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Reflections in a Golden Eye

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The edition of this novel that I own is the one with the introduction written by Tennessee Williams - and that introduction makes a lot of valid points about the novel itself, the darkness that it contains (or attempts to contain - this depth of darkness burns through boundaries), and the reception it received upon its original publication. On this last topic, it should be noted that the novel (her second) was not nearly as well received as McCullers' debut masterpiece, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. Williams points out - and rightly so - that `...in her second novel the veil of a subjective tenderness...was drawn away.' What readers and critics were left with was a chilling - and compelling - portrait of six people wrecking together at a fog-shrouded emotional intersection in their lives. It's not a pretty sight - but McCullers' incredible writing simply will not allow us (or her characters) to turn away. The characters slam together completely out of emotional control - mainly because none of them really know themselves deeply enough to understand what they're feeling or experiencing. It's excruciating - and fascinating - to watch.

The book may not have been well received critically when it was new - but time has shown McCullers' talents to be long lasting. She is truly one of the giants of 20th century literature.

This novella is a brave, bald exploration of homosexuality and infidelity in the military. It presents itself as a rare event that disturbs the routine dullness of peacetime military life.

The small circle of characters is individually and collectively self-destructive. There's Captain Penderton, who comes to nurse ambivalent homosexual yearnings for Private Williams, who fancies his wife. Meanwhile, Mrs Leonora Pederton is sleeping with General Langdon, whose wife, Alison, eventually succumbs to a complete breakdown of sanity. Got that? Good. It's compulsive stuff.

In this narrow social circle, author McCullers sets "normal" domestic events such as cooking delicious Southern dinners, and card evenings, against sexual episodes (both overt and latent). These range from Private Williams crouching in Mrs Penderton's room all night long to observe her sleeping naked, through to the tormentedly homosexual Captain Pemberton wrecking the body and spirit of his wife's horse on a particularly brutal ride.

In some ways, the strangest character is the Langdons' Filipino houseboy, Anacleto. Effete, devoted and fastidious to a "T", a would-be dancer and artist, he provides tragic Mrs Langdon with a kind of love. And it is Anacleto's artistic vision of a peacock with grotesque reflections in its golden eye that explains the title.

Typically of McCullers's Southern Gothicism, the writing infuses poetry with a feeling of utter menace. At times it's scarily bald, yet lyrical: "In the sky there was a white brilliant moon and the night was cold and silvery."

Some have found it too short, but I don't see that as a problem. It's a quick, chillingly stylish read that plumbs hidden psychological depths and doesn't shrink from uncomfortable truths.

Written in 1941, Carson McCullers' second novel probably qualifies as a novella or long short story. Surely it was light years ahead of its time as Ms. McCullers takes on homosexuality-- latent and the other kind, masochism, adultery, voyeurism, self-mutilation, a nervous breakdown and animal cruelty in fewer than a hundred pages. In the hands of a lesser writer, this tale would have degenerated into a trashy detective story. Ms. McCullers, however, manages to make the characters, with all their warts, believable, and for the most part, sympathetic. Captain Penderton, for example, is tormented by his hidden feelings for other men-- he is simultaneously attracted to both Private Williams as well as Major Langdon and hates Williams, even though he ought to despise the Major since he is cuckolding the Captain who, along with everyone else, knows about it. But Penderton is a real person, unhappy, lonely but capable of murder.

Ms. McCullers keeps this story first class with her spare, though poetic language. "An army post [the story is set on a military post in the 1930's in the South] in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but then they happen over and over again. . . At the same time things do occasionally happen on an army post that are not likely to re-occur. There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse." With those opening lines, the story begins and never slows down.

I never had an English professor who would give Carson McCullers the time of day. Her novels were too gothic, her plots unbelievable, there were too many kinks in her characters. Could it have been that her stories were too close to home or were they jealous of her popularity with the reading public from the publication of her first novel THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER?

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE holds up well on a second reading. Made into a movie by John Houston in 1967 starring Marlon Brando-- in one of his best roles-- and Elizabeth Taylor, this novel is ripe for a remake now by someone with the talent of Mike Nichols.

This book was written in 1941, and deals with homosexuality as well as infidelity in the military. Now being a former Marine and I know what that is like. That alone was enough to make me read it, and I was suprised as to how tastfully it was done. I loved the characters McCullers created and how she was short and to the point with there feelings. A quick read and a ...honest one at that. Very honest about gay supressed passions. I recommend it.

One would expect a 20-something year old in 1940s southern USA to be all prim and nice, with no knowledge of such things as deep emotional trauma and burning homosexual desires. Well Carson McCullers defied conventional wisdom and not only was aware of such matters but deftly encapsulated it in a short, brutal novel. Reflections in a Golden Eye is a painful examination of the wrecked lives of two couples (, and other characters, ) on a military base in the South. There is little in the way of action or story per se, but it is her examination of characters which makes this novel such a winner.

This novel is not for everyone. It is rather depressing, with everyone leading neurotic lives. No happy endings, and one has to wonder if there is moral to the story. But those who can tolerate looking at the world without wearing rose-colored glasses will appreciate this masterful work.

PS - the novel is MUCH better than the film. And I enjoyed it better than her other famous novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Carson McCullers' critically overlooked but excellent second novel, Reflections In A Golden Eye (1941), represents the author at the height of her creative powers. At the time of its release, Anais Nin thought the book betrayed the influence of D. H. Lawrence, but a more likely inspiration was fellow Southerner Erskine Caldwell, whose early novels Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933) shared McCullers' tart black humor. Like Caldwell, McCullers parted the heavy curtains of social respectability and looked human nature unsentimentally in the face: Reflections In A Golden Eye examines infidelity, madness, sexual frustration, emotional insensitivity, erotic obsession, the failure of self actualization, voyeurism, homosexuality, and bisexuality with perfect calm and assurance.

As the first paragraph bluntly reveals, Reflections In A Golden Eye is a tragedy involving "two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse." The novel takes place on a microcosmic army base in the Deep South: and "an army post in peacetime is a dull place." Despite the insulation of the setting and the generally grotesque inner lives of the cast, the smoothly critical tone of the book suggests that McCullers' characters are largely everymen, and thus essentially no different in any specific manner from the average American man or woman.

The novel's predominant theme is the general lack of self-awareness which, in the author's vision, most members of society, at all levels, enjoy or suffer. The book begs the question, "Which is the greater burden, consciousness or unconsciousness?" McCuller's answer is clear: for most people, the burden of consciousness is by far the heavier cross to bear.

Adulterous, lust-object Leonora Penderton is not only "a little feeble-minded" and inherently "very stupid," but emotionally coarse as well, while her stolid married lover, Major Morris Langdon, keeps "very recondite and literary" books by his bedside but privately longs for the "pulp magazines" featuring "wild, interplanetary superwars" hidden in his bureau drawer.

Alison Langdon, Morris' tense, cuckolded, and perpetually ailing wife, suffers from fits of "madness" which drive her to acts of self-mutilation. Sadly, Alison, the proverbial 'eye among the blind,' is the single character capable of making an accurate assessment of the terrible events unfolding around her. When the exasperated Alison finally announces what she has witnessed, she is diagnosed as mentally ill and taken away, a theme McCullers admirer Tennessee Williams would adopt and develop to great effect in the following decade.

Reflections In A Golden Eye is also dominated by characters who are, to varying degrees, homosexual in some capacity of their natures. The book's main character, secret aesthete, figurative eunuch, and kleptomaniac Captain Weldon Penderton, is vaguely aware of his homosexual instincts, and routinely and masochistically becomes enamored of his wife's lovers. Pompous and absurd, Captain Penderton, who was raised by "five old-maid aunts" and who is known as "Flap-Fanny" among his subordinates due to his flabby buttocks, receives the brunt of McCullers' often hilarious scorn.

All of the book's homosexual elements converge and are caricatured in Alison's mischievous house boy, Anacleto, who spontaneously creates and performs ballets, wears "a blouse of aquamarine linen," speaks rudimentary French to Major Langdon's annoyance, and whose paintings, which are at once "primitive and over-sophisticated," lay "a queer spell on the beholder." Like a folkloric animal trickster, Anacleto is continually described in physically atavistic, monkey-like terms. But McCullers allows the effeminate Anacleto a revenge of sorts: he is the only character who is both self-aware and self-accepting.

Rounding out the cast is the introverted Private Williams, a somnambulistic young man--and undetected murderer--who awakens to a new level of consciousness and strange longing after coming into contact with Leonora, whose horse, Firebird, he stables. Unfortunately for all concerned parties, Captain Penderton becomes as uncomfortably enamored of Private Williams as Williams is of Leonora, with fatal results. Though Private Williams clearly develops a definite sexual attraction for Leonora, he also becomes oddly mesmerized by Captain Penderton's halting overtures, which in turn lead him to spasmodic acts of irrational violence.

Though McCullers slightly loses her tight focus as the story winds to its conclusion, Reflections In A Golden Eye is so pristinely and economically written that it feels organic: there is barely a false note in any of its deft 124 pages.

"there is a fort in the south where a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a filipino, and a horse."

So starts ms mccullers novel, "reflections in a golden eye." This novella was written in 1941 and its underlying sexual tones are well ahead of its time. From extra marital affairs to homosexuality with a little voyeurism mixed in, we get a very unique picture of a southern army base in the 1940's.

The story is told with great precision and limited verbiage. As a result I enjoyed this more than I did ms mccullers more famous "the heart is a lonely hunter". Captain penderton's battle with his demons-which include his wife, her horse, and a private for whom he has unwanted feelings-is interestingly contrasted to the singular and more simple desires of the other characters.

A very well written book which, by the way, was made into an excellent movie starring marlon brando and elizabeth taylor. Don't miss either.

With its short page count, "Reflections in a Golden Eye" is more of a novella than a novel. What is disappointing about it is that it takes about fifty pages (the majority of the novella) to get involved in the characters and the plot. It starts intriguingly enough, with the promise of a murder involving the central characters ("two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse."), but McCullers' prose is so cold and distant that it makes the plot inaccessible to the reader. The descriptions of the setting benefit from this and become starkly beautiful -- "Then suddenly the sun was gone. There was a chill in the air and a light, pure wind. It was time for retreat. From far away came the sound of the bugle, clarified by distance and echoing in the woods with a lost hollow tone. The night was near at hand." -- but the characters are rendered so abstruse by it that it feels slightly maddening. After thirty pages someone asked me how the book was so far and the only word that came to mind was bizarre. The violence (both subtle and overt) is startling and seems too unreasoned.

But stick with it. In the last thirty pages or so you begin to comprehend the pathos of the characters and their situations, and suspense begins to build as the novella heads to its shattering climax. What McCullers is exploring is how repressed desire can turn to intense hatred, and how that loathing can turn to violence in one sudden moment. The characters are all stuck in their own traps, and most of them are being driven mad by desperation. At the center is Captain Weldon Penderton, a repressed homosexual whose desires are so internalized that the only expression they can find is rage and despair. When his colleague, and his wife's lover, remarks that another character would do better in life if he conformed to the mainstream a little more Penderton angrily disagrees, bitterly wondering "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 honorable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?" When you consider the ramifications that a life of trying to scrape into a round hole have had on him, you can't help but feel for Penderton. This becomes all the more resonant when you consider that "Reflections in a Golden Eye" was written at a time when McCullers' own marriage (to a bisexual soldier) was failing as a result of their homosexual affairs.

In the end "Reflections" is a startling and intelligent, not to mention socially important, work. I just wish that it wasn't so hard to get into in the first place, because its initial heartlessness is a misgiving. There actually is a lot of emotion and depth in this novella, and yet it is only toward the ending that it truly shines.

"There is a fort in the south where a few years ago a murder was committed.The participants of this tragedy were; two officers,a soldier,two women,a Filipino and a horse."
This is all you need as an introduction, and from this Carson McCullers weaves an intense and powerful story covering a theme she so uniquely disects; loneliness.
Each character is flawed and isolated in and by their own world,and each obsessed by each other-the Captain with the soldier,the soldier with the Captains wife Leonora,she by physical pleasures she cannot get from her husband;her lovers wife with her Filipino servant..... and throughout McCullers builds the story with her own unique and imaginative prose.
I can find no faults with Carson McCullers, I love everything she wrote. Her theme may always be the same, but the depth and sheer inventiveness of her stories never ceases to make her so readable and painfully true. 120 odd pages of magic-a great introduction to McCullers if you've not read her before.

I was able to read this book in about two hours. The short read time is my only complaint about this extremely interesting and mind stimulating story.

It deals with very interesting and complex characters. We have the two military couples, both of which have very bad marriages. The first because the husband (the Major) just shuts out his sickly wife. The second because the husband (the Captain) is an intellectual who seems to have married a fairly simple-minded woman whose only interests lie in material things and the carnal spirit. The four of them are drawn together in a weird relationship where the Major is having an affair with the Captain's wife. Both the Captain and the Major's wife know about the affair but seem to enjoy the get-togethers for Bridge and parties that the couples constantly happen together.

Meanwhile, the Captain's wife is being watched by a very strange enlisted man, who the Captain both hates and seems to be attracted to at the same time. The enlisted man spends nights watching the Captain's house to get a glimpse of the Captain's wife. Eventually, he starts to regularly enter the house to watch over the sleeping form of the Captain's wife.

The Major's wife seems to be worshipped by her Phillipino servant. Her additional confidante is an army lieutenant who she knits sweaters for.

A great deal seems to be hinted at (ex. The sexuality of the Captain), but never fully explained, probably because most of the subject matter was considered very risque when the book was written. I really wish this book could be written in an expanded form. All the characters seemed very complex and the life and psyche of each could be greatly explored in a much larger book.

I also think there is a lot of fodder to foster some really good University discussions on each of the characters. I wish we had explored this book when I was in college.