'A Little Glance of Grief and Lonely Recognition': Space and Gender Identity in Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Café.

Set in an enclosed southern mill town that punishes any women who attempts to depart from the role imposed by tradition, Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) offers a critique upon heteronormative discourses of gender, sexuality, and the body in the portrait of Miss Amelia Evans. This dissertation aims at analysing the ways in which the spaces in the novella become a representation of her transgression of gender boundaries and the destruction of her power at the hands of the male characters. The position of dominance she acquires from her sexual ambiguity and the appropriation of typically-male spaces is progressively brought down by her grotesque ‘feminization’, mirrored by the café. The last section of this document contemplates the decaying house in which Miss Amelia is confined after her ultimate defeat as a gothic space, symbol of the female body that imprisons her.<br /