Book Review: The Member of the Wedding, a novel by Carson McCullers (1946)

The Member of the Wedding was Carson McCullers’ third novel. Published in 1946, the slim volume tells the story of Frankie Addams, a precocious 12-year-old who is obsessed with her brother’s upcoming wedding. During the summer, Frankie has become increasingly isolated, and most of her world revolves around having listless, repetitive conversations with Berenice, the Black housekeeper who takes care of Frankie, and Frankie’s cousin, 6-year-old John Henry. As the narration tells us, “They had played cards after dinner every single afternoon; if you would eat those old cards, they would taste like a combination of all the dinners of that August, together with a sweaty-handed nasty taste.” (p.17) McCullers also describes Frankie’s boredom in this passage: “Every afternoon Frankie said exactly the same words to Berenice, and the answers of Berenice were always the same. So that now the words were like an ugly little tune they sang by heart.” (p.31) 

Frankie wants nothing more than to leave her sleepy little town and see the world, and she has convinced herself that her brother and his fiancée will want to take her along with them as they start their new life together.  In the second part of the book, the narration changes to refer to Frankie as “F. Jasmine,” her middle name, as part of her new attempt at refinement as she prepares to bid her small town goodbye. She walks through the town, telling anyone she runs across about the wedding and her new life that is about to begin. F. Jasmine discovers “It is far easier...to convince strangers of the coming to pass of dearest wants than those in your own home kitchen.” (p.59) Anyone who has ever had a deep conversation with someone you just met on an airplane can relate to that statement. F. Jasmine has many different thoughts as she walks through the town that morning “And of all these facts and feelings the strongest of all was the need to be known for her true self and recognized.” (p.62) 

The focus of The Member of the Wedding is narrower than McCullers’ first novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, as Frankie is the only character whose head we get inside of. But it’s still an effective book, because McCullers is able to so completely enter Frankie’s psyche. The book is really a character study of Frankie. McCullers really understood the adolescent experience. It’s so common for people to go through what Frankie is going through: you think that no one understands you, and these feelings are often accompanied by a yearning for escape.

I read the 2004 Mariner Books edition of The Member of the Wedding, and while it’s a nice enough presentation of the novel, Mariner needed some help with the proofreading. There are shoddy errors throughout the book—missing punctuation, quotation marks that never close—that should have been easily caught. There’s also one passage where em dashes that look like this — have been replaced by the equal sign. Sigh. 

But the sloppy proofreading does not detract from the wonderful sentences that McCullers crafts, and the beautiful, heartbreaking portrait of adolescence in The Member of the Wedding.