Ghosts in "The Member of the Wedding"

Paper Summary:

This paper analyzes the role of ghosts in the plot, themes, and language of Carson McCullers's novel, "The Member of the Wedding." Using Judith Butler's theories on kinship and queer relationality in "Antigone's Claim," the paper argues that ghosts help the novel to present an expanded vision of the field of human love.

From the Paper:

Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding is, essentially, the story of a twelve-year-old girl named Frankie Addams searching for love and connection in a lonely world. Frankie's world is frightening, even nightmarish at times, and it is filled with the ghosts that inhabit her imagination and described in the textually ghostly terms of the unknown, the secret, and the unnameable. The figure of the "ghost" " as imagined by Frankie and as a primary descriptive device in McCullers' prose " quite literally haunts the novel, complicating its conceptions of human relationality and connection. The ghosts enable the novel to posit a tenuous definition of what it is to be a living human being; every living figure in the novel is not only deeply aware of the presence of non-living figures but is in constant danger of falling out of the realm of the living, of becoming a ghost, and every relationship between the living is negotiated over the presence of the dead. Ultimately, the novel's " and its characters " ghosts allow for the at once terrifying and redemptive possibility of relationships and identities that transgress not only normative societal boundaries but the boundaries between the living and the dead.

More papers on Ghosts in "The Member of the Wedding":

• Book Review # 93841 : "The Member of the Wedding"
• Book Review # 65306 : "The Member of the Wedding" by Carson McCullers"

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