the member of the wedding by carson mccullers

Before Jarvis and Janice arrive, Frankie is content to play with John Henry. It is through her interactions with these two characters that the reader perceives Frankie’s ascent from childhood.

Frankie is forced to spend the summer with John Henry, her six-year-old cousin, and Berenice Brown, her black cook. Frankie, too, is desperate for Jarvis and Janice’s adult acceptance. In an effort to find this identity teens seek to join a group. The teen years are known as a time of soul-searching for a new and grown-up identity. Typical of many teenagers, she felt that in order to be someone she has to be a part of an intact, existing group, that is, Jarvis and Janice.

There were her brother and the bride, and it was as though when first she saw them something she had known inside of her: Being a member of the wedding will, she feels, connect her irrevocably to her brother and his wife. Now all this was suddenly over with and changed. Her positive thinking induces a euphoria which contributes to a rejection of the old feeling that “the old Frankie had no we to claim…. Jasmine so that she and the wedding couple will all have names beginning with the letters J and a. In her scheme to be part of this new unit, she dubs herself F. The once clumsy Frankie, forlorn and lonely, feeling that she “was a member of nothing in the world” now decides that she is going to be “the member of the wedding.” Frankie truly believes that she is going to be an integral part of her brother’s new family and becomes infatuated with the idea that she will leave Georgia and live with Jarvis and Janice in Winter Hill. The world begins to look new and beautiful to Frankie when her older brother Jarvis returns from Alaska with his bride-to-be, Janice. The novel teaches that one’s destiny is a self-fulfilled prophecy, seeing one’s self in a certain light oftentimes creates an environment where one might become that which one would like to be. The author seems to indicate that one can feel good about oneself through positive thinking regardless of reality. It is with this guise that twelve-year-old Frankie Adams begins to feel confident about herself and life. The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers is the story of an adolescent girl who triumphs over loneliness and gains maturity through an identity that she creates for herself in her mind.

The member of the wedding by carson mccullers