The American South Theme Analysis

Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is her first novel, published to widespread acclaim when she was only 23. The book is set in an unnamed mill town in the Deep South—while some contextual clues point to the novel’s setting being the state of Georgia, McCullers never directly names the place where her characters’ lives unfold. As a result, the novel transfigures a single town into an analogue of the larger American South—an analogue which allows McCullers to explore the racism, poverty, and mannered isolation of the larger region through the stories of just a few individuals. As McCullers employs (and subverts) tropes and traditions of Southern Gothic literature in aid of that mission, she ultimately argues that the conservativism; racism; and social, political, and economic stagnancy of the American South threaten to destroy the region.

The American South is a place of great significance in McCullers’s personal life and creative imagination. In the pages of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, however, she critically examines the economic disadvantages, social ills, and structural, political cruelties that pervade the place which formed her as both a writer and a human being. The town at the center of the novel is never named. It seems to have some proximity to Atlanta, Georgia—but while the big city is within reach, the citizens of McCullers’s unnamed town toil at the cotton mill, the center of the town’s economy, or wrangle part-time jobs to make ends meet. Many characters struggle with money—from the large Kelly family who own the boarding house to the tenants who live there (and often struggle to pay rent each month), to the itinerant Jake Blount, to Biff Brannon’s sister-in-law Lucile Wilson, who dreams of making money by turning her four-year-old daughter, Baby, into a movie star. The effects of the Great Depression on the town at the heart of the novel are grave and deeply felt. The economic stagnancy of the South, tied up in the region’s agrarian roots, is exacerbated by the Depression and threatened doubly by the looming entrance of the United States into World War II. McCullers paints a portrait of the ways in which economic tensions in a small town reverberate through the individuals who populate that town, creating animosity, distrust, and resentment among even friends and neighbors.

The sociopolitical atmosphere in town is just as fraught as the economic one. Racism and segregation have cleaved the town in two, and while characters like Doctor Benedict Mady Copeland and Jake Blount long for political revolution and an end to racial injustice, McCullers suffuses the social atmosphere of the town with an at best casual and at worst violent bedrock of racism, ableism, and prejudice. Many of McCullers’s characters believe in equality and justice—but she also takes care to show how casual racism and prejudice define much of life in the Deep South. For example, Mick Kelly claims to hate Nazis but privately thinks of her neighbor Harry Minowitz as a “Jew boy.” Jake Blount regularly defuses violent fights between white and black patrons at the amusement park, Sunny Dixie—fights in which white patrons hurl horrible epithets and slurs at their black neighbors. A Greek character, Spiros Antonapoulos, is referred to as “oily,” while many characters describe John Singer, who is deaf and never speaks aloud, bluntly and emotionlessly as “the mute” or a “dummy.” The many social ills facing this one small town in the Deep South are used by McCullers as a proxy for the social ills facing the South more broadly. Racism, prejudice, and callous disregard for a person’s interior based on their exterior are rampant social problems—and over the course of the novel, as racial tensions in town escalate to dangerous heights, McCullers takes care to show that unless people are able to look at their neighbors with grace and open-mindedness, society will descend into chaos and violence. McCullers replicates the language of racism and prejudice in order to point out its cruelty and the ways in which this cruelty destabilizes and unmoors society. Indeed, throughout the 20th century, violence throughout the South got much worse before it got better. Even now, contemporary readers of McCullers’s work can appreciate her prescient warnings in light of 21st-century escalations in police brutality and white nationalist violence, many instances of which still erupt in the South each year.

As Jake Blount prepares to leave town at the end of the novel, he thinks to himself: “He would not leave the South. That was one clear thing. There was hope in him.” Though McCullers interrogates and deconstructs the issues plaguing the American South in the 1930s, this brief passage indicates a fundamental “hope” in the region’s ability to repair itself and prosper. Jake Blount, frustrated as he is with the social, political, and economic disadvantages rife throughout the South, doesn’t want to leave it—or, perhaps he does want to leave, but nonetheless finds his “hope” for a brighter future there trapping him within it time and time again. Jake’s inner monologue in this moment perhaps mirrors McCullers’s innermost thoughts about the South—the place she grew up in, and the place to which she repeatedly returned through her writing about its politics, its people, and its twinned beauty and grotesquerie. Even as McCullers warns against the issues that threaten the South, she expresses a glimmer of optimism as to the region’s ability to repair its social, political, and economic ills.

Carson McCullers has become widely known as one of the masters of the Southern Gothic literary tradition—a kind of writing that zooms in on the physical and emotional horrors of life in the American South. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter employs Southern Gothic tropes in order to deeply and subversively criticize the ways in which Southern history, manners, and politics hold Southerners captive to a set of beliefs, morals, and traditions that run counter to their own best interests—a fate which McCullers rightly believed would plague her homeland for decades still to come.