748 McCullers, Carson
will carry them to their honeymoon, and away from
her forever, the child Frankie throws herself to the
dusty ground begging them to “Take me, Take
me.” Once back home, the grief-stricken Frankie
steals her father’s pistol and wallet and runs away
from home only to discover that she knows not
where to go or how to get there. She is found by
the Law at the Blue Moon where, by chance, she
learns that the red-headed soldier is alive and well.
As the novel closes, Berenice is moving on, John
Henry is dead from meningitis, the Addamses are
moving to the suburbs, and Frances emerges—“a
child no longer,” mad about Michelangelo, her
newest friend Mary Littlejohn, and perhaps her
own unknown future.
Connor Trebra
community in The Member of the Wedding
Although the community in which Frances Addams
lives remains unnamed, Carson McCullers’s novel
teems with the names of places both near and
distant. Frankie’s immediate world remains small,
inhabited by the family’s cook and children’s com-
panion Berenice Sadie Brown, her young cousin
John Henry West, her father Royal, and a handful
of Berenice’s friends and family. However, time and
place foster a growing awareness of the world outside
Frankie’s hometown. The omnipresent radio broad-
casts heard in the Addams kitchen detailing the
events of World War II thrust exotic places into the
forefront of Frankie’s mind: “China, Peachville, New
Zealand, Paris, Cincinnati, [and] Rome.” In addition,
the impending marriage of brother Jarvis, previously
stationed with the army in Alaska, to Janice Evans
contributes to Frankie’s growing restlessness. The
desire “to leave the town and go to some place far
away” from the smells, sounds, places, and people
Frankie knows so very well becomes irresistible. In
The Member of the Wedding, Frankie Addams is at war
with her feelings about the primacy of the familiar
and the promise of the unknown. She feels both
apart and separate from all around her: Yet, it is this
small community and the people in it who support
her in her greatest moment of crisis as she crosses the
threshold between innocence and experience.
To escape, Frankie constructs a fantasy: She will
join her brother Jarvis and his bride Janice; the three
will “go into the world and . . . always be together”
where she will be freed from familiar bonds and
free to forge new ones. On the morning before the
wedding, as the new F. Jasmine takes a final stroll
through the familiar streets, we witness the bit-
tersweet and complex relationship she has with her
community. Yet, despite Berenice’s admonitions to
the contrary, Frankie feels safe enough to walk these
streets alone. Perhaps it is the influx of soldiers from
the nearby army base, who fill the sidewalks with
“glad, loud gangs” as they walk hand in hand with
“grown girls,” which adds a flavor of adventure and
danger. F. Jasmine knows the town intimately, from
the glittering sidewalks and neatly striped awnings
of the main street, to Front Street with its glaring
cobbled brick surface, its pawnshop and “second-
hand clothing store,” and warehouses, to the “grass-
lawned houses and the sad mill sections and colored
Sugarville.” These landmarks are crushingly familiar
with “the same brick stores, about four blocks of
them, the big white bank, and in the distance the
many-windowed cotton mill,” and Frankie feels
as “free as a traveler who had never seen the town
before.”
Although the people Frankie meets are “mostly
strangers to her,” they are also recognizable. With
each passer-by, “[a]n old colored man, stiff and
proud on his rattling wagon seat, . . . a lady going
into MacDougal’s store, . . . a small man waiting
for the bus . . . a friend of her father’s called Tut
Ryan,” Frankie feels “a new unnamable connection,
as though they were known to each other.” She real-
izes that she wants these familiar faces “to know
her,” and because it is easier to “convince strangers
of the coming to pass of dearest wants,” she begins
to compulsively reveal her plans to escape. It is this
“thrill of speaking certain words—Jarvis and Jan-
ice, wedding and Winter Hill”—that compels her
to enter the “neon glow” and darkness of the Blue
Moon tavern and hotel catering to the soldiers from
the nearby base.
Although the people and sights Frankie encoun-
ters throughout the novel introduce an element of
familiarity, it is not an entirely comfortable familiar-
ity; there is always an element of distance in McCull-
ers’s writing. Frankie recognizes houses, streets,
shops, and individuals, nearly all of which afford