Essay About Older Brother Jarvis Returns And Teen Years

The Member of the Wedding
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The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers is
the story of an adolescent girl who triumphs over loneliness
and gains maturity through an identity that she creates for
herself in her mind. It is with this guise that twelve year old
Frankie Addams begins to feel confident about herself and
life. The author seems to indicate that one can feel good
about oneself through positive thinking regardless of reality.
The novel teaches that ones destiny is a self-fulfilled
prophesy, seeing ones self in a certain light oftentimes
creates an environment where one might become that which
one would like to be. The world begins to look new and
beautiful to Frankie when her older brother Jarvis returns
from Alaska with his bride-to-be, Janice. The once clumsy
Frankie, forlorn and lonely, feeling that she “was a member
of nothing in the world” now decides that she is going to be
“the member of the wedding.” Frankie truly believes that she
is going to be an integral part of her brothers new family and
becomes infatuated with the idea that she will leave Georgia
and live with Jarvis and Janice in Winter Hill. In her scheme
to be part of this new unit, she dubs herself F. Jasmine so
that she and the wedding couple will all have names
beginning with the letters J and a. Her positive thinking
induces a euphoria which contributes to a rejection of the
old feeling that “the old Frankie had no we to claim. Now
all this was suddenly over with and changed. There was her
brother and the bride, and it was as though when first she
saw them something she had known inside of her: They are
the we of me.” Being a member of the wedding will, she
feels, connect her irrevocably to her brother and his wife.
Typical of many teenagers, she felt that in order to be
someone she has to be a part of an intact, existing group,
that is, Jarvis and Janice. The teen years are known as a
time of soul-searching for a new and grown up identity. In an
effort to find this identity teens seek to join a group. Frankie,
too, is deperate for Jarvis and Janices adult acceptance.
Frankie is forced to spend the summer with John Henry, her
six year old cousin, and Berenice Brown, her black cook. It
is through her interactions with these two characters that the
reader perceives Frankies ascent from childhood. Before
Jarvis and Janice arrive, Frankie is content to play with John
Henry. When she becomes F. Jasmine and an imagined “we”
of the couple, she feels too mature to have John Henry sleep
over, preferring, instead, to occupy her time explaining her
wedding plans to strangers in bars, a behavior