#The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

[yellowbugifs]

194/365 days of regina mills

[flowerytale]

Carson McCullers, from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

[macrolit]

New arrivals.

[citizenscreen]

22-year-old Carson McCullers’ first novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” was published on June 4, 1940.

[m--bloop]

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter dir. Robert Ellis Miller (1968)

[goldenblood98]

“And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.”

-Carson McCullers

[litapeanut]

I love books whose titles are a saga on its own, which already tell you a story before you read their content.

[la-muerte-chiquita]

[pastnotfuture]

The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Carson McCullers

[mad-prophet-of-the-airwaves]

Rest in peace, Alan Arkin (1934-2023).

[ladyofdecember]

So John's whole advice to Shawn when he's trying to understand how to be in a real relationship is to compare him and Dana to him and Cory? 😅 Like Shawn really just hasn't had it click yet that the way he should behave and act with girls is the way he behaved and acts with Cory, his best friend? 🤔😂

[yellowbugifs]

76/365 days of regina mills

[flowerytale]

Carson McCullers, from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

[macrolit]

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers This is 1 of 12 vintage paperback classics that comprise our current giveaw@y.

[artist-issues]

Your favorite character was Graham you say?

How did/do you feel about his history/relationship(?) with Regina. Since there are a lot of different opinions and I'm curious how you view the two. Especially with Regina literally having Graham's heart and him having to obey her otherwise he'd die.

I don’t love his relationship with her. I don’t think they should’ve made it romantic, but I see why they did, because by making him romantic with the Evil Queen, they could segue into giving Emma a love interest that her rival also has. Like Mean Girls.

I don’t think they should’ve made it romantic because the only things we know about the Huntsman from the Snow White fairy tales is that he 1) is compassionate 2) works for the Evil Queen and 3) is afraid of her ((enough to initially obey her command to kill a child; enough to try and outsmart her instead of stand up to her directly.))

All those things are still intact in OUAT. It’s just…it’s not clear why the original Evil Queen from the fairy tale would ever want to be in a romantic relationship with her Huntsman. So why is it that way in OUAT? Just because the actor is handsome and the leading lady needed to prove she could get the villainess’ man.

Remember, this is the issue I had with season 1 of OUAT. Regina is an interesting villainess and a cool character but she’s not…actually…The Evil Queen Character from the original Snow White.

The Evil Queen from the original Snow White was self-obsessed in the MOST shallow way. She wanted to be the most renowned beauty in all the land. She wanted everyone to see her as beautiful, even though all along her heart was ugly. Which is what makes her a good opposite to Snow White, who is pure, innocent love on the inside and the outside, with nothing to hide. If you suddenly say, “no, the Evil Queen didn’t poison Snow because she was jealous—she poisoned Snow because she has this hole in her heart where love was stolen from her, and she thinks revenge or a child of her own will fill it,” that’s a cool character, but it’s not The Evil Queen.

If I were telling that story, I’d simply have had Regina find out that Graham kept Emma on as a deputy, or was consulting with her on police cases, and won’t stop defying orders on top of being dangerously close to finding out about the curse… then she crushes his heart and kills him. It’s still the same basic reasons—Regina needs to protect her secrets/Regina can’t stand losing control of something she once possessed/Regina hates anything that contributes to Emma’s happiness, etc. But you take out the weird “we’re in a loveless power-struggle relationship.”

But…you know, to do that, I’d have to re-tell all of OUAT, because this OC they made up who is not the real Evil Queen, Regina, really is the central character of the OUAT show. To re-write her motives in “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” would only make sense if she weren’t Regina anymore; if she were the real Evil Queen from the fairy tales, instead.

But either way Graham can still be in love with Emma and she can still be in love with him. I liked that, even if the “age” difference was weird. But take out the part where he’s ever forced into a relationship with the Queen. The Evil Queen wouldn’t have any interest in exercising her power, romantically or sexually or whatever, over someone who was already her subordinate. She’d just have him beheaded, or curse him. She doesn’t care about proving her power or finding someone to love her. She cares about appearances and being worshipped.

Anyway. Graham.

I liked that they explained his compassion for an innocent person like Snow White by recognizing she’s “pure of heart…” because he has this whole life-philosophy of “purity of heart” and knows how to spot it in animals. Because they raised him. So that’s cool. I like that he still has to learn to stand up to Regina, because in the original fairy tale, like I said, that’s the one thing he doesn’t really do. So it’s cool that when he meets Emma, he’s supposed to frame and ruin her by order of the Queen, but he doesn’t, simply because he genuinely feels compassion for her. That’s Step 1: show how he’s still The Huntsman at his core. Then Step 2 is: have the Huntsman’s story move forward from there, which essentially what the Curse being broken looks like: it stops all the fairy tale characters from moving toward a Happy Ending, and rewinds their character developments, and freezes them in time. Then when Graham starts developing past the point his character ended on in the fairy tale, that’s when the curse starts to weaken, so he has to be killed off. So I thought Graham was just a really cool bite-sized version of the whole plot, before they killed him off. 🤷‍♀️

[jawbonejoe]

Heart is a Lonely Hunter is timeless. You read when it’s from, of course, but the challenges and narratives of each character are as prescient today as they were in the 40’s. I read the book without asking myself to look past the author, as I have to with all other historic authors. McCullers is altogether different, she wrote people just as they are and knew why they are as they are. It’s the kind of book you don’t realize how extraordinary it is bc you don’t see McCullers ‘doing it’ you just experience the narrative just as she wants it.