Hung Around in Doorways:

Tomboy Heroine in Carson McCullerss The Member of the Wedding

Atsuko NISHIYAMA

In Carson McCullerss fiction, ones gender is often treated as one of the most important
elements that forms a human condition. The writer often unfolds her unique views on
peoples gender and sexuality through her characters. In her fictional world, there are
numerous characters who appear to transgress so called normative genders. Among those
characters, the most prominent ones are the boyish girls such as the narrator of a first-person
short story Like That (1936) and heroine named Mick Kelly in her first novel The Heart is
a Lonely Hunter (1940). In The Member of the Wedding (1946), McCullers focused solely on
the experiences of one such character: Frances Addams, a twelve-year old tomboy.
One of the key elements of this novel is heroines sense of being caught and loose. It is
expressed in the conversation between Frances and Berenice, an African-American
housekeeper and adviser of motherless Frances. Bernice explains that everyone is caught in
ones self. And she adds that the situation is more severe to her race:
We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we dont
know why. But we caught anyhow. [. . .] And maybe we wants to widen and
bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. [. . .] Everybody is caught
one way or another. But they done drawn completely extra bounds around all
colored people.1
Frances, on the other hand, asserts that people are not only caught:
I believe I realize what you were saying, F. Jasmine [Frances] said. Yet at the
same time you almost might use the word loose instead of caught. Although
they are two opposite words [. . .] . I mean you dont see what joins them
[people] up together. You dont know where they all came from, or where

I am grateful to Professor Takayuki Tatsumi of Keio University and Professor Momoko Watanabe of
Tokyo Metropolitan University who have read the draft of this essay and gave me a number of invaluable
suggestions.
1

Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (1946; New York: Penguin, 1962) 141. All further
page references to this edition are given in parentheses.

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theyre going to. [. . .] People loose and caught at the same time. Caught and
loose. (142-43)
Critical interpretations given to Frances caught and loose situation can be divided roughly
into two directions. One group of critics read it as the crisis common among all adolescents,
and thus regard this novel as a sensitive portrait of isolation (caught) and lack of
connection (loose). The other group of critics read this situation of the heroine as a
specifically female one.
This essay will briefly examine the latter groups appreciation of the heroine as a tomboy
fighting against the compulsory femininity. However, by relating McCullerss own
understanding of deviant gender with creation of her character, yet another gender-related
reading of heroine becomes possible. It allows us to see Francess waver between genders as
her nature. The encounter of Frances and Mary Littlejohn, who appears at the end of the
story, will then be examined in light of their shared nature.

1. Tomboy Heroinism
Frances Addams is introduced at the opening of the story as a twelve-year-old tomboy
dressed in a pair of blue track shorts and B.V.D. undervest (8). She is very tall for her age
with narrow shoulders, long legs and a hair cut like a boys, and is called by a boys name,
Frankie. As a person who belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world
(7), she starts to long for a connection. She detests the circumstances in which she is
caught, namely a Southern small town and heat of the kitchen where she spends the whole
summer with her six-year-old cousin John Henry West and a housekeeper Berenice Sadie
Brown. She dreams of Alaska where her brother stayed as a corporal in the army and of snow
that she has never seen. These longings symbolize her desire to escape for somewhere far
away and completely different from the summer kitchen.
Frankie starts to feel that she needs to run away in order to become a member of a bigger
world. Then she suddenly hits upon the idea that her brothers upcoming wedding will bring
her a solution. Thinking, They are the we of me (52; italics in original), she selfishly
decides to join her brother and bride and to go into the world with them. Being so absorbed
with the idea, she changes her name from Frankie to F. Jasmine which goes with the names
of the couple, Janise and Jarvis.
This desire of Frankies, a desire to go into the world is a familiar subject in Western
literature, especially in the forms of Bidungsroman. Thus the experience of Frances has been
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often regarded as epitome of the twentieth-century myth of adolescence (James 107).

However, a group of different critical reading of this text appeared in the 1960s.2 Francess
experiences in the story are interpreted by this group as a specifically female one, in spite of
her behaviors like a boy. Or rather, tomboyishness of the heroine itself makes this
interpretation possible.
Tomboyism is generally characterized by a girls preference for a boys clothes and
behaviors. It is associated with her desire to enjoy advantages of boys. Before adolescence, it
is often seen as a sign of independence and self-motivation and may even be encouraged to
the extent that it is easily linked to a sense of a girl identity. (Halberstam 6) However, as
Louise Westling states, as a girl, the tomboy is charming; as an adult she is grotesque (113),
a boyish girl would rarely be accepted when she reached her puberty. And if the girl still
persisted in her tomboyishness, she may have become a strange figure in the community.
Transformation into a lady was particularly required of a girl growing up in the South, the
land of Southern Belle, where McCullers herself spent her adolescence. In The Member of
the Wedding, Berenice says to Frances, You ought to fix yourself up nice in your dresses.
And speak sweetly and act sly (98). Berenice encourages Frances to do so in order to catch
a beau. Frances rigidly offends to the idea by saying I dont want any beau. What would I
do with one? (98).
Therefore, the critics who lead the interpretations of this novel with consciousness of
gender differences read it as a story of crisis concerning a tomboys coming of age in a male
dominant society. They read Francess heroinism in her resistance to such society and her
attitude of fighting a loosing battle against womanhood (Halberstam 6).
To appreciate Frances as a rebellious girl fighter is one possible way to read this story with
consciousness of heroines gender. However, when we notice that Frances keeps her gender
deviance even at the end of the story where she does not seem to fight or resist any longer, a
necessity to examine Francess gender in different light arises.

2. The Inversion Model and Transitivity of the Heroine

Judith Giblin James explains that the cause of blindness to gender difference before the 1960s
was the postwar celebration of consensus, whose effect in literary culture was to resolve internal
tensions in claims for unity and universality. As in the civic arena, James says, literary criticism persisted
in wrapping the problems of difference in a normative cloak of male, white, middle-class experience
(106).

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To consider Francess gender from different point of view, it is essential to start by examining
her position situated in the middle.
First, she is in her adolescence, existing on the border between childhood and adulthood. It
is made clear by the juxtaposition of the three main characters: Frances is caught between the
innocence of John Henry and rich experience of Berenice (Hassan 222). In addition, the three
days in this novel are exactly situated in the middle as the heroine remarks:
A last difference about that morning was the way her world seemed layered in
three different parts, all the twelve years of the Frankie, the present day itself, and
the future ahead when the J A three of them would be together in all the many
distant places. (73)
Although the future she dreams of does not come true because she does not succeed in
following the couple to their honeymoon, there is as great a change at the end of this story.
What is more significantly related to Francess identity is her gender which is situated on
the border between masculinity and femininity. Though this text is generally read critically
with much emphasis on Francess boyishness, she actually shows her waver between two
typical genders throughout the story. When Frances, Berenice and John Henry are gathered at
the kitchen table and judge the work of God and mention the ways how they improve the
world, she plans it so that people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls,
whichever way they felt like and wanted (116). As if to fulfill this plan, she changes her
appearances and her names from time to time. For example, she first appears in the text as
Frankie, dressed in the outfit like that of a boys and behave wildly. However, in the second
part of the novel, she wanders in town with the name F. Jasmine, in her pink organdie dress
and with lipstick and perfume on (61). She is perplexed with a young soldier who asks her
to have a date with him. Her behavior and action also change along with her costumes and
names.
This cross-gender characteristic bestowed on the heroine is actually influenced greatly by
the authors own view on deviant gender. McCullers herself was often dressed in a mans
clothes throughout her life. In addition, she related her cross-gender behaviors with her love
for women. Despite her marriage to Reeves McCullers, she fell in love with women
frantically, though not always accepted by the beloved. Judging by her ideas on her own
gender, she must have been influenced more by the older ideas of sexual inversion
populated by the European sexologists, though the Freudian idea about homosexuality was
becoming popular in America at the time. According to her biographer, McCullers was
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especially under a strong influence of Havelock Ellis, the author of Sexual Inversion, which is
second volume of his series of books titled Studies in the Psychology of Sex.3 She declared
herself as an invert, using the term Ellis employed to indicate person who is attracted
sexually to another person of his/her own sex.4 She was also deeply impressed by the
autobiography of Ellis. The book chronicles his relationship with his wife, who also was an
invert and whose situation was much like her own (Carr 168).
Elliss theory also equates gender-crossing and homosexual desire. It explains that certain
people are endowed with both by nature. It is stated, therefore, that a woman loving another
woman a more or less distinct trace of masculinity (Ellis, Sexual Inversion 133) has an
essential characteristic. In contrast to the Freudian psychological views which regard
homosexual desire as a developmental phenomenon, the inversion theory of Ellis holds that
sexual object choice is determined before birth. McCullers, who was affected greatly by his
ideas, once said to a friend, I was born a man (Carr 159).
This theory is mentioned as the inversion models by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in
Epistemology of the Closet. By using a term transitivity, Sedgwick explains that these
models locate gay people either biologically or culturally at the threshold between
genders (88, emphasis added). The word transitivity also describes perfectly of the
condition of Frances in The Member of the Wedding. She is obviously situated on the border,
or at the threshold, in Sedgwicks term. The old Frankie is, on the very opening page of the
novel, symbolically described as a person who hung around in doorways (1 emphasis
added).
By relating Francess position with the inversion model, two things implied in this novel
become clear. One of them is a possibility of a boyish girls lesbianism or bisexuality. And
the other is Francess transitivity as her nature. According to Elliss theory, crossing
genders is an inborn nature for a certain people. In this novel, transitivity is not a temporal
option given to the heroine, it illuminates her nature with which she was born. In other words,
doorway is not a mere place to pass over in order to become an adult. She is caught in

For details on the Freudian views on homosexuality, see Three Essays on the Theory of
Homosexuality (1905), especially The Sexual Aberrations (1905). For the difference of views between
Freud and Ellis, see Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State: Discourses of Homosexual Identity in
Interwar Britain by Chris Waters.
4

Ellis distinguished inversion, cases in which the sexual attraction to the same sex seems to be
deeply-rooted and organic from homosexuality, the general phenomena including sexual attraction to
persons of same sex acquired accidentally after birth. (Ellis, Sexual Inversion 35n1).

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there and cannot reach other people, and therefore, she is at the same time loose, being
unjoined by anyone.

3. Exchanging Secret Gazes

Taking into account that Francess transitivity is her nature, a change occurs to her now
called in her real name Frances- in the last part of the story is remarkable. This change is not
that of her transitivity itself, but that of her attitude toward it. And the appearance of another
girl named Mary Littlejohn who brings this change to Frances has greater meaning than it
appears. Mary does not actually shows up in the story but only gets into a conversation
between Berenice and Frances while they spend their last minutes together in the kitchen.
However, Mary must be considered as a key character to the conclusion of the story after
Frances fails both in going into the world with J A couple and escaping the town by herself.
The change occurs to the heroine is not, as mentioned previously, that of Francess nature.
Assuming Mary as a stereotypical female teenager, some critics read Francess becoming
friend with her as a sign of Francess abandoning disgust toward womanhood. More feminist
readings interpret it as Francess compromise (McDowell 94). They claim that she gives up
resistance and becomes a giddy teenager (Westling 131). Though in the last minutes of the
film version of The Members of the Wedding (1953), Frances, played by Julie Harris, is
dressed in an ordinary school-girlish outfit, no such change in her appearance is mentioned in
the text. And also in the film, Frances tells Berenice that she met Mary at the lipsticks and
cosmetic counter at the Woolworths. But the text only says, Frances had met Mary at a
raffle two weeks before (187). There is no obvious sign in the text that shows Francess
transformation into a typical teenager. Therefore, her cry of joy, Mary had picked me out to
be her most intimate friend. Me! Of all People! (187, emphasis added) reveals her
astonishment as well as happiness for being chosen.
Instead of the nature itself, her attitude toward it changes dramatically. Before this change,
the transitive nature of the old Frankie is deeply connected with her fear. Her feeling of terror
is emphasizes by the phrase she was afraid repeated again and again on the opening pages
of the novel. This fear is most clearly expressed through the image of the freaks at the show
in the annual exposition coming to town in October:
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. She was afraid of their long freak eyes. (27)
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Of all the freaks, The Half-Man Half Woman, a morphidite and a miracle of science is most
deeply related to Francess fear as Ellen Mores singles it out to describe the gothicness of this
novel (166). This freak is Frankies self-identification embodied on a person: the border
between masculinity and femininity is placed right in the middle of the body. Frankie is afraid
of the freaks, especially the morphidite, not because they are completely strange and
unearthly, but because they turn secret gazes on her with a certain intimacy, as if they saw
through her nature.
This fear seems to have disappeared at the end of the story by a friendship with Mary
Littlejohn. But then, what makes Mary pick up especially a girl like Frances of all
people? If Frances does not change essentially, why does Mary want to become a close
friend with her, a girl who does not belong anywhere? It may be possible to presume that
Mary has the same nature herself. Marys last name Littlejohn does not suggest, then, the
possibility of Frances ability to attract others (i.e. male friends) in the future (Edmonds
28). It gives a possibility to see Mary as a girl who has a little boy in her, like Frances herself.
Therefore, it is reasonable to conjecture that Mary has turned the same gaze with the freaks
at the show on Frances, looking at her in a secret way and tried to connect her eyes with
Francess, as though to say: I know you just like the freaks did. In other words, Mary, at a
glance, penetrates Frances real nature, the transitivity. An exchange of secret gazes
unnoticed by other people must have taken place between two girls. Just like the old Frankie
could not forget the eyes of freaks, she becomes almost obsessed with Mary Littlejohn. Of
course, the effects of the secret gaze of Mary on Frances, however, differ greatly from that of
the freaks. Instead of the fear of the spring and summer, she feels an instant shock of
happiness when she hears the doorbell that tells Marys arrival. (190).
Now that John Henry is dead of meningitis and Berenice is going to leave Frances as she
and her father are moving, Mary is emphasized as the real we of Francess who shares
same nature with her. They do not dream of going into the world as the old Frankie used to
dream when she was planning to escape from the town with her brother and his bride. She
used to imagine [t]he three of them go into the world and they would always be together
(57, emphasis added). Instead, future of Mary and Frances is planned as follows:
Mary is going to be a great painter and Frances a great poet- or else the foremost
authority on radar. [. . .] When Frances was sixteen and Mary eighteen, they were
going around the world together. (186, emphasis added)

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This change shows, not Francess giving up of the ambitions she used to have, but her
decision to keep standing or wandering at the threshold. It must be read as positive
self-recognition of her gender deviance.

Conclusion
By reading The Member of the Wedding with a focus on the transitive nature of Frances, what
McCullers as the author implies in the novel becomes clear. Knowing both the homophobic
atmosphere of the dominant culture and the loneliness of those who cannot fit into such
society, she throws her secret gaze on readers through the pages.
There is an episode that tells well of McCullerss ability to see a nature like that of hers in
others and connect eyes with them. Four years before her death, McCullers took a final trip to
the South and met a man named Gordon Langley Hall at a party. The writer studied him
closely and then said with a smile, Youre really a little girl. Hall, who was later discovered
as wrongly sexed at birth, remarked on the moment:
[N]o one had ever seen that in me before [. . .] . Carson, her senses sharpened by
her own affliction, saw me for what I was in a moment of truth and her heart went
out to me. I was a freak, yes, a freak like one of her own characters [. . .] . (Carr
520)
Finally, taking it into account that the last part of The Member of the Wedding tells a girls
acceptance of her nature with a help from another girl, it is possible to say that it has an
aspect of a coming out story. It generally includes the protagonists confession of
homosexuality, namely his/her coming out from a closet door. This novel may unfold similar
plot, not by showing the heroine coming out of the door, but by implying the very existence
of the door itself.

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Works Cited
Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. New York: Carroll, 1975.
Demons, Dale. Southern Writers Series: Carson McCullers. Austin: Steck Vaughn, 1969.
EllisHavelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1908.
---. My Life. Boston: Mifflin, 1939.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Homosexuality. 1905. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol.II. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961.
James, Judith Giblin. Wunderkind: The Reputation of Carson McCullers, 1940-1990. Columbia: Camden,
1995.
McCullers, Carson. Like That. 1936. Collected Short Stories of Carson McCullers. Boston: Houghton,
1998.
---. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. 1940. New York: Penguin, 2000.
---. The Member of the Wedding. 1946. New York: Penguin, 1962.
McDowel, Margaret B. Carson McCullers. New York: Twayne, 1980.
Mores, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Anchor, 1977.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.
Waters, Chris. Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State: Discourses of Homosexual Identity in
Interwar Britain Ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan. Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and
Desires. London: Polity, 1998.
Westling, Louise. Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers
and Flannery OConnor. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985.
Zinneman, Fred, dir. The Member of the Wedding. Perf. Julie Harris and Ethel Waters. Columbia Pictures,
1953.

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