"Wunderkind" by Carson McCullers

Discussion Leader: Erica

Tuesday's reading is Carson McCullers's short story, "Wunderkind" -- many folks have said that McCullers herself was a "Wunderkind" since she wrote most of her great literature before the age of 30 (including writing the amazing novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at 23!). What made McCullers such a prodigy was her preternatural ability to capture the heart at its frailest.

Written in 1936, when McCullers was 19 years old, ‘‘Wunderkind’’ was McCullers’s first published work. It presents the story of Frances, a teenage girl who has been considered a musical prodigy but who, after years of training and sacrifice, seems suddenly incapable of fulfilling the bright expectations she has always held. In the brief space of a single piano lesson, we see her struggling to recover the confidence and artistry she once knew and trying to navigate a flood of conflicting emotions and desires that threaten to overwhelm her. Often praised as a sensitive, insightful portrayal of the pressures and isolation of adolescence, it is marked by a dramatic tension that increases relentlessly throughout the story—despite the fact that very little ‘‘action’’ occurs. That action takes place in the studio of her music teacher, but the story’s actual setting is the intimate depths of Frances’s troubled mind.

I think this quotation from Wikipedia aptly describes a way of seeing her work in a general way: "Although McCullers's oeuvre is often described as 'Southern Gothic,' she produced her famous works after leaving the South. Her eccentric characters suffer from loneliness that is interpreted with deep empathy. In a discussion with the Irish critic and writer Terence de Vere White she said: 'Writing, for me, is a search for God.'"

Click here for an encyclopedia entry that outlines her life and her work!