The Métis and the Multiple "Me" in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding

Regarding the operations of the racial imaginary in literature, Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine remark that "race enters writing, the making of art, as a structure of feeling, as something that structures feelings in the moment of encounter" (18). The "writer's essential strangeness is her greatest resource," so long as the author remains "in skeptical tension with her own inclinations" by confronting a "racial imaginary that both is and is not hers" (21). Richard Wright once upheld his friend Carson McCullers's novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) as the first southern novel in which the white author's racial imaginary rises "above the pressures of her environment," embracing "white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness" (18). Her characters absorb the South's political and historical pressures, lingering in "the more obscure, oblique and elusive emotions" of the subject, even whilst the plot's sequence "of typical actions" seems entirely replaceable (Wright 18). In McCullers's lesser known novel, The Member of the Wedding (1946), her critique of southern identity likewise enters the text as a structure of feeling embodied in the encounters of its liminal characters living under Jim Crow, focalized through the character of twelve-year-old Frankie Addams, who struggles to realize her place in that world.

The twentieth century southern racial imaginary, as Loffreda and Rankine define this concept, remains steeped in the social history of the plantation system, even where physical vestiges of that system may no longer be present in a novel's setting. As a white southern author who often writes about domestic concerns, McCullers inherits the plantation topos as the fulcrum of the "postslavery" literary imagination in which the plantation becomes, as Elizabeth Christine Russ observes, "not primarily a physical location but rather an insidious ideological and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told and retold" (3). Whilst no physical plantation edifice is present in The Member of the Wedding, its domestic small-town setting houses and articulates the same structural issue at stake in both Russ's and Loffreda and Rankine's statements. Accordingly, McCullers's fiction bears witness to psychological and ideological plantation legacies still enclosed within the household hierarchy, where the atavistic divisions of race and gender remained hegemonic long into the twentieth century. What Russ calls the plantation's insidious ideological trope coiled itself around the racial imaginary of the southern "household" that formed the lens and lever of the plantation social system, continuing to inform the household assembly long after the abolition of chattel slavery. This "household" largely privatized matters of both labor and gender relations, whilst informing all spheres of southern communal life, as opposed to the North's division of labor, which consigned them to the market and state. This enabled those "decisive relations of production and reproduction" to persist after the abolition of slavery through the continuation of those household networks (Fox Genovese 38). If the southern household relegates its members to valuated reproductive and productive roles, both gendered and racialized, it insists upon the need to harmonize these roles for the "good of the family," a mauvaise foi misrepresentation of utopian logic.

Despite the centrality of the domestic sphere in the South's political economy, male novelists of McCullers's era, including Faulkner, Styron, and Wolfe, were predominantly perceived in their time as authoring the "panoramic view" of the South beyond the unrevolutionary household of women's fiction (Yaeger 153). On the surface of things, that panoramic view appears absent from a novel like The Member of the Wedding, a narrative about a socially isolated twelve-year-old "tomboy" who fantasizes about joining her older brother's honeymoon, who rejects her black housekeeper and gender-fluid cousin, and who inevitably turns to self-destruction. Yet McCullers applies a Southern Gothic mode full of absurdity and tension to that household comprising the three primary characters: twelve-year-old Frankie Addams, her six-year-old cousin John Henry West, and the Addams' black housekeeper, Berenice Sadie Brown. As Patricia Yaeger notes...