"Caught and Loose": Southern Cosmopolitanism in Carson McCullers's The Ballad Of The Sad Café and The Member of the Wedding

In December 1953, Carson McCullers returned to Georgia after having lived in Europe for several years. She had been commissioned to write an article about the state of her birth for Holiday magazine, a "glossy, lavishly illustrated" national travel publication.¹ McCullers's mandate, according to Virginia Spencer Carr, was to "publicize Georgia and attract people to the state as a vacationland," but the magazine ultimately rejected the finished piece because of "a prejudiced southern editor who refused to see the South as it was."²

However, perhaps the editor was unable to see the South as McCullers saw it. At certain moments in the article, to be sure, what McCullers writes might serve as promotion for a tour of the "authentic South." For example, she treats her reader to evocative descriptions of the Georgia countryside in the fall, where the mountains "blazed with yellow, russet, and autumn red."³ Elsewhere, she notes: "the traveler is struck by the number of barbecue stands," many of which serve "real barbecue which is well-seasoned pork that has been roasted over a spit and basted with spices and condiments for a whole day."⁴ But at other moments McCullers's tone shifts, and she denounces some of the traditions and myths that white southerners hold most dear. For example, in the course of recounting a meeting with Ralph McGill, the progressive editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, she defends Sherman's march through Georgia and burning of Atlanta during the Civil War—a signal event in white southerners' self-conception as wronged victims of an oppressive North—with passages like this one: "Atlanta is one of the great geographical centers of the South and its burning was as necessary as in the last war the destruction of the Ruhr."⁵

But it was not unusual for McCullers to celebrate southern regional particulars at one moment and compare the antebellum South to Hitler's Germany at another. Much of McCullers's work shows her reaching for a language that will allow her to articulate both her love for, and her antagonism against, the South of her birth, and doing so in the context of an emerging American global presence. When we examine the way in which McCullers negotiates among competing visions of what it meant to be "southern," we see that her work points toward the kind of cosmopolitan tensions facing an increasingly transformed twenty-first century South. In The Ballad of the Sad Café and The Member of the Wedding, McCullers considers what such a southern cosmopolitanism might look like, were the South she knew ready to accept the expansive conceptions of race, gender, class, and place with which she increasingly identified.

The South and The World

When we think about the South "from a global perspective," we are likely to imagine a series of correspondences between the American North-South divide and broader contemporary tensions regarding the West and the "Global South." Jennifer Rae Greeson, in Our South, makes the argument that such correspondences have been inherent to American narratives since the founding of the Republic. Indeed, she shows us the ways in which American writers from Thomas Paine to W.E.B. Du Bois have presented the South as an unreconstructed "other" within the United States, but an other whose presence serves to remind an expanding and globalizing nation that it "emerged out of the ideological matrices of New World empire."⁶

It is these tensions, between the South as "the internalization in U.S. culture of that which is openly disavowed" and the South as the domestic space upon which American imperialism and conquest can be rehearsed, that have often prompted southern writers to draw parallels between what their South has meant in American history and what it continues to mean in the American present. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. examines the ways in which a number of southern writers, William Faulkner and McCullers among them, did exactly that by constructing fictions which located elements of European fascism within southern settings and which...