The Individual vs. Society Theme Analysis

In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers investigates the forces of isolation and injustice—and then considers how those forces create animosity and distance between the individual and society. McCullers’s characters come up against apathy or even outright cruelty, and they also fight against the defeatist impulse to become apathetic or cruel themselves. Ultimately, McCullers argues that American society is engineered to suppress individual thought and action as a means of perpetuating the capitalist status quo, denying black Americans justice and dignity, and securing the dominion of the ultra-wealthy few over the oppressed masses.

Over the course of the novel, McCullers uses the trajectories of her major characters to illustrate how society suppresses individuality, forcing its individual members—struggle as they might against the status quo—to resign themselves to lives as cogs in a racist, capitalist machine. Jake Blount is an aggressive, belligerent drunk who comes to town looking for work at the start of the novel. Jake, an anti-capitalist, believes the South is suffering at the hands of the North and longs for a revolution which will bring about the end of capitalism in America. McCullers presents Jake as not just anti-establishment, but as fundamentally incapable of living in society. His drunken rants and brawls are frightening to behold—in the novel’s first part, he bloodies his head and hands against a brick wall while intoxicated. Even once Jake secures a job at an amusement park, Sunny Dixie, he finds himself sparring verbally and even physically with his patrons. Even though McCullers presents Jake as unstable and unpredictable, she is obviously invested in his unorthodox ideas and sympathetically portrays his inability to get people to see his point of view. Jake is a traveler who has been all over the South and has witnessed the suffering of the American proletariat. He longs to share the truth about society with the people he meets—and in showing them how the deck is stacked against them, inspire them toward revolution. Ultimately, however, Jake is unable to fulfill his purpose: after a riot rips through Sunny Dixie at the end of the novel, he decides to leave town and resume his wandering. Though Jake aspires to revolution, he’s doomed to wander from place to place, scrounging up work where he can get it and using alcohol to dull the pain of his fate as a pawn of capitalism.

Doctor Benedict Mady Copeland is another character who stands alone against the larger society of which he’s a part. As a black man living in the Deep South, Doctor Copeland must wrestle daily with prejudice, cruelty, and violence aimed at him, his family, and his community. Doctor Copeland believes that there are ways in which black Americans can rise up and change the way others perceive them, and hopes that through adherence to Marxism and the pursuit of education, the black community in his town will be able to prosper. However, Doctor Copeland’s hopes for an end to racism and injustice in his community are dashed again and again. After his son Willie is arrested, jailed, and brutalized by the police, Doctor Copeland goes to the courthouse to pursue justice. But when Copeland himself is attacked, beaten, and jailed by the police, his tuberculosis worsens and he finds himself, upon release from jail, bedridden and unable to work or visit with his patients. Doctor Copeland harbored hopes of being a beacon of change in his community—but by the end of the novel, his society has forsaken and forgotten him. Doctor Copeland’s daughter, Portia, concerned for his health, moves him to her grandfather’s farm. As Doctor Copeland rides away toward the country with his father-in-law, McCullers illustrates how Copeland has failed to change society: he is just another old man bound to his bed, incapable of standing tall and strong any longer against the relentless forces of racism and injustice.

Mick Kelly—seen by many critics and scholars as a character inspired by McCullers herself—is the third major character in the novel who pushes back against the role society dictates for her. Mick is a tomboy who rejects the traditional femininity that her older sisters Hazel and Etta embody. Mick is obsessed with music, finding solace in the work of Mozart (whom she calls “Motsart”) and Beethoven rather than popular tunes on the radio. Mick is a loner at school, and while she throws a successful prom party to gather all her classmates, she finds herself feeling awkward and uncertain of herself throughout the festivities; she ultimately ends the night alone, back in her trademark shorts after having abandoned her party dress and stripped off her makeup, listening to a neighbor’s radio alone from the dark of their lawn. Mick, like Jake Blount and Doctor Copeland, is only able to resist the pressure to conform to society to a certain point. At the end of the novel, Mick takes a job at a nearby department store, Woolworth’s, in order to help provide for her family. Mick works at the costume jewelry counter, and for her job, she must dress in fancy clothing and adorn herself with makeup and jewelry. Most crushingly of all, she must drop out of school and abandon her music in order to devote all her time to work. Mick stood against society for as long as she could—but in the end, she, too, was forced to either become a part of society’s machine or watch her family suffer in poverty. McCullers uses the plights of these major characters to illustrate the unfairness of society and the compulsory nature of capitalism. McCullers demonstrates the ways in which individuals are often powerless to change their societies—a sentiment born of the frustration and desperation of the Great Depression, and one that, in spite of the progress American society ostensibly made over the course of the 20th century, is still echoed by many today.

The revolutionary politics espoused by many of the characters within The Heart is a Lonely Hunter are yet another facet of the book’s central concern with social and spiritual loneliness. The individuals who populate the novel are lonely on an existential level—and they stand alone, out of choice or due to forces beyond their control, when it comes to their politics, their hopes, and their uneasiness about the very society in which they live.