The Square Root of Wonderful (Criticism)

Criticism

Candyce Norvell

Norvell is an independent educational writer who specializes in English and literature. In this essay, Norvell counters critics' assertions that Mollie is a reflection of McCullers's own "bizarre nonsexuality."

McCullers was an eccentric, and nothing about her was more eccentric than her sexuality. Especially because McCullers was a woman and a southerner who lived in less liberal times than now, this eccentric sexuality has always loomed large in studies of McCullers's life and her work. ("Especially" because sexual experimentation has been, in general, more tolerated in men than in women and because southern culture, in general, has given women less latitude than they have had in other regions to explore various roles and lifestyles.) Readers and critics alike, of course, are always tempted to see literary characters as barely disguised incarnations of their creators. The temptation is particularly strong when everything that is known or suspected about an author's intimate life is offbeat and titillating.

It is not surprising, then, that those who comment on McCullers's work often analyze the sexual attitudes and behaviors of her characters and assume that these are an undistorted reflection of the author's attitudes and behaviors. It is also not surprising that The Square Root of Wonderful would come in for more than its share of such analysis, since the play is all about love and sex. Hence, Lynne Greeley, in a recent article in Theatre History Studies, declares that in The Square Root of Wonderful and other works, McCullers "decapitates sex totally and retreats into a kind of bizarre nonsexualilty." Greeley's thesis is that McCullers, profoundly uncomfortable with her own sexuality, created characters, including Mollie in The Square Root of Wonderful, who are sexually dysfunctional and stories that portray sex as base or even pathological.

Well-known facts about McCullers provide the starting point for such analysis. The author dressed androgynously and chose to use her gender-neutral middle name in place of her first name, Lula. In addition, she had a troubled marriage; a cadre of gay male friends, including playwright Tennessee Williams; and exceptionally close (though not necessarily sexual) relationships with women. For Greeley and some other critics, these facts add up to a flight from sexuality that, they believe, is clearly mirrored in The Square Root of Wonderful and other works.

The Square Root of Wonderful does, indeed, portray love as more elevated than sex. Mollie tells John that Phillip wanted her for her body but that John loves her for her mind, which clearly makes her happy. The play's symbolism links love to light and luminosity, while through characterization, the point is driven home that love and sex are two separate entities. John, who loves Mollie, does not have sex with her; Phillip, who does not love her, seduces her one last time. Mollie tells John that "a kiss that is warm can lead to sin and sorrow." She refuses to have sex with John, although readers can reasonably assume that she plans to have a sexual relationship with him in the future. When Phillip reminds Mollie that "you used to like it in the car, in ditches, in open fields," Mollie is embarrassed.

Mollie's words and actions certainly show a change in her attitudes about sex between her adolescence, when she first met Phillip, and the time of the play's action. This hardly is tantamount to a rejection of sexuality. In Mollie's life, impulsive indulgence of physical desire has cost her dearly. It has led her to marry, twice, a man who does not love her but who nevertheless expects her to fulfill his needs and desires. Phillip is an unstable, abusive alcoholic who, according to Mollie, has used physical attraction to cast a spell over her and draw her into physically satisfying but emotionally destructive encounters. Mollie's withdrawal from Phillip, and her unwillingness to immediately enter into a sexual relationship with John, represent not a desperate, unhealthy flight from sexuality but a shift from immature, impulsive sexuality to a more mature handling of this challenging area of life. The older, wiser Mollie is more strongly attracted to John, a stable and loving man, than she is to Phillip. Her words and actions imply that she expects to have a physical relationship with John in the future. The fact that she is not willing to initiate this when she has known John only briefly, and when they are sharing the house with her ex-husband, his mother and sister, and Mollie's son, hardly seems unreasonable. Simply put, Mollie has learned through hard experience to take care of herself — to protect her heart, her feelings, and her well-being — by controlling her impulses and choosing her lovers wisely. She is committed to expressing her sexuality in a way that is not self-destructive.

Critics who cast the change in Mollie as a rejection of sexuality are seeing in black and white; they seem to conclude that any limit placed on sexual behavior represents an unhealthy denial of a natural instinct. Both life and literature prove them wrong. Prudence is one of the age-old cardinal virtues; it is rare in the young, and its mastery is considered an important part of the maturation process. Young people are often rash and moved by impulses. More often than not, impulsive behavior brings suffering, and suffering leads eventually to the development of prudence, which simply means the wisdom to stop and think of the possible consequences before acting. This is what Mollie is finally learning to do.

Most readers can think of people they have known in their own lives who have succeeded in learning prudence and, unfortunately, of those who have failed to do so. Literature, too, offers many stories built around the lesson of prudence: the tragedies of characters who fail to acquire it (the title character in Madame Bovary, for example) and the comedies of those who, after youthful errors and the resulting suffering, succeed (Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility). This theme is far from unique to McCullers; in fact, it is universal.

Critics who interpret Mollie's transformation negatively are predisposed to do so because they interpret McCullers's life as a failure to come to grips with her own sexuality. But, they are wrong about Mollie, and they are quite possibly wrong about McCullers as well. Wearing pants and refusing to settle into conventional gender roles are not symptoms of a retreat into "bizarre nonsexuality." McCullers had a famous contemporary who gives the lie to such notions. Actress Katharine Hepburn, like McCullers, has always been known for her androgynous dress and her complete lack of interest in traditional female roles. Hepburn, like McCullers, prefers to live alone. The great love affair of Hepburn's life, with alcoholic Spencer Tracy, was a relationship in which she loved much more than he and acted as caretaker and lover to a married man who gave her virtually nothing, emotionally or otherwise. In this way, Hepburn is reminiscent of Mollie. Further, since Tracy's death in 1967, Hepburn, who is still living as of this writing, has remained unattached. That in itself might seem to be grounds for a charge that Hepburn retreated from sexuality.

It is interesting, then, that Hepburn shares so much with McCullers and Mollie and yet, unlike them, has never been accused of being maladjusted, sexually or otherwise. In fact, Hepburn has been admired throughout her life for her determination to be her own person regardless of convention.

The question of why Hepburn is judged so favorably while McCullers and her characters are labeled pathological is beyond the scope of this essay. Perhaps eccentricity is more tolerated in a New England woman than in a southern one, or in an actress than in an author. Perhaps McCullers's physical illnesses colored opinions of her emotional health. In any case, the diagnosis of McCullers as having been a dysfunctional woman who wrote about dysfunctional women is far from certain, and it is a diagnosis that requires something in addition to the facts.

Source: Candyce Norvell, Critical Essay on The Square Root of Wonderful, in Drama for Students, Gale, 2003.

Sheldon Goldfarb

Goldfarb has a Ph.D. in English and has published two books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. In the following essay, Goldfarb explores the different types of love portrayed in McCullers's play.

In her discussion of The Square Root of Wonderful in her book on Carson McCullers, Margaret B. McDowell says that in this play McCullers "approaches love rationalistically," meaning that the lesson she is conveying is that love is a matter of logic rather than magic. This interpretation of McDowell's gets to the central issue of the play, and yet it is not quite accurate to say McCullers condemns magic and promotes rationality in love. It would be truer to say that she presents two sorts of magic, clearly indicating that one is preferable to the other. As to rationality, that is more present in the play as a refusal of love than as a way to get to it.

It is true that the love McCullers promotes is the love offered by John Tucker, an unpoetical, scientific man, an architect who never wrote a poem in his life, a man who talks of the "logic" of love and who even uses the mathematical term "square root" in discussing the subject. Still, the logic that John talks of bears closer examination. When Mollie, in the middle of act 2, asks John what he means by the logic of love, he tells her it means, in effect, that they were fated to meet. If they had not met on the road where they did, they would have met somewhere else: in the Statue of Liberty or at the Panama Canal.

This sounds more magical than logical, and indeed John goes on to say that the logic of love is "zany" and "crazy," which sounds a long way from rationalistic. Moreover, near the beginning of the play, when he describes his relationship with Mollie, he calls it a "crazy time" in which "something magical happened." He also says love can happen almost instantly, or at first sight. And near the end of act 1, he says that you cannot plan love; it arrives totally unexpectedly, and when it does, it puts a light in a person's eyes and makes objects, such as the chair and table in Mollie's house, shine like a watch dial. None of this sounds very scientific or rationalistic.

The task for Mollie in this play is not to learn to reject love's magic in favor of a more rational sort of love, but to learn to choose good magic over bad. John's love is based on good magic; it is the magical coming together of people who are good for each other, who support each other. When John and Mollie magically meet, it brings order to John's life; it gives him what he calls "color, pulse [and] form." As for Mollie, what John offers her is protection, affection, and collaboration. He wants her to help him with the house he plans to build for them, and it will be a strong house, a protective house. When Mollie says she will be desolate if he goes to San Francisco, he gently puts his arms around her. When she repeats a cruel thing Mother Lovejoy said to her, he has an angry word for Mother Lovejoy.

This is all quite different from the sort of love Mollie had previously with her ex-husband, Phillip. Phillip was an abusive husband. He beat Mollie, made fun of the way she talked, and one time even threw her naked out of the house. He also had affairs with other women. Yet, Mollie loved him and loved him in a magical way. She tells John that she was under Phillip's spell, drawn as if by an irresistible force, as if they were two magnets. Love with Phillip, which she says was like "witches and ghosts," made her powerless, swirled her head, and turned her legs to macaroni.

Remembering this sort of love with Phillip, Mollie at first will not even let John kiss her. Kissing, she tells him, leads to the dark and to sin, as if there was a sort of black magic associated with it, the bad sort of magic that weakens a person and binds them in an unhappy relationship like hers with Phillip. Thus, she tells John she cannot kiss him; instead she must "think and be practical." Similarly, when Phillip returns bringing flowers and asking for love, Mollie tries to push him away by saying she has to be "adult and practical." Later, when John is telling her lovingly about the dream house he is planning for the two of them, she interrupts to do something practical: she goes off to fix dinner. It is as if she is pushing away both good love and bad love, good magic and bad magic, by trying to be down to earth, practical, rational. What she has to learn is to distinguish between good and bad love, good and bad magic.

She does learn this. It is a gradual process. At the end of act 1, she is able to say that John is her moral support. At the end of act 2, she realizes that looking at John makes her strong. At the end of the play, Mollie is able to open herself to loving John, and as a result, loves everybody.

Actually, even when Mollie loved Phillip she loved everybody, she tells John. There is something positive about Mollie's love even when directed at someone who is no good for her. This can be seen at the end of act 1 when she tries out John's theory that love makes objects shine. She is able to make the table and chair shine for both Phillip and John, for the two men she loves.

Interestingly, when Phillip sees the same table and chair, they do not shine for him. Quite the contrary. They stand out as a sort of reproach to him, in his eyes; he thinks they will outlast him and is angry with them. There is no love in Phillip, one might conclude, at least not love of a positive sort. The table and chair can shine for John and Mollie, but not for him. Indeed, when Phillip returns, although he asks for Mollie's love, he tells her he cannot love her back. All he is really focused on is his writing. He thinks that if Mollie will love him again and protect him like a cocoon, then he will be able to write again. But cocoons are dead, Mollie says, a point Phillip seems indifferent to. He does not care if their relationship leaves her feeling dead. He does not care if it gives her nothing. He just wants it for what it can give him.

To be fair to Phillip, he too seems in the grip of an irresistible force. In reciting the poem by Rainer Maria Rilke about the violin and the bow, he seems to be saying that he would rather keep to himself, only something makes the two of them "twin." He is able to remind Mollie of the lovemaking they used to engage in: they had that physical sort of love together. He says she needs him just as he needs her, which may be true in a way. They seem to have developed what a later era would call a pattern of co-dependency; they are both dependent on each other in an unhealthy way. Mutual desire and dependence is the nature of the love between Phillip and Mollie. It seems the sort of love it would be a good idea to escape. Mollie at first tries to escape through rationality and practicality, but this seems to have little effect. When Phillip returns, she is drawn to him again. Another sort of escape is the one practiced by Sister. Avoiding love in the real world, Sister indulges in all sorts of love fantasies about men who never existed. This seems a sad sort of solution, and quite unfulfilling.

The only effective escape from the unhealthy love relationship with Phillip seems to be another love relationship, the one with John. Only by connecting romantically to John can Mollie free herself from Phillip. Only by indulging in John's good magic can she free herself from Phillip's bad sort. The play is not recommending a rejection of love's magic in favor of rationality, nor is it questioning all heterosexual love as suggested by Brooke Horvath and Lisa Logan in their Southern Quarterly article "Nobody Knows Best: Carson McCullers's Plays as Social Criticism."

The play is condemning the hypnotic sort of magic that forces a person to do demeaning things against their will, as in the hypnotist's show that John remembers, in which old ladies were made to ride bicycles and a dignified gentleman was made to stand on his head. What the play is recommending is the sort of magic that brings together a man and a woman who support each other and make each other strong, who literally light up each other's life.

This sort of magic transforms Mollie when John comes to live with her. Mother Lovejoy notes it in act 2, saying that when Mollie last lived with Phillip she lost her looks, but now she has got her old figure, her old color, and her old life back. Sister agrees, saying Mollie looks radiant. Mother Lovejoy attributes the transformation to sex, but what it really has to do with must be Mollie's new love for John, which has not yet become sexual. Sex is what Mollie had with Phillip, and it made her sad and did not save her looks. What Mollie has with John is something much deeper, a magical love that makes her strong.

Source: Sheldon Goldfarb, Critical Essay on The Square Root of Wonderful, in Drama for Students, Gale, 2003.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• Illuminations and Night Glare (1999) is McCullers's unfinished autobiography. The book features letters between the author and her husband, the outline for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, stories of her relationships with such famous people as Richard Wright, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Tennessee Williams, and memories of the psychiatrist she consulted after the failure of The Square Root of Wonderful.
• McCullers's second novel Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) is set at a southern military base in the 1930s and shocked audiences with its depiction of a bisexual army captain and his flirtatious wife. Just before McCullers's death, it was adapted to the screen starring Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando.
• Susie Mee's Downhome: An Anthology of Southern Women Writers (1995) features twenty-one stories written by a variety of authors ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Alice Walker, but it does not include McCullers. The stories were chosen based on the theme of memories about home in the South.
• McCullers has often been compared to Flannery O'Connor for her depictions of odd-ball characters in the American South. O'Connor's short stories have been collected in The Complete Stories (1971). The stories blend tragedy and comedy while revealing the darker side of human nature.
• One of McCullers's closest friends was playwright Tennessee Williams. His play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), an intense tale of familial relations, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for that year.