1.3 The homosexul Lymon’s affecetion to Marvin Macy
Marvin Macy loves Miss Amelia, but Amelia loves Lymon, yet Lymon has strong feeling with Marvin Macy. They form a circle; everyone loves the one stand in front of him, but never looks back.
Lymon’s love for Macy is even pitiful. Actually, he acted as a homosexual in this novel. It is easy to imagine that Marvin Macy either treated him hatefully or failed to notice him at all. Even so, Lymon is still concerned about Macy, and starts to do more. He helps Macy to revenge on Amelia. At last, he left Amelia, never having returned her love, to travel with Macy. And from Macy’s attitude it is easy to guess that Lymon was not able to gain Macy’s love. It is probable that Marvin Macy used him to climb into windows and steal and had sold him into a sideshow, as those rumors are spreaded.
Lymon’s love is hopeless and has no happy ending, so are Amelia’s love and Macy’s love. They are both the lovers and the beloved, but they are rather being the lovers than the beloved. Grotesque triangle love relationship brings them tragedy.
2 Analysis of Love Desperation
The Ballad of Sad Café narrates a grotesque and tragic love story of the three characters: Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy. The polyderosis love relationship of the three characters reveals the theme of this novel—spiritual isolation and love desperation. “The inescapable isolation of the individual American is as much economic as political and that, though its causes might indeed be material, its ultimate significance is spiritual.”[4] The central theme of The Ballad of Sad Café is spiritual isolation. Still, love desperation in polyhedrosis love relationship of the three characters specifically suggests human loneliness and alienation in modern society. After the analysis of polyhedrosis love relationship of the three characters at the beginning of this paper, then how their polyhedrosis love relationship reveals the theme of love desperation will be discussed in this chapter, from the following two aspects: causes of their polyhedrosis love relationship and the relationship between love desperation and spiritual isolation.
2.1 Causes of polyhedrosis love relationship of the three characters
The novella reflects such a real world: solitude and loss of love, through the terrible deformities and love. Through the description of absurd and tragic love story, The Ballad of Sad Café profoundly reflects the fact that people have difficulties of communicating and exchanging ideas with each other during the social process of industrialization in the South America, and proves McCullers’s view of love as well—love is strange, unexplained, is a unilateral feeling and could not possibly have echoed the equal feeling. The three characters are suffering a variety of social commitment. Through this extreme form of expression, the novel implies a profound sense of urgency of American spirit and culture. “To some extent, McCullers has gone beyond the localism, and become the spokesman of the loneliness and alienation in the world.”[5]
The three characters: Miss Amelia, Marvin Macy and Cousin Lymon, are typical images of those lonely and despair human, and their tragic love story resulted from the following two factors—the social background of southern America in the 19th century and their individual personalities.
2.1.1 Social background
In the second half of the 19th century, with the rapid development of capitalism the entire Western world and the United States have changed tremendously. Not only the development of material condition has changed people’s daily life, but also has it changed people’s mental state. In the pre-capitalist society, people are always “closely affiliated with a social unit, which can be a family, clan, village groups, associations, religious bodies and so on, not only the connection last people’s whole life, but for generations it has few changes; a strong sense of belonging to the community is along with most people in their lifetime.”[6] However, when people access to modern society, the whole community has been in the pursuit of progress, and people have pursued more money, greater power and higher social status, either. "We call it a community, but we believe the most completed separation and loneliness and under the appearance of fair competition, mutual hatred instead of mutual help exists in our life. We have forgotten the cash payment is not the only connection and relation between people.”[7]
That is why in the modern society, people have enjoyed more convenient communication and transportation provided by modern science and technology, but they are more isolated in spirit than any previous era. Trust and faith between people are replaced by all sorts of individual interests. Loneliness has become modern spiritual crisis, which is universally concerned by west modern literature.
In the southern America, people have experienced more profound of this spiritual crisis. The so-called “southern America” does not refer to the southern United States, but the seven rebel states in the Civil War. This is a unique region of the United Sates for its characteristics of special concept, culture and history. Before the Civil War, southern states’ economy is developed, except the blacks, most whites lead a self-sufficient life on their own farms and plantations. But after the war, along with the development of capitalist industry and commerce, agriculture, especially southern America which fed on cotton-producing has experienced economic recession. Plantation owners have no confidence in the reconstruction for the bad collapse during the war; those blacks freed from the slavery mostly live in the bottom of society for the lack of capital, education or racial discrimination. What is worse, the ideology of southerners has a strong sense of failure.
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