The Ballad of the Sad Café is one of the best-known works of the American novelist Carson McCullers, born on February 19, 1917. Carson McCullers’ fiction is representative of the literature of the American South in which the motif of the grotesque is combined with the theme of human alienation. McCullers had her own personal experience with isolation which frequently made her feel like a freak and a social misfit as she stated in the preface to the published version of her play The Square Root of Wonderful (1958): “Certainly I have always felt alone”. That is because Carson McCullers’ physical appearance was not ordinary. She was strangely tall for a woman, 5 feet and 8 inches as well as interested in both men and women. Her bisexuality and her feeling of being emotionally and intellectually estranged her from a society she felt that could not accommodate her. As a result Carson McCullers composed a type of fiction that emphasized the themes of spiritual isolation and loneliness as in most of her novels and short stories. The Ballad of the Sad Café is a work that best represents McCullers’ fictional art . In this novel Carson McCullers portrays destructive infatuation, sexual ambivalence, longing for communication and the human need for love. The novella features three main characters and it is set in a Southern town that is melancholic and desolate. Like the town the characters are lonesome, unhappy and estranged from one another. McCullers dramatizes the loneliness of the characters as a manifestation of unreciprocated love. Miss Amelia, the protagonist in the Ballad of the Sad Café, experiences alienation but also momentary triumph through the solitude and suffering of love.
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Amelia was in control of their relationship emotionally, physically and financially. She never gave him any love, and when he tried to approach her physically he abused him “Amelia hit him whenever he came within arm’s reach of her” (McCullers 32). Amelia was an expert in draining people off and acquiring money and power from anything in terms of business. Though, one time she felt helpless and totally dependent on other was when she had her kidney stones removed. That was a dramatic experience for Amelia and she seems to have been unable to overcome that incident of not being able to use your power so she kept her removed kidney stones in a box like ornaments: “They were the kidney stones of Miss Amelia herself, and had been taken from her by the doctor of Cheehaw some years ago. It had been a terrible experience, from the first minute to the last and all she had got out were those little stones” (35)
Amelia treated everyone in a not so nice way and would mostly look for a chance to take advantage of people because she had the power to do so. Though, when Marvin returned from prison Amelia had nothing more to gain from him and he had nothing to gain from her. He came back for revenge like he promise in the letter he wrote to her ” It was a wild love letter-but in it were also included threats, and he swore that in his life he would get even with her” (McCullers 33). So in fear of him going through with what he promised to her in that letter when she saw him back in town she changed into her red dress instead of her overalls which is a sign of her fear for him “For some reason, after the day of Marvin Macy’s arrival, she put aside her overalls and wore always the red dress she had before this time reserved for Sundays, funerals and session of the court.” (53).
Amelia wanted to be in charge of everything and everyone. Even love she wanted to control and do it the way she perceived it. Her perception of love was outside of the norms of a normal love experienced between two people:
First of all, it is a joint experience between two persons-but that fact does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries…. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge that makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best as he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world-a world intense and strange, complete in himself. (26)
That is why Amelia preferred to be the Lover not the Beloved. She believed that the lover had the power over the beloved and that the lover was the one that could manipulate the emotions within the joint experience of love:
Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state is being be loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. (27).
The love the in the Ballad of the Sad café is inversion of normal love patterns. Each character is in turn a slave and a tyrant depending on whether he is loved or being loved. That creates a love triangle because those characters simple do not know how to love. They cannot love without sacrificing their individual integrity nor can they be beloved without exerting their power or superiority
Furthermore, the Sad café portrays an inversion of heterosexual patterns and search for self-identification. Amelia is a character that rejects her feminine side and nearly everything that has to do with things that would attribute to women. Though, she seems to be maternal when she treats children “Though she denies her own femininity, she expresses maternal concern children and is infinitely gentle in her treatment of them” (McDowell 68). Amelia was maternal but she could not treat patients with strictly female problems as suggested in the novel:
If a patient came with a female complaint she could do nothing. Indeed at the mere mention of the words her face would slowly darken with shame, and she would stand there craning her neck against the collar of her shirt, or rubbing her swamp boots together, for all the world like a great, shamed, dumb-tongued child. (17)
Even during her wedding when Amelia knew she had to accept her feminine side and act and dress like a woman she seemed suppressed and not comfortable in what she was wearing ” As the marriages lines were read Miss Amelia kept making an odd gesture…. She was reaching for the pocket of her overall, and being unable to find it her face became impatient, bored, and exasperated” (30). Amelia made a compromise that was against everything she believed so when she return home from the wedding she took of her dress immediately “Within half an hour Miss Amelia had stomped down the stairs in breeches and a khaki jacket” (31). Amelia’s rejection of her feminine side is more than a confused gender identity. McCullers through Amelia’s sexual ambivalence symbolizes the character’s view on the norms of society. Amelia by rejecting her feminine side and acting and dressing masculine portrays her inability to accept the narrow world into which society wants women to exist.
Moreover, another motif of the Ballad of the Sad Café is the freakishness’ of its characters. McCullers uses that literary device to articulate her vision of things. In this case of Amelia who is also a freak because of her emotional state but mainly because of her physical appearance:
They remembered that Miss Amelia had been born dark and somewhat queer of face, raised motherless by her father who was a solitary man, that early in youth she had grown to be six feet two inches tall which in itself is not natural for a woman, and that her ways and habits were too peculiar ever to reason about. (14).
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McCullers’ purpose was to create a freak, a woman that would not fit into the norms of feminine so she did construct Amelia this way on purpose ” By emphasizing her physical defects and her masculinity McCullers effectively transforms Miss Amelia into a freak here” (Gray 81). Amelia’s masculinity is a symbol against the social norms in which she cannot get absorbed into “The form of the Ballad of the Sad Café allows McCullers to indulge the impulse to appropriate male power and thus escape the culturally inferior role of women” (Westling 110). Lymon on the other hand is a character that did not threaten her masculinity or what Amelia’s masculinity symbolized. That is the inversion of the social norms that propose that women are inferior to men. This is why Amelia loved Lymon, because he could not threaten her power nor could he make her feel inferior gender wise “Her later relationship Cousin Lymon is never threatening because he is not a real man who sees her as female” (Westling 110).
Furthermore McCullers usage of freaks in the Ballad of the Sad Café and her portrayal of Amelia as something outside of the norms of normal is not only because she want to emphasize Amelia’s need to not be thought as inferior because of the femininity of her gender. But it is also a sign of McCullers’ and Amelia’s existential alienation and loneliness. Amelia’s loneliness in reflected upon the town and her house “The town itself is dreary….Otherwise the town is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world” (3).
Amelia was so lonely, that when she had to be around people she did not feel comfortable at all “It was only with people that Miss Amelia was not at ease. People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and changed overnight to something more worthwhile and profitable” (5). Amelia wanted to bond with someone, to fit in but she could not achieve it because she did not let anyone in so she sunk in her loneliness:
Miss Amelia listened with her head turned slightly aside. She ate her Sunday dinners by herself; her place was never crowded with a flock of relatives and she claimed kin with no one…. Other people had tried very hard, from time to time, to work out some kind of far-fetched connection with Miss Amelia, but with absolutely no success. (7).
Amelia finally decides to give in since through Lymon she realizes she can be less lonely in more ways than one. Lymon represents her companion, the family she will never have and through him she becomes likeable to the rest of the town and more sociable:
For her he is simultaneously the lover-husband she has rejected and the child she will never have. Through him she establishes a precarious contact with the rest of the village insofar as the café, formed for Lymon’s entertainment, becomes a meeting place for all who seek “fellowship”…. But even as she escapes from that constricting loneliness of which Cousin Lymon maker her aware, she loses her cherished independence. (Vikery 99).
Amelia cherishes her independence but her love for Lymon and the Café itself brought her out of her solitude and filled her life. The Café was a temporary salvation of the state of living death in which the town and Amelia was in.
The characters that Carson McCullers chooses to use in her fiction are all strange and they consist of unusual characteristics. That is not to emphasize their physical defects but to symbolize her belief that not everything and everyone fit into the norms of society nor do they have to. In this fable of love in the Ballad of the Sad Café people do not know how to love. They do not perceive love as something worth experiencing or as something pleasant. Love is supposed to be a solitary thing according to Carson McCullers “I Live with people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen” (McCullers).
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