Reflections in a Golden Eye
by Carson McCullers
List Price:
Our Price: $5.26
You Save: $4.74 (47%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $3.86 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Carson McCullersEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-09-08
ISBN: 0618084754
Number of pages: 182
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of Reflections in a Golden Eye
Book Review: A Desultory Battle For Consciousness In The Deep South
Summary: 4 Stars
Carson McCullers' critically overlooked but excellent second novel, Reflections In A Golden Eye (1941), represents the author at the height of her creative powers. At the time of its release, Anais Nin thought the book betrayed the influence of D. H. Lawrence, but a more likely inspiration was fellow Southerner Erskine Caldwell, whose early novels Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933) shared McCullers' tart black humor. Like Caldwell, McCullers parted the heavy curtains of social respectability and looked human nature unsentimentally in the face: Reflections In A Golden Eye examines infidelity, madness, sexual frustration, emotional insensitivity, erotic obsession, the failure of self actualization, voyeurism, homosexuality, and bisexuality with perfect calm and assurance.
As the first paragraph bluntly reveals, Reflections In A Golden Eye is a tragedy involving "two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse." The novel takes place on a microcosmic army base in the Deep South: and "an army post in peacetime is a dull place." Despite the insulation of the setting and the generally grotesque inner lives of the cast, the smoothly critical tone of the book suggests that McCullers' characters are largely everymen, and thus essentially no different in any specific manner from the average American man or woman.
The novel's predominant theme is the general lack of self-awareness which, in the author's vision, most members of society, at all levels, enjoy or suffer. The book begs the question, "Which is the greater burden, consciousness or unconsciousness?" McCuller's answer is clear: for most people, the burden of consciousness is by far the heavier cross to bear.
Adulterous, lust-object Leonora Penderton is not only "a little feeble-minded" and inherently "very stupid," but emotionally coarse as well, while her stolid married lover, Major Morris Langdon, keeps "very recondite and literary" books by his bedside but privately longs for the "pulp magazines" featuring "wild, interplanetary superwars" hidden in his bureau drawer.
Alison Langdon, Morris' tense, cuckolded, and perpetually ailing wife, suffers from fits of "madness" which drive her to acts of self-mutilation. Sadly, Alison, the proverbial 'eye among the blind,' is the single character capable of making an accurate assessment of the terrible events unfolding around her. When the exasperated Alison finally announces what she has witnessed, she is diagnosed as mentally ill and taken away, a theme McCullers admirer Tennessee Williams would adopt and develop to great effect in the following decade.
Reflections In A Golden Eye is also dominated by characters who are, to varying degrees, homosexual in some capacity of their natures. The book's main character, secret aesthete, figurative eunuch, and kleptomaniac Captain Weldon Penderton, is vaguely aware of his homosexual instincts, and routinely and masochistically becomes enamored of his wife's lovers. Pompous and absurd, Captain Penderton, who was raised by "five old-maid aunts" and who is known as "Flap-Fanny" among his subordinates due to his flabby buttocks, receives the brunt of McCullers' often hilarious scorn.
All of the book's homosexual elements converge and are caricatured in Alison's mischievous house boy, Anacleto, who spontaneously creates and performs ballets, wears "a blouse of aquamarine linen," speaks rudimentary French to Major Langdon's annoyance, and whose paintings, which are at once "primitive and over-sophisticated," lay "a queer spell on the beholder." Like a folkloric animal trickster, Anacleto is continually described in physically atavistic, monkey-like terms. But McCullers allows the effeminate Anacleto a revenge of sorts: he is the only character who is both self-aware and self-accepting.
Rounding out the cast is the introverted Private Williams, a somnambulistic young man--and undetected murderer--who awakens to a new level of consciousness and strange longing after coming into contact with Leonora, whose horse, Firebird, he stables. Unfortunately for all concerned parties, Captain Penderton becomes as uncomfortably enamored of Private Williams as Williams is of Leonora, with fatal results. Though Private Williams clearly develops a definite sexual attraction for Leonora, he also becomes oddly mesmerized by Captain Penderton's halting overtures, which in turn lead him to spasmodic acts of irrational violence.
Though McCullers slightly loses her tight focus as the story winds to its conclusion, Reflections In A Golden Eye is so pristinely and economically written that it feels organic: there is barely a false note in any of its deft 124 pages.
Classics Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Similar books summaries and other product reviews
The Passionby Jeanette Winterson
Grove Press; Published: 1997-08-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.49
Price in other shops:
Tobacco Roadby Erskine Caldwell
University of Georgia Press; Published: 1995-02-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.65
Price in other shops:
The Color Purpleby Alice Walker
Mariner Books; Published: 2003-05-28; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.10
Price in other shops:
The Line of Beauty: A Novelby Alan Hollinghurst
Bloomsbury USA; Published: 2005-10-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.99
Price in other shops:
Wise Blood: A Novelby Flannery O'Connor
Spring Arbor/Ingram; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Published: 2007-03-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.67
Price in other shops:
The Member of the Weddingby Carson McCullers
Mariner Books; Published: 2004-08-13; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.00
Price in other shops:
Other Voices, Other Roomsby Truman Capote
Vintage; Published: 1994-02-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.48
Price in other shops:
Clock Without Handsby Carson McCullers
Mariner Books; Published: 1998-09-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.65
Price in other shops:
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Storiesby Carson McCullers
Mariner Books; Published: 2005-04-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.17
Price in other shops:
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Oprah's Book Club)by Carson McCullers
Mariner Books; Mariner; Published: 2004-04-21; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.22
Price in other shops: