Cousin Lymon

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The Ballad of The Sad Café is a gothic novella written by Carson McCuller that depicts the peculiar love triangle between Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon and Marvin Macy. The book takes place in a small mill town in Georgia, where Cousin Lymon comes to find Miss Amelia. Miss Amelia is the richest woman in town and for that reason is a dream woman to many of the men in town. Despite her riches, she herself has a rather odd manish appearance as her “hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead” (pg. 4) to go with her haggard “sunburned face” (pg. 4) that wouldn’t equate to her being in the eyes of so many men. This quirkiness matched her vacuous abilities in a social atmosphere. That didn’t seem to bother Miss Amelia as she lived her life…show more content…
Lymon was a hunchback, odd-looking with “his thin crooked legs” (pg. 7), that “seemed too thin to carry the weight of his great warped chest and hump that sat on his shoulders” (pg.7). He comes to town in search of Miss Amelia who he later persuades that he is her cousin with a fake photograph to convince her. We know that Lymon is not rich and perhaps plotted this scheme to take advantage of her wealth. Miss Amelia gives him clean clothes, and her father’s room to live in. Lymon takes advantage of Miss Amelia’s love for him that she gives him her café in which is the main source of her successes so that he could transform it to a gathering spot for the townspeople. As described by McCullers's theory of love that “one person is the lover and the other the beloved” (pg. 25), it is clear that Lymon is the beloved in this relationship as Miss Amelia showers him in gifts and pleasures, and Lymon shows no sign of gratitude for her actions. The townsfolk are baffled by the love display that Miss Amelia has put on for Lymon, she has done things that would have been thought to be unthinkable such as let him call her Amelia which she never allowed anyone to do previously. It is apparent that Lymon is using Amelia for her resources and not with Miss Amelia because of a joint love…show more content…
Cousin Lymon was the first to witness his arrival and immediately “he and the man stared at each other, and it was not it was not the look of two strangers meeting for the first time (pg. 46). Marvin, described as a rather good looking “tall man, with brown curly hair and slow-moving deep-blue eyes”, an unexpected description with the odd illustrations of Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon. To the regular townspeople, Marvin is known to be Miss Amelia’s ex-husband in a marriage lasting only 10 days, that ended with Macy and Amelia in a fight that led to Macy being charged with trespassing after he attempted to “climb in the window of her store one night to sit there in the dark” (pg.32). It was at this point when a love triangle was beginning to be apparent in this story as Lymon tries ingratiating himself with Marvin. To gain Marvin’s approval, Lymon uses a unique “trick” in which he “stands very still, and with just a little concentration he would wiggle his large pale ears with marvelous quickness and ease” (pg. 48). With Miss Amelia standing right there, Lymon continues desperately to try and pursue Marvin by “[fluttering] his eyelids, [scraping] his feet on the ground, waving his hands about, and finally began doing a little trot like dance” (pg. 49). Marvin Macy, was “unimpressed” by Lymon’s childish behaviour, asking

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