Arts
Queer Classics
Queer Classics
Carson McCullers's
"The Member of the Wedding"
by Ernie McLeod
I can’t offer scientific proof, but I suspect Carson McCullers used the word “queer” more than any other fiction writer. In The Member of the Wedding alone everything from a conversation to feelings to the kitchen wall to the night outside is described as queer. Of course “queer” connoted something different in 1946 – when The Member of the Wedding was published – than it does today, but McCullers’s reliance on it is telling. In her fictional world nearly everything, including romantic love, is at odds with mainstream norms. Because her characters are almost exclusively social outcasts, their pairings – even the “straight” ones – all seem essentially queer.
Though McCullers’s work, with its eye towards the grotesque, is often labeled “Southern Gothic,” the magic lies in its depiction of the ordinary. Details that should seem perfectly normal appear fun-house-mirror warped, while the peculiar comes across as everyday. A passage from The Member of the Wedding could describe McCullers’s writing itself: “a curious fact about this day was a twisted sense of the astonishing; the unexpected did not make her wonder, and only the long known, the familiar, struck her with a strange surprise.”
Since her death at age fifty in 1967, Carson McCullers has never disappeared from the canon, queer or otherwise. Four of her five novels have been turned into movies. The Member of the Wedding, in addition to achieving Broadway success, has been filmed twice – in 1952 with Julie Harris, and for TV in 1997. Reflections in a Golden Eye, McCullers’s most overtly weird and homoerotic novel, was equally bent in its 1967 film adaptation. (A super-sultry Liz, a way-repressed Marlon, an ultra-queeny Filipino houseboy, and a hunky nude horseback-riding soldier – rent it tonight!)
In the past year, however, McCullers’s life and works have undergone reexamination: an article on her by gay writer Hilton Als appeared in a December New Yorker; a new biography by Josyane Savigneau has been translated from French into English; and lesbian writer Sarah Schulman’s play Carson McCullers (Historically Inaccurate) ran this winter in New York.
While McCullers was twice married to the same man (Reeves McCullers, a failed writer and hopeless alcoholic who eventually committed suicide), it’s no secret she had lesbian leanings. She pursued several well-known, unattainable women – including Greta Garbo – but her actual sexual experiences with women were, at most, limited. At the prestigious artists’ community Yaddo, she became infatuated with writer Katherine Anne Porter, going so far as to throw herself across Porter’s threshold, repeatedly professing her love. Porter wasn’t impressed.
Schulman argues that McCullers was really a transgendered person, which makes sense when you look at her fiction. Her most autobiographical characters – including Frankie in The Member of the Wedding and Mick in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – are tomboyish girls with boys’ names. Miss Amelia in The Ballad of the Sad Café is described as a “dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man.” McCullers herself was quoted as saying that she was born a man.
In spite of her early success (a story published at nineteen, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at twenty-three), McCullers’s life was not an easy one. Undiagnosed rheumatic fever when she was a teenager led to a series of increasingly paralyzing strokes when she was in her twenties. From her early thirties onward she was basically an invalid, though she continued to write almost until her death.
Alongside the great physical challenges, McCullers suffered unhappily in her marriage, behaved self-destructively (a whole lot of drinking and smoking), and increasingly assumed the demeanor of a “wounded animal.” She kept company with such gay literary luminaries as W.H. Auden, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams, but her constant need for attention made her a difficult friend. The always tart-tongued Gore Vidal, though a fan of her work, reportedly claimed: “An hour with a dentist without Novocain was like a minute with Carson McCullers.” Ouch.
A quote about love from The Ballad of the Sad Café may best illuminate the workings of McCullers’s own heart: “Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.”
The pain McCullers endured and caused is everywhere evident on the page. Frankie Addams, the twelve year-old protagonist of The Member of the Wedding, is a motherless, lonely child, extremely sensitive to the slights of others, yet frequently insensitive towards those who care for her, namely her family’s black cook Berenice and her little cousin John Henry West.
The short novel’s dramatic centerpiece is the impending wedding of Frankie’s brother Jarvis, who has just returned from Alaska to marry a girl named Janice in a place called Winter Hill. Frankie is infatuated with the idea of Alaska and of Winter Hill, with all things frozen and far away from the “green sick dream” that had been her Southern summer. She changes her name to F. Jasmine (to alliterate with Jarvis and Janice) and seizes onto the wedding as a means of escaping solitariness, suddenly convinced her brother and his bride will take her away with them to live happily-ever-after together as three. “They are the we of me” becomes Frankie’s – and the novel’s – mantra of belonging.
Frankie’s adolescent plight – and the plights of many of McCullers’s characters – should resonate with anyone who’s felt freakish and afraid, isolated in their childhood surroundings. I’m guessing that might include most of us. It’s not so much what happens to Frankie that matters – the actual wedding is barely described, for instance – but how she perceives things along the way.
Carson McCullers said she became her characters, whether that character was a deaf-mute, a closeted Captain, a black cook, a boy in high-heels, a socialist agitator, or a hunchback. Frankie’s declaration that she felt “‘exactly like somebody has peeled all the skin off me,’“ could apply to most any of McCullers’s characters and likely to McCullers herself.
McCullers wrote that “spiritual isolation” was the thematic basis of her work and that, for her, writing was “a search for God.” One hopes and imagines she was successful in her quest.
Ernie McLeod is a native Vermonter currently attempting a novel in Montreal. He can be reached by e-mail at mcleod@middlebury.edu
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