McCullers's "'The Member of the Wedding"--Dolce Carina, this one's for you

I just finished reading McCuller's "The Member of the Wedding," and I feel like it's something I have to write about right now. It's real. Fiction, although fiction and not the truth, speaks truth. And right now, I think this story speaks the truth of me.

It's a story of an adolescent going through many transformations (isn't that what adolescence is for?) from Frankie ( character like Mick in McCullers's The Hear is a Lonely Hunter), to F. Jasmine, to Francis.

In the opening paragraph the narrator tells us that Frankie "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." I guess that this sticks with me because now I too feel like an "unjoined person," a "member of nothing in the world." I realize that it sounds so self-absorbed to say that, but it's how I feel; it's who I am today. And like Frankie, I so much want to feel connected to people in the world.

Frankie, now F. Jasmine, becomes obsessed with her brother's wedding, and she wants to believe that her brother and his bride will accept her as part of their relationship and take her with them. She tells herself over and over that "you [Jarvis and Janice] are the we of me." This line, "you are the we of me," repeated so often strikes me as a refrain. I guess that the important thing to me is realizing that we all want to be a part of a "we;" none of us wants to be an "unjoined person." In McCullers's work, however, joining seems much more difficult than we may think. Jarvis and Janice, predictably, turn out not to be Frankie / Jasmine's "we." Now what I am getting to is this. The reason I've loved J.S. (Carina knows who I mean), the reason that I stayed and stayed getting hurt is that he was "the we of me." Now, I just feel adrift, an "unjoined person."

Reader response theory argues that we, as readers, create meaning in texts, maybe even create the texts ourselves in the ways that our experiences, beliefs, assumptions, and prejudices affect the meaning we find in literature. I guess this is true of me and "The Member of the Wedding."

I think that Frankie, maybe even McCullers and all writers, are "the we of me."

I loved this story, and although sad in many ways, I find it validating and even life-affirming.

I want this world to be "the we of me."