The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (1946)
By Nava Atlas | On April 14, 2019 | Updated July 9, 2023 | Comments (0)
The Member of the Wedding (1946), Carson McCullers’ third novel (more accurately, it is a novella), followed the incredibly successful The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and the far less successful Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941). The Member of the Wedding re-established McCullers, still in her twenties, as a literary force.
The story centers on a lonely twelve-year-old girl, Frankie Addams, who prefers to be known as F. Jasmine. Her mother has died, and her father, a jeweler, treats her with benign neglect.
The story takes place during a hot summer in a small Georgia town, finding Frankie consumed with worry that she doesn’t belong anywhere or with anyone.
For company, Frankie has her six-year-old cousin, John Henry West, and Berenice Sadie Brown, the African-American cook employed by her father. Her dull existence is shaken up when her older brother Jarvis, an army veteran, announces that he is to be married to Janice Evans.
Belonging nowhere, to no one
In this in-depth analysis of Frankie Addams, Francis Booth observes:
Frankie doesn’t feel part of any community or family. She has no mother – again, there is an absence of a mother figure – a distant father who is always at work and a much older brother who is away in the army (the highly successful play that McCullers made from the novel specifies the setting as August 1945, at the end of the Second World War).
“It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.”
Frankie is not a member of the club of thirteen and fourteen-year-old girls at school who have “parties with boys on Saturday night. Frankie knew all of the club members, and until this summer she had been like a younger member of the crowd, but now they had this club and she was not a member. They said she was too young and mean.”
An adolescent delusion takes root
Frankie’s daydreams become ever more vivid and emotionally charged as she imagines that she might not only be a member of the wedding, but that she will be invited to go on the honeymoon with her brother and his bride. She now wants to be called “F. Jasmine,” to share the first two letters of the names of Jarvis and Janice.
The slim novel is a portrait of the interior workings of F. Jasmine’s adolescent mind as she fixates on the wedding and contends with the insular small town that she inhabits.
The Detroit Free Press, in its 1946 review concluded, “This is a marvelous study of the agony of adolescence, the fierce desire which breeds fierce denial, the inner loneliness which expresses itself perversely in violence.”
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Learn more about Carson McCullers
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A contemporary perspective
For a more contemporary perspective, in a 2012 installment of The Guardian series, Overlooked American Classics, Tom Cox wrote,
“It’s an innocent, twinkling kind of backstory to accompany what could, from a distance, seem like an innocent, twinkling kind of book. Close inspection reveals it most definitely isn’t.
With its portrait of pre-teen awkwardness and self-delusion, The Member Of The Wedding has attracted youthful fans … Much of the activity is interior – either inside Frankie’s head, or in the kitchen, where she tells her family’s black cook, Berenice, of her plans to leave town with Janice and Jarvis.
When something that might be construed as ‘action’ does finally occur, it’s shockingly dark: an incident involving a soldier who mistakenly believes Frankie to be much older than she is.”
Here are two reviews from the many that this book received upon its publication in the spring of 1946:
A 1946 review of The Member of the Wedding
From the original review of The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers in Council Bluffs Nonpareil, March 1946: Carson McCullers’ third novel, The Member of the Wedding, is the story of Frankie, a girl on the dizzy edges of becoming a young woman.
The scene is a small Georgia town. Besides Frankie, or F. Jasmine as she later becomes, or Frances as she is named grandly a few weeks later when the novel of which she is the heroine closes, there are also young John Henry West; and Berenice Sadie Brown, who speaks out of the wisdom which can only come to a woman who has had four husbands; Frankie’s father; her brother and his bride.
Growing up in a “green and crazy summer”
Frankie is almost five feet and a half tall in the “green and crazy summer” when this story takes place. Shooting up like a beanstalk, adding four inches almost overnight, she is worried.
Being 12 years and 10 months old, she is worried too, about what she has done with Barney; about the way the other girls had suddenly abandoned her to form a club of their own so that practically the only thing left in the whole world for her to be a member of is her brother’s wedding.
A story of adolescence tinged with violence
Though recent writers have devoted more time to the adolescent than the so-called modern parent is ever credited with doing, this is a different kind of story. A knife is thrown, a pistol stolen out of a father’s dresser, a fellow’s head bashed in.
And there’s a macabre touch; it isn’t only what happens that thrills you, but even more, what incessantly threatens to happen. A sword of Damocles, 12-year-old size, hands over this tale from start to finish.
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See also: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
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Another 1946 review of The Member of the Wedding
From the original review in The Palm Beach Post, April 7, 1946: Carson McCullers’ first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter , and her second, Reflections in a Golden Eye ,won great critical acclaim. Their appeal, or lack thereof, was similar to the question of one’s tase for ultra modern trends in art.
For this reader, at least, The Member of the Wedding seems much more readable. There is little action, the characters few and eccentric, but the author definitely evokes a mood and creates an atmosphere.
The awkwardness and emotions of adolescence
Adolescence is a favored subject, and seldom has an author captured more poignancy the emotional ups and downs of a neglected child, standing at the brink of her teens, unsure of herself, fearful of unpopularity, subject to the unhappiness and despair that comes from lack of perspective by which to judge, and common sense by which to be guided.
Twelve-year-old Frankie is the main character. This is the story of one summer in her life. Her father was away all day, she was at outs with the girls her own age, excluded from their secrets and their clubs, thrown back for companionship on her curious little six-year-old cousin, John Henry, and Berenice, her family’s African-American cook.
The approaching marriage of a brother
The high point of excitement the dull, dreary summer offered was the approaching marriage of her brother, who had been with the Army in Alaska, to an unknown girl in a nearby town. Frankie’s father is taking her to the wedding, and with childish intensity she latches on to this one happening as a great climax in her life.
In her imagination she identifies herself has part of the wedding party, determines that she will ask her brother to take her with them on the honeymoon, persuades herself that he will do so.
The great part of the story centers around her preparations for the wedding, her preoccupation with her daydreams, her emergence into the reality of the kitchen with Berenice and John Henry, her despair after the wedding did not turn out as she had made herself believe.
Frankie comes to terms
Throughout it all she passes virtually in a daze with the drama of a small Southern city, its tragedies and its daily life, leaving her virtually untouched. At the end with the formation of one tangible friendship, Frankie gains new interests, and shows some signs of reverting to normalcy.
Though the story could hardly be termed typical, Carson McCullers has managed to convey the sensitivity of an exceptional chid, with all the violence of emotion and awkwardness of this age.
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See also: The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers
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Quotes from The Member of the Wedding
“You have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to have a meaning. Things have accumulated around your name.”
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“She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.”
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“There are all these people here I don’t know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don’t have any connection. And they don’t know me and I don’t know them. And now I’m leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.”
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“The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.”
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“It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.”
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The Member of the Wedding was made into
… a 1950 Broadway play
… a 1952 feature film
… a 1997 made for television film (above)
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More about The Member of the Wedding
- Wikipedia
- Reader discussion on Goodreads
- 1952 film of The Member of the Wedding
- All-American Loneliness and a Universe of Yearning
- 1997 made for television film
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