The Member of the Wedding

The Member of the Wedding
First edition cover
Author(s)	Carson McCullers
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Houghton Mifflin Company
Publication date	1946
Media type	Print
Pages	176 pp (paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 9780618492398 ISBN 0618492399
OCLC Number	57134632

The Member of the Wedding is a 1946 novel by Southern writer Carson McCullers. It took McCullers five years to complete—though she interrupted the work for a few months to write the short novel The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.^[1]

She explained in a letter to her husband Reeves that it was "one of those works that the least slip can ruin. It must be beautifully done. For like a poem there is not much excuse for it otherwise."^[2]

She had originally planned to write a story about a girl who was in love with her piano teacher. Then she had what she called "a divine spark". "Suddenly I said: Frankie is in love with her brother and the bride...The illumination focused the whole book."^[3]

Plot

The main action of the novel takes place over a few days in late August. It tells the story of 12-year-old tomboy Frankie Addams, who feels disconnected from the world—an "unjoined person". She dreams of going away with her brother and his bride-to-be on their honeymoon, following them to the Alaskan wilderness. She has no friends in the small Southern town in which she lives. Her mother died giving birth to Frankie and her father is a distant, uncomprehending figure. Her closest companions are the family's African American maid, Berenice Sadie Brown, and her six-year-old cousin, John Henry West.

The novel is more concerned with the psychology of the three main characters and an evocation of the setting than with incident. Frankie does, however, have a brief and troubling encounter with a soldier. Her hopes of going away having been disappointed — her fantasy destroyed — a short coda reveals how her personality has changed. It also recounts the fate of John Henry West, and Berenice Sadie Brown's future plans.

Critical interpretations

The Member of the Wedding is told from the point of view of Frankie, who is a troubled adolescent. But for some critics it is a mistake to view The Member of the Wedding as simply a coming of age novel—a "sweet momentary illumination of adolescence before the disillusion of adulthood,"^[4] as it is sometimes regarded, or as Patricia Yaeger puts it, "an economical way of learning about the pangs of growing up."^[5]

For Yaeger and the British novelist and critic Ali Smith, this is to sentimentalize the work. They suggest that such a reading misses much of its profundity, darkness, and what Smith calls its "political heft".^[6] It should be seen, according to Smith, as a "very funny, very dark novel" and a "combination of hope, hopelessness and callousness." Its theme, says Smith, is "why people exclude others and what happens when they do."

Other critics, including McKay Jenkins,^[7] have highlighted the importance of themes of racial and sexual identity. Frankie wishes people could "change back and forth from boys to girls". John Henry wants them to be "half boy and half girl". Berenice would like there to be "no separate colored people in the world, but all human beings would be light brown color with blue eyes and black hair." For them, Jenkins suggests, the ideal world would be "a place where identity…is fluid, changeable, amorphous."

Another critic, Margaret B McDowell, has also stressed the role of Berenice Sadie Brown (and to a lesser extent John Henry West) in counter-pointing Frankie’s story.^[1]

Judith Halberstam, in her book Female Masculinity, uses the character of Frankie to illustrate the pressures on girls to "outgrow" their tomboyishness, arguing that masculinity is tolerated in girls only as long as they ultimately conform to gender expectations in adulthood. In the example of Frankie, she argues, we can see that "the image of the tomboy can be tolerated only within a narrative of blossoming womanhood; within such a narrative, tomboyism represents a resistance to adulthood itself rather than to adult femininity."^[8]

Critics such as Elizabeth Freeman^[9] and Nicole Seymour view the novel as "queer" -- as challenging gender and sexual norms. In her article on the novel, Seymour argues that McCullers queers the human developmental schema (childhood-adolescence-adulthood) through various narrative methods. These methods include the novel's strange tripartite structure; its depiction of personal difficulties with narrativizing, "the refusal of dynamism, and the use of the literary devices of repetition and analepsis." Seymour concludes that "the novel allows us to imagine an adolescent body in synchronic rather than diachronic terms - thereby challenging the ideals of sexuality, gender, and race that normally accrue to such bodies."^[10]

Adaptations

The book has been adapted for the stage, motion pictures, and television.

McCullers herself adapted the novel for a Broadway production directed by Harold Clurman. It opened on January 5, 1950 at the Empire Theatre, where it ran for 501 performances. The cast included Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, and Brandon De Wilde.

Waters, Harris, and De Wilde reprised their stage roles, with Arthur Franz, Nancy Gates, and Dickie Moore joining the cast, for the 1952 film version. The screenplay was adapted by Edna and Edward Anhalt and directed by Fred Zinnemann. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Julie Harris, in her debut screen appearance.

A 1982 television adaptation, directed by Delbert Mann, starred Pearl Bailey, Dana Hill, and Howard E. Rollins, Jr..

The 1997 film version, adapted by David W. Rintels and directed by Fielder Cook, starred Anna Paquin, Alfre Woodard, Corey Dunn, and Enrico Colantoni. Rintels used the original novel rather than the play as his source material.

The Young Vic theatre in London produced the stage version of The Member of the Wedding in 2007, directed by Matthew Dunster. Frankie Adams was played by Flora Spencer-Longhurst and Berenice Sadie Brown by Portia, a member of Philip Seymour Hoffman's LAByrinth Theater Company.

References in popular culture

Text from The Member of the Wedding was used by Jarvis Cocker on his debut album, Jarvis. It forms the introduction to the 11th song on the album, "Big Julie", and consists of his re-writing of the opening lines of the book. In the original these are: "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."

The poet Sylvia Plath was known to admire McCullers' work, and the unusual phrase "silver and exact", used by McCullers to describe a set of train tracks in the novel, is the first line of Plath's poem "Mirror".

References

1. ^ ^{a b} McDowell, Margaret B. Carson McCullers, Boston, 1980
2. ^ quoted in Carson McCullers:A Life, Josyane Savigneau, London, 2001
3. ^ Letter to Tennessee Williams, quoted by Josyane Savigneau,Carson McCullers: A Life
4. ^ Ali Smith, Introduction to The Member of the Wedding , London, 2004
5. ^ Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, Chicago, 2000
6. ^ Ali Smith, Introduction to The Member of the Wedding
7. ^ McKay Jenkins The South in Black and White, Chapel Hill, 1999
8. ^ Halberstam, Judith, Female Masculinity, Durham: Duke University Press, 1998, p. 6. ISBN 0822322269 & 0822322439
9. ^ Freeman, Elizabeth. The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture. Duke UP, 2002
10. ^ Seymour, Nicole, "Somatic Syntax: Replotting the Developmental Narrative in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding." Studies in the Novel 41.3 (Fall 2009): 293-313.

External links

• The Member of the Wedding at the Internet Movie Database
• The Member of the Wedding at AllRovi
• The Member of the Wedding at the TCM Movie Database