Illness as Metaphor in Clock Without Hands

Abstract

Carson McCullers’ Clock Without Hands vividly portrays the racial dynamics of the American South in the 1960s through its central characters: Malone, Jester, Judge Clane, and the biracial Sherman. The ailments afflicting these characters—obesity, leukemia, stroke, and social marginalization—serve as powerful metaphors for the shifting societal structures in the postwar South. McCullers employs these symbolic illnesses to reflect the fragility and eventual collapse of the deeply entrenched racial hierarchies that once defined Southern identity. Obesity reflects greed and obsession with power, leukemia signifies the erosion of conservative ideals, and stroke represents the paralysis of outdated ideologies. Through the metaphor of disease, McCullers critiques the South’s staunch conservatism and resistance to change, while revealing the decay of racism’s ideological foundations. By intertwining personal suffering with broader social upheavals, she poignantly illustrates the South’s failure to reconcile its rigid traditions with the demands of modernity, emphasizing the inevitable disintegration of its discriminatory structures.