These Carson McCullers Stories Are Haunted By Mothers Who Can’t Be Their Authentic Selves

Snow fell outside the hotel conference room, and my breasts grew heavy with milk. I sat in a cushioned, straight-back chair amongst a dozen other students from my creative writing graduate program. On my lap was a printout with a selection from a Carson McCullers short story called “The Haunted Boy.” When this seminar was over, I would meet my husband and two young children back at our hotel room and nurse my not-quite-one-year-old baby. 

The instructor asked someone to read the story excerpt aloud. In it, a teenage boy comes home with a friend from school and finds his mother absent. The scene plays out much like my children’s well-worn copy of Where’s Spot? Is the mother in the garden? No. Is she in the living room? No. Is she in the kitchen? No, there’s only clean pans and a lemon pie on the counter. The signs of this mother’s labor are all around the house, but she is not. 

The boy worries, “sickened with a sudden chill remembrance of ‘the other time.’” A man in my class commented, “It sounds like there’s something off with the mother, like maybe she isn’t very involved.” Our instructor nodded thoughtfully. I read again about the “fresh checked towels” and the “wax-floored hall” and the spring flowers in the garden, of which this mother had taught her son the names, and I seethed. Can’t this poor lady get five minutes to herself? I thought. 

Perhaps I felt this man was talking about me. Throughout the 10-day graduate residency—intended to be an intensive creative retreat—I had felt both not present enough as a writer and not present enough as a mother. I hurried back from every seminar to nurse the baby, and I missed bedtime stories to attend faculty readings. Of course, no one had forced me to start a masters program at eight months pregnant. I chose to be both a mother and a writer—two identities that come imprinted with inescapable fantasies of what we, as a culture, imagine them to be. There’s the solitary writer, escaping into Thoreau’s wilderness, unburdened by cell phone service and children, responsible to nothing and no one but his own ingenious imagination. Opposite him is the dutiful mother, attached at the hip—and the breast—to her children, as she lovingly prepares a home-cooked meal. These images haunted me at the residency, not only because I feared other people expected me to embody them, but because I myself wanted to. 

After I flew home (my children both charming and annoying everyone on the plane), I kept thinking about “The Haunted Boy.” I obtained a copy of the story and read it in full. Upon this reading, I learned that Hugh’s all-consuming worry is due to his mother’s past suicide attempt, when Hugh found her alone in the house, covered in blood. McCullers reveals the mother to us, ghostlike, through her son’s anxieties. When the boy, Hugh, feeds his friend a slice of her homemade pie, he makes excuses for why the crust is store-bought instead of made from scratch: “We think this graham-cracker pastry is just as good. Naturally, my mother can make regular pie dough if she wants to.” Even this mother’s accomplishments are seasoned with her shortcomings. 

“My mother is a super cook,” he insists to the friend, who seems to represent some nascent patriarchal power. “She cooks things like meat pie and salmon loaf – as well as steaks and hot dogs.” Reciting this banal menu, he reassures himself.

We never get a full, three-dimensional portrait of the mother. McCullers writes of her room, simply, “The lady things were on the dresser.” To Hugh, the mother is a feature of the house, a light he turns on when he enters, until one day he finds the bulb broken. But while Hugh’s understanding of his mother’s interior life is limited, he is not a stock stand-in for toxic masculinity either. He allows—even invites—his friend to see him at his most vulnerable, begging him not to leave while he looks for his mother. Hugh confides to the friend that she was institutionalized for a time. The friend, in response, “reached out and carefully stroked Hugh’s sweatered arm.” 

The story is rich with tension until its final pages, when the mother—to my great relief—returns home safe, wearing a new dress and shoes. She has only been out shopping. At this moment, Hugh’s fear morphs into anger. McCullers writes, “He could not stand his love or his mother’s prettiness.” How dare she make him worry? How dare she not be there when he needed her? I am reminded of my own children, climbing onto my back without asking, or screaming in frustration if I don’t “look!” fast enough at a creation they’ve made. I am also reminded of the Zadie Smith quote: “What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission.” To Hugh, his mother is just that: his mother. His own burgeoning manhood demands her constant presence and the sacrifice of her selfhood. His worry, therefore, is not only personal but existential: If she dies, what happens to him? 

Hugh’s father comes home, too, and he comforts the boy privately by commenting on how nice the mother looks in her new clothes. She is neither the first nor the last woman to find solace in shopping. 

“The Haunted Boy” first appeared in a 1955 issue of Mademoiselle, a magazine that published “shoe and stocking news” (according to one cover) alongside stories by Truman Capote and Joyce Carol Oates. For middle-class white women like McCullers (and like myself), the 1950s was a time of economic boom and increased consumerism, when teen culture emerged and the nuclear family atomized in the suburbs. 

Carson McCullers was my age, late 30s, when she wrote the story. Hailing from the South (also like me), she alternately conformed to and defied her culture’s patriarchal fantasy of what she should be. The author Jenn Shapland captures McCullers’ complexity exquisitely in her memoir-biography, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. She writes of the author’s personal style: “In some photos from her twenties, she wears a white dress, has long, waving hair past her breasts. In others, she wears a suit and a bob.” McCullers loved many women throughout her life, but married (and divorced, and then remarried) a man. It’s hard to understand why she remarried her ex-husband; there seemed to be little reason except that he wanted her to. The year was 1945; as Shapland writes, “More marriages occurred during these years than in any other period of US history, and as men came home from the front the pressure for people to return to heteronormative gender roles mounted from many corners of society.” McCuller’s husband, like her, was queer and closeted, and perhaps for this reason battled debilitating alcoholism. He abused McCullers emotionally and physically until one night in a hotel in Paris, he killed himself with sleeping pills. She didn’t attend his funeral. 

Much of McCullers’ work is queer or queer-coded, depicting tomboys, gay characters both open and closeted, and same-sex “friendships” that read like love affairs. The title of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, comes from a poem by William Sharp, who for many years carried on a female alter ego named Fiona Macleod. When I read about Sharp/Macleod’s “ambivalent” relationship with W.B. Yeats, I heard Shapland in my ear, pointing out that many of McCullers’ relationships were also called “ambivalent.” 

My copy of “The Haunted Boy” comes from a slim, three-story collection by the same name, published in 2018 as part of a Penguin Modern box set. Each story in the book takes place within the confines of a heterosexual nuclear family’s home. The second story, “The Sojourner,” follows a worldly yet lonesome man who visits his ex-wife and the family she has built with someone else. He seems to long for the woman and, perhaps, for this domestic life he could have had with her. It’s hard not to see a bit of McCullers in the character of the sojourner. Was she thinking of her own decision to reunite with her ex-husband when she wrote this? 

Her choice to write from a male perspective is both curious to me and not. When I began writing as a teen, I idolized Fitzgerald, Salinger and Hemingway, identifying with them and their characters without ever thinking of them as “male.” Likewise, I never thought of myself as a “female” writer. McCuller’s choice of point-of-view could be a strategy for avoiding confinement in the women’s fiction shelves, or a craft choice, or another hint at her sexuality and/or gender expression. Perhaps, like me, she simply felt at odds with her culture’s portrait of femininity. 

In the story, the sojourner’s ex-wife becomes more appealing to him by the minute when surrounded by her children. He muses that she “was very beautiful, more beautiful perhaps than he had ever realized. … It was a Madonna loveliness, dependent on the family ambience.” We see here the male gaze turned mother-ward. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, co-editor of the anthology, Revolutionary Mothering, writes in her essay “m/other ourselves: a Black queer feminist genealogy for radical mothering” that motherhood is “a status granted by patriarchy to white middle-class women.” Mothering, on the other hand, is an act of care done in community, outside patriarchy, and “is a queer thing,” she writes. “Not just when people who do not identify as heterosexual give birth to or adopt children and parent them, but all day long and everywhere when we acknowledge the creative power of transforming ourselves and the ways we relate to each other.” Gumbs draws particular attention to the word “other” contained in “mother.” She is not arguing that our definition of motherhood should expand to include those traditionally excluded by the term. To stop there would be “assimilating into existing white supremacist norms of family.” What Gumbs and her intellectual ancestors call for instead is to “create something new,” something queer. 

McCullers herself never had children, but that’s not to say she didn’t have a family. She spent part of her twenties living in February House, a three-story Brooklyn brownstone that she shared with other queer artists. She lived off and on with her sister and mother, who helped care for her during her frequent bouts of illness. And she maintained a long-term partnership with her former therapist in the latter years of her life. The only person she couldn’t stand to live with, it seems, was her husband. 

Queer family shows up not only in McCullers’ life but also in her two most famous novels. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter depicts a poignant relationship between two deaf men who live together and care for each other, until they are forced apart by a blood family member. The Member of the Wedding follows a twelve-year-old tomboy coming to terms with being an “unjoined person” while longing to join her brother and his fiancée’s bond. 

Then there’s the last of the three stories in my collection, “A Domestic Dilemma.” It reveals how motherhood as the patriarchy has defined it—caring for a child in virtual isolation—guarantees not only a mother’s undoing and the death of her true self, as we saw in “The Haunted Boy,” but also the neglect and harm of her children. In the story, a father leaves work early and comes home to his house in the suburbs, where he finds his children unattended in the living room, their mother drunk upstairs. Again, food signals failure: It’s dinnertime, yet the mother, stinking of sherry, has prepared nothing. Like Hugh’s mother discovering the joy of shopping, we witness the spectral modes of self-expression allotted to this woman: “Often at such times she affected a slight English accent, copying perhaps some actress she admired.” Finally, there’s the heavy, uneasy apprehension that all is not right in this household: “If you could only realize how sick I am –,” the father says, “how bad it is for all of us.” By “it,” he means his wife’s alcoholism. But McCullers, I imagine, means much more. 

While this story is clearly about the ills of the patriarchy, the father’s desires, like Hugh’s, are complex. He fears the town’s gossip, feeling his wife’s drunkenness undermines his manhood. But he also enjoys the tenderness of bathing his children. I am reminded of my grandmother’s surprise when, while staying at her house, my husband took the children upstairs to give them a bath. “You mean he bathes them too?” she asked in astonishment and delight. Perhaps it is possible for even those of us in heterosexual nuclear families to queer mothering. 

McCullers writes of the suburban husband, “For the first time that evening he looked at his wife.” Looking at her requires him to see who she has become: a depressed drunk who cannot care for her children and hates the life her husband has built for her. She is the tradwife behind closed doors, after the selfie camera has been shut off. If a tradwife’s hyper-feminine, drag-like performance is designed for the eyes of men, not for women—as some have speculated—the tradwife in this story is not worth watching, because her faults belie the artifice of her motherhood. And if her performance of gender is exposed, what does that mean for her husband’s? A whistle of wind, and the house of cards quivers. 

I think back to the opening line of “The Haunted Boy:” “Hugh looked for his mother at the corner, but she was not in the yard.” Hugh finds his mother at the end of the story, but does he really? He is haunted by the traumatic memory of her suicide attempt, yes. But he is also haunted by her authentic self, which he will never find—not here in the suburbs, and not in the 1950s American vision of family. 

The men and boys in these stories desire mothering, but they look for it in motherhood—the uncanny double that their own sex has invented and imposed. To enjoy true mothering—the tender care and comfort, the love and connection and kindness—would require them to give up the jig: to relinquish their power and dominance. Until they do so, they will never find the mother they long for, but they will never stop seeking her either. She will haunt these boys their whole lives, and longer.