Evil and Violence in "The Ballad of The Sad Café"

Evil and Violence in Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Café:

Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Café is a book about love. However, love is not existent without its antagonist : Hate
Hate goes, as everyone knows, hand in hand with evil whose representation on our little planet is violence.

In the novella, evil and violence take different forms :


In the atmosphere

The town is portrayed as a dreary place, different from any other place in the world. As McCullers would put it, ' estranged from all other places'. It seems that an evil spirit is hovering over the town to spread its crookedness. Along with the swamp and its horrid odor, it really does look like a ghost town. As an example, after the snowfall, some houses will 'appear dirty, crooked, and about to collapse' , giving us the impression that everything is rotting from the inside. Nothing seems alive,
everything looks deserted, as if the town was struck by Evil.
Indeed the setting is very important and is closely woven into the narrative passages, as it seems often hostile. When the rumor that Ms. Amelia had murdered the hunchback starts, the air suddenly becomes 'icy with a drizzle settling in.' The day, which had been fine, ends in a bleak night, in keeping the gruesome talk of the day.


In the townspeople

Most townsmen are not depicted in the novella, they appear as a whole, as
a unity. The most obvious example is the 8 men coming in the store on the
night of the rumor. McCullers writes that this little community of 8
'looked very much alike (like an army platoon) with a set dreaming look in
the eye. What they would have done next, no one knows' However, we can
imagine that they were ready to ransack the store and destroy it. This
symbolic of violence is very representative of the town : the thought of
destroying, fighting and killing amuses more than anything else. Indeed,
they were all present at the Ms Amelia vs. Marvin Macy fight.
Even though the subject is not clearly tackled in the book, a few casual
allusions here and there seem to support the idea of racism and denigration
: the town is not likely to 'let white orphans perish in the road before
your eyes' , which may mean that the town would not care for black children
- otherwise, why would McCullers use the adjective white ? - Similarly,
Ms. Amelia is seen cutting Marvin Macy's 'Klansman's robe to cover her
tobacco plants.' The narrator passes no comment on this fact, which seems
to imply that the KKK is so much a part of everyday life in the South that it has become trivial. Furthermore, we are told at the beginning of the book, the story of Morris Finestein, obviously a Jewish name, which is a synonym for coward in this town. We are given the impression that the whole South is racist throughout these few people. And racism is a form of violence.


In the main characters

Ms Amelia : She is depicted as a hard character, strong-willed. She is often seen clenching her fists, whenever someone annoys her, ready to fight, to get violent. She is not afraid to fight fearlessly some 'huge strapping fellows whom she will leave quarter dead when she has finished with them'. Her shop makes her the 'townboss', which enables her to have an attitude of defiance towards the other people, who are frightened of her. Except for Cousin Lymon, she often adopts some kind of violent attitude, whether for making money or else.

Cousin Lymon : The little 'strutting hunchback' who arrives in the village is a freak of nature, he looks like the embodiment of the Devil himself as much in his physical appearance than in his mental attitude. His hands which look like 'dirty little sparrow claws' refer to his jumping on Ms Amelia's back and clutching at her neck 'with his clawed little fingers' : he, like the devil, is able to change his appearance and sometimes looks like a 'swamphaunt'. He takes a passionate delight in watching cockfights, which are cruel and violent spectacles. Furthermore, one of his favorite activities is setting people against each other and watch them fight and argue. His wickedness is emphasized by the look he first exchanges with Marvin Macy, which is that of 'two criminals'. In the end, he behaves in the most cruel manner with Ms Amelia when he starts making fun of her by imitating and emphasizing her way of walking, and finally when he helps Marvin Macy win the fight and ransack Amelia's shop. He lies all the time too, which is often associated with evil.

Marvin Macy : he is the caricature of the traditional villain in any US movie. From the start, he is described as a handsome bad guy that ' shamelessly ruins the tenderest girls of the county'. Indeed, he acts as a tough person with violent manners for he often chops off squirrels' tails. Even though he changes his manners for a while, after being thrown out of Ms. Amelia's house, he starts stealing and killing again, which leads him straight to jail. Evil is in his soul, and for years he 'carried the ears of a man he had chopped off in a razor fight'. The ugliness and the violence of the character is studied very closely through some explanation with he way he was brought up as a child, that is, beaten and violently educated and, as McCullers says, ' a cruel beginning can twist the heart of small children into curious shapes'. After his stay in the penitentiary, he comes back looking like the devil, for Ms. Amelia says : 'he will never set his split foot on my premises', which means the devil's foot. In his wake follows the rotten smell of the swamp. After the fight, he ruins the place and leaves unpunished before continuing their wrongdoing elsewhere.


In the action

There are few passages in the novella that reinforce the impact of violence in the Ballad of the Sad Café. For example, the wedding night and the ten days that followed. Ms Amelia, after punching her husband in the face, does not let him in on her premises again without being beaten. Another example, the most convincing one about Evil and Violence in the book, is the final fight between Marvin Macy and Ms. Amelia. McCullers gives the reader a great deal of details on the fight, on the fighters' attitude, etc. But the violent climax is reached when Marvin Macy, accompanied by his dwarfish friend, ransacks the café, leaving everything upside down.

The conclusion

Evil and violence are very important aspects of the novella, and the Ballad of the Sad Café would be a very sad story if those aspects were not toned down by another recurring theme : humor and irony, used quite often by the writer to sand-off the rough edges given by the Evil and Violence.




The Ballad of the Sad Café
McCullers, Carson
(Full name Lula Carson Smith McCullers) American novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and poet.
The following entry presents criticism on McCullers's novella The Ballad of the Sad Café, first published in August, 1943 in Harper's Bazaar. For an overview of McCullers's short fiction, see SSC, Volume 9.
INTRODUCTION
The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943) is generally considered one of McCullers's best works of fiction and her most successful exploration of her signature themes: loneliness and the effects of unrequited non partagé love. McCullers was twenty-four-years-old when she began writing the novella during the winter of 1941. Citing her remark that "everything significant that has happened in my fiction has also happened to me," McCullers's biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, noted that The Ballad of the Sad Café was most likely inspired by several events in her life at this time. For example, the story's depiction of unreciprocated love is often seen as a grotesque representation of her own one-sided infatuations with the Swiss journalist and novelist Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach and the American writer Katherine Anne Porter. Similarly, the motif of the romantic triangle is regarded as a distorted rendering of the situation between McCullers, her husband, and the American composer David Diamond.
Plot and Major Characters
The Ballad of the Sad Café is set in a small mill town in Georgia, where Miss Amelia Evans lives alone in a boarded-up building. Most of the story is told in a flashback that explains how "Miss Amelia" came to her present situation. We learn that the building she lives in was a general store she inherited from her father. Miss Amelia is described as a tall, somewhat masculine woman who becomes the richest person in town from her earnings with the store and a very prosperous still that produces the best liquor in the county. A grim and solitary person, Miss Amelia surprises the town when she agrees to marry Marvin Macy. A handsome and apparently industrious man, Macy has a history of nefarious and sadistic activities: he used to carry with him the ear of a man he killed in a razor fight; he has chopped off the heads of squirrels; and he has abused several young girls. His marriage to Miss Amelia lasts only ten days, mainly because, having married only to gain companionship, she refuses to consummate the marriage. Disgusted by his attempts to seduce her, Miss Amelia puts him out of the house. Macy leaves town vowing revenge and quickly returns to his old ways, robbing gas stations and supermarkets

and becoming a suspect in a murder. He is eventually arrested and sentenced to serve time in a penitentiary near Atlanta.
One April evening eleven years later, Miss Amelia and several townspeople are sitting on her porch when a hunchbacked stranger named Lymon Willis shows up. Claiming to be a distant relation of Miss Amelia, "Cousin Lymon," as he comes to be known, is a sociable if somewhat shallow character who has "an instinct which is usually only found in small children, an instinct to establish immediate and vital contact between himself and all things in the world." Miss Amelia takes him in. The next day, however, Cousin Lymon is nowhere to be seen. The third day after his arrival, Miss Amelia stays holed up inside her house, leading one of the townspeople to speculate that she has murdered Lymon for something he had in his suitcase. By nightfall, with the rumor having spread throughout the town, a number of men come to Miss Amelia's house and watch from the porch as she writes at the desk in her office. When she gets up to close her office door, the men sense that the moment has come for action and walk into the store. At that point Cousin Lymon emerges from the top of the stairs and begins chatting with everyone. Miss Amelia comes out of her office and asks if anyone needs anything. She then breaks her rule against liquor being consumed in the building and brings out some bottles and glasses and serves the men drinks. This is how the café starts. Over the course of the following four years it gradually expands: tables and chairs are brought in and meals are served. The café's growth is due largely to Miss Amelia's compassion for Cousin Lymon's fear of the night: the company and pleasure the customers bring help him pass the hours. Six years later Macy returns to town. Cousin Lymon, hearing that he has been to Atlanta and been in jail, becomes infatuated with this dangerous character and follows him around. For his part, Macy shows nothing but contempt and disgust for Lymon. Miss Amelia endures Cousin Lymon's refocused affection, tolerates his giving Macy liquor, puts up with his making fun of her gangly walk, and even bears with his asking Macy to live with them, because she knows that if she were to drive Macy away, she would lose Cousin Lymon. The climax of the story occurs when the hatred between Miss Amelia and Macy explodes in a fist fight. After thirty minutes or so of struggling, Miss Amelia is about to win the fight when Lymon suddenly leaps onto her back and claws at her throat, enabling Macy to get the upper hand. During the night Macy and Lymon destroy the café, steal Miss Amelia's belongings, and break her still; by morning, they have left town. For three years Miss Amelia waits for Cousin Lymon to return. Eventually giving up hope, Amelia boards up the house and locks herself in.
Major Themes
As many critics have pointed out, The Ballad of the 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. Other themes—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 and transformative effects that even transitory and ultimately doomed love can have on an individual and his or her community. Critics note that McCullers was particularly interested in the paradox of shared isolation, a term that describes the relationships among the three main characters and between the three and their community as well.
Critical Reception
On the initial publication of The Ballad of the Sad Café, Tennessee Williams wrote that it is "assuredly among the masterpieces of our language in the form of the novella." V. S. Pritchett considered it evidence that McCullers was "the most remarkable novelist... to come out of America for a generation." William Clancy stated that the work's "metaphysical fusion of horror and compassion" represented "an achievement equaled by few other contemporary American writers." The critical reaction has not been unanimously favorable, however. Robert Drake has called The Ballad of the Sad Café "ridiculous . . . with its fabricated primitivistic folkishness." Lawrence Graver has argued that while the novella is "by far the best of Mrs. McCullers's excursions into the grotesque . . . it is not without reminders of the penumbral insistence that mars her worst work," namely the sense that "too much is made of dark nights of the soul and of things going on there that only God can understand." Nonetheless, The Ballad of the Sad Café is generally regarded as one of her best works of fiction. The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s saw renewed interest in McCullers's body of work. During these decades numerous studies appeared on the novella that focused on issues such as the role of the narrator, the nature of love, the relationship between the text and the traditional ballad form, its mythical qualities, its connection to the Southern Gothic tradition, and its representation of sexuality and gender.




GOOD LUCK