746 McCullers, Carson
Frances Addams, a gangly, androgynous, and moth-
erless 12-year-old tomboy; her bespectacled and
ethereal six-year-old cousin, John Henry West; and
Berenice Sadie Brown, the Addams’s black cook,
housekeeper, and caretaker. The novel is divided
into three parts, each depicting a different day and
a different leg in Frankie’s journey. Frankie’s father,
a widower whose wife died giving birth to Frankie,
appears only briefly. He is a jeweler, a shadow father
preoccupied with his business and his own gray
thoughts, who only absentmindedly engages with
his child. This coming-of-age novel weaves itself
around the wedding of Frankie’s older brother,
Jarvis, a soldier who returns from duty in Alaska
to marry Janice Evans from nearby Winter Hill.
During the three days encompassed by the novel,
McCullers presents us with the grander themes of
abandonment, love, death, identity, sexuality,
and innocence as seen, experienced, and interpreted
through the eyes of Frankie Addams. While the
effects of war and racial bigotry are never far from
the surface of this novel, what concerns McCullers
most is Frankie’s internal emotional struggle as she
wrestles with her fantasies and fears, and grapples
with who she is and what place she holds in the
world.
Connor Trebra
abandonment in The Member of the Wedding
“It looks to me like everything has just walked
off and left me.” These words, spoken by Frankie
Addams, punctuate the repetitive conversations she
has each evening with Berenice Sadie Brown, the
Addams’s cook and caretaker, as they discuss the dis-
appearance of Frankie’s tomcat Charles. Of all the
complex themes found in McCullers’s novel, that of
abandonment permeates the work, even to its end-
ing. Frankie, her father, Berenice, and John Henry
each undergo profound levels of loss that deeply
affect their lives and drive their actions.
Berenice Sadie Smith has lost four husbands.
The first, Ludie Smith, whom she loved the deep-
est, died early in their marriage, and since that time
she has searched for him in men who appear in her
life trailing physical reminders of him—his coat,
his hands. These subsequent marriages have ended
badly, with men who break their vows, commit vio-
lence, and lose themselves to alcohol. In addition,
as a black woman, she has been abandoned by the
dominant white society within which she lives. And
she will leave the Addams family to marry yet again.
However, when she does, the Addams family will
themselves have left their home, and John Henry,
too, will be gone.
Royal Quincy Addams, Frankie’s father, is a
widower who lost his wife during the birth of his
daughter. As she watches him in the morning,
Frankie notes that he appears as one who “has lost
something, but forgotten what it is that he has lost.”
He is a man who “deserved a little peace and quiet
before he put his nose down to the grindstone.” A
man who has “ears to hear with” but “[does] not lis-
ten.” Late in the evenings, Frankie hears him as he
stumbles about his room, appearing the next morn-
ing with a face “pale as cheese” and eyes “pink and
ragged,” who hates the sound of his own cup rattling
against its saucer. This physical description suggests
a man whose sleep is often disturbed and who may
drink in order to medicate his feelings. He is a man
whose “saggy-kneed grey trousers” and distracted
air reflect an inner sadness and numbing confusion.
In his struggle to dampen his own emotional pain
by focusing intently on his work as a watchmaker,
he has closed the door to the deeper needs of his
daughter, and leaves her alone to struggle with her
emotional challenges.
John Henry is only six, yet there is something
that suggests a lonely maturity, and there is a strange
pensiveness, even aloofness, that hints at a sense of
sorrow beyond his six years. His mother and father
are never mentioned, and there is a sense that he
has been forsaken. He depends on the love found in
the Addams’s hot summer kitchen, in the caring of
Berenice, and in the sometimes begrudging affection
shown by his cousin Frankie. Frankie often com-
ments on a sense of loneliness and fear that emanate
from John Henry, and it is this perhaps more than
blood relations that connects the cousins. Both are
children whose place in the world seems tenuous;
despite their age difference, they are drawn together
in mutual support and commiseration.
Frankie has been unintentionally abandoned,
first by her mother and then by her father, who,
while continuing to provide for her, seems to have