SOURCE: "The Mother Tongue," in Engendering Romance: Women Writers and the Hawthorne Tradition, 1850–1990. Yale University Press, 1994, pp. 143-61.

In the following essay Budick discusses how different characters in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter strive to develop both verbal and sexual intercourse with others.

Like her predecessors in the romance tradition, Carson McCullers, in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, renders a portrait of reality more suggestive than mimetic. As with The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables (and the tradition of sentimental fiction to which these texts are related), its subject is the truth of the human heart, and its fundamental message has to do with what the text specifies as "one word—love." At the end of Wharton's House of Mirth, Lily is trying to remember this single word, and Selden in on his way to Lily to say it. The word is...