Reflections in a Golden Eye

Like much of McCullers’s work, Reflections in a Golden Eye depicts elements of what literary critics have called “spiritual isolation” and longing for connection. This isolation, in turn, is bound up to the idea of the grotesque, or spiritual incompleteness and distortion; the grotesque famously typifies Southern Gothic literature, which often portrays aspects of human experience that are likely to contravene the readership’s preconceived notions of what is natural. The characters are therefore generally seen as somehow bizarre or eccentric, both despite and because of their humanity. This novel’s characters, being somehow “incomplete,” long for wholeness and unconsciously believe that union with a beloved will make them whole—yet that longing is thwarted, due both to the oppressive environment and to the subjects’ apparent inability to give or receive love.

The novel opens with a symbol of spiritual isolation when the narrator reveals that the story will end in murder. Homicide—one person’s willful and consummate destruction of another—is the furthest thing from spiritual communion, and this premise sets the tone for the narrative. Even without the looming murder, however, alienation pervades nearly every aspect of life on the army base, where the marriages are not only loveless but fractured by chronic infidelity and antipathy. Each spouse finds the other repellant, and each seeks fulfillment through some form of estrangement from the other.

Yet the novel’s central figure of spiritual isolation, Private Williams, is unmarried. He is also the novel’s central figure of the grotesque, as his eponymous golden eyes bear the literal reflections of his obsession, Leonora, whom he stalks and surveils. His obsession, and especially his obsessive behavior, would have struck most midcentury readers (and plenty modern ones) as disturbing or unnatural. The character thus takes up the literary tradition of “freaks” (as scholars have called them) who dramatize the grotesque and are a mainstay of the Southern Gothic. Nevertheless, in keeping with the true nature of the grotesque, Williams’s intense longing for connection with Leonora is not “unnatural.” Though he neither understands nor appropriately expresses it, his longing is the entirely natural outcome of an acute and highly particular emotional deprivation:

He had been brought up in a household exclusively male. From his father, who ran a one-mule farm and preached on Sunday at a Holiness church, he had learned that women carried in them a deadly and catching disease which made men blind, crippled, and doomed to hell. […] Private Williams had never willingly touched, or looked at, or spoken to a female since he was eight years old (320).

This upbringing conflates, among other things, sexual desire with damnation, leaving the Private with an incomplete, distorted image of relationships and a similarly incomplete psychology that can neither connect with women nor fully conceive of their personhood. Though this inner distortion fuels his pathological expression of longing, the longing itself—the longing for connection, for a safe encounter with femininity—is human. McCullers hints at this core redeeming quality when Williams deludedly thinks of Leonora as his “Lady,” a sobriquet invoking something ennobling and chivalric, however off-kilter. The title “Lady” recalls an earlier work of Southern Literature that similarly depicts a grotesque misexpression of desire: In Faulkner’s The Hamlet (1940), a character becomes enamored with a cow and perceives the relationship as an almost mythic romance.

Private Williams is himself the object of another’s fixation. Captain Penderton is likewise spiritually alienated, especially from himself, which only exacerbates his obsession with Williams: Penderton’s intense longing for Williams is at once the longing to know himself, to realize his own sexuality and capacity for love. Unlike Williams, however, Penderton represses his desire, and that desire eventually manifests as murder. A passionate release that paradoxically allows the Captain to distance himself from that very passion, the homicide is a grotesque stand-in for intimacy.

Another key scene involves Alison’s self-mutilation with the garden shears. What makes the episode grotesque, in the germane sense of the word, is that her behavior appears abnormal but is, in fact, the outlet for a normal grief that otherwise has no outlet. Being so psychologically cut off from others, she has no one with whom to process her grief and no one, besides Anacleto, to give witness to the reality of her agony. Alison encounters the novel’s other “golden eye,” which belongs to the brilliant bird that Anacleto paints: “‘A peacock of a sort of ghastly green. With one immense golden eye. And in it these reflections of something tiny and—’ […] ‘Grotesque,’ she finished for him” (366). The novel’s most honest and perceptive character, Alison understands that reality is much different from the idealized beauty that she and Anacleto so cherish, and the peacock’s golden eye reflects that reality: the grotesque.