The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

The story portrays the damaging effects of alcoholism in a sympathetic way. Unlike Marvin Macy from “The Ballad of the Sad Café,” whose drinking is shown in a wholly negative and irredeemable light, McCullers explains Emily’s substance use as the understandable result of depression and alienation. Emily begins drinking to cope with being unable to adjust after the family moves to New York for Martin’s job: “accustomed to the idle warmth of a small Southern town, the matrix of the family and cousinship and childhood friends, she had failed to accommodate herself to the stricter, more lenient mores of the North” (133). The culture shock and the sudden lack of a supportive “matrix” of a community makes homemaking and parenting overwhelming. The story doesn’t shrink from showing how Emily’s addiction scares and physically harms her children, but by ending on Martin’s continuing love and desire for her, McCullers suggests that there is hope for recovery and for the family to thrive.

Surprisingly, for a story written and set in the US in the 1950s, Martin’s disappointment in Emily’s neglect of her childcare duties is not described as coming from a patriarchal or gender-essentialist place. While the family does have a traditional arrangement with Martin as the breadwinner who works in the city and Emily as a stay-at-home mother, Martin takes on a greater parenting role without feeling that it somehow diminishes him as a man. This Rejection of Gender Conformity is central to this story: Martin is a warm and connected father who feeds and bathes his children while also experiencing deep concern about their inner lives and the impact that their mother’s behavior will have on their memories of childhood.

In contrast, Emily is cast as an antagonist from whom Martin must protect their children. She has no feminine traits; instead, when she appears for dinner, she is portrayed as frightening: “Martin tensed suddenly. Emily was coming down the stairs. He listened to her fumbling footsteps, his arms embracing the little boy with dread” (135). In this tense moment, Martin perceives Emily as a threat: Her “fumbling” movements are lumbering and unpredictable, he feels “dread” about her arrival, and he shields his son with his body as her inebriation becomes apparent. The atmosphere relies on Southern Gothic tropes of anxiety and foreboding; rather than a traditionally nurturing mother, Emily here is monstrous. Martin’s embrace of his son positions them as opponents of his wife; the need to protect the children from her complicates his desire to support his wife and fractures his duties to his loved ones. By “embracing the little boy,” he commits to his children over Emily.

The story also explores the whimsy and ignorance of childhood. Martin wonders how the children’s youth influences their perception of events around them. While facing a drunken and yelling Emily terrifies Andy, the boy is also up for jokey banter with his father, haggling about how much money the tooth fairy should leave for his tooth. As Martin bathes and feeds his children, he hopes that his children remember these physical manifestations of love and that these memories can protect them. McCullers portrays Martin’s thoughts via a simile comparing the heavy weight of a beached whale to the light flow of leaves in a stream: “Absorbed in the instant—the tooth, the bath, the quarter—the fluid passage of child-time had borne these weightless episodes like leaves in the swift current of a shallow stream while the adult enigma was beached and forgotten on the shore” (139). Martin conceives of the children’s minds as a “shallow stream”: The “swift current” is strong enough to carry along lighthearted events like the fun bath, the pulled tooth, and the tooth fairy’s quarter, but it cannot also propel along the “adult enigma” of their mother’s substance use. This image is a hopeful consolation for Martin.