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Essay topics, essay writing: Carson Mccullers The Member Of The Wedding: Summary - 710 words

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 loneliness 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 can feel good about oneself throughpositive thinking regardless of reality. The novel teaches that one's destinyis a self-fulfilled prophecy, seeing one's self in a certain 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 onceclumsy 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 part of her brother's 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 euphoria 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 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 order to be someone she has to be apart of an intact, existing group, that is, Jarvis and Janice. The teen yearsare known 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 Janice's adult acceptance. Frankie is forced to spend the summer with John Henry, her six year oldcousin, and Berenice Brown, her black cook. It is through her interactionswith these two characters that the reader perceives Frankie's ascent fromchildhood. Before Jarvis and Janice arrive, Frankie is content to play withJohn Henry. When she becomes F.

Jasmine and an imagined 'we' of the couple,she feels too mature to have John Henry sleep over, preferring, instead, tooccupy her time explaining her wedding plans to strangers in bars, a behaviorshe would not have considered doing before gaining this new confidence. When F. Jasmine tells her plans to Berenice, the cook immediately warnsher that Jarvis and Janice will not want her to live with them. F. Jasminesmugly ignores the cook's warning that 'you just laying yourself this fancytrap to catch yourself in trouble.' The adolescent feels confident and cocky,refusing to believe that her plot is preposterous. After the wedding and theshattering reality that Frances (as she is now known) faces, it is evident,from the fact that their refusal doesn't crush her, that she has truly turnedherself around, and that her maturity is an authentic and abiding one.

At theconclusion of the story, the now confident Frances is able to plan a future forherself, by herself, which includes becoming a great writer. She, further,finds a sympathetic friend who becomes the other half of her new 'we.' Carson McCullers brilliantly portrays a teenage girl's maturationthrough a fabricated feeling of belonging, which ultimately leads to a truebelonging. The reader sees how the girl grows from a childish 'Frankie,' to adisillusioned 'F. Jasmine,' and eventually to a matured Frances. When F.Jasmine questions Berenice as to why it is illegal to change one's name withoutconsent of the court, the cook insightfully responds, 'You have a name and onething after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and dovarious things, so that soon the name begins to have a meaning.' No matterhow we might change externals, it is only when our innermost feelings arealtered that we truly change and grow.

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