Sunday book pick: Being young and bored in Carson McCullers’s novel ‘The Member of the Wedding’

“It looks like to me everything has just walked off and left me.”

Twelve-year-old Frankie Addams has never felt so lonely in her life. Motherless, her father too busy at the jewellery shop, her brother away in the army, Frankie spends the hot summer months with her six-year-old first cousin John Henry and the family maid Berenice. A tomboy and a misfit, Frankie is so in love with her brother and his bride – Jarvis and Janice – that she has all but made up her mind to run away from her “hideous” house and join them in not just their wedding, but also the honeymoon.

A kid who has probably freshly hit puberty, Frankie thinks of herself as an “unjoined person” who is not a member of any club – not at home, not outside. She is less than pleased about being left behind with her young cousin and their black maid. Though she is well looked after, her lonely existence at home is doing little to stimulate her intellectually or creatively. And Berenice’s patronising attitude isn’t helping either. She cannot see Frankie as the adult she claims to be – she is advised to not be foolish and throw tantrums about being in the same “club” as her brother and his new bride. She is so taken in by their coupledom that she becomes desperate to change her name to something that starts with “Ja-” too. Berenice once more shoots down her plan by trying to impress upon her the mindless confusion this will cause. Moreover, it is illegal too.

An unjoined person

Being left out is pretty much the worst fate that can befall Frankie. She feels jealous of soldiers who have been on the battlefield, fought in the trenches, witnessed the war. It must be terribly exciting, she imagines. Being part of history in such a crucial, present way. The fact that her brother is a soldier exhilarating too. She has not even donated blood or volunteered with the Red Cross. Something about her being too young for service. If only they let women on the front, rest assured, she’d not shy away from her duties. But this is fanciful imagination. In this stagnant existence, the best Frankie can do is be at her brother’s wedding which will take place in Alaska.

Frankie is not really needed at the wedding. She could attend it on the day with her father, Berenice and the rest but that will not do. She is quite convinced that there’s a natural spot for her in her brother’s married life. In fact, her conviction – and the desire to be taken seriously – is so strong that she goes ahead and starts to call herself F Jasmine anyway. In this lonely summer, the wedding is “bright and beautiful as snow” while her heart is “mashed”. Her desolation is almost physical – in an instance, Frankie starts to cry although she has been known to not shed tears no matter how sad or terrible things got.

Berenice’s advice of getting a “beau” falls on deaf ears too. Frankie is not interested in snivelling 12-year-old boys who are neither worldly nor clever. Berenice tries yet again to talk her out of her wedding- and honeymoon-crashing mania but not before teasing her about how she has got a “crush” on a wedding.

Though Frankie’s plans revolve around her brother’s bride whom she is yet to meet and her brother, she has not thought to consult either of them about the feasibility of her presence in their lives. She is “sick” of feeling like just an ‘I’ and has convinced herself that Jarvis and Janice are the “we of me”. Despite her elaborately constructed plans of fleeing from home, she spends long hours in Berenice and John Henry’s company as they eat together, Berenice regales them with stories of her many marriages, and John Henry plays a second fiddle to Frankie’s bored existence. She is eager to run away but also seems unable to sever ties with those she considers family.

The practicalities of running away

In The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers takes a child’s fancy of wanting to run away from home seriously. Addled with new hormones, perpetual boredom, and the uninspiring environment of home, Frankie’s desire is both foolish and understandable. She is rebellious but unaware of the strong attachments to those around her, there is also vague but a powerful sense of guilt she feels. She is already viewing her life as a 12-year-old in retrospect – the complete real-life absence of those she considers the “we of me” does not deter her from imagining a life where she’ll be wanted, perhaps even cherished, for her odd mannerisms. The schemes she devises to prove herself worthy of her brother and his bride, without her realising, open her world to invaluable experiences she can have in her hometown. A chance encounter with another soldier or going to the bar unsupervised becomes the adventure that she seems so hungry for.

The only voice of reason in her life is Berenice. The two are constantly at loggerheads and Frankie believes she’ll never understand what being young feels like. But Berenice, with jokes and tough love, tries to make her see reason. She asks Frankie if she’ll be “attempting to break into weddings for the rest of her life” – the child does not have an answer to it.

When the wedding day finally arrives, Frankie, besides not being addressed as F Jasmine by anyone, is asked about what grade she is in. In fact, that’s the only question anyone seems to be interested in asking her. The possibility of being taken seriously as an adult and being included in her brother’s plans is looking incredibly slim.

Elaborate planning and scheming and a vivid imagination cannot replace the practical difficulties of running away. Frankie gets hold of her father’s wallet, his revolver (she has sworn to kill herself if she can’t flee), and makes up her mind to get on a freight train to leave town. But when the moment presents itself, Frankie stops to wonder how “bums and people really do it.”

McCullers confines the drama, excitement, and monotony in the house that Frankie has grown to detest. And more precisely, to the dining table where the three leftovers take long dinners in the summer evenings. The impish attitude of a preteen Frankie is equal parts funny and frustrating, but it’s also easy to sympathise with her. Her restlessness is born not so much out of the rebellious phase that many of us go through during puberty but from the acute awareness of the world around us changing at a speed that very few of us – even in adulthood – can keep pace with.

In some ways, it makes her innocence even more obvious. The growing pains of stepping into teenage and impending adulthood can be highly individual and Frankie’s determination to do something epic before time runs out is entirely understandable. If given the chance, wouldn’t you too do something so out of character, so grand, so ambitious early in life that you could spend the rest of your days patting yourself on the back for having the foresight to realise your potential just in time?

The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers, Penguin Modern Classics.