《伤心咖啡馆之歌》是美国小说家卡森·麦卡勒斯创作的中篇小说，是作者创作生涯中最富创造力的代表作品之一。这一故事之所以令人印象深刻是因为它独特的情景设置、语言、主题和人物。它讲述了一个包含了咖啡馆主任艾米莉亚小姐、畸形罗锅李蒙表哥和艾米利亚小姐英俊的恶棍前夫马文·马西的三角恋故事。而在这三个主要人物之中，艾米利亚小姐和李蒙表哥是两个在麦卡勒斯的作品中极具代表性的雌雄同体角色。

    本文将从人物的角度入手，深入剖析这一光怪陆离的爱情故事中的两个雌雄同体角色、他们对传统性别观念的冲击，以及这场挑战的失败结局。文章将包含以下五个章节：第一章是对于卡森·麦卡勒斯及《伤心咖啡馆之歌》的简介与现有的文献综述；第二章将着重研究《伤心咖啡馆之歌》一文的背景设置与中心思想，包括它们对人物及故事结局的深刻影响；第三章是对两个雌雄同体人物的分析，包括他们的性格特征及他们之所以被称为雌雄同体的原因；第四章上接前文，解释了角色对传统性别观念的挑战及这场挑战的必然失败结局，包含富有独创性的文本解释。第五章为总结。

    本文主要使用的研究方法有：文献研究法、文本分析法及思维方法等。

The Ballad of the Sad Café is a novelette written by American female novelist Carson McCullers, and it has been considered as one of the most creative stories of McCullers. The lyrical story is so impressive because of its settings, languages, and themes, but most importantly, the characters that McCullers created. It portrays a story of a triangular love relationship which involves the café owner Miss Amelia, the hunchback Cousin Lymon, and a good-looking ruffian Marvin Macy. Among the three main characters, Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon are two of the most representative characters of all McCullers’s works for their androgynous characteristics. Miss Amelia, though physically set as a woman, has been masculinized by the author, while Cousin Lymon is in a completely opposite situation. Behind of the peculiar reverse always hides the certain aims of the author; and in this particular story, the theme of loneliness and love, the queer tradition in McCullers’s works, and a challenge to the traditional gender stereotypes in the United States of America in between 1920s to 1940s, though eventually a desperate failure.

       From the perspective of characters, this essay will deeply analyze the two androgynous characters in this bizarre love story, their impact on traditional notions of gender, and the failed outcome of the challenge. The essay will involve the following five chapters: Chapter One is a brief introduction to Carson McCullers and The Ballad of the Sad Café, consisting of a retrospect of Carson McCullers’s life, some of her famous work, and the main plot of the novelette. A literature review by chronological order based on the current studies of McCullers is also expected to be learnt in this chapter. The second chapter will focus on the settings and the main themes of The Ballad of the Sad Café. The reason why McCullers chose the particular settings of the enclosed southern town and her consistent themes of loneliness, love and grotesquery, as well as their profound influence on the androgynous characters and the end of the story will be analyzed in this part. The third chapter is an analysis of the two main characters, Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon, including the expatiation of their characteristics and the reason why they can be considered as androgynous characters. Chapter four follows up with an original textual explanation of the characters' challenge to the traditional gender stereotypes and the inevitable failure it. The main causes of the failure will be listed and discussed in this chapter. The fifth chapter is the conclusion.

       The main research methods of this paper are literature research, textual analysis, and logical reasoning.

Broughton, Panthea Reid. Rejection of the Feminine in Carson McCullers’The Ballad of the Sad Café. Twentieth Century Literature. Jan., 1974, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 34-43

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McCullers, Carson. “A Personal Preface”, in The Square Root of Wonderful. Boston: Honghton Mifflin Company. 1958.

Richards, Gary. Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction: 1936-1961. Baton Rouge: Louisianan State University Press, 2005.

Singer, June. Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality, New York: Anchor Press, 1976.

Westling, Louise. Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. Athens: the University of Georgia Press, 1985.