The Member of the Wedding
Carson McCullers
It’s an innocent, twinkling kind of backstory to accompany what could, from a distance, seem like an innocent, twinkling kind of book. Close inspection reveals it most definitely isn’t. With its portrait of pre-teen awkwardness and self-delusion, The Member Of The Wedding has attracted youthful fans. But if the book is a female Catcher in the Rye for the American south, it’s a very downtempo, febrile one. Much of the activity is interior either inside Frankie’s head, or in the kitchen, where she tells her family’s black cook, Berenice, of her plans to leave town with Janice and Jarvis. When something that might be construed as ‘action’ does finally occur, it’s shockingly dark: an incident involving a soldier who mistakenly believes Frankie to be much older than she is. This is a book perfectly suited to readers who wrote off The Bell Jar as lightweight, plot-driven entertainment
Ali Smith has called the atmosphere the book conjures ‘numb and fevered’. McCullers’ evocative descriptions of place contribute in no small part to this. There’s a feeling that, in the unnamed town where Frankie and Berenice live, it’s always one long, lazy, unhappily hot evening. Here, at twilight, the sky becomes a ‘curious blue-green that soon faded to white’ and ‘noises have a blurred sound the slam of a screen door down the street, the voices of children, the whir of a lawn mower’. There are smells of ‘crushed scuppernongs and dust’ and, in the afternoon, ‘bars of sunlight crossed the back yard like the bars of a bright strange jail’. You know you’re not dealing with a standard coming-of-age tale when there’s time for crushed scuppernongs Much in the novel is only hinted at, as if McCullers were actively anticipating future readers who would pick it apart for meaning…’~ The Guardian
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Details
| Genre | Pulp |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Publication Date | 1950 |
| Publisher | Bantam |
| Format | Mass Market Paperback |
| No. of Pages | 184 |
| Notes | Bantam Book 822 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | NotRated |
| Subject | Lesbians – Fiction |
| BookID | 8214 |
