Seen them working on her properties—with Cousin Lymon standing by and doing absolutely nothing, but quick to point out any laziness among the hands. On autumn afternoons they sat on the back steps chopping sugar cane, the glaring summer days they spent back in the swamp where the water cypress is a deep black green, where beneath the tangled swamp trees there is a drowsy gloom. When the path leads through a bog or a stretch of blackened water see Miss Amelia bend down to let Cousin Lymon scrambled on her back—and see her wading forward with the hunchback settled on her shoulders, clinging to her ears or to her broad forehead.[2]
People can realize that Miss Amelia is content with these years of warmth. She proves to the entire town that she is a real and wonderful “man”. During the love of Lymon, Amelia acted as a knight and threatened those who will abuse her lover. [8]
Absolutely, Amelia acts the role of man. Details in this novel suggest that she is the wrong character of gender and social role. Amelia’s personality directly results in the triangle love of herself with Marvin Macy and Lymon.
2.1.2.2 Marvin Macy Marvin Macy is also a tragic character. “His reputation was as bad, if not worse, than that of any young man in the county” [2] He is cruel, once cut someone’s an ear, and degraded those gentle and beautiful girls. Yet there is some explanation for the ugliness of his evil character. Marvin Macy had had a hard beginning in this world. He was abandoned by his parents who could hardly be called parents at all: their own children, and there was a new one almost every year, were only a nuisance to the wild young couple. Marvin Macy experienced a very bad childhood.
If the children cried they were beaten, and the first thing they learned in this world was to seek the darkest corner of the room and try to hide them as best they could. They were as thin as little whitehaired ghosts, and they did not speak, not even to each other. Finally, they were abandoned by their parents altogether and left to the mercies of the town. [2]
Tragic childhood left deep shadow in his heart. Marvin Macy hates the cruel society; hence he leads a hopeless life. The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.
As his painful childhood twist his personality, Marvin Macy’s view of love can not be explained as a normal person. Surprised the town, that solitary and queer Miss Amelia was the one he longed for. Although his love for Amelia reverses his character, it doesn’t completely change his life, for he doesn’t receive the love from Amelia. Otherwise, his love makes his life more painful. After he is released from prison, he immediately revenge on Amelia, which leads to the tragic ending of the three characters.
2.1.2.3 Cousin Lymon Amelia’s loved one is Lymon, who is disabled both in physic and mind. He came to the town just like a ghost. First of all, he is strange and ugly in appearance. He is a hunchback. He is scarcely more than four feet tall and he wears a ragged, dusty coat that reached only to his knees. His crooked little legs seemes too thin to carry the weight of his great warped chest and the hump that sat on his shoulders. He has a very large head, with deep-set blue eyes and a sharp little mouth. Besides, he is ill in psychology. He is a great mischief-maker. “He enjoyed any kind of to-do, and without saying a word he could set the people at each other in a way that was miraculous.”[2] He has hatred of the world, but he is afraid of dark, feels lonely. This grotesque character is pitiful and tragic.
Lymon is also a figure of symbolic significance. His large head, little legs and hunchback symbolize material prosperity but spirit poverty. He never works and lives totally dependent on Amelia’s fortune. Though Amelia loves him so much, he betrays her at last. Sine Marvin Macy returned to the town again, Lymon has been attracted. In his eyes, Marvin Macy is handsome and strong, even his cruel and experience of prison is considered as the adventure of man. In fact, ugly and poor Lymon humble to get close to Marvin Macy because the latter is Lymon’s ideal ego in his imagination. Lymon’s disability in physical brings him inferior complex. With such sense, he is not able to rescue himself.
2.2 The relationship between love desperation and spiritual isolation
As many critics have pointed out, The Ballad of Sad Café reflects McCullers’s fascination with freaks, misfits, and grotesques. “For her, such characters best embodied the loneliness and isolation that she regarded as the basic condition of human existence.”[9] The author uses exaggeration, describing the three characters with the deformation of the body and the twisted soul, and expresses deep sympathy to the people, also reflects the social reality: the material and inhuman relationship between people. Lacking of mutual understanding, trust, loyalty, people just feel strange, lonely, empty, and the status is helpless and hopeless.
As it is discussed at the beginning of this paper, the polyhedrosis love relationship of the three characters represents the loneliness and alienation in the modern society. Still other theme—all of which bear on the novella’s central concern with loneliness—include the failure of communication, the anguish of unrequited love, the psychological phenomenon that causes human beings who are worshiped to despise the worshiper and the redemptive efforts of love. This paper will attach great importance to the theme of love desperation. The relationship between love desperation and spiritual isolation is that the former is echoing the latter, that is to say, love desperation of the three characters is one way of expressing their spiritual loneliness and separation. How does love desperation express spiritual isolation? It will be analyzed in two aspects: Miss Amelia’s incompetent love for Cousin Lymon and Marvin Macy, and the twisted love of Cousin Lymon for Marvin Macy.转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net
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