resourceful thoughts and her love towards Lymon Willis could be some quite solid proves of this point．Therefore，it has become obvious that Amelia could hardly fight for women because she is even unaware of her own identity as a female．

The special environment equips her with masculine traits and men's value .In appearance, Miss Amelia Evans was “dark, tall man with bones and muscles like man” and “her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead and there was about her sunburned face a tense, haggard quality.”(173) at the same time, in business , no man in her town can surpass her. “Miss Amelia inherited the building from her father, and it was a store that carried mostly feed, guano and staples such as meal and snuff.”(173). It is her ability and hard-working that made her the richest person in the town ---“mortgages on crops and property, a sawmill, money in the bank in the town”(174).

In addition to her possession of store in the swamp, she also ran out the best liquor in the country. At the same time, she could do every handwork better than man such as rushing in a house to drag forth a sewing machine in payment for a debt, or getting herself worked up over some matter concerning the law. However, in daily life, she was a “solitary person” and “she often spent the whole nights back in her shed in the swamp, dressed in overalls and gum boots, silently guarding the low fire of the still”(174), all this conveyed that she was a real tom-boy because other girls in the town mostly were clean-haired and soft-eyed, with tender sweet little buttocks and charming ways, without dressing and behaving manly.

More weirdly, In marriage, “her marriage had been unlike any other marriage ever contracted in this country”(173). So it is worth mentioning that her puzzling marriage, lasting for only 10 days, which the whole town knows it. She was manly enough that his husband was unable to bring his beloved bride to bed with him and had to keep some distance away from her. Amelia did her business as usual as though nothing whatsoever had occurred:

Within half an hour Miss Amelia had stomped down the stairs in breeches and a

khaki jacket. Her face had darkened so that it looked quite black. She slammed

the kitchen door and gave it an ugly kick.She poked up the fire, sat down, and

put her feet up on the kitchen stove.She read the Farmer Almanac, drank coffee,

and had a smoke with her father’s pipe. Her face was hard, stern, and had now

whitened to its natural color. Sometimes she paused to jot down some

information from the Almanac on a piece of paper. Towards dawn she went into

her her office and uncovered her typewriter, which she had recently bought and

only just learning how to Run.(211)

That was the way in which she spent the the whole of her wedding night. Since then all things that went on like for previous day. In order to win his bride’s heart, Marvin Macy did a lot of romantic efforts, but Amelia only cared about her profits. Worse enough, in the afternoon of the fourth day, when Marvin Macy tried to put his hands on her shoulder , his face was hit and one of his front teeth was broken by his strong wife. It is queer for girls in the wedding day to assume their responsibilities of being a wife except Amelia ,who was unwilling to be controlled by man. At last she even “set off immediately to the courthouse in Cheehaw with some notion that she could get him locked in the penitentiary for trespassing.” ( 213 )

What’s more, she was very tall and broke the balance between man and woman. “ Now, of course, Miss Amelia was a powerful blunders of a person, more than six feet tall - and cousin Lymon a weakly little hunchback reaching only to her waist.” (203). We can hardly judge that she was a girl because she had a distinct manlike eating habit different from other girls “sat with both elbows on the table, bent over the plate, her knees spread with apart and her feet braced on the rungs of the chair”. ( 183 ) All in all, Amelia had a great deal of masculine characteristics.

Though, she mostly behaved like a man , but she was a real feminine. She was too timid to talk about sensitive topic like a girl.“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”.( 191)

Since the arrival of Lyman Will, she changed a lot, for instance, “Because the hunchback was so extremely sociable, she even went about a little- to revivals, to funerals, and so on”(201) , even turned her shop into café and gradually she became sociable. The hunchback won Amelia’s heart quickly by talking on any interminable subject which Amelia’s father used to talk. Maybe their relationship was mainly built on between child and father. Amelia’ love for Lymen was clear in the eyes of her town folks .“most of the time her eyes were fastened lonesomely on the hunchback.” ( 199 ). When Amelia talked to Lymon, her face had bright soft look. Even for the sake of her love for Lymon, she offered her father’s decorated room and she just lived in a smaller and simpler room. When Lymon was ill, she tried every possible way to care about him; when the path was filled with water, Amelia bent down to let hunchback scramble on her back what’s more, “He owned almost everything on the premise, for when he was across Miss Amelia would prowl about and close at hand to give him.”(220)

She hated Marvin Macy very much and “ Marvin Macy was the one subject that was never, at any time, discussed between the two of them”(220). No matter what Marvin Macy did to make her richer and to bring her love, she never referred to him by his name but scornfully commented him “that loom-fixer I was married to”Amelia at that time was capable and muscular which was thought-provoking, so she could make tremendous achievements. In some ways, showing care for man and pursuit of her balance of gender led to a bad result. If she did not plunge herself into the abnormal love triangle，maybe she will live a tranquil life till she dies．In the love triangle，her identity crisis explodes and disintegrates her. The love is gone; despair

and doom have set in．So Amelia cannot survive in a society in which men dominates．

3.2 Androgyny reflected in Lymon

Lymon began his debut in the following manner:

The man was a stranger, and it is rare that a stranger enters the town on foot at that hour. Besides the man was a hunchback. He was scarcely more than four feet tall and he wore a ragged, dusty coat that reached only to his knees. His crooked little legs seemed too thin to carry the weight of his great warped chest and the hump that sat on his shoulder. He had a very large head,with deep-set blue eyes and a sharp little mouth. His face was both soft and sassy- at the moment his pale skin was yellowed by dust and there were lavender shadows beneath his eyes(176).

At the first sight, his appearance is a sharp contrast to the traditional masculine image. And the two cousins in the town even called him a regular Morris Finestein. McCullers made it clear that Lymon is a effeminate man from those obvious words like: little, soft , sassy, pale. By contrast, she exaggerated Lymon’s incompetence: he was scarcely more than four feet tall”, “His crooked little legs seemed too thin to carry the weight of his great warped chest.” (176). He gradually showed his timid characters.

In addition to his effeminate appearance, his behavior was different from man. First of all, what he shocked us was that he started crying in front of people when he appeared in the town. Crying is always the way for a female when facing dismal predicament.

Then, “ For one thing he was clean beyond words”(192). “When Miss Amelia had eaten her supper, she wiped her plate carefully with a slice of light bread,and then poured her own clear, sweet syrup over the bread. The hunchback did likewise - except that he was more finicky and asked for a new plate”. （184）Also, his coat was neatly mended, his shoes was newly cleaned and polished with wax which is usually the attitude of female.

As for his dressing style, McCullers described it as “ He did not wear trousers such as ordinary men are meant to wear, but a pair if tight-fitting little knee-length breeches. On his skinny legs he wore black stocking, and his shoes were of a special kind, being queering shaped, laced up over the ankles, and newly cleaned and polished with wax”( 192) . Only female is more likely to tend to put special attention on dressing style.

Brought in a small town and had a poor medicine care , Lymon had weakly and deformed body. Taken well care of Amelia, “see marching in Miss Amelia’s footstep when on a red winter morning they set out for the pinewoods to hunt”(201), “when the path leads through a bog or a stretch of blackened water see Miss Amelia bend down to let Cousin Lymon scramble on her back” (202). Amelia used to spoil him into an extreme point mostly because of his cousin’s timid temper. As a matter of fact, Lymon did not have a respectful status when he came to the town, so he had to live independently. Without the help and love of Amelia, he could not get rid of bad fortune and support himself. In some ways, he belonged to inferiority like numerous women having no money, no home and no status. Unlike Amelia who stayed silent all the time, not letting her tongue run wild on any subject that happened to pop into her head, while Cousin Lymon always talked every subject even if unimportant endlessly. “The hunchback was a great mischief- maker . He enjoyed any kind of to-do, and without saying a word he could set the people at each other in a way that was miraculous”( 223 ). Though he had the habit of chattering with people, he was still a novelty and his appearance motivate folktown to get together: “so when the hunchback marched into the café everyone looked around at him and there was a quick outburst of talking and a drawing of corks”(223)

But in his heart, he loved patriarchal male. So there was no doubt when Marvin returned to the town, cousin Lymon was the first newcomer to see Marvin and it was he who immediately attracted Lymon with some ridiculous reason. Marvin Macy had a reputation : “ he had carried about with his the dried and saluted ear of a man he had killed in a razor fight”,“he had chopped off the tails of squirrel in the pinewoods just to please his fancy”(206). Maybe in the eyes of Lymon, Marvin had done many masculine things and he was once in a penitentiary which seemed to Lymon was charm and masculine. “He and the man stared at each other and it was not the look of two criminals who recognize each other,” “Every minute he wanted to be following along behind this jailbird, and he was full of silly schemes to attract attention to himself”.（234）

For the sake of love for Marvin Macy Lymon , he helped Marvin during a crucial moment in the duel and Amelia got beat. Eventually he and Marvin took all the valuable things and left Amelia’s house empty and ruinous.

3.3 Androgyny reflected in McCullers

It was clear that beautiful androgyny was the dilemma that McCullers wanted to be, a projection of both narcissistic impulse and her narcissistic impulse and her idealized self. McCullers was a controversial writer not only in personal life but also in her writing. As was constantly ridiculed for her strange hair style and her gangly tall height, McCullers somehow viewed herself a freak. The duality of herself perception was patterned early, so as she struggled how to know what she was. She simultaneously experienced her first major infatuation with her piano teacher, Mary Tucker. However, McClluers’ personal attachment for Mary Tucker didn’t last long. She eventually made her residence at Middagh Street in Brookklyn in whereshe met her future husband-Jame Reeves McClluers in1936, an army sergeant in Columbus and they got married in 1937. .And at that time, their marriage life provided a lot of inspiration for her literature. But four years later they divorced and remarried in 1945 and their marriage completely ended as a result of Reeves McClluers’s suicide in 1953. Within eight years, their marriage was consistently plagued by betrayal and discord. Actually both of them were bisexual and lived a turbulent life. During their marriage, she was attracted by a female called Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer which was vividly showed in her most of works especially in The Ballad of Sad café, but she was rejected. And in the following year, in the next marriage, similarly, she still suffered a lot, her marriage was doomed to be a tragedy. She even said once that everything happened in her fiction has also happened to her- or it will happen eventually.

4. Conclusion

McCullers is a southern female writer and makes international achievements in literature. Some of her works are featured as Gothic characters which was widely known by her theme of isolation which had been explored more than once. Some of Feminist development calls for our attention on female works especially their unique view on androgynous gender. She was a prominent representative among those female writers so her works deserved to be studied and we can get more inspirations from The Ballad of Sad café .

The Ballad of Sad café is considered to be most creative work during the years of 1943 to 1945. The love tragedy derived from the two protagonists’ confused and reversed ideal of gender, and meantime it was closely related to their social environment in which woman has to be governed by man . In order to be emancipated from man-dominated society, Amelia had to struggle and work hard to live well in a warped condition. So she gained great success. However, from a traditional and object views, she was a failure. She lived a sexless and bored live so much so that she was cheated by a little and weakly hunchback. In the end, Amelia was left alone in the town helpless. The idea of Androgynous gender is a byproduct of advanced society,

so learning to analyze different characters in The Ballad of Sad café can not only get us to know the impossibility of lopsided androgynous gender but also lay firm foundations for our understanding of McCullers”s works, which offers a diverse understanding of southern writer from different perspectives.

Yes, the town is dreary. On August afternoons the road is empty, white with

dusts, and the sky above is bright as glass. Nothing moves- there are no

children’s voices, only the hum of mill. The peach trees seem to grow more

crooked every summer, and the leaves are dull gray and of a sickly

delicacy(267)

Those words depicted above is extracted from The Ballad of Sad café. we can see not only the disappearance of a unnamed town but also the fading of the home of spirit.

Since the 20th century, sudden jump in technology helps to widen the horizon of people and increase their knowledge. As social revolution goes on, old moral codes were gradually abolished. And women are marching on the stage, requiring the same social freedom a men, which affect people significantly. Traditions like marriage, courtship, dress, etc underwent a raid change. Meantime there emerges a large number of emotion- lost people. Many people were confronted with the same experience like Amelia and Lymon - The lover and loved experience the relationship differently so that hate occurs inevitably. But after a deep understanding of the notion of McCullers’s androgynous gender, we can conclude that only if androgynous gender live in a harmonious condition can everyone gained real happiness. So does everyone in the contemporary. Works cited

Cai，Chunlu. [蔡春露]，怪诞不怪 怪中寓真——评麦卡勒斯的小说《伤心咖啡馆之歌》. 外国文学研究，2002，（03）ook, Richard. Carson McCullers. Literature and Life Series. New York: Ungar, 1975.

Evans, Oliver. The Ballad of Carson McCullers: A biography. New York: Coward McCann. Inc.,1966.

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