Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers
McCullers second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, is set in an army camp during peace time. It concerns the relationships between five key figures – repressed and confused Captain Penderton, his unsatisfied flighty wife Leonora, who is having an affair with Major Langdon, whose wife Alison is suffering great mental and physical exhaustion. Outside of them is Private Williams, somewhat simple and quiet, but menacing. As with all of McCullers’ work it deals with the nuances of spiritual isolation, the ways in which we find ourselves completely alienated despite and because of our surroundings.
Reflections in a Golden Eye is set up as a tragedy from the very beginning, we are well aware that one of the characters is going to meet a violent end at the hands of another. Some of the imagery here is utterly horrific, but it shapes our knowledge of the characters. The novella is brutal in the refusal to soften these stark elements of the human psyche. Shockingly violent, in both actions and private thoughts. These lives are burdened with intense hatred for each other that it controls their entire spiritual beings disallowing them to fully comprehend themselves.
Captain Penderton, who on the whole had lived a most rigid and unemotional life, did not question this strange hate of his. Once or twice, when he awoke late at night after taking too much Seconal, he made himself uncomfortable by thinking back over his recent behaviour. But he made no real effort to force himself to an inward reckoning.
Captain Penderton is the most intriguing character, with his slow and painful realization of his attraction to the quiet soldier Private Williams which manifests itself in an absurd form of hate. This hate reveals itself because it is a frustrated attraction which can never be fulfilled. The closest that Penderton comes to self-realization, is when Langdon comments that his servant would be a better person if he acted normally, to which Penderton bitterly responds:
‘You mean,’ Captain Penderton said, ‘that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?’
‘Why, you put it exactly right,’ the Major said. ‘Don’t you agree with me?’
‘No,’ said the Captain, after a short pause. With gruesome vividness the Captain suddenly looked into his soul and saw himself. For once he did not see himself as others saw him; there came to him a distorted doll-like image, mean of countenance and grotesque in form. The Captain dwelt on this vision without compassion. He accepted it with neither alteration nor excuse. ‘I don’t agree,’ he repeated absently.
It is typical McCullers’ in that it is unspeakably bleak, and delves into the darkest emotions. Knowing of McCullers’ personal life, and her dedicating Reflections in a Golden Eye to Annemarie Schwarzenbach – who she was immensely attracted to, but who constantly rejected her advances – speaks volumes about where she is coming from, and relates to the concept which she would come to struggle with in her later work The Ballad of the Sad Café, the eternal disparity between the lover and the beloved. I think it is a book that is going to benefit greatly from future re-readings.
(Yes, that is Elizabeth Taylor on the Penguin Modern Classics cover. A film version, starring Taylor and Marlon Brando and directed by John Huston was filmed in 1967. It is available to watch on YouTube.)
Great review!
I’ve been resisting McCullers because I feel like her work is going to leave me feeling thoroughly depressed. I once read the little descriptive blurb on the back of The Ballad of Sad Cafe DVD and started feeling a little low, so I can’t imagine what an entire book would do to me.
(I love your site!)
Haha, yeah she’s not exactly a laugh riot but she is very much worth reading. You definitely have to be in the right frame of mind for it.
Thank you for your kind words!
“These lives are burdened with intense hatred for each other that it controls their entire spiritual beings disallowing them to fully comprehend themselves.”
Does their hatred blind them or their ignorance? Or both?
“the eternal disparity between the lover and the beloved”
Do you buy into this concept? Or are you stating that was McCuller’s belief or dramatic device for creating dramatic conflict?
Why is this author, with such a bleak outlook, and with such an apparently pessimistic outlook on love, your favorite author?
Is there some safety in believing love will always be unrequited? Does that belief allow a person to more easily justify not taking risks toward loves?
And just what are the odds that between 5 main characters, all of them would be more “in love” or “attracted to” a person they “cannot have”? I gather that in McCullers’ perceptions, those odds might be better than I might expect.
Oh, definitely both hatred and ignorance blinds them – with how they react to others and how they see themselves. The differences between lover/beloved is McCullers’ major theme in all of her works, though it is usually in a … unconsummated relationship for lack of a better word, because the lover is so emotionally/physically distanced from the beloved – because they can’t bring themselves to make it into something real, because society doesn’t “allow” it, or for whatever reason. I think her point with this is more the difference between the lover’s image/ideal of the beloved and the beloved themselves. I would say that she is my favourite author because she can articulate this difference so well, she adequately relates that feeling of being outside of relationship/s, society, etc. Because she’s not afraid to be pessimistic.
My own bleak, pessimistic outlook makes me partially buy into this concept, but more to the difference between ideal/actual. Do I believe that two people can exist together on a level plane with equal amounts of love both ways? Absolutely. Or at least, I hope I do. Of course there is an element of safety in the unrequited love – in the novel I wonder how much of Penderton’s inability to articulate and fulfill his desire is because of the norms driven into him by society – even if he also recognizes that those that do not fit the ideal of normalcy deserve happiness.
You’ve really made me want to re-read this novel and reconsider all of these aspects. Thank you so much for your comment.
Thank you for taking time to respond to my comment.
You wrote: “I think her point with this is more the difference between the lover’s image/ideal of the beloved and the beloved themselves” – that is a genuine mystery.
How do we ever know if our perceptions of our unrequited beloved are real? Especially with the common circumstances of unrequited love – a love that has the circumstance of never being “consumated” – or said another way – it never comes into day to day “being” – at least not as long as the lover wanted it to last. From the “unloved”‘s perspective, the regular perception/imagination is that if the beloved had stayed and wanted them and tried, then “everything” would have been better.
The comfort and dependendence on that perception (relationship or proximity to a relationship with the unrequited beloved) is sometimes the lover’s sincerely best actual experience with happiness or love.
Further complexity often comes in play because the lover often has had other relationships since then, and while the other relationships may have been bad, fine, good, or great – there still are comparative points from the unrequited love relationship that are perceived to be as good or better than anything else experienced since.
But in a world where we are told the ideal is to find “the one” relationship that is “better than the rest,” McCullers possibly speaks to the by-products of that kind of social system. But even if the social system/expectation was something more flexible or complex, the themes and conflicts McCullers speaks to would still be equally, if not more frequently, present.
It’s probably good to have more than one counselor – even if it’s better to have only one lover. It’s probably better to consider and read the ideas of many people – even if in practice you choose to synthesize all of those efforts toward one primary other person.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why McCullers remarried the same person, re-entering into her previously-failed heterosexual relationship. Another mystery.