Southern Gothic--Carson McCullers

From Thomas Paine to Ernest Hemingway, our class has by now studied American literary giants from just about every time period. I would have to say, however, that the one author that truly stole my heart--Southern Gothic Carson McCullers--was someone I learned about outside of class: I read two of her novels, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, in preparation for our spring semester research paper. (Just the fact that I voluntarily read an additional 300+ page novel for this project should say something...)

One of the reasons that I enjoyed reading McCullers was that I found her writing easy to understand verbally, but still complex and engaging. With the impossibly long sentence structures of Hawthorne, I found myself repeatedly reading one paragraph just to retain key ideas. With McCullers's more lyrical and minimalistic style, I reread simply because I wanted to.

McCullers embodies the typical Southern Gothic writer in her depiction of grotesque and flawed characters in dysfunctional small town settings. She recreates the feeling of human isolation with poignancy, and her character studies are sketched with accuracy and insight. (At the top, I included a picture of Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, which visually displays the loneliness of Americans that McCullers also portrayed.)

In a way, McCullers's writings fit right in with the modernists: she shares their disillusionment and fundamental, well, pessimism. However, surreal settings and bizarre plot events make her works unique, even among those of other Southern Gothic authors. Despite a narrow range of subjects, McCullers's work is deeply moving. Its only "flaw" is a complete lack of redemption and renewal for her characters: each of them seems to lead a permanently nightmarish existence that they can't escape for more than a few seconds at a time.

American Dream

Whether the American dream is still alive and well today has come under debate. Despite this generation's tendency toward pessimism, however, I still believe in the resilience of the American dream.

It seems that, over the years, American ideals have been shaped and changed by historical and economic circumstance. As F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested in The Great Gatsby, the bootlegging and overall decadence of the Jazz Age was one manifestation of the American dream's corruption, but its corruption does not necessarily signify its death.

Today, the phrase "American dream" usually evokes the image of a middle-class family, a picket-fenced house in the suburbs, and a financially secure future. However, it is something far more all-encompassing and inspiring: it is the hope that each of us can improve our lives. This hope is always evolving, but it is rooted in our belief that freedom and equal opportunities are fundamental to American society. It is because of its optimistic outlook that the American dream has remained alive and highly relevant to the contemporary era.