Carson Mccullers The Member Of The Wedding: Summary :: essays research papers

Carson McCullers The Member of the Wedding Summary     The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers is the story of anadolescent girl who triumphs over desolation and gains maturity through anidentity that she creates for herself in her mind. It is with this guise thattwelve year old Frankie Addams begins to feel confident about herself and life.The author seems to indicate that one chamberpot feel good about oneself throughpositive thinking regardless of reality. The novel teaches that ones destinyis a self-fulfilled prophecy, seeing ones self in a original light oftentimescreates an environment where one might become that which one would like to be.     The world begins to look new and beautiful to Frankie when her olderbrother Jarvis returns from Alaska with his bride-to-be, Janice. The at a timeclumsy Frankie, forlorn and lonely, feeling that she "was a member of nothingin the world" now decides that she isgoing to be "the member of the wedding." Frankie truly believes that she isgoing to be an integral cave in of her brothers new family and becomes infatuatedwith the idea that she will leave Georgia and live with Jarvis and Janice inWinter Hill. In her scheme to be part of this new unit, she dubs herself F.Jasmine so that she and the wedding couple will all have names beginning withthe letters J and a. Her positive thinking induces a euphory whichcontributes to a rejection of the old feeling that "the old Frankie had no weto claim.... Now all this was suddenly over with and changed. There was herbrother and the bride, and it was as though when first she power saw them somethingshe had known inside of her They are the we of me." Being a member of thewedding will, she feels, connect her irrevocably to her brother and his wife.Typical of many teenagers, she felt that in nine to be someone she has to be apart of an intact, existing group, that is, Jarvis and Janice. The teen yearsare know n as a time of soul-searching for a new and grown up identity. In aneffort to find this identity teens seek to join a group. Frankie, too, isdeperate for Jarvis and Janices adult acceptance.     Frankie is forced to spend the summer with tin Henry, her six year oldcousin, and Berenice Brown, her black cook. It is through her interactionswith these two characters that the reader perceives Frankies ascent fromchildhood. Before Jarvis and Janice arrive, Frankie is content to play with