Catch The Member Of The Wedding Originated By Carson McCullers Expressed As E-Text

imagine the word 'universal' gets thrown around a lot in regards to this work, The temptation of it is exactly why I am excising it from my vocabulary, for even the small amount of literature I've read in the culverts of unacknowledged canon were enough to show the lie of the word.
I find an immense amount of resonance in this work, resonance structured on a foundation of tokenism, sentimentality, and other measures of selfwilled isolation commonly shared with other white people works of 'universal' meaning.
I do not claim that works such as sitelinkCities of Salt or sitelinkAlmanac of the Dead do not rely on the same dynamics of self vs other, but no one would think to call them universal.
That epithet requires power, and the world at large is not of a mind to grant them that,

How much does the cult of US American childhood play a part in letting millions of white parents sleep at night Boys will be boys, girls will be sugar and sweet, and every excuse will be made when a troubled teenage soul slaughters their propagators with gun in hand.
I wonder how many condemned Frankie's father for letting her roam rather than the systematic excision of her mind from her body by the mores of society.
There are the usual excuses: lack of mother, lack of white female friends of a common age, the lack of urban space commonly put as the ultimate solution by the North and the South.
As per usual, McCullers comes much closer to the heart of it than most who try their hand at the metaphysics of growing up, but the threat society places on the body of a young white girl is still centered around that fact of whiteness.


I may be too old to take as deep a comfort in this as I would have once, but my methods of reacting to fear of the oncoming void with rampant imagination are no different now than they were at age twelve and under.
Enough experience has honed it into a serviceable way of living in this capitalistic age, replete with the communication skills and awareness of personal strengths requisite in this country of mine.
However, I now know that I am never going to "grow up" for better or for worse, It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old, This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member, She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world, Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid,

Carson McCullers draws you into the awkward and confusing existence of ayear old girl, yearning to belong, not yet an adult but ready to make the leap into maturity.
She understands very little about that world and what it means, This short novel takes place in a hot Georgia summer and centers on Frankie Addams awarenessor lack of and fear of figuring out who she is to be and how to be that person.
She lives with a distant and inattentive father and her only companions are her youngyear old cousin, John Henry and their AfricanAmerican cook, Berenice.
Frankies dull, boring summer turns upside down when she finds out that her older brother Jarvis is coming home from the Army to get married.


Frankie feels so unconnected to everyone, even the teenage girls snub her and leave her out of their club, Shes feeling gangly and selfconscious after a growth spurt and she is moody and grumpy all of the time, She becomes obsessed with and fantasizes about how her brothers wedding is going to change her life, thinking about all the places theyll go together.
Frankie wants so much to be a part of something,

This story is much more amazing than this very short paraphrase, You get lost in McCullers prose and begin to feel like you are Franky and that every thing she does and thinks is happening to you.
Thats how special of a writer McCullers is, She doesnt just show you how angstridden and distraught Frankie is, Instead, she puts you right into her thoughts and into her mind as a reader you experience what Frankie is experiencing, Its an amazing thing. As a reader, you are Franky because you connect with her on some level of sameness, You see your ownyear old, disordered self who grewinches overnight and was lanky and uncoordinated, You remember your gawky and clumsy ways and your lonely experiences from adolescence and know that Frankie will get through them because you did.
She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.


I read a lot about loneliness, Overwhelmingly, the books that I gravitate towards seem to have at least some thread of loneliness, But this this didn't just deal with loneliness, this was trying to explain absolute aloneness, That completely exposed and silent and almost panicked feeling of being just you, by yourself, in a world full of “we,” part of nothing and no one.
I was a child who was alone a lot, and there were passages in here that were painfully realistic to me, So many dusks in darkened backyards with the distant sounds of peoples dishes clinking, a dog barking, other kid's voices, and maybe a faraway radio or car horn, and none of it is yours.


This little girl narrator stood around, walked around, sat around, She wanted out. She needed someone, almost anyone, She looked up from the twilight into lighted house windows and peered into doorways, searching, She was selfish and mean with flashes of anger, but that anger made so much sense to me, Shes stuck and were all stuck, and damned if I of all people dont know just how futile it can turn out to be to leave a place and start over and find that distant dog barks and car horns are everywhere, especially at dusk.


This book surprised me, I liked it more than Lonely Hunter, perhaps because I related to it on a deeper level, but even the writing felt more intimate to me, more tortured and dreamy and in parts, philosophical.
As others have pointed out, the ending feels oddly tackedon and almost ruins the perfect tension in the firstof the book.
Almost.
Frankie is feeling lonely, and isolated in this comingofage story: "It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old.
This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member, She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world, Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around doorways, and she was afraid, " Her mother died when Frankie was born, her father is distant, and her best friend moved away, Frankie wonders if she might turn into a freak because she is at a gangly, awkward stage, Her wish to belong to a group is so strong that she comes up with the idea of going away with her brother and his bride after their wedding.


The story also shows Carson McCullers' concern for other individuals that are excluded because they are different, Bernice,

the African American maid, tells how difficult it is having dark skin, Frankie, who is a tomboy, wishes that people could switch back and forth from being boys to girls, Her cousin, John Henry, wants people to be "half boy and half girl, "

A small town is hard on anyone that's different, and feeling excluded, Frankie is fascinated that the soldiers have the opportunity to travel to other places, "The Member of the Wedding" is a heartbreaking comingofage novel, but there is hope for a more realistic Frankie by the end of the story.
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