The Member of the Wedding
Carson McCullers Meditation on Belonging
In The Member of the Wedding, 1946, Penguin Books, IBSN 0-14-118282-2, Carson McCullers employs a poetic narrative in her story telling, a narrative driven by mood rather than message. As such, the reader is driven deep into the experience, not as an onlooker but as a participant.
Plot and Vision
The Member of the Wedding concerns Frankie, a twelve year old girl in an out-of-the-way American township. The novel focuses around the build up to her elder brothers wedding to a woman from ‘Winter Hill’. Frankie, perhaps out of boredom, but more likely out of desperation, fantasizes about a future with her brother and his new wife. She desires to live with them in Winter Hill, a place, she assumes, is far removed from that which she is familiar with, if only in climate.
Frankie is led through life on the coattails of her emotions, envisioning how she will feel if things were this way and not that, always chasing after something; sentiment, suggestion or temperament. Frankie’s vision clouds the everyday existence she subsists on with her widowed father, hired cook and ever-present young cousin.
The Poetry of Empathy, The Empathy of Poetry
To really arrive at the heart of the child, McCullers has done away with any kind of didactics. The audience is not led to ask whether or not what Frankie is doing is right, whether it is wise, whether they should sympathize or discard. The reader must simply watch Frankie’s heart palpitate, engorge and deflate, while feeling their own do the same.
McCullers achieves such close proximity through a richly poetic language that is more sublime than traditionally beautiful:
‘the three of them sat at the kitchen table, saying the same things over and over so that by August the words began to rhyme with each other and sound strange. The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any monger. At last the summer was like a green sick dream, or like a crazy jungle under glass’
The sense of contained and bordered fecundity communicates the mood of that particular summer in a manner difficult to replicate in any other linguistic mode.
McCullers opens the door and allows the reader to walk inside the dark, entangled space Frankie inhabits. As in the best narratives, the reader is not on the other side of the telescope looking in, but among those being watched. When Frankie’s world cracks, the reader's world cracks; if they learn anything, it is not directly prescribed by the text, but – like a tattoo that can only be read in the mirror – is only evident through ricochet.
Mood and Belonging
The dominant mood of The Member of the Wedding is oppressive. However, it is this oppression that sets off sparks in Frankie’s imagination as she fantasizes for a better space to occupy, one which will foster in her a sense of belonging, of being a ‘member’, of dispelling the sense that she has been so far unanswered for in this world.
Frankie is plagued by the ‘old question’, the question of ‘who she was and what she would be in the world, and why she was standing there that minute’. It is this question which propels the narrative towards its end point, which, all things considered, is no more an end point than is the crash of a wave upon shore. McCullers deceptively prosaic final chapter seems to suggest that, for Frankie, the wave will roll back only to crash again, and again.
Carson McCullers published six other novels, including The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and one play. The Member of the Wedding won the New York Critics Award in 1950.
The Member of the Wedding
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