Bryan Aubrey Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. In the following essay, he discusses some ofthe autobiographical elements in “The Haunted Boy” and assessesthesuccess of the story as a literary work. The works of Carson McCullers are generally credited with having much insight into the demands and complexities of love, and what it feels like for people who are outsiders or in some way unable to create the emotional connections with others that they desperately need. McCullers writes about the human heart and the pain it endures when it cannot find the fulfillment that it seeks. She understands loneliness and isolation. In “The Haunted Boy,” she is able to imagine herself into the mind and heart of a fourteen-year-old boy who has been dealt a devastating blow when he sees the mother he loves lying in the bathroom covered in blood following a suicide attempt. After that, Hugh endures loss and loneliness as his mother is confined to a hospital for three months to be treated for depression. For Hugh, these are three long months “strained with dullness and want and dread.” All a teenage boy's need for his mother is contained in that short phrase, as well as his fear of what the future may hold. Hugh's sense of abandonment must be great, as is his stoicism. In all that time he never gives way to tears. He holds his emotions at bay and cuts himself off from most of his friends at school. But stoicism, although it may mask deeper feelings, does not remove them. Eventually they flare up, but even then, despite the story's apparently positive ending, they are not fully resolved. “OFTEN, ONE APPARENTLY DESIRABLE EMOTION CARRIES WITH IT AS A KIND OF UNDERTOW ANOTHER EMOTION THAT IS ITS OPPOSITE, AND THESE TWO (OR MORE) CONFLICTING EMOTIONS MAY NEVER BE HAPPILY RESOLVED.” Some of the roots of the story can be traced to elements in McCullers's own life. In 1948, like Hugh's mother in the story, she had a bout with depression and slashed her left wrist in what appeared to be a half-hearted suicide attempt. As a result, she was hospitalized at a psychiatric clinic in New York City for three weeks. The following year, also like the mother in the story, she had to have a pregnancy terminated because her doctors decided that giving birth would be too risky for her delicate health. Although it is not known precisely when the story was written, it was published in 1955, just five months after thedeathof McCullers's mother. McCullers had been very dependent on her mother for much of her life, especially following the suicide of her husband, Reeves, in November 1953. McCullers, however, was not happy with her state of dependency, so the mother-daughter relationship was not a comfortable one for her. Her Virginia Spencer Carr, in her book The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers, points out that in all of McCullers's fiction, she did not once create a happy, positive
relationship between a mother and a daughter. Carr connects this to “The Haunted Boy,” arguing thatthe
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