"Somehow Caught": Race and Deferred Sexuality in McCullers's The Member of the Wedding

At the end of her first outing as her alter-ego "F. Jasmine," Frankie Addams, the young heroine of Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding (1946), stumbles upon an image that immediately arrests her, but that she cannot comprehend:

She was walking home when all at once there was a shock in her as though a thrown knife had struck and shivered in her chest. F. Jasmine stopped dead in her tracks, one foot still raised, and at first she could not take in just what had happened . . . she had half-seen something, a dark double shape, in the alley she had just that moment passed. And because of this half-seen object, the quick flash in the corner of her eye, there had sprung up in her the sudden picture of her brother and the bride. . . . She did not look at it directly, for somehow it was as though she was almost afraid. . . . There in the alley were only two colored boys, one taller than the other and with his arm resting on the shorter boy's shoulder.

(74)

What so shocks Frankie about this "dark double shape" is its significance as a sort of closed system impossible for her to access—the coupling in the alley—that the novel positions as an ultimate synecdotal entrée into a southern society built on two uneven parallels: black and white, male and female.

McCullers's novel narrates the initiation of an adolescent girl into the southern (and American) school of distinctions, a set of signifying closures beginning and ending with race, but encompassing sexuality and equations of sexualized racial identity. Just as Frankie begins to understand the full weight of the social hierarchy on her whiteness, a realization often linked with puberty as a sort of end of racial innocence in the southern novel, she begins to reflect on the black or, more aptly, non-white, influence on her developing sexuality. In Frankie's case, this is provided by her black caretaker, Berenice. Berenice's attempts to defend her surrogate daughter from the violence of transgression are received by Frankie as acts of suppression, and Berenice's heterosexuality is taken as similarly oppressive. Gary Richards has argued that Frankie "can only imagine Berenice's membership in heterosexual womanhood as being contingent upon her blackness," (188) and thus that Frankie's membership in this womanhood becomes contingent on her own racial "responsibilities." The Member of the Wedding is a novel about a young girl seeking new outlets as she is faced with painfully limiting expectations for her sexuality and race. McCullers portrays her as afraid of inhabiting a heterosexual self, because her black surrogate mother models it as painful. She is equally afraid of exploring a queer self confined to dark alleys. As Jeff Abernathy posits, Frankie "fears discovering a marginalized black identity within herself as she moves into adolescence, a time when she will feel compelled to shed all association with blackness" (85).

To take this a step further, an even more anxious conflict arises from being told by Berenice that this transformation into white womanhood also entails a paradoxical entrance into active sexuality that Frankie can't help but associate with blackness, and the array of non-traditional (thus non-accepted) sexual identities, including homosexual, gender-transitive, and even asexual orientations, that provide only more possibilities of marginalization. Ironically, while Berenice attempts to dissuade Frankie away from these non-traditional sexual identities they are locations of otherness and rejection in southern society not unlike the blackness rejected by the white patriarchy.

In this article, I will explore the options that Frankie considers as she attempts to find an identity not defined by the forced racial separation and unwelcome physicality of white southern heterosexual womanhood or the queer gender-indefinability that threatens painful rejection. This gender-and sexual-indefinability is discouraged by Frankie's mother-surrogate, Berenice, the woman with whom Frankie paradoxically attempts to maintain connection at the same time that Berenice's encouragement of Frankie's womanhood speeds along their separation. The...