In Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding once Frankie, the motherless, awkward, and frantic adolescent main character, recovers from her obsession with her brother and his bride, her smashed fantasy of getting out of her suffocating hometown, of becoming someone exceptional, she settles into a new friendship and way of belonging that alienates her friend and surrogate mother Berenice.

Frankie and her father are moving into a new home with her aunt and uncle and Berenice is leaving her role as caretaker of Frankie. Frankie’s younger friend John Henry has died, ending the trio of outsiders who populate the beginning of the book—Berenice, Frankie and John Henry. Now Frankie embraces a new sense of acceptance and belonging with a girlfriend from her school. That friend is coming over for a visit. Frankie is preparing a snack.

Frankie, who we have witnessed coming out of her skin through most of the novel as her growing body inspires feelings she does not understand, is now condescending and mean to her former friend and confidant Berenice, asserting her race, class and privilege over her in ways she did not before.

“There is no use our discussing a certain party. You could not possibly ever understand her. It’s just not in you.” She had said that once before to Berenice, and from the sudden faded stillness in her eye she knew that the words had hurt. And now she repeated them, angered because of the tinged way Berenice had said the name, but once the words were spoken she was sorry. “Anyhow I consider it the greatest honor of my existence that Mary has picked me out to be her one most intimate friend. Me! Of all people!”(160).

The novel ends  with Frankie and Berenice separating in this painful way as Frankie looks forward to fitting in with someone who appreciates Michelangelo and poetry like Berenice never could, or so she thinks. Is Frankie becoming a southern white woman with privilege? Whereas before Frankie felt herself to be an outsider in her own world, now she uses Berenice to assert her identity as different from. Berenice becomes the outsider, a role that, being African American, she is not unfamiliar with.

Are we happy about what has become of Frankie? What kind of life is Frankie heading toward? Conformity? She was rebelling against it all before and there was spark and there was genius but now she is almost lobotomized, dull, racist. Certainly no one we are interested in.

Is this a depiction of adolescence and the maturing into an adult, a coming of age story? Or is something else being communicated? Is McCullers insinuating that conformity is death to originality and creativity?

The same happens to Mick Kelly, the main female character in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers’ first novel. Mick, who has been an outsider quite similar to Frankie— in fact they could almost be the same character—gets lulled into taking a job because she has a momentary feeling of belonging. But it traps her and she can’t get out of it.

Mick is sitting on the porch with her family when her sister returns from work and says there is an opening at Woolworths. The family has been struggling financially since her brother shot the neighbor girl and they had to pay for her hospital bills and more. Her father’s job fixing clocks isn’t gaining ground. They have tenants in their home but many of them struggle to pay the rent. As the debts grow larger, collectors are on their back and come and take things away due to failed payments.

Mick is still only a freshman in Vocational school. She has been an outsider in the family until now, until her sister comes home and tells the family about an opening and instead of encouraging Mick to take the job, they all say she must stay in school. It is too early for her to work.

“Nobody ought to work until they’re around sixteen. Mick should have two more years and finish Vocational—if we can make it.”

“Even if we have to give up the house and move down in mill town,” their Mama said. “I rather keep Mick at home for a while.”

For a minute she had been scared they would try to corner her into taking the job. She would have said she would run away from home. But the way they took the attitude they did touched her. She felt excited. They were all talking about her—and in a kindly way. She was ashamed for the first scared feeling that had come to her. Of a sudden she loved all of the family and a tightness came in her throat.

“About how much money is in it?” She asked.” (131).

Once she takes the job and moves into that life, Mick changes. Suddenly she cares how she looks and stops hearing the music that she previously accessed with her creativity in her “inside room.” Mick is making money and can buy herself things and help out her family:

“But now no music was in her mind. That was a funny thing. It was like she was shut out from the inside room. Sometimes a quick little tune would come and go—but she never went into the inside room with music like she used to do. It was like she was too tense. Or maybe because the store took all her energy and time”(146).

Like Frankie at the end of The Member of the Wedding, Mick loses her outsider status at the end of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and therefore her creativity and spark. Yes, a full time job can often deplete our creative juices but does it have to take away the inside room? Is the only way to retain this, according to McCullers, to maintain the uncomfortable outsider status and identity?

Both characters —Frankie and Mick—could easily also be McCullers. Did McCullers resist conformity in her own life because of this?

And yet not everyone has the privilege of belonging. As we see with Berenice and the persistent Jewish characters populating McCullers writing, people who have always been othered, blacks in the United States, Jews in the modern era, mentally ill, physically disabled, and neurodivergent members of the population do not have the privilege of deciding whether or not to take on the identity of outsider. The culture has decided that for them.

Is this deliberate or does McCullers actually feel herself to be like them? Equal in her otherness, outsiderness?

The Lonely Hunters

The group of outsiders The Heart is a Lonely Hunter focuses on all believe they have found a friend in the deaf-mute character John Singer. It seems to be because he listens to them, or they think he does, that they feel he “understands” them.

“One by one they would come to Singer’s room to spend the evening with him. The mute was always thoughtful and composed. His many-tinted gentle eyes were grave as a sorcerer’s. Mick Kelly and Jake Blount and Doctor Copeland would come and talk in the silent room—for they felt that the mute would always understand whatever they wanted to say to him. And maybe even more than that” (39).

Doctor Copeland, a black doctor determined to create exceptional blacks as the way out of racism has alienated himself from his own children who cannot live up to his expectations. Jake Blount, determined to lecture all who will listen about Marxism and the follies of the current culture through raging alcoholic tirades is completely ignored, and Mick, who wanders around dreamily, listening to music on other people’s radios fantasizing of being a musician herself, literally stalks the man.

“In the inside room, along with music, there was Mister Singer. Every afternoon as soon as she finished playing on the piano in the gym she walked down the main street past the store where he worked. From the front window she couldn’t see Mister Singer. He worked in the back, behind a curtain. But she looked at the store where he stayed every day and saw the people he knew. Then every night she waited on the front porch for him to come home. Sometimes she followed him upstairs. She sat on the bed and watched him put away his hat and undo the button on his collar and brush his hair. For some reason it was like they had a secret together. Or like they waited to tell each other things that had never been said before.

He was the only person on the inside room. A long time ago there had been others”(98).

Singer has nothing else to do so he tolerates their company. And maybe it soothes his own outsider feelings but in the end, it is not what he is looking for. He even tries to bring them together one time in his room, but none of them can understand the other once in the same room. Nor do they try.

He longs for someone who can listen to him in his own language. His hands, yearning to move and speak, he constantly restrains in his pockets.

Singer spends all his energy on one man, the Greek, Spiros Antonapoulus, also a deaf-mute he lived with and felt at home with. It was Spiros he thought he belonged to. And he thought Spiros belonged to him. But Spiros has been taken away, institutionalized after an illness that left him mentally incapacitated and unable to function in a way others felt comfortable with.

The lonely hunters, focused on themselves and their outsider identities only, fail to learn anything about their friend John Singer. Upon learning of the death of Spiros, having lost his only opportunity for belonging, Singer takes his own life.

Wunderkind

“Wunderkind” (1936), one of McCullers earliest publishing successes and a short story for which she is well known, reveals this existential fear: To fit in. To not be exceptional. To be normal. To not be an outsider. To be regular.

If you belong then you are not different. You are not special. You are the same. Ultimately it is true of all of us. We are all the same. We all are born and we all die and nothing we do in between actually matters at all. To strive to be special, exceptional, is a trap.

In the story, Frances, the main character is surrounded by Jews— outsiders without trying. And outdone by a Jewish violinist, Heime, who according to Frances and others is actually truly exceptional. But she isn’t and has to accept this. She even wonders if the talented violinist is exceptional because he is Jewish. Once again, this white character wants to be an outsider but is cursed with the privilege of belonging. Her teacher:

“Mr. Bilderbach’s father had been a Dutch violinist. His mother was from Prague. He had been born in this country and had spent his youth in Germany. So many times she wished she had not been born and brought up in just Cincinnati. How do you say cheese in German? Mister Bilderbach, what is Dutch for I don’t understand you?”(79).

Carson McCullers was white. She was female and gender divergent but was that really enough to give her an outsider status? Artists of many generations have fabricated identities to make themselves outsider. We have all seen them, waltzing into rooms and parties flamboyantly showing off that they are “not like us”— meaning better than.

McCullers created an outsider identity as well but was it all done to hide the real outsider?

Youth wears this well. Many people in their youth feel victimized by what they perceive to be an outsiderness. Especially white youth, who are not outsiders in white supremacist cultures and yet long for this special title, to make them stand out— to make them exceptional.

The exceptional youth is paraded everywhere these days and it is very damaging. To feel the only way you get approval and attention, indeed love, is by being exceptional creates intense loneliness. McCullers was victim of this as well. Her parents decided she was exceptional and told her so and expected it of her. She believed them and proved them right by becoming a star.

She began as a musician. She was going to be a concert pianist. But when she understood that was not going to make her exceptional or a star she stopped.“Wunderkind”captures the moment when she realizes that as a pianist she is not exceptional. She is indeed not a Wunderkind.

In her real life she gave up music and became a writer. She succeeded in writing an exceptional book, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. But she was hiding things in her books. Hiding her own sexuality and the true story of her outsiderness.

And so what is the true tragedy here? What is McCullers striving so hard to hide by writing that belonging is a trap, boring, death to creativity. Her own homosexuality?

Closeting and recloseting

According to Jenn Shapland’s book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, this seems to be the case. Shapland, a writer and archivist, details her years of combing through the McCullers archive and outing herself and McCullers in the process. The outing is not as simple as it sounds. Shapland exposes the closeting experience of lesbians and the recloseting of literary lesbians by subsequent biographers and historians along with the agonizing and repeated demand and need for “proof”that two women were in an intimate relationship in order to make writing about their partnerships legit.

If writing about them isn’t legit “without proof” then does that make their relationships and their personhood not legit? This toxic pattern has hurt so many people and continues to hurt in its closeting and delegitimizing female partnerships and love affairs What other relationships require “proof” of intimacy to be taken seriously?

“It is by no means easy to track or trace relationships between women, past or present. Women’s relationships with other women are often disguised: by well-documented marriages to men, by a cultural refusal to see what is in full view or even to believe such relationships exist. In a world built by and for men and their pursuits, a woman who loves women does not register—and is not registered, i.e., written down. Reasons for this layering upon the other: a lesbian refuses to call herself a lesbian, misidentifying from the term and its associations for reasons personal or political. A woman does not know she is a lesbian—because she does not ever have a relationship with another woman, or because she is not aware that the relationships she engages in could be called lesbian. I didn’t call myself one for several years: hence the “roommate.” Or, as in Carson’s case, her own self-understanding and identification are difficult to determine due to the efforts of those who outlived her and pushed her into the closet.

It was her retroactive closeting by peers and biographers that I found most disturbing. I took it personally. I began to feel unreal, deranged. If Carson was not a lesbian, if none of these women were lesbians, according to history, if indeed there hardly is a lesbian history, do I exist?”(21).

Had McCullers come out and written openly about her experience as a lesbian would her life have been different? Would she have been able to shed the outsider identity and find belonging in her community of lesbians? Still she would experience an outsider status, because in the straight world perceived “deviants” are othered. McCullers chose not to take the risk to expose her true outsiderness and continued trying to define her otherness with her exceptionalism.

Perhaps Carson McCullers could not bear the sting of being a true outsider. An out lesbian.

If this is the case then we should listen to Jenn Shapland and see that Frankie was in love with her brother’s bride and that is what forced her into the closet at the end of the book— and that is why it felt like death. Singer was in love with Spiros and this is the deeper pain that haunted him, his own closeting of that love. That exceptional child named  Carson Smith was queer and it is this she writes about over and over again. The pain of being in the closet and the loneliness of having to search for love and approval through being exceptional rather than just for who she was.

The truth is belonging feels good. It is a necessary human condition which McCullers also reveals in her writing. Why should anyone need to be outside to be themself? And why should anyone be called outside because of their skin color, class, race, sexual orientation or religion, physical or mental ability? Why do humans constantly do this? It’s all a trap of pain and loneliness and it is all explored in McCullers art as well as her life.

Carson McCullers in a Nasty Woman Writer.

© Theresa C. Dintino 2024

Works Cited:

McCullers, Carson. The Ballad of the Sad Café and other stories. Mariner Books, 2005.

_________________. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Houghton Mifflin, 1940.

_________________. The Member of the Wedding. Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

Shapland, Jenn. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. Tin House Books, Portland, OR. 2020.