Miss. Amelia let her hair grow ragged and it was turning gray. Her face lengthened and the great muscles of her body shrank until she was thin as old maids are thin when they go crazy. And those gray eyes slowly day by day they were more crossed and it was as though they sought each other out to exchange a little glance of grief and lonely recognition. She was not pleasant to listen to; her tongue had sharpened terribly. For three years she sat out on the front steps every night, alone and silent looking down the road and waiting. But the hunchback never returned. There were rumors that Marvin Macy used him to climb into windows and steal and other rumors that Marvin Macy had sold him into a side show. But both these reports were traced back to Merlie Ryan. Nothing true was ever heard of him. It was in the fourth year that Miss. Amelia hired a Cheehaw carpenter and had he board up the premises and there in those closed rooms she has remained ever since.
For though love is the great opposing principle which McCullers embraces in her fictional critique of our civilization the failure of love and love seems always to fail leaves man encapsulated in a state not very distinguishable from anguished solipsism. The fate of her lowly heroes however always chosen among the
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It contains a philosophy of love that has slowly evolved through her earlier works and has now reached a point of completeness where it is not only presented dramatically, but also explicitly in a reflective passage, not only may love not be returned by the beloved, it may also cause the latter to hate the lover. This idea is the result of a consistent development of such relations as between the deaf mutes and it accounts for the singular and terrible connection of the characters in her fourth book. In this novel, McCullers explores love, hate relationship in marriage and what she calls ‘the immense complexity of