Full of excuses

The Member of the Wedding
by Carson McCullers

Like a poem, wrote McCullers, this novel had to be beautiful otherwise there would be no excuse for it.

A startling – but honestly correct – admission; McCullers was not wrong. Indeed, if it were not for the beauty in her fourth novel’s language this mere coming-of-age story would fall flat. For it is via precise prose that we are led into the world of Frankie, a twelve-year-old tomboy who is wasting away a long, steamy southern summer with her housekeeper and much younger male cousin. Instead of enjoying what she has in front of her – a sassy surrogate mother in Berenice and a loyal, adorable friend in John Henry – Frankie superimposes herself onto dreamed-up scenarios. Her most real and apparently believable dream is to be part of her brother’s wedding. Not content with having a part to play on the day, Frankie is convinced that she can join the marriage, that she can live a wonderful, classy life with her brother and sister-in-law. It is this central dream that forms the basis of McCullers’ novel, as Frankie deconstructs her own individuality as a twelve-year-old girl and asks philosophically how she can become part of a ‘we’.

Frankie spends the most vivid scenes of the book plodding around the kitchen, riling Berenice (the best black character written by a white writer from the time) and confusing poor John Henry. It is a book in which nothing much happens. But, on the other hand, everything happens. Epiphanies do not happen atop mountains; they occur at the kitchen sink. And so it is in her father’s sleepy house that Frankie does not quite come of age but merely begins asking the tough questions that will lead her to adulthood.

In the novel’s surprising central sequence, we follow the young girl into town. She wanders about aimlessly and begins somewhat of a relationship with a soldier. It is in this development that McCullers can explore the clash of childhood innocence with the corruption of adulthood. The passage is incredibly brave and could so easily have subsumed the novel’s focus. Instead, it is merely one step in Frankie’s blossoming – as she does with everything in her life, Frankie storms through it. She paves her own path, teaching readers who have forgotten that twelve-year-olds are naturally struck at that age by an extraordinary feeling of opportunity.

In writing a simple coming-of-age tale, McCullers must have felt the weight of opportunity. She chose one absurd but infinitely endearing desire for Frankie and built the story and her protagonist’s development around that. It’s a clever excuse.