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Jacklyn R. Pierce
Instructor
Saint Louis University
Date
The Virgin Ogre: Subverted Southern Belles in O'Connor and McCullers
Even as we rapidly approach the next millennium, young women in late-20th century
America are still raised to believe in a traditional and predictable course for their lives. Little
girls still grow up fully expecting to fall in love, get married, have children, and, of course, live
happily ever after. While this may sound like the stuff of fairy tales, it is still a common enough
mythic structure by which women especially tend to judge their lives. The cultural expectations
for women--to fulfill their roles as wives and mothers--are certainly nothing new, and neither are
literary portrayals of women who both complete and subvert these traditional roles. Particularly
interesting are the literary portrayals of those women who, for one reason or another, cannot live
up to their culture’s expectations because they cannot, will not, or fail to marry. Single women
are a curious segment of any culture, and, in literature, they offer a fascinating study of their
given culture’s social codes simply because they operate outside the expectations of society. The
literature of the American South is especially full of these curious single women who react either
negatively or at least peculiarly to their situation in life. In some ways, the tension surrounding
single women is even greater in Southern literature because of the unique expectations Southern
culture still remembers for its women. The Southern Belle grows up (in genteel style), gets
married (becoming a Southern lady), and, like the larger American culture’s stereotypical
woman, fulfills her highest destiny when she is wife and mother. Any woman who fails to fulfill
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these roles is typically portrayed as either laughable, pathetic, or terrifying (and, in some cases,
all of the above).
How do the single women in Southern literature differ from the stereotypical “Southern
Belle”--a creature still talked about but who probably no longer exists? In order to determine
how the women of the literary tradition depart from this so-called ideal, one must establish what
the imaginary Southern woman is supposed to be. In “Ladies, Belles, Working Women, and
Civil Rights,” Julia Kirk Blackwelder offers a model of the traditional Southern “lady”: she is
the mistress of her husband’s plantation and a “symbol of lost virtue” in that the Southern men
hadn’t been able to insure her safety during the Civil War. The men felt, then, obliged to protect
her virtue from all harm. This led to a belief that “moral purity was the central tenet of
womanhood”: “Ladies should be refined and passionless. A lady would never kiss a man who
had not publicly announced his intention to marry her.... A wife’s vocation was to enhance the
comfort, social status, and masculinity of her husband” (Blackwelder 98). Melanie, the delicate,
young Southern lady in Gone With the Wind, is a good literary example of this belief. The
Southern woman, therefore, was to marry and then serve her husband. Since a woman was to
have no sexual feelings outside her wifely duty, an unmarried woman should, by extension,
prove an asexual being.
The Civil War left many women on their own, if not permanently, at least for the duration
of the war. George C. Rable, in Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism,
discusses this period as a confusing one for Southern women. Before this time, they had only to
perform their duties as good wives and mothers. Suddenly, these women found themselves in
charge of farms or plantations and in a position to make decisions for the first time. Rable
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suggests that this role did not come immediately for Southern women, but in time they adjusted
to it, creating in themselves stronger women (112-14).
In the post-Civil War South, and particularly in the literature of the region on into the
20th century, we see an increasing number of portrayals of single women fumbling to create a
path for themselves in life, typically with comic or sometimes horrific results. William
Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily,” offers an interesting statement on the views Southern
society held toward the single woman following the Civil War. Emily Grierson is, in some
ways, the very embodiment of the “old maid” stereotype. She is from a good family, and her
eccentricities are generally accepted by the townspeople after her father’s death and the apparent
departure of her only suitor, Homer Barron. After Emily’s death, the other citizens, finding
Homer’s decomposed body in an upstairs bedroom, discover that Emily had murdered Homer
Barron many years before. This suggests that it is so impossible for a woman to live without a
man, that she must resort to murder and implied necrophilia rather than spend her life alone.
Even though Emily Grierson is an aberration, Faulkner’s story has some troubling implications.
The literature of the post-Faulknerian South sees an emergence of single women writing
about single women, and their attitudes toward their single female characters still reveal an
underlying assumption that this is an unnatural state and that these women are to be pitied in
their solitude. In Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens, Louise Westling offers a study of three
of these female Southern writers: Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers.
According to Westling, the very existence of these three women offers a challenge to the
traditional role of the Southern “lady”: “The intellectual interests and literary aspirations shared
by Eudora Welty, Lula Carson Smith, and Flannery O’Connor made them oddities in a world
which demanded beauty and charm for women but disapproved of intellect.... None of these
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writers was conventionally pretty, all were bookish and two took special pains to rebel against
demands that they grow up to be graceful ladies” (48-9). And in the literature produced by these
women, two of which are the focus of this study, we see the emergence of a character who is a
direct descendant of Faulkner’s Emily Grierson, a single woman so far outside the norms of her
society that she passes beyond being the stereotypical “old maid.”
This particular sort of single female figure that becomes more than a stereotype in
Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers is the woman that I will call the “virgin-ogre”--a
woman whose sexual frustration turns her into a freakish, usually bitter, and sometimes even
dangerous woman. The two best examples of this figure are O’Connor’s Joy-Hulga Hopewell,
from “Good Country People,” and McCullers’ Miss Amelia Evans, in The Ballad of the Sad
Café. Both of these “old maids” are interesting because they fail to meet society’s expectations
of them, and yet, they struggle with the same issues as other women who occupy spaces more
traditionally acceptable for aging women. In both of these Southern women, the adult single
women’s struggles with sexuality, spirituality, and self make interesting statements about the
social codes they seem to uphold and subvert, often at the same time.
Joy-Hulga Hopewell, in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People,” is an
old maid in the traditional sense of the word. She is an odd woman who has seemingly never
even had the chance at fulfilling the “normal” Southern roles of wife and mother. But she moves
beyond the stereotype and becomes an exaggerated, “virgin-ogre” figure because of her atypical
mindset and her role in O’Connor’s grotesque tradition. One distinguishing feature which
separates Joy-Hulga from the typical, comical Southern old maid is that she is educated--she has
a Ph.D. in philosophy--and she is an atheist, perhaps as a result of her extensive education. Mrs.
Hopewell, Joy-Hulga’s mother, is a firm believer in “traditional Southern values,” but she is also
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atypical in that she is divorced. Like many of the mothers in O’Connor’s stories, Joy-Hulga’s is
not affectionate toward her, nor can she accept Joy-Hulga for who or what she is.
“Good Country People,” unlike the macabre “A Rose for Emily,” is one of O’Connor’s
most humorous short stories. Joy Hopewell, who legally changed her name to Hulga, is a
negative woman in her thirties who lost one leg when she was a child. A Southern intellectual,
she fancies herself to be the antithesis of the stereotypical Southern lady, and indeed in most
ways she is. However, in Joy-Hulga, we see the path of the “virgin-ogre” unfolding--she fights
against all the values espoused by women like her mother, but she then ends up chasing after the
dream most typical of the Southern woman who, like Mrs. Hopewell, are interested in mundane
things like marriage and their uncanny ability to distinguish between “good country people” and
“trash” (170).
To understand Joy-Hulga, one must also deal with Mrs. Hopewell, a comedic character
who operates her life based on aphorisms: “Nothing is perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell’s
favorite sayings. Another was: that is life! And still another, the most important, was: well,
other people have their opinions too” (171). Mrs. Hopewell tries to impart this folk wisdom to
her daughter as well, particularly regarding Joy-Hulga’s appearance: she criticizes her clothing
(“a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it”)
and insists “that if she would only keep herself up a little, she wouldn’t be so bad looking” (175).
The truth of the matter, however, is that Joy-Hulga is an ugly person. She provides much
of the humor in the story, as well as the grotesque element as yet another one of what O’Connor
routinely referred to as her “freaks.” She is both laughable and pitiful as she determines to
seduce the traveling Bible salesman, Manley Pointer, who appears to be her mother’s ideal--a
good country person. Joy-Hulga’s interest in the Bible salesman is curious as he seems to
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represent everything Joy-Hulga finds reprehensible about the world around her, everything
“normal”: “Sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or flowers or nature or
nice young men” (176). And, in her efforts to bond with Manley Pointer, we see another reality
for the “virgin-ogre”--she must subvert herself to the point of even lying about her age, telling
him she was seventeen instead of admitting to be over thirty.
Even as she plans to seduce Manley Pointer, we know that Joy-Hulga is destined to fail.
During the seduction scene, we learn that she has never been kissed (188). In a funny but sad
exchange: “The boy dropped down by her side and began methodically kissing her face, making
little noises like a fish. He did not remove his hat but it was pushed far enough back not to
interfere. When her glasses got in the way, he took them off of her and slipped them into his
pocket” (190). By robbing Joy-Hulga of her glasses, we see a foreshadowing of the most
troubling and grotesque part of the story, the ending during which Manley Pointer leaves JoyHulga stripped of her wooden leg as well as her dignity (195). Joy-Hulga mistakenly thought
she knew who she was and what she wanted from life, and her succumbing to the desire for
human intimacy with Manley Pointer left her confused about her place in the world and the
truths she was so convinced she already knew.
Joy-Hulga Hopewell had never fully exposed herself to another human being, and this is
what shook her to the core when Manley Pointer “leaned over and put his lips to her ear. ‘Show
me where your wooden leg joins on,’ he whispered” (192). And she does take the gamble, the
huge risk of opening up her very self to another human being. When she agrees to allow him to
see where her wooden leg extends from herself, O’Connor describes this moment as “losing her
own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his” (192). Her childish trust in him as he
removes her leg and refuses to put it back on reveals how badly she really wants the human
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contact previously not allowed to her: “She was thinking that she would run away with him and
that every night he would take the leg off and every morning put it back on again” (193). But the
result of Joy-Hulga’s self-revelation to the young Bible salesman is not one of fulfilling human
interaction, instead it leaves her devastated: “[his] toast colored hat disappeared down the hole
and the girl was left, sitting on the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning
face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled
lake” (195).
This tragic moment of desertion and solitude points to two separate issues at work in the
overtly religious message of O’Connor’s “Good Country People”: not only love and sexuality
but also the need to worship God. Joy-Hulga is obviously a woman whose stunted sexuality had
prompted her in her thirties to abandon all sense and reason in her pursuit of intimacy with
another human being. Not only is she a virgin, but she has never even been kissed until Manley
Pointer comes along. O’Connor writes, in a 1956 letter, that Joy-Hulga is like her, and that to
assume that Joy-Hulga has never loved anyone would be a mistake: “Further, it’s not been said
that she’s never loved anybody, only that she’s never been kissed by anybody--a very different
thing” (Habit of Being 170). We don’t know how Joy-Hulga became the bitter, ugly, negative
person that she is in “Good Country People,” but perhaps it is precisely because she has fallen in
love before--unrequited love can turn an intelligent woman like a Joy Hopewell into a Hulga.
This brings up an important distinction between sex and love. O’Connor pointed out that
Joy-Hulga’s inexperience did not preclude her having loved in the past. That O’Connor
compares herself to Joy-Hulga is interesting because, as a single Southern woman, an old maid,
so to speak, she is expected by her culture to be an asexual being and therefore a being without
love. But O’Connor continues in the same letter: “That my stories scream to you that I have
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never consented to be in love with anybody is merely to prove that they are screaming an
historical inaccuracy. I have God help me consented to this frequently” (Habit of Being 170-1).
On one level, then, “Good Country People” can be interpreted as a story about the pain of
unrequited love, certainly with Manley Pointer and perhaps with some other figure from JoyHulga’s past.
While O’Connor’s stories often have sexual overtones and innuendoes, skeptical readers
and critics, particularly those who subscribe to the “traditional Southern values” her stories seem
to undermine, often assume that the religious nature of her writing would preclude notions of sex
in anyone but properly married women and men, that O’Connor must support the traditional
Christian view that to engage in sexual activity (and perhaps even sexual fantasy) outside the
bonds of marriage would be wrong. But since O’Connor said herself on numerous occasions that
she was writing about reality, she had to come to terms with the fact that human beings are
innately sexual. Sadly, Joy-Hulga’s attempt at seducing the phallically named Manley Pointer
failed, and this is part of the story’s moral message. Even though Manley Pointer makes JoyHulga proclaim that she loves him (“Good Country People” 190-1), there is no love there, just
as, as it turns out, neither of them believes in God.
On another level, however, this story is about a love that is constant and that will not fail-the love for God. Joy-Hulga is a self-proclaimed atheist, but she is drawn to Manley Pointer, a
Bible salesman. Until she learns otherwise at the end of the story, she has every reason to
believe that he is “good country people” and is a man of God as well. She claims to believe in
nothing, and yet she is shocked when Pointer declares: “‘And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga,’
he said, using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, ‘you ain’t so smart. I been believing in
nothing ever since I was born!’” (195). Her disappointment at Pointer’s revelation suggests that
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perhaps Joy-Hulga wanted to believe not only in love and her own sexuality, but in God as well.
Ironically, from O’Connor’s perspective, it is only at Joy-Hulga’s lowest moment, the moment
that she is stripped of herself, as symbolized by her wooden leg, that salvation becomes possible
for this woman previously mired in her own sense of pride and self-importance.
Carson McCullers’ protagonist in The Ballad of the Sad Café is a much darker figure than
O’Connor’s Joy-Hulga Hopewell, and the resolution that Miss Amelia Evans’ story comes to is
not a part of the larger Christian message we see in Joy-Hulga’s story. For McCullers’ heroine,
there is no final redemptive moment, and her struggle for self-actualization ends up being
another tragic story about a woman whose situation in life remains unchanged. The story ends
with her just as far outside the norms of society and all the satisfaction that conforming to norms
is supposed to bring:
Miss Amelia let her hair grow ragged, and it was turning gray. Her face
lengthened, and the great muscles of her body shrank until she was thin as old
maids are thin when they go crazy. And those gray eyes--slowly day by day they
were more crossed, and it was as though they sought each other out to exchange a
little glance of grief and lonely recognition. She was not pleasant to listen to; her
tongue had sharpened considerably. (70)
What happens to the once independent, if a little eccentric, Miss Amelia Evans is the epitome of
the culturally assumed path of the “virgin-ogre”--to fail at what one's society expects of women
in life is to end up alone, broken, crazy, and tragic.
A key element which ties Joy-Hulga’s humorous story to Miss Amelia’s more tragic one
is the sexuality, particularly the stunted sexuality, with which both women are struggling. Like
Joy-Hulga, Miss Amelia obviously has sexual needs that have gone unfulfilled in her “old
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maid’s” existence. When these needs come to the forefront, they serve not to spur the “old
maid” or “virgin-ogre” into an existence rife with sexual activity or even fantasy, but instead
only serve to separate these women further from a society which refuses to admit their sexual
natures or to allow them to come to full fruition as human beings. Perhaps this is the real tragedy
of stories like The Ballad of the Sad Café, that Miss Amelia and those like her are denied
selfhood.
Carson McCullers, like her protagonist and like Flannery O’Connor, did not live the life
of the prototypical Southern “lady.” Unlike Miss Amelia and O’Connor, however, McCullers’
life was certainly unlike that of her “virgin-ogre” creation. McCullers, according to Louis
Westling, led a tumultuous life which involved a non-traditional marriage, divorce, and
remarriage to Reeves McCullers as well as bisexuality (62). But McCullers shares with her
protagonist the obvious struggles with her own sexuality as well as the realities that face women
who choose or are forced to live their lives outside of societal norms.
Miss Amelia’s life, as we see in The Ballad of the Sad Café and indeed in many other
single women’s lives in Southern literature, is disrupted by the intrusion of men into an
otherwise stable existence. She is a prime example of a fairly independent old maid in literature,
at least as her story begins. Of course, Miss Amelia is not the average old maid, having once
been married, but then her marriage was never consummated. In appearance, in temperament,
and in industry, she is in key ways a masculine figure: “Miss Amelia was rich. In addition to the
store she operated a still three miles back in the swamp, and ran out the best liquor in the county.
She was a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man. Her hair was cut short and
brushed back from the forehead, and there was about her sunburned face a tense, haggard
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quality” (4). The townspeople, although somewhat fearful of Amelia, basically accepted her in
spite of all of her idiosyncrasies. McCullers depicts their attitudes:
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 of life were too peculiar to ever reason
about. Above all, they remembered her puzzling marriage, which was the most
unreasonable scandal ever to happen in this town.
So these good people felt toward her something near to pity. And when she
was out on her wild business, . . . they had toward her a feeling which was a
mixture of exasperation, a ridiculous little inside tickle, and a deep, unnamable
sadness. (14-15)
And it is through the curious eyes of the townspeople that we see the change in Miss Amelia
brought about when they realize that “Miss Amelia loved Cousin Lymon. So much was clear to
everyone” (25). And they even go as far as allowing what they assumed to be “some satisfaction
of the flesh between themselves,” reconciling it as “a matter concerning them and God alone”
(26).
Miss Amelia led a fairly normal life until a man, Cousin Lymon, intruded and ruined
everything. To be more specific, however, it was not the presence of this man in her life which
led to her downfall, but rather the manner in which she tried to overcome her self-created,
masculinized existence by attempting to become a fully actualized and feminine woman in an
effort to establish a “normal” relationship with a man. Cousin Lymon, “a hunchback,” “scarcely
more than four feet tall and [wearing] a ragged, dusty coat that reached only to his knees” (6),
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comes into town and alters Miss Amelia’s life forever. As unlikely a candidate as he seems, this
grotesque character brings out Miss Amelia’s sexuality and femininity. Through his influence,
she starts wearing dresses and turns the previously successful store into a café. The changes in
Miss Amelia do not go unnoticed:
Outwardly she did not seem changed at all. But there were many who noticed her
face. She watched all that went on, but most of the time here eyes were fastened
lonesomely on the hunchback. . . . Where Miss Amelia stood, the light from the
chinks of the stove cast a glow, so that her brown, long face was somewhat
brightened. She seemed to be looking inward. There was in her expression pain,
perplexity, and uncertain joy. Her lips were not so firmly set as usual, and she
swallowed often. Her skin had paled and her large empty hands were sweating.
Her look that night, then, was the lonesome look of the lover. (23)
Since McCullers’ narrative is somewhat filtered through the lens of the townspeople’s
perspective, the reader can never be sure whether or not Miss Amelia’s love for “the hunchback”
was returned, and perhaps Cousin Lymon’s presence, and the several years of peaceful
coexistence she had with him, would not have ruined her without the further intrusion of Marvin
Macy’s return to town.
Marvin Macy, Miss Amelia’s ex-husband, returns to town and turns Miss Amelia’s world
upside down once again. As previously noted, their short marriage had been the scandal of the
town years before the story takes place, and the nature of their marriage reveals the depths of
Miss Amelia’s struggles with self and sexuality. While Macy pursued her incessantly for two
years, Miss Amelia was reportedly unmoved by his advances. The townspeople, in fact,
questioned why she married him in the first place, finally supposing that “it was because she
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wanted to get herself some wedding presents” or because her great-aunt, “a terrible old woman,”
kept nagging her about it” (30). From the moment they were married, Miss Amelia sought to
distance herself from her husband: “when the last lines were spoken and the marriage prayer was
done Miss Amelia hurried out of the church, not taking the arm of her husband, but walking at
least two paces ahead of him” (30). On their wedding night, Amelia simply “went about her
ordinary business” before stomping out of the bedroom after Macy apparently tried to
consummate the marriage (31). After three days of his trying everything from presents to getting
a lawyer and signing over all his assets to her, Macy got drunk, prompting her to physically
attack him:
Toward evening he came in drunk, went up to Miss Amelia with wet wide eyes,
and put his hand on her shoulder. He was trying to tell her something, but before
he could open his mouth she had swung once with her fist and hit his face so hard
that he was thrown back against the wall and one of his front teeth was broken.
The rest of this affair can only be mentioned in bare outline. After this first
blow Miss Amelia hit him whenever he came within arm’s reach of her, and
whenever he was drunk. At last she turned him off the premises altogether, and
he was forced to suffer publicly. (32-3)
The narrative voice clearly sympathizes with Macy’s plight in falling in love and trying to
maintain a marriage to this eccentric woman. For the reader, however, what is striking about this
relationship, and especially about the reaction of the townspeople, is that Miss Amelia’s refusal
to be inscribed in the “normal” system of patriarchy and to fulfill her “duties” as wife and, later,
as mother, casts her in the role of social pariah, the butt of her culture’s jokes, and the subject of
rumor and speculation of impropriety by all those around her.
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When Marvin Macy returns, after a stint in “the penitentiary near Atlanta,” a fate about
which “Miss Amelia was deeply gratified” (34), he interrupts the idyllic, if bizarre, existence
Miss Amelia had managed to form with Cousin Lymon and the café. Macy shows up at Miss
Amelia’s café, and the townspeople gather to see what they expect to be an explosion from her.
Instead, they find that she is not as bothered by Macy’s presence as she is by Cousin Lymon’s
reaction to him:
The hunchback stood at the end of the pit, his pale face lighted by the soft glow
from the smoldering oak fire. Cousin Lymon had a very peculiar
accomplishment, which he used whenever he wished to ingratiate himself with
someone. He would stand very still, and with just a little concentration, he could
wiggle his large pale ears with marvelous quickness and ease. This trick he
always used when he wanted to get something special out of Miss Amelia, and to
her it was irresistible. Now as he stood there the hunchback’s ears were wiggling
furiously on his head, but it was not Miss Amelia at whom he was looking this
time. The hunchback was smiling at Marvin Macy with an entreaty that was near
to desperation. (49)
In her efforts to compete with Macy for Cousin Lymon’s affections, Miss Amelia “put aside her
overalls and wore always the red dress she had before this time reserved for Sundays, funerals,
and sessions of the court” (53). But she did not forbid Cousin Lymon to associate with Marvin
Macy, a fact which surprised the townspeople who assumed that “Miss Amelia seemed to have
lost her will; for the first time in her life she hesitated as to just what course to pursue” (53).
Cousin Lymon’s worship of Marvin Macy and Miss Amelia’s inability to deal with it
leads to violent confrontation as the tension between Macy and Miss Amelia erupts in a physical
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fight. The cause of Miss Amelia’s frustration is apparent--her feelings for Cousin Lymon,
intense and passionate as they are, cannot seem to overcome the apparent love Lymon bears for
Macy, feelings arguably sexual in nature and with the further suggestion that Macy may indeed
return those feelings. Amelia, then, becomes the “odd man out” in this love triangle, and what
little “normalcy” she had managed to create in her life with Cousin Lymon is thwarted by
Macy’s powerful presence. The grotesque and violent confrontation takes place in the café with
the “prize,” Cousin Lymon, watching from the top of the bar. Miss Amelia ends up with “her
strong, big hands on [Macy’s] throat,” poised for sure victory until “the hunchback sprang
forward and sailed through the air as though he had grown hawk wings. He landed on the broad
strong back of Miss Amelia and clutched at her neck with his clawed little fingers” (67-8),
causing her to lose the fight. The next day, after destroying the café and Miss Amelia’s still and
leaving her favorite meal laced with poison on the counter, Macy and Lymon “went off together,
the two of them” (69).
And so ends Miss Amelia’s story; she is left devastated and alone, but the narrative voice
is ironically more concerned with the plight of the town, which became far more “dreary” and in
which “the soul rots with boredom” (71) after Miss Amelia’s demise. McCullers sums up what
becomes of Miss Amelia in a matter-of-fact tone which belies the personal tragedy for her
protagonist:
For three years she sat out on the front steps every night, alone and silent, looking
down the road and waiting. But the hunchback never returned. There were
rumors that Marvin Macy used him to climb into windows and steal, and other
rumors that Marvin Macy had sold him into a side show. . . . Nothing true was
ever heard of him. It was in the fourth year that Miss Amelia hired a Cheehaw
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carpenter and had him board up the premises, and there in those closed rooms she
has remained ever since. (70)
The perspective of the town, as represented by the narration, is oddly appropriate, however,
given Miss Amelia’s role in her world. The “virgin-ogre” is certainly an oddity who inspires
fear and interest as well as providing entertainment for those around her. Once it is clear that she
will not be fighting for the kind of “normal” life that her society values, she ceases to be of any
interest and is relegated to the world of boarded up houses and legend, certainly she is not
allowed a fully human existence.
One troubling aspect of the stories of Joy-Hulga Hopewell and Miss Amelia Evans is that
these women, creations of women, are powerless even within the contexts of fiction. To the
contemporary reader, these stories have some disturbing implications because of the apparent
lack of female empowerment of single women--women who should be all the more powerful
because they have managed to escape the power relationship of marriage--that we see in
characters created by women. However, both Joy-Hulga and Miss Amelia are products of the
very distinct Southern mindset and their fates are, in large part, sealed by their failure to live up
to their culture’s expectations of them. O’Connor proclaimed in many places that her stories
were based in reality, and the reality they reveal for the single woman is certainly problematic.
At least O’Connor’s heroine has the possibility of Christian redemption to hold onto, but
McCullers’ Miss Amelia reveals little hope, offering an even darker picture of what life has to
offer the single Southern woman. Both O’Connor and McCullers, operating within the Southern
literary and the grotesque traditions, offer a chilling portrait of what becomes of the woman who
will not or cannot fit into the molds of wife and mother prescribed for her by her culture.
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For the contemporary reader, characters such as Joy-Hulga and Miss Amelia perhaps
represent past ideals and values. After all, we live in a world where women routinely do not get
married at sixteen anymore and where many choose never to marry at all. The “old maid” is,
after all, a thing of the past, isn’t she? Perhaps she is. Certainly, women have much more
freedom in expressing their selves and their sexuality through careers and the choices of whether
or not to marry or to have children. No longer is a woman assumed to be some kind of asexual
being simply because she is not married. However, societal pressures still exist regarding the
typical paths that women’s lives are supposed to take, and, more often than not, these revolve
around marriage and family. One need only ask any woman who is still single in her late
twenties and thirties if anyone has ever asked, “So, when are you getting married?” Even the
“virgin-ogre” still persists, though she is no longer assumed to be virginal, in the many portrayals
of the “woman scorned” we see especially in contemporary cinema. Perhaps the women who
turn to violence in the face of lost “love” in films such as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct are
the direct descendants of women like Emily Grierson, Joy-Hulga Hopewell, and Miss Amelia
Evans, women whose frustrated attempts at self- and sexual fulfillment, when thwarted by men,
lead to violence, destruction, and spiritual isolation.
Pierce 18
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