Unrequited Love

“Through the open door the crowd could see her sitting at her desk, her head in the crook of her arm, and she was sobbing with the last of her grating, winded breath.  Once she gathered her right fist together and knocked it three times on the top of her office desk, then her hand opened feebly and lay palm upward and still.”

One of McCuller’s running themes throughout the story is unrequited and isolated love.  McCuller depicts the less relished side of love by subjecting her characters Amelia, Cousin Lymon and Marvin Macy to a doomed love that is unreciprocated by their beloved.  While unrequited love leads Cousin Lymon and Marvin Macy to a life of lawless action, it leads Amelia to an even more isolated life forever haunted by heartbreak.  This section in the novel is especially important because it marks the moment in which Amelia relinquishes her strength and pride which made her both feared and revered by the townspeople.  Before, her pain could only be seen by a flicker in her eyes but now her indifference to the open door shows she is broken to the point where she can no longer hide her anguish.  Her last hand gesture conveys to the reader that her fight and vigor has fled and in its place has settled the perpetual aches of an unrequited love.          

Why did Amelia, whose strength and independence was at one point notable, allow herself to make such an emotional investment into Cousin Lymon giving him the power to bring her to ruins?