“A big deaf-mute moron”: Eugenic Traces in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Heidi Krumland [1]
The essay uses a historical approach to reassess previous literary criticism of Spiros Antonapoulos, the cognitively impaired character in Carson McCullers’s novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in which a staged drama of loneliness unfolds against the backdrop of racial segregation and poverty in the American South during the Great Depression. The rereading of the novel, which focuses on the representation of cognitive impairment in its historical context, suggests that Carson McCullers’s imagination was shaped by eugenic influences that were still noticeable in American society in the late 1930s.
Introduction
Sixty-four years after its original publication in 1940, Carson McCullers’s debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (HLH) was featured in Oprah’s Book Club, thereby proving its continuing appeal to the American readership. Announced as “truthfully” capturing the “American experience of its time”, giving “voice to the rejected, forgotten, mistreated and oppressed,” this modern classic has not only inspired the imagination of Oprah Winfrey’s advertising team, but also that of countless readers and reviewers alike (“Book Selections”, par. 1). Yet, even though the anonymous editor of the Oprah’s Book Club website claims that “the margins of society” have never been “so brilliantly illuminated” (par 1.), little attention has been paid to the literary representation of one particular marginalized group: people with a cognitive impairment. Most reviewers have read the “big deaf-mute moron” (HLH 204), Spiros Antonapoulos as a freak, grotesque, or symbol–placing him on a timeless, universal level without considering the socio-historical context in which the character was produced. Other reviewers understood him as “an illiterate idiot” (Lubbers 189), the only one of the portrayed characters who even in the insane asylum is “content, at peace with himself and the world because he alone has no need for human sympathy and communication” (Lubbers 190). The essay will explore this shortcoming in literary reception by surveying the secondary material and investigating how literary scholars have dealt with the cognitively impaired character over time. In addition, a contextualized reading of the cognitively impaired character from a historical disability-related perspective will offer an alternative view on the author’s use of Spiros Antonapoulos.
The Limited Frame of Criticism
As observed by Lisa Logan and Kathleen Anne Patterson, literary critics had a marked predilection to read McCullers’s first published novel as an allegory of the human condition in general, pointing to the themes of isolation, loneliness and unreciprocated love. These metaphorical readings, as both Logan and Patterson notice, were encouraged in McCullers’s essay “The Flowering Dream”:
[s]piritual isolation is the basis of most of my themes. My first book was concerned with this, almost entirely, and of all my books since, in one way or another. Love, and especially love of a person who is incapable of returning or receiving it, is at the heart of my selection of grotesque figures to write about–people whose physical incapacity is a symbol of their spiritual incapacity to love or receive love–their spiritual isolation. (The Mortgaged Heart 280)
This statement is an example par excellence of what David Mitchell has described as “the modernist linkage of physical deformity and interior pathology” (359). In addition, the author’s suggested allegorical interpretation, which reduces the fictional characters to symbols, also holds the danger that the lack of community and solidarity among the main characters appears as if it were due to the impossibility of meaningful communication and communion among humans in general–leading to what McCullers termed “spiritual isolation.” Yet, although the individual’s essential alienation in modern society was a key issue in literary modernism, texts from this period were not necessarily apolitical and concerned with primarily private or metaphysical questions, as it may appear after reading McCullers’s statement. In fact, McCullers also hinted at another metaphorical reading of her novel–as “an ironic parable of fascism […] presenting the spiritual rather than the political side of the phenomenon” (qtd. in Evans 43), an interpretation that might seem far-fetched, but was taken up by her biographer Oliver Evans, who constructed the following symbolism for the friendship between the hearing impaired John Singer and his cognitively impaired companion:
[I]f we think of Singer and Antonapoulos as leaders, blindly invested by others with attributes in which they are only too conspicuously (for those whom they fail to hypnotize) lacking, [it is possible] for us to see the terrifying meaning of the parable: in this absurdly grim game of follow-the-leader, the ultimate leader, the power beyond the power, is a lunatic. (43)
This attempt at interpretation dating from the mid-1960s does not only conflate insanity and cognitive disability, but also turns the cognitively impaired Antonapoulos into a totalitarian ruler, reminiscent of Hitler, thereby equating him with a dangerous mass murderer rather than seeing him as an individual excluded from society due to his Otherness.
It was more than two decades before literary scholars went beyond the limiting frame of interpretation that McCullers had prompted by her statements about the novel. Whereas Lawrence Graver found in 1969 that “[f]rom the opening pages […] one is aware that this strange and absorbing story is designed to be read both as a realistic tale of a half-dozen displaced southerners and as a generalized parable on the nature of human illusion and love” (12, emphasis added), it was the rise of new critical approaches to literature, such as feminist or queer studies, that helped broaden McCullers’s explicit focus on spiritual isolation.
The prevailing realistic elements in the narrative make it possible to read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter as a socio-critical novel, even if the author’s own emphasis on the concept of unreciprocated love seems to veil the structural shortcomings of an unequal society, the segregating practices that may, in fact, lead to the feeling of isolation in individuals and groups who are marginalized. The author does address the old hierarchies in the American South along the lines of race, gender, class, poverty, and education–as, for example, in the realistically drawn figures of Mick Kelly or Dr. Copeland, who both struggle against deeply ingrained, restrictive expectations and structures in society that continue to hold them down. But McCullers, who later in life became disabled herself, does not question or critically reflect the marker of disability. She uses, as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have found in many other narratives, “the potency of disability as a symbolic figure” without taking up “disability as an experience of social or political dimensions” (48). Thus, unlike the author’s true-to-life portrayal of the various outsider figures in Southern society at the time of the Great Depression,[2] the outsider with a marked cognitive difference, Spiros Antonopoulos, is mapped out unrealistically as a flat type and without empathy.
The way McCullers chose to present the hearing and cognitively impaired character and his stay in a mental asylum in the South of the 1930s is worth contrasting with conditions as they are described by historians. Such a comparison will elucidate how preconceptions about cognitively impaired persons as absolute Others were so engraved and prevalent in American society that even an author who was considered an antiracist and “very much ahead of” her time regarding social conventions (Savigneau 56) used them unreflectingly to suit her storyline; it should also explain why the literary rendering of the two ‘deaf-mutes’, Spiros Antonapoulos and his friend John Singer, went down so smoothly with reviewers and readers alike.[3] McCullers’s contemporary, Klaus Mann, for instance, was impressed by her “melancholy novel” and recorded in his diary in 1940 that “that strange girl” appeared “[u]ncannily versed in the secrets of all freaks and pariahs” (qtd. in Carr 100; emphasis added). Likewise, later literary critics in the 1960s, such as Oliver Evans, Klaus Lubbers, and Leslie Fiedler, did not note the stereotypical depiction of the characters with a disability–, finding, in the case of Fiedler, that “the deaf-and-dumb protagonists are completely satisfactory as fact and as symbol” (485). The reasons for the difference in the author’s literary treatment of the ‘normal grotesque’ characters as realistic persons and the cognitively impaired character as a type will become clearer when leaving McCullers’s statements on the novel aside and taking a look at the historical context and social attitudes of the American society in which the novel was produced.
Contextualizing the Novel
Joseph Millichap noted in 1971 that McCullers’s writing style resembled “classics of American realism” like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (13), a collection of short stories turned into a novel and published in 1919. Tellingly, the author’s original title had been The Book of the Grotesque. Anderson, as Malcom Cowley asserts in his 1960 introduction to Winesburg, Ohio, was “the only story teller of his generation who left his mark on the style and vision of the generation that followed. Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Saroyan, Henry Miller […], and their names might stand for dozens of others” (1). One of these might as well have been McCullers, who uses a very similar concept to Anderson when it comes to turning her characters into ‘grotesques’ and letting them revolve around one central character in the hope that he would solve their dilemmas. ‘Grotesques’, in Anderson’s and McCuller’s novels, are solitary persons who try to live by a single truth that becomes a falsehood. As they are unable to truly express themselves and communicate with others, they hope for some other person to “speak what is in their hearts and thus re-establish their connection with mankind” (Cowley 15). The twist in McCullers’s choice is that she destined for this role a hearing impaired protagonist, John Singer, whose sign language the other characters fail to understand.
Whereas Malcom Cowley characterizes Anderson’s ‘grotesques’ as “emotional cripples” (14), McCullers described her grotesque figures as having a “physical incapacity” that symbolizes their “spiritual isolation” (The Mortgaged Heart 280). In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter such an incapacity can take the form of tuberculosis, which the author attributes to Doctor Copeland, an illness that, according to Susan Sontag, was commonly understood “as a disease that isolates one from the community” (37-38); it can also take the form of sexual impotence, which Biff is endowed with, addiction to alcohol as in Jake Blount’s case, or, as McCullers thought, ‘deafness and muteness’ in John Singer. Cognitive impairment, however, is not included in McCullers’s conceptual scheme.
While in the process of writing the novel, McCullers submitted an outline of her work, at the time entitled The Mute, to the publishing house Houghton Mifflin. She explained that she wanted to create John Singer, Antonapoulos’s friend and a main character in the book, as a “flat character” (The Mortgaged Heart 138) and assume “the tone of a legend” (137) when referring to him. True to her intentions, the novel starts like a fairy tale: “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. Early every morning they would come out from the house where they lived and walk arm in arm down the street to work” (7). Because Antonapoulos is only mentioned when interacting with Singer, this style of writing concerns him in particular–all the more since McCullers did not completely succeed in creating John Singer as the intended flat character. After the two friends are forced to separate due to Antonapoulos’s display of deviant behavior that leads to his institutionalization, McCullers allows the reader glimpses into Singer’s inner life, showing his intense loneliness as he writes letters that will remain unsent to his friend Antonapoulos. What McCullers did, however, was to divide the novel into fairy-tale mode when relating incidences involving the two ‘deaf-mutes’ or Antonapoulos alone, and into realistic mode when narrating the lives of the other characters.
One reason for this difference in narrative technique might be that McCullers explicitly refused to do research on hearing impaired and cognitively impaired people and thus built on assumptions readily accepted by contemporary readers when describing the relationship between the ‘deaf-mutes’. As has been repeatedly pointed out, Carson’s husband Reeves McCullers had offered to “take her to a deaf-and-dumb convention in Macon, Georgia, so that she might authenticate her concept of John Singer” (Carr 19). Yet Carson told him that that “was the last thing” she wanted to do because she already had made her “conception of deaf mutes and didn’t want it to be disturbed” (The Mortgaged Heart 281); she was afraid that “too many facts” would impede her intuition (281-82).
Whereas Carson McCullers is assumed to have borrowed from real-life models traits for her literary characters in that she endowed, for instance, Jake Blount with certain characteristics of her husband (Carr 152), formed Mick after her own adolescent self (Evans 18), modeled Portia after the various housemaids employed in her family’s household (Evans 10), and made John Singer work in a jeweler’s store like her father, she lacked real-life stimuli and first-hand experience for a character with a cognitive and hearing impairment. Instead, she used, according to Evans, “a Greek produce dealer in Columbus” as a model–“with a few radical alterations” (42) and turned him into a character whose “mental, sexual and spiritual development is that of a child of about seven years old” (The Mortgaged Heart 149). Thus, what McCullers perceived as her “intuition” in regards to Spiros Antonapoulos can be interpreted as her unconsciously resorting to commonly accepted ideas about a cognitively different person being a mix between a burdensome child and a social menace:
At times he [Antonapoulos] would meet people on the sidewalk whose faces did not please him and he would bump into these persons and push at them with his elbows and stomach. He walked into a store one day and hauled out a floor lamp without paying for it, and another time he tried to take an electric train he had seen in a showcase. (HLH 11)
According to historian James Trent, the notion that people with an intellectual disability posed a public threat “began to penetrate American consciousness” (141) by the First World War and soon caught on:
The feeble-minded are a parasitic, predatory class, never capable of self-support or of managing their own affairs. The great majority ultimately become public charges in some form. They cause unutterable sorrow at home and are a menace and a danger to the community. […] Every feeble-minded person, especially the high-grade imbecile, is a potential criminal, needing only the proper environment and opportunity for the development and expression of his criminal tendencies. The unrecognized imbecile is a most dangerous element in the community (Fernald qtd. in Bogdan and Taylor 9-10).[4]
Intertwined with this opinion about cognitively impaired persons was a demand to protect society from those labeled ‘retarded’ and criminal. It did not occur to most people that, instead of custodial institutionalization, persons with cognitive impairments might need attention, care, and affection, but also instruction, a useful occupation, and encouragement like other human beings. This unthinking attitude echoes throughout McCullers’s novel when she depicts Antonapoulos as so different, antisocial, and remote from the other characters that he seems like a planet revolving around his own self-centered greed, unable to feel ordinary human emotions like sorrow–apart from when food or alcohol is withheld from him–, homesickness, or longing for friendship. For instance, on the rare occasion that John Singer invites another “mute”, Carl, to their apartment, the evening that could have been a pleasant one ends in disaster, because Antonopoulos starts behaving unaccountably. After a good meal in a cozy atmosphere Antonapoulos’s face takes on a “glowering look”:
He [Antonapoulos] sat on his bed and began to stare repeatedly at their new friend with expressions of offence and great disgust. […] Carl huddled in a chair, nursing his bony knees, fascinated and bewildered by the grimaces of the big Greek. […] He [Antonapoulos] pointed to Carl and began to make all the gestures of obscenity which he knew. […] Carl was small with fear. At last the big Greek ground his teeth and rose from his chair. Hurriedly Carl picked up his cap and left the room. (179)
Antonapoulos accuses the guest of having drunk an entire bottle of gin that he, in fact, has secretly drunk himself.
Social reformers who wanted to help people with a cognitive impairment had to surrender vis-à-vis the growing number of persons considered ‘feeble-minded’ who were sent to institutions, particularly during the 1930s. As historian Steven Noll points out:
the depression of the 1930s exacerbated bleak economic conditions, reducing national institutional expenditures by nearly one-third. […] While national funding levels declined, the total number of people institutionalized actually increased. Contemporaries viewed this increase as symptomatic of the depression and explained higher institutionalization rates of high-level morons in economic terms. (44)
Consequently, “superintendents were often forced to keep prospective patients on long waiting lists for extensive periods of time” (Noll 50). This is not so, however, in McCullers’s novel. Soon after Antonapoulos’s mysterious illness that apparently elicits his deviant behavior, his Greek cousin, for whom he had previously worked, “used his money and influence to admit […] [Antonapoulos] to the asylum without delay” (HLH 12). That an immigrant with a fruit and candy store who “did not know much American” should possess enough “influence in town” to arrange for his cousin to be “admitted into the asylum [two hundred miles away] the next week” (HLH 12) is not very likely, but the author’s shortcut propels the action and heightens the dramatic effect of impending loss for Singer. This detail of Antonapoulos’s expedited relocation, however, illustrates another point that Noll makes, that it is not necessarily the state that institutionalizes those considered deviant for social control purposes, but that “families and communities played major roles in the process of institutionalization, often for mundane and personal reasons” (8). In this case, it is Antonapoulos’s only relative who is afraid to be held responsible for the actions of his uncontrollable cousin, afraid to lose his standing among the townspeople.
McCullers, however, did not only imagine the fruit and candy store owner but also his hearing and cognitively impaired cousin as a foreigner.[5] Whereas Antonapoulos’s cousin tries to melt into mainstream American society, which is obvious when he discards his Greek name in favor of the American sounding Charles Parker (HLH 11), Spiros is always referred to as Antonapoulos or the Greek and thus continuously marked out as the Other. This labeling brings to mind the heyday of eugenic thought in the first decades of the twentieth century, when pseudo-scientific works like Henry H. Goddard’s “case study” (which significantly enough worked with a Greek pseudonym) The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, whichdebased people with cognitive impairments and pronounced the racial superiority of ‘the Nordic race’, met with public approval. As Noll points out, “by the 1920s many eugenic reformers focused on immigrants as a major cause of the increasing number of feeble-minded” (39),[6] believing in Henry H. Goddard’s “findings” in 1917 that “as many as 40 percent to 50 percent of immigrants were feebleminded” (Trent 168).[7] Politicians from a Northern European background successfully argued in favor of restrictions for immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. The resulting Immigration Act of 1924, also known as National Origins Act, limited the number of immigrants from these areas considerably, prohibited the immigration of East Asians and Asian Indians entirely, and contributed to the distorted public image of such immigrants.
Yet, if it is true that “Americans learn perspectives on disability from books and films more than from policies or personal interactions” (Mitchell and Snyder 166), it is not only the political environment or the refusal of McCullers to find out more about people with disabilities that has to be taken into account when considering the context in which the novel was conceived. Mitchell and Snyder have divided disability studies scholarship in the humanities into five methodologies, one of which they termed "studies of negative imagery" (15) or the negative-imagery school. That is to say, one might also blame the long tradition of stereotypical depictions of impaired characters in world literature and films for influencing the public’s perception. James Trent, for instance, writes that “Goddard’s moron would live on in popular literature and in the public’s conscience for at least four decades after the 1920s. In the 1930s, ‘little moron’ jokes would (along with Polack jokes, both of which had their origins in Goddard’s testings) become all the rage” (165). Apart from such jokes, newspaper articles about fathers killing sons born with several severe impairments contributed to the image that the lives of cognitively impaired people were not worthy of their parents’ love, but only their ‘mercy’. Janice Brockley, who looked into the newspaper coverage of the mid- to late 1930s on mercy killing and euthanasia, points out that “[p]hysical disability, while stigmatized, was not as disturbing as intellectual disability” (294). People with cognitive impairments did not fit the theory of ever progressing humanity; rather they represented, in Robert Bogdan and Steven Taylor’s words, “unwanted humanity” (xi). In the hierarchies of disability, cognitive impairments rank lowest:
An individual’s position in this hierarchy [of acceptability] is generally determined by how well that person fits into society’s ‘norm.’ In other words, the less disabled you look, the higher you rank. Probably the lowest on the general hierarchy of disability, set up by the able-bodied society and mirrored in the disabled community, are those individuals labelled mentally ill or mentally retarded. Both groups are still routinely referred to as incompetents, vegetables, basket cases, and, thanks to the media, dangerous threats to society. (Thompson 82-83)
In light of this background, it is not surprising that McCullers conceived of Spiros Antonapoulos as a one-dimensional comic figure, whose confinement in an insane asylum is never depicted as worthy of further contemplation. The only importance Spiros Antonapoulos holds in her story is “as the child-idiot-idol to whom Singer brings the offering of Mickey Mouse and Popeye films” (Spivak 19), a fake love object that stresses McCullers’s point that the relationship between the two is unequal and reciprocity impossible. Whereas Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reads Antonapoulos allegorically as “the book’s god” and “the male homosexual as the institutionalized insane” (20), Charlene Kerne Clark, who looked at the tragicomic vision of McCullers’s novels, perceived Antonapoulos as Singer’s “comic sidekick”:
In appearance and personality, Singer and Antonapoulos resemble Laurel and Hardy. Antonapoulos is an enormous roly-poly figure given to mischievous antics and public temper tantrums, and he is passionately fond of food and cartoons. In contrast with his beloved fat friend, Singer is a mere slip of a man, Spartan and reserved, and extremely anxious to avoid the public commotion Antonapoulos is so fond of creating. (164)
In making Antonapoulos obese, McCullers employs another negatively connoted trait that has traditionally been used by artists to symbolize dullness, passiveness, and stupidity. As Sander L. Gilman reminds us, there is a “powerful myth” in the Western imagination that philosopher-scientists have to have “a lean and hungry look” (272), whereas the fat body is usually associated with soft feminine attributes and primitive emotions. Creating John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos with such divergent bodies, adds a further aspect to the oddness of the couple that, for instance, Spivak perceived as homosexual,[8] an attribute that at the time of McCullers’s writing was considered by many psychiatrists as a form of mental illness.
Whether one chooses to see Antonapoulos as Singer’s god, his homosexual partner, his comic sidekick, or as a “grotesque parody of the flippant and witty Wildean dandy” (Gleeson-White 64), the fact that McCullers created him without depth, positive emotions, inner thoughts, and without a past alienates him from the reader and makes Singer’s perception of his companion, who “excepting drinking and a certain solitary secret pleasure” loves nothing more than to eat (HLH 8), seem preposterous and distorted:
Sometimes he thought of Antonapoulos with awe and self-abasement, sometimes with pride–always with love unchecked by criticism, freed of will. When he dreamed at night the face of his friend was always before him, massive and wise and gentle. And in his waking thoughts they were eternally united. (HLH 282)
When Antonapoulos dies in the asylum, it is not for him that readers grieve but for his friend Singer who is not willing to live without the image he had projected onto Antonapoulos as his “Only Friend” (HLH 188).
Rereading the Cognitively Impaired Character as Marginalized Other
Whereas the hearing impaired Singer gains in narrative dimension and humanity throughout the novel–more than apparently intended by the author–the cognitively impaired character, created in complete contrast to Singer, remains one-dimensional. In addition, the fact that he is kept separate from society in a custodial institution is not depicted as tragic for him, but only for his friend Singer.
Antonapoulos is actually confined twice, but neither one of his confinements is used for socio-critical purposes: Before being dispatched to the asylum, he already spends a night in the local prison for some crime unknown to the reader, because his friend Singer is unable to pay bail. Prison life in the 1930s was certainly no pleasure–as McCullers shows with regard to Willie, the African-American character who is mistreated in such a way that he returns from prison with his feet sawn off, or in the scene where Dr. Copeland is beaten by the sheriff and dragged to a prison cell: “In the cramped cubicle there were five other prisoners–three Negroes and two white men. […] The icy cell was permeated with a rotten odour. A pail brimming with urine was in a corner. Cockroaches crawled upon the walls” (HLH 230). As Dr. Copeland’s mistreatment and Willie’s torture is due to their jailers’ racism, it may have been that Spiros, who is not an African-American, experienced better treatment. Nevertheless, as a person with a cognitive impairment and unable to communicate by words, considered inferior and a nuisance by “normates,”[9] he might also have been mistreated or ridiculed, if not by the guards, by fellow prisoners. Yet, McCullers shows Antonapoulos as “very sulky” when Singer is there to take him home, because “[h]e did not want to leave” (HLH 12). After all, he “had enjoyed his dinner of sowbelly and cornbread with syrup poured over it” and “the new sleeping arrangements and his cellmates pleased him” (HLH 12). Hence, whereas McCullers employs Willie and Dr. Copeland’s experiences in jail to elicit outrage in the reader about the racism of Southern society, she uses the prison scene involving Antonapoulos only as an instance of humor to stress his alleged childlike and grotesque character.
In a similar vein, Antonapoulos’s confinement in the “state insane asylum” (HLH 12) is not taken seriously and serves only as a device to trigger the novel’s action. The sparse description of the asylum scenes seems more related to McCullers’s own experience as a 15-year-old in a tuberculosis sanatorium at Alto than to real-life conditions in an overcrowded and understaffed “state insane asylum.”[10] According to historian Edward Shorter, “[b]etween 1903 and 1933, the number of patients confined in psychiatric institutions in the United States more than doubled, from 143,000 to 366,000. The vast majority were institutions with more than a thousand beds. There were psychiatric hospitals such as Georgia’s notorious Milledgeville with more than eight thousand patients” (190),[11] which Carson McCullers, who had been born and raised in Georgia, was aware of and alluded to in her novel The Member of the Wedding as “Crazy-House” (130). These “snake pits” (Shorter 190) were of no therapeutic value whatsoever, ward attendants were often overburdened, underpaid, and unqualified (Noll 142) and patients were mistreated, humiliated, or neglected:
It was a hopeless, depressing atmosphere; and psychiatrists themselves had to struggle not to be engulfed by it. A series of exposés in the 1930s and 1940s describing the ‘ugly,’ ‘crowded,’ ‘incompetent,’ ‘perverse,’ ‘neglectful,’ ‘callous,’ ‘abusive,’ and ‘oppressive’ conditions in state mental hospitals effected little change. Patients were beaten, choked, and spat on by attendants. They were put in dark, damp, padded cells and often restrained in straitjackets at night for weeks at a time. (Valenstein 174)
In contrast to the actual conditions in psychiatric hospitals, McCullers shows Antonapoulos apparently happy and content, lacking neither affection, privacy, nor nutritious food. When John Singer is able to visit his friend for the first time in eight months in the asylum, he finds that “Antonapoulos was not changed at all. […] He was even fatter than before, but the dreamy smile on his face was just the same” (HLH 85). Upon Singer’s second visit half a year later, however, Antonapoulos is ill with nephritis and transferred to the infirmary. In spite of his illness, this peculiar patient doesn’t show any signs of discomfort or pain. Instead, McCullers uses the infirmary scene to raise Antonapoulos to fantastic proportions, again establishing his status as different from the rest: “Sitting motionless in his bright, rich garments he seemed like some wise king from a legend” (HLH 196). Whereas the other patients eat “listlessly”, seem “sick and colourless”, and have to wear “seedy grey nightshirts slit down the back”, Antonapoulos eats “with relish” (HLH 195), wearing a “scarlet dressing-gown and green silk pyjamas” (HLH 193) that Singer had sent him as gifts, and holds “his fingers regally to a nurse” so that she comes to him to straighten “the bed to his liking” (HLH 195). The scene is so absurd that “[w]e cannot fail to be amused at the notion of Mr. Antonapoulos arrayed like a king holding court in the ward of the state asylum” (C. Clark 164).
When comparing the relationship between Singer and Antonapoulos with the two main characters in John Steinbeck’s famous novel Of Mice and Men, published a few years earlier than The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and also describing a friendship between a man and his cognitively impaired friend, there are striking similarities, but also a remarkable difference in the narrative design. Unlike Steinbeck’s Lennie, McCullers created Spiros Antonapoulos as an insensitive character who appears as “the epitome of the grotesque in human nature: he is crude, obnoxious, obscene, vulgar, sensual, and amoral” (Whitt 24) –in complete contrast to his friend John Singer, whom Julian Symons describes as “the thoughtful, composed and gentle deaf mute” (22). What is even more significant is that Antonapoulos is depicted as incapable of love, whereas the cognitively impaired Lennie elicits at least the reader’s sympathy by his complete devotedness to his friend George–even if, like Antonapoulos, the author destines him to die. Because Antonapoulos is portrayed as indifferent towards his “friend,” as a greedy and selfish taker, as “unworthy” (Evans 45) of love, his purpose in the story is not to draw attention to the segregation of people with a cognitive impairment, but to prove a point made in McCullers’s “Outline”: “A personal God created by a man is a reflection of himself and in substance this God is most often inferior to his creator” (The Mortgaged Heart 136). It is therefore no accident that from the very first page of the novel only negatively connoted terms are used to introduce Antonapoulos to the reader–“sloppily”, “oily”, “stupid”, “lazily” (7) –character traits that his friend Singer fails to perceive.
Conclusion
In resorting to a one-dimensional rendering of Antonapoulos in either comic, negative, or mystic terms, in not granting him human status, McCullers sets him apart from the other characters. Therefore, Antonapoulos is not necessarily “indefinitely displaced through mutism, homosexuality, and idiocy” as Spivak finds (19), but rather by the meanings society invests in these terms. In addition, he is isolated by the narrative mode, by the author’s switch from realistic narration to fairytale mode, by the space she accords him, and by inventing him as devoid of an essential human attribute: the capacity to love and care. In McCullers’s fictional world, the awareness of loneliness and spiritual longing is a defining criterion of humanness. Antonapoulos is excluded from common humanity because he is lacking the perception of any emotions besides appetite for food and diversion. McCullers’s usual narratological approach does not extend to him:
I become the characters I write about. I am so immersed in them that their motives are my own. When I write about a thief, I become one; when I write about Captain Penderton, I become a homosexual man; when I write about a deaf mute, I become dumb during the time of the story. I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said, ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’ (The Mortgaged Heart 282)
Representing a cognitively impaired man realistically was a challenge that McCullers could not meet due to the typical preconceptions about cognitive impairment in her time. The alienness of Antonapoulos, it seems, defies this approach. He is beyond the scope of McCullers’s technique of imaginative identification and figures as a symbol of Otherness–too remote to be accessible.
Notes
[1] Heidi Krumland, Doctoral Candidate, Department of English and American Studies, Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany.
[2] Richard Wright lauded Carson McCullers for “the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race” (Clark and Friedman 18).
[3] Although the term “deaf-mute” was in common use at the time Carson McCullers wrote her novel, hearing impaired people resented this designation. As Susan Burch points out, “[t]hroughout the early twentieth century, both sign language and oralist advocates expounded on the need to educate mainstream society about the inappropriateness of such terms. […] The National Association of the Deaf and numerous local chapters of Deaf associations published pamphlets and established publicity committees in an effort to inform the public about deafness and the preferred terminology. […] Not until the 1930s, however, did a strong push for an alternative nomenclature develop in educational circles. […] in 1937, the CEASD [Conference of Executives of American Schools for the Deaf] strongly recommended dropping a number of terms, including ‘deaf-mute,’ ‘deaf and dumb,’ ‘semimute,’ ‘mute,’ and ‘deafened’” (34).
[4] Walter E. Fernald was the first superintendent of The Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded, later renamed the Walter E. Fernald School, and an advocate of eugenics. This quote is from an address to the Massachusetts Medical School in 1912.
[5] How much ‘American’ and its corresponding sign language Antonapoulos would be able to understand or for how long he has already been in the USA is never mentioned. Referring to the case of the hearing impaired Junius Wilson, who was unfairly judged as an insane rapist, castrated and put away into an institution for life, Susan Burch reminds us that “deafness could be misinterpreted as mental retardation, insanity, or criminality” (136-7).
[6] According to Steven Noll, in 1930 the following terms were used in scientific circles for persons who are nowadays denoted as developmentally disabled or cognitively impaired: “feeble-minded, mentally defective, mentally deficient” as general labels with subcategories ranked “moron” for an IQ score between 55-70, “imbecile” for an IQ score between 25-50, and “idiot” for an IQ score of less than 25 (3).
[7] Goddard had translated the French Binet intelligence test into English and administered them to new arrivals at Ellis Island, many of whom were unable to understand English and came from a different cultural background than the one Binet had envisioned when conceiving the test. In addition, the intelligence test “unfairly privileged hearing participants” (Burch 135).
[8] Spivak’s reading of John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos as “homosexuals of completely incompatible personalities” (18) is contested by Patterson (79), who objects on the grounds that there is no clear evidence for their homosexuality.
[9] Rosemarie Garland Thomson coined the term “normate” that describes a “social figure” which is “outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries”. This constructed identity “through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings” allows for “a position of authority” and power (8).
[10] Lisa Claire Roney, who examined the relationship between Carson McCuller’s own experience of chronic illness and her fictional depictions of outsiders (albeit leaving out The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter), mentions that McCullers grew seriously ill in 1932 at the age of 15 and was sent to a tuberculosis sanatorium, where she spent several weeks (120). Her physicians were at a loss to diagnose her illness correctly and it was only in 1947, after long years of uncertainty about her condition and several strokes, that a rheumatic heart disease was diagnosed.
[11] Steven Noll also refers to Milledgeville State Hospital in Georgia, but mentions “only” 6,000 mentally ill patients (128).
Works Cited
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. Introd. Malcom Cowley. New York: Viking, 1960.
Bogdan, Robert, and Steven J. Taylor. The Social Meaning of Mental Retardation: Two Life Stories. New York: Teachers College P, 1994. Rpt. of Inside Out: The Social Meaning of Mental Retardation. 1982.
“Book Selections. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” Oprah’s Book Club. 2004. 12 Aug 2006 <http://www2.oprah.com/obc_classic/featbook/thlh/novel/thlh_novel_main.jhtml>.
Brockley, Janice A. “Martyred Mothers and Merciful Fathers. Exploring Disability and Motherhood in the Lives of Jerome Greenfield and Raymond Repouille.” The New Disability History. American Perspectives. Ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky. New York: New York UP, 2001. 293-312.
Burch, Susan. Signs of Resistance. American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II. New York and London: NY UP, 2002.
Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter. A Biography of Carson McCullers. 1975. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 2003.
Clark, Beverly Lyon and Melvin J. Friedman. Critical Essays on Carson McCullers. New York: G. K. Hall & Co, 1996.
Clark, Charlene Kerne. “Pathos With a Chuckle: The Tragicomic Vision in the Novels of Carson McCullers.” Studies in American Humor 1.3 (1975): 160-65.
Cowley, Malcolm. Introduction. Winesburg, Ohio. By Sherwood Anderson. New York: Viking, 1960. 1-15.
Evans, Oliver. The Ballad of Carson McCullers. A Biography. New York: Coward-McCann, 1966.
Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. ed. New York: Dell, 1966.
Gilman, Sander L. “The Fact Detective: Obesity and Disability.” Disability Studies. Enabling the Humanities. Ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: MLA, 2002. 271-279.
Gleeson-White, Sarah. Strange Bodies. Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2003.
Goddard, Henry H. The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. New York: Macmillan, 1912.
Graver, Lawrence. Carson McCullers. Pamphlets on American Writers 84. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1969.
Logan, Lisa. Introduction. Clark and Friedman 1-14.
Lubbers, Klaus. “The Necessary Order. A Study of Theme and Structure in Carson McCullers’ Fiction.” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 8. Heidelberg: Winter, 1963.
McCullers, Carson. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. 1940. Harmondsworth: Penguin, ca. 1995.
---. The Member of the Wedding. 1946. Toronto, New York, London, 1969.
---. The Mortgaged Heart. 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
Millichap, Joseph R. “The Realistic Structure of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Twentieth Century Literature (1971): 11-17.
Mitchell, David. “Modernist Freaks and Postmodernist Geeks.” The Disability Studies Reader. Ed.
Lennard Davis. New York: Routledge, 1997. 348-65.
Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis. Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.
Noll, Steven. Feeble-Minded in Our Midst. Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900–1940. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1995.
Patterson, Kathleen A. Representations of Disability in Mid Twentieth-Century Southern Fiction: From Metaphor to Social Construction. Diss. U of California, 1997. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1998. 9819467.
Roney, Lisa C. Beyond the Pale: Chronic Illness, Disability, and Difference in the Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Diss. Pennsylvania State U, 2001. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2001.3036106
Savigneau, Josyane. Carson McCullers. A Life. London: The Women’s Press, 2001.
Shorter, Edward. A History of Psychiatry. From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac. New York: Wiley, 1997.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. London: Allen Lane, 1979.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Feminist Readings: McCullers, Drabble, Habermas.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 35.1-2 (1979-80): 15-24.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. 1937. Stuttgart: Klett, 1979.
Symons, Julian. “The Lonely Heart.” 1953. Clark and Friedman 22-25.
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
Thompson, Dai R. “Anger.” With the Power of Each Breath. A Disabled Women’s Anthology. Ed.
Susan E. Browne, Debra Connors and Nanci Stern. Pittsburgh/San Francisco: Cleis, 1985. 78-85.
Trent, James W. Inventing the Feeble Mind. A History of Mental Retardation in the United States. Medicine and Society 6. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.
Valenstein, Elliot S. Great and Desperate Cures. The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Whitt, Mary A. “The Mutes in McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Pembroke Magazine (1988): 24-29.
Wright, Richard. “Inner Landscape” Rev. of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. New Republic 5 Aug. 1940: 195. Rpt. in Clark and Friedman 17-18.
Editor, Dr. David Bolt |
Book Reviews Editor, Dr. Clare Barker
|