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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 4 page paper discusses Carson McCullers’s novella “Ballad of the Sad Café” and whether the character of Amelia, who is sexually ambiguous, is a model for the author herself. Bibliography lists 8 sources.
Page Count:
4 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_HVsadcfe.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
Amelia may be considered masculine, it is romance, not sex that seems to drive McCullers characters. Discussion The prompt for this paper asks why McCullers created a character like Amelia
and suggests that it was to have an outlet to express her own alleged homosexuality. However, McCullers may best be described as "sexually ambiguous"; while it certainly seems likely that
she was a lesbian, it is even more likely that her attraction to women was not sexual, but more like a series of adolescent crushes. She is even more mysterious
because she was married twice to the same man, but there is doubt about the nature of that relationship. As far as this novella, Amelia has many masculine qualities, but
apparently falls in love with a man, who in turn falls in love with another man, so that the same-sex relationship here is male/male. That at least is unambiguous: at
the climax of the story, Amelia fights her husband of ten days, Marvin Macy, with her fists; she is winning when the little hunchback she loves, Cousin Lymon, leaps on
her back "like a demon" and helps Macy win ("The Shy & the Lonely"). After the fight the men wreck Amelias home and leave together ("The Shy & the Lonely").
Whether or not she is gay, there are certainly the hints are that Amelia is not womanly in any traditional sense: "She was a dark, tall woman with bones and
muscles like a man. Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead..." (McCullers 4). McCullers even uses the words "not natural" (i.e., unnatural, suggesting perversion), when she
writes "... she had grown to be six feet two inches tall which in itself is not natural for a woman" (McCullers 14). Perhaps the most disturbing image is
...