Tall, awkward, and lonely, Frankie Addams has a vivid imagination but no friends. Even her father calls her a great big long-legged 12-year-old blunderbuss, and the friendless girl spends most of her time in the kitchen, pouring out her heart to Berenice, the gentle and wise family cook and housekeeper.Frankie's jealousy of her brother's impending marriage, and her curious belief that she must accompany him and his bride on their honeymoon in order to belong, drives her to strange measures. She devises a desperate plan, ...
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Tall, awkward, and lonely, Frankie Addams has a vivid imagination but no friends. Even her father calls her a great big long-legged 12-year-old blunderbuss, and the friendless girl spends most of her time in the kitchen, pouring out her heart to Berenice, the gentle and wise family cook and housekeeper.Frankie's jealousy of her brother's impending marriage, and her curious belief that she must accompany him and his bride on their honeymoon in order to belong, drives her to strange measures. She devises a desperate plan, reinventing herself as the seemingly sophisticated F. Jasmine, a gawky beauty in a pink dress who looks closer to 16 than 12. But she's ill prepared for what follows from this troubling game of make-believe. Carson McCullers captures the universal in the particular in this sensitive, nuanced portrayal of one girl's struggle into adulthood.
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Has there ever been another coming-of-age novel as lovely as Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding published in 1946? Her portrait of the tall, gawkish, motherless girl Frankie Addams is a true, indelible portrait of adolescent angst: "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. Franklie had become an unjoined person. . .and she was afraid."
During the dog days of summer in a small Southern town, Frankie's only companions at home are Berenice Sadie Brown, a regal African American domestic, and John Henry West, a small, big-kneed boy. Their kitchen conversations are marked by repetition and sameness, an "ugly little tune they sung by heart." Her father, a pale, uncommunicative jeweler, is largely absent, and critical of his daughter when present.
To Frankie, the world feels utterly lifeless, static, and imprisoning, "a green sick dream," and she feels separate from it. The protagonist expresses her feelings in melodramatic terms; she is "sick unto death." Everything she does is wrong and unintended. Like Frankie's summer, McCullers' narrative circles, reiterating motifs, composing a fugue of voices.
Everything changes when Frankie's brother Jarvis announces his plan to marry Janice Evans in Winter Hill. At the sight of the couple, Frankie longs for an impossible union, belongingness, and love: "They are the we of me." The story of the wedding has a "shape like song," that is, order, coherence. Even Winter Hill becomes a romantic image of Northern snow, coolness, otherness.
The novel traces Frankie's initiation into the sordid, unromantic nature of adult reality, but also her mature sense of having "things done. . .by a stranger a long time ago," evolving beyond her former child-self. In the process, she learns about mortality, friendship, "the shock of happiness," and the expectation of love. In the drama of her fear, desire, sadness, apartness, self-invention, and intuition of love as a "thing known and not spoken," Frankie Addams stumbles waywardly off the page, falling directly into the reader's heart.
