The Member of the Wedding

Member of the Wedding, The (1950), a play by Carson McCullers. [ Empire Theatre, 501 perf.; NYDCC Award.] Frankie Addams (Julie Harris), a lonely, sensitive twelve‐year‐old girl, lives in a small southern town with a widowed father, who ignores her, and Berenice Sadie Brown (Ethel Waters), the warm, understanding, thrice‐married “Negro” cook. Only Berenice and Frankie's bespectacled six‐year‐old cousin John Henry West (Brandon de Wilde) make life bearable for Frankie until her brother Jarvis (James Holden) returns from the army and asks her to be a member of his wedding party. Frankie is thrilled, then shattered when she realizes that she cannot accompany them on their honeymoon, as she had expected to do. Although John Henry dies of meningitis and Berenice leaves to get married again, the first stirrings of adolescent romance promise better days for Frankie. The play was adapted by the playwright from her novel of the same name. Although most critics had initially held serious reservations about the work, questioning the play's construction, the luminous performances made the Robert Whitehead offering a surprise hit, capping Waters's career and launching Harris into stardom. Revivals by the Phoenix Theatre in 1975, with Mary Beth Hurt and Marge Elliott, and by the Roundabout Theatre in 1989, with Amelia Campbell and Esther Rolle, confirmed the play's stage worthiness.

Regarded by many critics as Carson McCullers's most accessible work, The Member of the Wedding is a sensitive portrayal of twelve-year-old Frankie Addams. McCullers was able to finish the novel with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, and several summers at Yaddo, a writers' colony in New York. Much of the material for the novel is autobiographical. The town in which Frankie lives is based on McCullers's hometown of Columbus, Georgia. McCullers's father, like Frankie's, was a jeweler, and her family had employed African-American servants in her childhood home. Many of Frankie's feelings of awkwardness are drawn from McCullers's own memories of what it was like to be twelve years old. She, like Frankie, felt like a gangly misfit whose tomboyish ways made it difficult to fit in with boys or girls her age.

At the urging of her friend Tennessee Williams, McCullers's adapted the novel into a play. The play was highly successful, opening on Broadway in 1950 and lasting for fourteen months and 501 performances. In addition, the play received a number of prestigious awards. Despite the popular and critical success of the play, most critics agree that some of the insight into the characters is lost on the stage. It is just such insights, along with believable characters, a smooth writing style, and an unsentimental tone that continue to impress readers and critics alike.

Carson Mccullers 1950

Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding is only one of two plays written by the author and by far the most successful. Adapted from her 1946 novel of the same name, Member was first produced at the Empire Theatre on Broadway in 1950. McCullers had only seen several professional theatrical productions — two on Broadway (Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie) — prior to her attempt at adapting her work for the stage. McCullers undertook the task when encouraged by Williams, who had read the novel and was greatly impressed with its potential for the stage. The veteran playwright invited McCullers and her husband to his home in Nantucket, where he offered his advice on the novel’s adaptation (later, he was also instrumental in obtaining financial backing and production staff for the play’s bow).

Though personal obstacles prevented a speedy transformation from page to stage, Member’s 1950 debut was an immediate success, running for 501 performances on Broadway. It won several prestigious awards for McCullers, including the New York Dramatics Circle Award for best play, two Donaldson Awards (for best play and best first play by an author) and the Theatre Club, Inc.’s gold medal for best playwright of the year. After its Broadway run, the play was produced for a national tour and a feature film. This is one of the few instances in which an author successfully adapted their own work to the stage, and it led to McCullers’s membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Though McCullers is primarily known as a novelist, critics praised her dramatic interpretation of The Member of the Wedding, in great part due to the stylistic chances the play takes. Critics lauded her imaginative emphasis on character, emotion, and mood over the more traditional dramatic elements of plot and staging. In an unconventional move, almost all of the play’s dramatic action takes place off stage (including the wedding of the title). Some critics found this lack of plot to be a great weakness. Others, however, found the author’s focus on such an unusual protagonist (Frankie) and the play’s overwhelming theme of loneliness to be a breath of fresh air and a unique perspective. Even McCullers was said to be surprised by the acclaim. The Member of the Wedding proved that mainstream dramatic productions could focus on emotional states in favor of narrative thrust. That so many viewers were able to identify with the plights of Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry testified to this fact. While late-twentieth century appraisals of the play have tended to focus on the racial aspects of the play — particularly the second-class citizenship of Berenice and Honey — McCullers’s work is still highly regarded for its sensitive examination of adolescent alienation.

The Member of the Wedding
First edition cover
Author	Carson McCullers
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	None
Subject(s)	None
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Houghton Mifflin Company
Publication date	1946
Media type	Print
Pages	176 pp (paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 9780618492398 ISBN 0618492399
OCLC Number	57134632

The Member of the Wedding is a 1946 novel by Southern writer Carson McCullers. It took McCullers five years to complete—though she interrupted the work for a few months to write the short novel The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.^[1].

She explained in a letter to her husband Reeves that it was 'one of those works that the least slip can ruin. It must be beautifully done. For like a poem there is not much excuse for it otherwise.'^[2]

She had originally planned to write a story about a girl who was in love with her piano teacher. Then she had what she called 'a divine spark'. 'Suddenly I said: Frankie is in love with her brother and the bride...The illumination focused the whole book.'^[3]

Contents 1 Plot 2 Critical Interpretations 3 Adaptations 4 References in popular culture 5 References 6 External links

Plot

The main action of the novel takes place over a few days in late August. It tells the story of 12-year-old tomboy Frankie Addams, who feels disconnected from the world -- 'an unjoined person'. She dreams of going away with her brother and his bride-to-be on their honeymoon, following them to the Alaskan wilderness. She has no friends in the small Southern town in which she lives. Her mother died giving birth to Frankie and her father is a distant, uncomprehending figure. Her closest companions are the family's African American maid, Berenice Sadie Brown, and her six-year-old cousin, John Henry West.

The novel is more concerned with the psychology of the three main characters and an evocation of the setting than with incident. Frankie does, however, have a brief and troubling encounter with a soldier. Her hopes of going away having been disappointed—her fantasy destroyed—a short coda reveals how her personality has changed. It also recounts the fate of John Henry West; and Berenice Sadie Brown's future plans.

Critical Interpretations

The Member of the Wedding is told from the point of view of Frankie, who is a troubled adolescent. But for some critics it is a mistake to view The Member of the Wedding as simply a coming of age novel—a ‘sweet momentary illumination of adolescence before the disillusion of adulthood’^[4] , as it is sometimes regarded. Or as Patricia Yaeger puts it ‘an economical way of learning about the pangs of growing up’^[5].

For Yaeger and the British novelist and critic Ali Smith this is to sentimentalise the work. They suggest that such a reading misses much of its profundity, darkness and what Smith calls its ‘political heft’.^[6]. It should be seen, according to Smith as a ‘very funny, very dark novel’, and a ‘combination of hope, hopelessness and callousness.’ Its theme, says Smith, is 'why people exclude others and what happens when they do.'

Other critics, including McKay Jenkins,^[7], have highlighted the importance of themes of racial and sexual identity. Frankie wishes people could ‘change back and forth from boys to girls’. John Henry wants them to be ‘half boy and half girl’. Berenice would like there to be ‘no separate colored people in the world, but all human beings would be light brown color with blue eyes and black hair.’ For them, Jenkins suggests, the ideal world would be 'a place where identity…is fluid, changeable, amorphous.’

Another critic, Margaret B McDowell has also stressed the role of Berenice Sadie Brown (and to a lesser extent John Henry West) in counter-pointing Frankie’s story.^[1]

Adaptations

The book has been adapted for the stage, motion pictures, and television.

McCullers herself adapted the novel for a Broadway production directed by Harold Clurman. It opened on January 5, 1950 at the Empire Theatre, where it ran for 501 performances. The cast included Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, and Brandon De Wilde.

Waters, Harris, and De Wilde reprised their stage roles, with Arthur Franz, Nancy Gates, and Dickie Moore joining the cast, for the 1952 film version. The screenplay was adapted by Edna and Edward Anhalt and directed by Fred Zinnemann. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Julie Harris, in her debut screen appearance.

A 1982 television adaptation, directed by Delbert Mann, starred Pearl Bailey, Dana Hill, and Howard E. Rollins Jr..

The 1997 film version, adapted by David W. Rintels and directed by Fielder Cook, starred Anna Paquin, Alfre Woodard, Corey Dunn, and Enrico Colantoni. Rintels used the original novel rather than the play as his source material.

The Young Vic theatre, in London, produced the stage version of The Member of the Wedding in 2007, directed by Matthew Dunster Frankie Adams was played by Flora Spencer-Longhurst and Berenice Sadie Brown by Portia, a member of Philip Seymour Hoffman's LAByrinth Theater Company.

References in popular culture

Text from the 'The Member of the Wedding' was used by Jarvis Cocker on his debut album, 'Jarvis'. It forms the introduction to the 11th song on the album, Big Julie and consists of his re-writing of the opening lines of the book. In the original these are: "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 who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid."

References

1. ^ ^{a b} McDowell, Margaret B. Carson McCullers, Boston, 1980
2. ^ quoted in Carson McCullers:A Life, Josyane Savigneau, London, 2001.
3. ^ Letter to Tennessee Williams, quoted by Josyane Savigneau,Carson McCullers: A Life
4. ^ Ali Smith, Introduction to The Member of the Wedding , London, 2004
5. ^ Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, Chicago, 2000
6. ^ Ali Smith, Introduction to The Member of the Wedding
7. ^ McKay Jenkins The South in Black and White, Chapel Hill, 1999

External links

• The Member of the Wedding at the Internet Movie Database
• The Member of the Wedding at Allmovie
• The Member of the Wedding at the TCM Movie Database

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