The Presentation of the American South in Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café Rebeka Franciska Szentgyörgyi College

When it comes to defining the literature of the American South, geography, history, politics, race, gender, social order and religion are what come to one’s mind immediately (Hobson, Ladd 1). However, this description changed over time, and in the middle of the twentieth century scholars added “a tragic sense, a sense of place, and a sense of the past in the present” to this definition (Hobson, Ladd 1). All of these three characteristics, as well as a strong sense of loneliness and trials of strength, are present in Carson McCullers’ novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café (Gray, 266, 270). According to Richard Gray, the author’s “peculiar quality of isolation”, with which her works are usually described, is a result of her place among other writers of the South (Gray, 265). She was not part of the great “renaissance”, but it would not be true to say that she belonged to the new wave of Southern writers who came after the Second World War either, considering most of her main works were published before the end of the war (Gray, 265-266). The Ballad of the Sad Café was first published in 1943, when the author was only twenty-six, in Harper’s Bazaar, and in the following, I discus the above mentioned themes’ presence and the Southern...