"He smelled like a sour little rose": Olfactory Discourse and Transgressive Smell in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding

ABSTRACT: Sight and hearing predominate in McCullers criticism, while olfaction hardly receives critical attention, though her masterpieces The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding are situated in the nexus of smell and broad ideological agendas. Reconsidering McCullers's novels through the lens of olfaction is conducive to unraveling how smell is interlocked with power and how one's olfactory identity is manipulated and manufactured. In this process, olfactory discourses naturalize the association between some odor and one's intrinsic quality, thus reinforcing the biological and social distinctions between the odorless Self and the odorous Other. Ostensibly inanimate smells are nevertheless likely to exert their agency and showcase the potential for transgression, interrogating the conceptualization of gender, race, and class in the south while displaying an affective potency that evokes McCullers's ambivalence towards her southern hometown.