C/LI/12. Urban Environment & Dislocation in Modern American Fiction – Gender, Culture and Community in the City versus Small Town America Toni Morrison's Paradise and Carson McCullers The Ballad of the Sad Café:

The urban environment has many different roles in literature, from a place of business and power to a place of poverty and sadness. The one theme that seems to be present in a majority of literature in regards to the urban environment, which is there, is a lack of community and the individual is in a state of dislocation. This paper is going to examine the theme of the lack of community, as a key factor to this sense of dislocation and not belonging. The key factor in the Ballad of the Sad Café are three individuals looking for love, a person to belong with and too, a small community outside the urban disarray and the danger is the convict that invades their town from out there – the Big City. Paradise is similar in that it refers to an African American town that biggest threat is the culture of out there – the cities of mainstream America. In many ways these books see city life a threat to their culture, morals and beliefs. This is an interesting concept, because what the town and the characters are concerned about is the Americanization of their town in small town America. Usually when one considers the resistance to Americanization the resistance is from other nations, but writers such as Toni Morrison and Carson McCullers illustrate that there is an internal conflict as well. This internal conflict raises some interesting cultural and political thoughts in regards to culture and politics within the USA, including the role of women where cities do not bring their liberation, but oppression. It is in the small communities through discourse that women find freedom in both books, not in the soulless dislocated urban environment of the city. In a way there is almost a sense of Diaspora within the country, a sense of separation from culture and belief when a city engulfs the culture and belief of small towns.