That is a very good point about the ending—I had interpreted it as being meant very bleakly, but I suppose you're right that she is making her own decisions, even if the circumstances of that are rather tragic.
That may be just me, after reading her stuff 10000000 times XD but I feel that even her saddest, unhappiest endings show her characters keeping their dignity, even if they are living in tragic situations, and choosing how they deal with that tragedy. I think her endings feel very real because of this.
And definitely!! Miss Amelia is "queer in a nebulous sort of way"--many of her characters (and McCullers herself, I think) exist in that place between "normality" and "queerness", and the way she writes about people's experiences navigating between them is fascinating to me, and again, feels very real. Also, she writes a lot about people with disability trying to fit in in a world that doesn't want them, and I think Cousin Lymon is an interesting example of that... but I think she did this even better in "The heart is a lonely hunter", which is so impressive, because it was her first novel! It shows the way disability and queerness overlap, and how people try to fit into the "normal" world, with various degrees of success and failure, and it's just an amazing book!
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: Feb. 27th, 2022 08:19 pm (UTC)That may be just me, after reading her stuff 10000000 times XD but I feel that even her saddest, unhappiest endings show her characters keeping their dignity, even if they are living in tragic situations, and choosing how they deal with that tragedy. I think her endings feel very real because of this.
And definitely!! Miss Amelia is "queer in a nebulous sort of way"--many of her characters (and McCullers herself, I think) exist in that place between "normality" and "queerness", and the way she writes about people's experiences navigating between them is fascinating to me, and again, feels very real. Also, she writes a lot about people with disability trying to fit in in a world that doesn't want them, and I think Cousin Lymon is an interesting example of that... but I think she did this even better in "The heart is a lonely hunter", which is so impressive, because it was her first novel! It shows the way disability and queerness overlap, and how people try to fit into the "normal" world, with various degrees of success and failure, and it's just an amazing book!