The Member of the Wedding 745The regularity of work shapes several characters’
lives for good and ill. Perhaps the most obvious
example of lives dominated by work are those of Biff
and Alice Brannon, who run the New York Café.
Since their business stays open 24 hours a day, seven
days a week, the Brannons never see each other
except for a few minutes each day when one goes to
bed and the other awakens to start a 12-hour shift.
Although the two share a life of constant work, the
actual organization of that work keeps them apart.
Ironically, their permanent state of living close but
separate lives gives the rest of the town a place to go
at any hour and not be alone. The Brannons’ shared
work ethic to keep their business open all hours
defines their married life as one of separation, in
which only a few passing moments are not governed
by the demands of work.
Difference in work ethics can also demonstrate
a distance between characters who might otherwise
seem close. John Singer and his friend Antonapou-
los demonstrate a profound difference in work eth-
ics. Singer’s job as a silver-engraver requires delicacy
and concentration, while Antonapoulos, who helps
at his brother’s grocery, is an unreliable worker
who is known to steal from the store more often
than doing any real work. Antonapoulos shows a
similar laziness in his friendship with Singer, barely
paying attention to his friends’ stories, but Singer
still derives great satisfaction from the friendship.
The friends’ behaviors on and off work are thus
consistent in themselves, but unequal to each other.
Nevertheless, this pair of workers makes a working,
if not healthy, friendship for a time.
Dr. Copeland is extremely self-conscious about
his work, including his position as a doctor in
the black community and, what he considers his
true work, leading his people to greater freedom
through political self-awareness. However, Cope-
land’s self-appointed mission to preach Marxist
revolution, and so expand his work to include curing
social and economic ills, is unsuccessful because his
beliefs distance him from his community, even his
own family. His grown children spend their money,
earned at work, on commercial products and dances,
which Copeland considers wasteful and detrimental
to true freedom of the mind. The doctor’s own defi-
nition of meaningful work as political and serious
thus conflicts with the ideas of the community he
wishes to lead. Because Copeland’s definition of
meaningful work goes beyond what his community
will accept from him as a doctor, he considers him-
self a failure in his true life’s work.
More than any other character, Roy Blount
desires to change society’s definition of meaning-
ful work and reorganize the relationship of work in
the lives of the people. As an itinerant worker and
socialist, Blount travels from town to town, working
odd jobs, as he attempts to organize workers into
labor unions. However, Blount’s altruistic goal to
improve the lives of his fellow workers fails because
his political views, like Copeland’s, differ greatly
from the community of workers, who grow hostile
to him and his ideas. Blount loses both his ability
to work, when he is fired for being a trouble-maker,
and his ability to help workers because their ideas
about work are too different from his own. His
drunken talk about workers’ rights is an attempt
to work out his vision of just working conditions,
which never come to fruition.
Mick Kelly’s father represents a more modest
worker who holds few hopes of changing the cir-
cumstances of, or future prospects for, better work.
As the head of a poor family that survives more from
rent paid by boarders than from wages, the figure of
Mr. Kelly is a small but effective reminder that work
was and is, for many Americans, more often about
economic survival than self-expression. The fact
that Mick eventually goes to work to support the
family, trading her dreams of a musical education
for a meager paycheck, shows the less fulfilling real-
ity of working life, which places individuals’ deepest
desires against social and economic realities beyond
their control.
Tim BryantMcCULLERS, CARSON The Member
of the Wedding (1946)
Carson McCullers’s third novel, a small book with
an unimposing title, mixes a commonplace event, a
brother’s wedding, with a young girl’s journey into
adolescence. It is the summer of 1944, the middle
of World War II, in a small southern town, and the
novel introduces and develops only three characters: