“It’s so very queer”: Growing up South
The first line that Carson McCuller’s twelve-year old protagonist has in The Member of the Wedding, “’It is so very queer. . . . The way it just happened’” (3), signals the emotional arc of the novel as the protagonist moves through an environment infused with the queer and the strange and grapples with her newly unsettled identity. The “it” in these sentences represents what she cannot name—her own changes and transition to adolescence, itself a transitional term that denotes the time between identities. Set primarily in the summer of her twelfth year, the novel moves in and out of seasons as Frankie sets out to escape her childhood.
The novel begins: “It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person . . .” (3). Introducing themes of not belonging and being unjoined, McCullers uses the word “queer” four times in the paragraphs immediately following the opening to signal the physical, emotional changes that young Frankie is experiencing. Joyce Carol Oates calls The Member of the Wedding “one of our great portrayals of American family life and the singularly painful loneliness of adolescence” (xv), but we might also think of it as portrayal of the necessary strangeness of change, transition, and identity. The incident that initiates the action of the novel and Frankie’s feelings of loneliness and queerness is the impending marriage of her brother, Jarvis. She feels “unjoined,” like a “big freak,” “sick,” and “afraid” (3, 4, 6, 9). The familiar space of the house where the adult desires of her brother, who has come to introduce his bride, collide with the childish “queer” drawings by six-year-old John Henry on the kitchen walls, mimicking the uneasy, queer, meeting of adult and child that Frankie is experiencing: “And now the old kitchen made Frankie sick” (6).
To resolve the feeling of being “unjoined,” Frankie determines to become a member of her brother’s wedding, not only by attending and participating in the ceremony but by escaping her current existence and leaving with the newlyweds afterwards. This determination joins movement, mobility, with meanings of queerness as she wanders about town looking for a dress to wear, travels to the wedding, attempts to run away afterwards, and finally moves to a new house with her father. As the novel unfolds, McCullers joins meanings of “queer” with emotion, space, movement, sex, and gender identity as it follows the protagonist’s transition from twelve-year-old Frankie to F. Jasmine and finally to the thirteen-year-old Frances.
The change that she is undergoing, like the change of the seasons, the “queer season” of spring (22) and then summer, brings on a “queer tightness in her chest” as Frankie realizes that she “ought to leave town” (24) The seasons, the atmosphere, the air are appropriately figured as “queer” for they reify her emotions of strangeness and loneliness. As she “wonder[s] who she was, and what she was going to be in the world” (24), a “feeling that she could not name” left her “in the same queer way . . . afraid” and dizzy (27). When her brother and the bride come to the house, “Frankie knew that everything was changed; but why this was so, and what would happen to her next, she did not know” (26). The change of seasons, the change of the family situation with her brother’s pending wedding, and her own uneasy feelings of identity, of not knowing who she was, make things “queer,” disrupt the old ways of being and knowing without providing Frankie a clear path or understanding except to flee.
It was as if things had become surreal, like the “queer look of a brick building that has begun to melt” (66) and the time warp of imagination that juxtaposes the picture in her mind of her brother and the bride together on the train and the reality that she is stuck in the kitchen, “an old hull left there at the table”—“’It is so queer,’ she said” (30). The sound of a piano being tuned, “enough to shiver the gizzards of musicians and make all listeners feel queer” (91), sounds like the shivers of realization she experiences in the novel. Like the style of the novel, these images capture the dream-like quality of Frankie’s bewilderment about change. For her it is as if the world has changed, become unreal or strange—a bizarre fantasy or carnival of freaks—in ways that parallel her own sense that reality has been disrupted or usurped.
In similar ways, her meanderings, wanderings through town suggest something surreal about movement as the past, present, and future meet uncannily, as child and young adult sit uncomfortably together in the Blue Moon café, as imagination and reality are glanced sideways like a dark double shape in the alley she passes. Like the morphidite she remembers seeing at the House of Freaks, “Half-Man Half-Woman,” Frankie moves in and out of time, in and out of identities as she wanders about town after determining that she will be a member of the wedding and shed her current place and identity: “The day before the wedding was not like any day that F. Jasmine [formerly known as Frankie] had ever known. It was the Saturday she went into town . . . and in a new way she belonged” (49).
When she had wandered about the booths of the Chattahoochee Exposition with its House of Freaks that came to town every autumn, “She was afraid of all the Freaks, for it seemed to her that they had looked at her in a secret way and tried to connect their eyes with hers, as though to say: we know you” (20) and wondered if she gave people “the creeps” (21). Fearing identification with the “freaks,” she nonetheless seeks connection, hoping to communicate to the people she encounters about her plan to be a member of the wedding as she walks about that Saturday, enacting what Glenn Willis calls, her “anxiety of communicative failure” (92).
She walked around town as she had done in the past, seeing some of its characters, “an old colored man,” “a lady going into MacDougal’s store” (55), the monkey man and his monkey, and soldiers from the nearby fort roaming about during the unsettled times of WWII. But now, with her desire to connect, to tell people about the wedding and her plans, it was different. McCullers describes F. Jasmine’s movement in a passage peppered with language and images synonymous with “queer”: “But it was a morning when many things occurred, and 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” (50).
Not only did it seem as though “the ghost of the old Frankie, dirty and hungry-eyed, trudged silently along not far from her, and the thought of the future, after the wedding, was constant as the very sky. . . . the day when past and future mingled . . .” (61), but “She went into places she had never dreamed of entering until that day. For one thing, F. Jasmine went to a hotel . . . Furthermore, she was there with a soldier . . .” (49). Sitting across the table at the Blue Moon hotel and café from the red-haired soldier she had met during her walk, she put on a big-girl persona when he asked if she cared for a beer, calmly replying, “I would be delighted” (70) even as doubt, “a troubled sense, a light uneasiness” (74) unsettled her.
Then as she is walking home with a bit of a beer buzz, she experiences something like a shock, “a mysterious trick of sight and the imagination.” “There was something sideways and behind her that had flashed across the very corner edge of her left eye; she had half-seen something, a dark double shape, in the alley.” Instead of the imagined picture of her brother and the bride, she saw “two colored boys, one taller than the other and with his arm resting on the shorter boy’s shoulder” (74-75). When she later told Berenice, the Black woman who cooks and takes care of her while her father works, about the scene, the woman called it “a queer thing” (80) and informed Frankie that she has known “boys to take it into their heads to fall in love with other boys” and of one man who “changed his nature and his sex and turned into a girl” (81). Another instance of the “peculiar things” from her walk around town, this moment of queerness in the alley reifies Frankie’s desire for connection and belonging against her lonely reality. At the same time, it instantiates the dual identities of Half-Child Half-Adult as she moves from childhood to adolescence. Proclaiming that Frankie’s “falling in love with a wedding” is “peculiar” and that she should begin thinking about a “beau,” Berenice understands that movement and life’s transitions are a part of growing up (82).
This is what Frankie does not understand and what she knocks against when she has a melt-down when the wedding was not as romantic as she had imagined and the couple did not take her with them. “The wedding was all wrong” (145). During the gathering, “Everybody was lovely to her,” but instead of engaging in conversation about the wedding and her plans, the grownups kept asking her what grade she is in and pointed her toward the swings outside. She hates herself, she feels like a fool for not understanding that despite another name change, this time to Frances, she is not grown up, is still a child. Indeed, “From the beginning the wedding had been queer like the card games in the kitchen” when John Henry had absconded with the jacks and queens (145). Like a game, weddings follow certain rules and practices to assist the couple’s movement into marriage. The rules of weddings and of life, like the card game missing important characters, are stacked against Frankie’s desires. They have their own meanings that the twelve-year-old does not understand.
The most bizarre thing to her, what she does not understand, is sex and her own place or role in the game. An indication that she is growing up and that it is inappropriate for her to sleep with her widowed father comes when he calls her a “great big long-legged twelve-year-old blunderbuss.” Now, “She had to sleep in her upstairs room alone” (24). Other discoveries about the oddities of sex pepper the novel. One of these occurs when, in an act of rebellion against the change in sleeping arrangements, on “One Saturday afternoon she committed a secret and unknown sin,” a “queer sin” with Barney MacKean in his garage. She does not like or understand what happened in the garage, but it seems somehow wrong to her. In another instance, she comes upon Mr. and Mrs. Marlowe, renters of a front bedroom, having sex, or in Frankie’s mind, having fits. Though Berenice knows quite well what the “fits” portend, Frankie had a feeling she could not name but one that made her think of ghosts (40). Curious about marriage and the history of Berenice’s multiple marriages, she asks the woman, “‘How old were you when you married your first husband?’” and “What made you get married so young for?’” Although she enjoys hearing the stories of Berenice’s marriages, she does not understand the pull and shiver of love and sex (27). It is all weird, queer, spooky, strange to her until it becomes physically dangerous when she does not read or understand the motives of the Fort Benning soldier who buys her a drink, takes her up to his room, and then makes a grab for her: “He was nice, but their two conversations would not join together, and underneath there was a layer of queerness she could not place and understand” (133). Most clearly, she does not understand what her brother’s wedding really means, for him and his bride, or why her efforts to join the party are “queer.” The adult world of sexual relations is simply queer, odd, strange, and incomprehensible to the young girl. If she does not understand the “game,” the best she can do, in her mind, is to escape—to both enter the adult world by taking charge of her life and to remain a child by running from the implications of growing up.
As she had tried earlier to escape her situation by joining the wedding party, near the end of the novel she tries again to escape. This time she goes out by herself into the “queer” night (150). Shaped by the looming storm, the colored lights of town, the alley with its reminders of death, and the passage of couples in the dark, the short journey through town to the Blue Moon brings her to realizations that her romantic plans of hopping a freight car and her “plans for the movies or the Marines were only child plans” (157). In the Blue Moon, where she had again hoped to make connections, where she had earlier told of her plans to join the wedding, she experiences an “anxiety of communicative failure” (92) that causes her to feel like a stranger. “In the blue light she felt queer as a person drowning” (158), a stranger in a room of strangers who do not understand or care about her plight of identity. For all the bravado of taking her father’s pistol and her stolen Sears & Roebuck knife, in a stark epiphany she realizes that “she was too scared to go into the world alone” (155). Imagining that she would find the red-haired soldier she had earlier hit over the head, she recalls “the silence in the hotel room; and all at once a fit in a front room, the silence, the nasty talk behind the garage . . . so that in a flash there came in her an understanding . . . a feeling of cold surprise” (155) as she realizes the sexual dangers of the world. Then all at once the screen door of the Blue Moon slammed, and the Law said, “’Here’s your Daddy come to take you home’” (158). Her freakish adventures of this transitional period at an end, she returns home to the next stage of her life.
In the next paragraph, after her Daddy has rescued her from her own misadventure, we are told that the seasons have changed; it is November, “Frances was now thirteen,” she and her father were moving to the suburbs to share a home with Aunt Pet and Uncle Ustace; Berenice will marry T. T.; John Henry has died of meningitis; and Frances has a new friend, Mary Littlejohn, a girl with similar interests in the arts. The transitions, changes, the movements of life that Frankie experiences and the novel recounts are normal and queer at the same time. And necessary, for young people but also for the nation and the world.
Set in the Southern town of Columbus, Georgia during the turmoil of WWII, the novel situates Frankie’s coming of age story in the local context of Southern politics of race, gender, and class and in the global context of a world fraught by violence and conflict. Doing so gives Frankie’s story weight and positions it as a metaphor for the uneasy transitions on the cusp of occurring at the regional and national levels. Freighted with the queerness of sex, her initiation into the adult world is also charged by reminders of war, violence, political turmoil, by the larger moral issues and questions of identity that conflict instigates. Reminders of the war and the region’s connections to the larger world weave in and out of Frankie’s story: her brother’s military assignments, the soldiers that permeate her town, the red-haired soldier who tries to take advantage of her and whom she fears she has killed, a conversation with Berenice about a new world in which there were “No killed Jews and no hurt colored people. No war and no hunger in the world” (97). Talking of a world undergoing violent change and contestation, Berenice and Frankie imagine a different kind of transition, one in which there is no violence, expect for one War Island for those who want to fight, a world in which there is no racial prejudice, poverty or hunger, one in which there “would be no colored people and no white people” and where “people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls” (97). This may be what Mc Cullers has in mind when she describes Democracy as “intellectual and moral freedom, the liberty to work and live in the way most productive for us, the right to establish individual spiritual values—that is the breath of the American ideal” (“We Carried Our Banners” 224). Getting to that ideal, the novel implies, is queer and requires a queering or deconstructing of the so-called “normal” order of things.
Harper Lee writes another Southern girl’s coming-of-age story in To Kill a Mockingbird. Set in a small Alabama town, the novel follows Jean Louise Finch aka Scout as she witnesses the prejudice, racism, and hypocrisy of her town, assessing them against ideals of democracy and human decency. Told from the point of view of a mature Scout, the novel begins, “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. . . . When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, . . . said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out” (3). Framed by the night Jem got his arm broken, the novel begins with a series of childhood pranks to tease out the reclusive, “phantom” Boo Radley who lives in a shuttered home nearby (8). Soon enough, the story begins to trace Scout’s intellectual and moral education in the context of the racism and hypocrisy of her 1930’s small town when her lawyer father, Atticus Finch, takes on the impossible, already-failed defense of Tom Robinson, a black man unjustly, spitefully accused of raping Mayella, one of the Ewell clan, a set of people occupying the lowest rung of white society in this small town.
Although Scout’s Aunt Alexandra hopes to make a little lady of this tomboy who wears overalls and eschews girlish activities for adventures with Jem and Dill, the boy with the fantastic imagination who visited them in the summers, Scout’s real initiation begins when townspeople begin calling Atticus a “n . . . lover” (114). Her education about the adult world is shaped by her growing awareness and understanding of the racism that pervades the town and its politics. These teachings occur on several occasions in the novel, beginning when a mob confronts Atticus outside the jail that houses Tom Robinson and during the tense trial as Atticus exposes the truth about the so-called rape through his examinations of the witnesses. Standing in the balcony with Reverend Sykes and the Black community, Jem, Dill, and Scout hear the unanimous guilty verdict and are moved to tears by the unfairness of the racial politics that stains the town’s legal institutions. Then, at one of Aunt Alexandra’s teas, she overhears the self-centered, racist attitudes of the Christian ladies who feel put out by their cooks and field hands who are sulky and “’just dissatisfied’” after the verdict. Their level of hypocrisy is exposed as Mrs. Merriweather recounts, “’Sophy,’ I said, ‘you simply are not being Christian today’” (245). After the imprisoned, hopeless Tom is shot seventeen times trying to escape, Scout learns the hard truth about Southern justice: “Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed” (254). Schooled in the principles of democracy and the evils of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, she gets another lesson in racist hypocrisy when her teacher says, “’Over here we don’t believe in persecuting anybody. Persecution comes from people who are prejudiced’” (258). When Scout overhears Miss Stephanie Crawford saying, “It’s time somebody taught ‘em a lesson, they were getting’ way above themselves, an’ the next thing they think they can do is marry us,” she questions Jem, “how can you hate Hitler so bad an’ then turn around and be ugly to folks right at home—” (260). It strikes her as odd, queer, that people can hold two disparate ideas about humans and prejudice instead of extending the concern for one group to the people close to home. The final lesson in her coming-of-age saga takes place on the night that frames the novel: Mr. Ewell’s vengeful attack on her and Jem after the Thanksgiving pageant and Boo Radley’s protection of the children. After the doctor has tended to Jem’s arm, and after Scout escorted the reticent Boo back to his home, she imagines life from his perspective as he had watched Scout and Jem, “his children,” over the years. Scout remarks, “As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn’t much else left for us to learn” (296). Coming of age at a time of historical and moral turmoil, Scout gains political understanding and emotional maturity when she puts herself in the shoes or mind of another person, Boo, to see life from his point of view.
Harper Lee may not have used the word “queer” as Carson McCullers does, but she sketches a South just as odd, strange, freaky, and queer. Clearly some of her characters, like Dill, Boo Radley, and Mr. Ewell are quirky, freakish. Just as clear, the crooked, racist, hypocritical society, the crimes against Tom Robinson, and the persecution of the Jews are queer because they run crosswise to the ideals of democracy and humanity. And when Lee has Scout learn to look at life from Boo’s perspective, she engages in deconstructing accepted ways of looking at identity. Like McCullers, Lee disrupts accepted notions about girlhood, identity, and the South, showing that they are not easily defined but are instead complicated and complex.
As Lee traces Scout’s coming of age, she seems to imply that if the South, the nation, could look at life from the perspective of other people, like its Black citizens, it too might “get grown.” Both The Member of the Wedding and To Kill a Mockingbird suggest that the coming of age of their young protagonists represents a metaphor for national transitions that are on the cusp of occurring at mid-century when these novels were published. At stake are not only individual identity and the tests the girls face in their hometowns, but a national identity tested on the field of institutions and the people who create and manage them. Within the confines of the novels their authors created, Frankie and Scout passed their tests. Will the nation pass its test? Will it ever mature morally?
Works Cited:
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Reader’s Digest Edition. Boston: Haper Collins, 1960.
McCullers, Carson. The Member of the Wedding. Boston: Harper Collins, 1946.
-----. “We Carried Our Banners—We Were Pacificists, Too.” In Carson McCullers: The Mortgaged Heart, Selected Writings. Edited by Margarita G. Smith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. 221-226.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Introduction to the Mariner Edition.” In Carson McCullers: The Mortgaged Heart, Selected Writings. Edited by Margarita G. Smith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971, xiii-xviii.
Willis, Glenn. “Mental Illness, Alcoholism, and Echoes of the Joycean Epiphany in McCullers’s Short Fiction.” In Understanding the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers. Edited by Alison Graham-Bertolini and Casey Kayser. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 84-101.