The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (1946)

A twelve-year-old girl comes of age and takes a step toward becoming aware in the American South during the Second World War.

Book Review: The Member of the Wedding is a story about seeking connection, of the desire for belonging and fulfillment, of breaking with childhood and searching for the next step. "She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world ... an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid." Usually I don't like books for adults about children. Often the child is unrealistically precocious and exists in the novel as a diminutive adult, or the child is realistic and so simple as to be uninteresting. Although this short novel may suffer these pitfalls, it works and succeeds nonetheless. We see Frankie Addams (tall for her age) as she grows up amidst the racial issues of the South (read America as a whole), questions of gender identity (that must've been radical in 1946), the dangers of sexuality, and the necessity of hopes and pipe dreams. Carson McCullers brings all of that into the story. The Member of the Wedding addresses issues we're still trying to cope with today. Frankie is isolated, without connections or attachments, without teachers. Her mother is dead and her father is kindly but distant and oblivious. Her small, mismatched family consists of Berenice, the black maid, and John Henry her six-year-old cousin, who spend the long summer days together. Blame her youth but she can be coldly cruel to Berenice and John Henry, yet she also desperately relies on them for support. "She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world." This is the summer her brother, who's been off at war, is getting married. Frankie falls in love, and wants to run away, with both her brother and his bride, finally achieving the connection she doesn't have. She's looking for the "we of me," no longer an "I" all alone, a time when "the world seemed no longer separate from herself." An ill-fated hope. But Frankie's love is innocent and sweet, unaware of the implications of her hopes and needs, just as she is (at least superficially) naively unaware of the consequences of meeting a clumsily flirtatious soldier in his hotel room. In his awkwardness, the too-young Frankie must have seemed somehow approachable to the soldier, hapless as he is. In a way this is just a small poem of a story, about a girl growing up. But Frankie's tale is balanced by her small cohort, who each have their own tragic hopes and dreams. Berenice sees a world where "there would be no separate colored people ... all human beings would be light brown color with blue eyes and black hair ... no white people to make the colored people feel cheap and sorry all through their lives." John Henry has his own vision "that people ought to be half boy and half girl," though Frankie prefers "that people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls, whichever way they felt like." The ending of The Member of the Wedding (although Frankie has learned something), combines both the hope that she has found a friend, but still contains her Achilles heel as she imbues her new friend with the romantic fantasies she's always had, the hopeless hopes she's had before.  [4★]