SOURCE: Paden, Frances Freeman. “Autistic Gestures in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Modern Fiction Studies 28, no. 3 (autumn 1982): 453-63.

In the following essay, Paden contends that by examining the autistic hand gestures of the five main characters in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, “we will see how their hands reveal the alienation that they feel in their unsuccessful quests for love and acceptance.”

She observed the length and shape of the fingers, their curves in repose, the character of the nails, the smooth cuticles, the veins that made small ridges upon the back of the hand and seemed to swell from wrist to finger joints. She liked looking at rings on fingers, too. They enhanced the beauty of the hand; there was a quality of oneness about them which implied reciprocity.¹

In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers endows her characters with a kind of...