The Member of the Wedding: “an unjoined person who hung around in doorways”

1/ Himadri (Argumentative Old Git) has written at length about the characters in The Member of the Wedding and the themes of loneliness, identity, belonging, and so on—what can I possibly say?—so I’m gonna have to write about something else. 

Maybe Carson McCullers’s style? 

“She complained aloud, and her voice was fringed and sharp like the edge of a saw.” 

Later on: 

“So she sharpened her voice and chiselled the words.” 

Remember Nabokov’s idea that before the 19th century, writers didn’t “see” colours? “The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green, the eyes of beauty black, the clouds grey, and so on”? 

“She opened her eyes, and it was night. The lavender sky had at last grown dark and there was slanted starlight and twisted shade. Her heart had divided like two wings and she had never seen a night so beautiful.” 

Lavender sky. 

“The air was chilled, and day after day the sky was a clear green-blue, but filled with light, the colour of a shallow wave.” 

Carson McCullers is not Flannery O’Connor, who fills her pages with strange and striking metaphors, but once in a while one comes across an interesting sentence in McCullers. 

“The noon air was thick and sticky as hot syrup, and there was the stifling smell of the dye-rooms from the cotton mill.” 

I like this: 

“In the silence of the kitchen they heard the tone shaft quietly across the room, then again the same note was repeated. A piano scale slanted across the August afternoon. A chord was struck. Then in a dreaming way a chain of chords climbed slowly upward like a flight of castle stairs…” 

This is an unusual sentence: 

“… But nevertheless there were times when Frances felt his presence there, solemn and hovering and ghost-grey.” 

These phrases are repeated later: “solemn”, “hovering”, “ghost-grey”. 

2/ As I read The Member of the Wedding, I couldn’t help thinking of the contrast between Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor—both female writers from the American South, about a decade apart. 

Carson McCullers is warm. Flannery O’Connor is cold. 

Tolstoy is warm. Flaubert, cold. Chekhov, warm. Ibsen, cold. Fielding, warm. Thackeray, warm. Choderlos de Laclos, cold. Dickens, warm. Jane Austen, I’d say cold. Vasily Grossman, warm. Nabokov, cold.

With Flannery O’Connor, you can feel her cold, pitiless stare as she cuts open her characters and studies them. Carson McCullers, in contrast, depicts her characters with compassion and warmth, even affection. 

3/ Much has been said about the central character of the book, Frankie, the 12-year-old tomboy who belongs to no club and who so desperately wants to belong, to be part of something that she fantasises about her brother’s wedding, wanting to join him and his wife and get out of her ugly little town. Himadri for example has written a very good blog post about Frankie, who calls herself F. Jasmine in the second section of the book (a name she adopts to group herself with her brother Jarvis and his bride Janice), and who becomes Frances in the final section. 

It is very good, but I don’t particularly remember 12-year-old me. Perhaps I blocked it out of my memory. 

So I’m more interested in Frankie’s black cook, Berenice. This is a black woman in the segregated South. This is a woman who first got married at the age of 13, just one year older than Frankie now, and who has gone through many bad marriages, each time worse than the last. This is a woman who has a blue glass eye because her last husband gouged out her eye. 

But she was happy once (I should say, she was adored once too). 

“‘I loved Ludie and he was the first man I loved.  Therefore, I had to go and copy myself forever afterward. What I did was to marry off little pieces of Ludie whenever I come across them. It was just my misfortune they all turned out to be the wrong pieces…’” 

It is heartbreaking. I suspect that when I have forgotten everything else about The Member of the Wedding, I will still remember Berenice.