SOURCE: Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “A Feminist Reading: McCullers's Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” In Critical Essays on Carson McCullers, edited by Beverly Lyon Clark and Melvin J. Friedman, pp. 129-42. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996.

In the following essay, originally published in 1979, Spivak offers a feminist interpretation of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

We are in trouble over sex, race, and class. Any intellectual, any reader, any teacher must try to understand the world, even if she must remind herself constantly of the perils of taking understanding as a privilege or a goal. If she is a feminist, she must try to change the world, even if she is cautious enough at every step to reiterate at least two things: the sense of a “world” is the ever-shifting and many-planed converging point of interminable determinations; and even a “change” conceived of as a restructuring must be...