Literary articles - Carson McCullers 2024

“Caught and Loose”: Southern Cosmopolitanism in Carson McCullers's The Ballad Of The Sad Café and The Member of the Wedding

Noah Mass

In December 1953, Carson McCullers returned to Georgia after having lived in Europe for several years. She had been commissioned to write an article about the state of her birth for Holiday magazine, a “glossy, lavishly illustrated” national travel pub-lication.1 McCullers's mandate, according to Virginia Spencer Carr, was to “publicize Georgia and attract people to the state as a vacationland,” but the magazine ultimately rejected the finished piece because of “a prejudiced southern editor who refused to see the South as it was.”2

However, perhaps the editor was unable to see the South as McCullers saw it. At certain moments in the article, to be sure, what McCullers writes might serve as promotion for a tour of the “authentic South.” For example, she treats her reader to evocative descriptions of the Georgia countryside in the fall, where the mountains “blazed with yellow, russet, and autumn red.”3 Elsewhere, she notes: “the traveler is struck by the number of barbecue stands,” many of which serve “real barbecue which is well-seasoned pork that has been roasted over a spit and basted with spices and condiments for a whole day.”4 But at other moments McCullers's tone shifts, and she denounces some of the traditions and myths that white southerners hold most dear. For example, in the course of recounting a meeting with Ralph McGill, the progressive editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, she defends Sherman's march through Georgia and burning of Atlanta during the Civil War—a signal event in white southerners' self-conception as wronged Studies in American Fiction 37.2 (2010): 225–246 © 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press victims of an oppressive North—with passages like this one: “Atlanta is one of the great geographical centers of the South and its burning was as necessary as in the last war the destruction of the Ruhr.”5

But it was not unusual for McCullers to celebrate southern regional particulars at one moment and compare the antebellum South to Hitler's Germany at another. Much of McCullers's work shows her reaching for a language that will allow her to articulate both her love for, and her antagonism against, the South of her birth, and doing so in the context of an emerging American global presence. When we examine the way in which McCullers negotiates among competing visions of what it meant to be “southern,” we see that her work points toward the kind of cosmopolitan tensions facing an increasingly transformed twenty-first century South. In The Ballad of the Sad Café and The Member of the Wedding, McCullers considers what such a southern cosmopolitanism might look like, were the South she knew ready to accept the expansive conceptions of race, gender, class, and place with which she increasingly identified.

The South and The World

When we think about the South “from a global perspective,” we are likely to imagine a series of correspondences between the American North-South divide and broader contemporary tensions regarding the West and the “Global South.” Jennifer Rae Greeson, in Our South, makes the argument that such correspondences have been inherent to American narratives since the founding of the Republic. Indeed, she shows us the ways in which American writers from Thomas Paine to W.E.B. Du Bois have presented the South as an unreconstructed “other” within the United States, but an other whose presence serves to remind an expanding and globalizing nation that it “emerged out of the ideological matrices of New World empire.”6

It is these tensions, between the South as “the internalization in U.S. culture of that which is openly disavowed” and the South as the domestic space upon which American imperialism and conquest can be rehearsed, that have often prompted southern writers to draw parallels between what their South has meant in American history and what it continues to mean in the American present. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. examines the ways in which a number of southern writers, William Faulkner and McCullers among them, did exactly that by constructing fictions which located elements of European fascism within southern settings and which enacted the democratic struggle against fascism within those settings. In particular, Brinkmeyer argues that McCullers “used her fiction to explore what she saw as both Fascism's dangerous psychology and its frightening manifestations within southern society.”7

Although McCullers certainly recognized parallels between southern life and totalitarianism (as we can see in her Holiday article), the global turn she made was more complicated than that. Throughout her life, McCullers was more concerned with the meaning of southern identity in an era of American global expansion. As Leigh Anne Duck has argued, “provincial cosmopolitans” like McCullers worked against the grain of regional parochialism in their texts and sought to make interventions in contemporary certainties about what counted as southern. In Duck's view, McCullers and other southern writers of her era did this by situating the South in relation to other spaces and by “demonstrating the ways in which aspects of regional life considered backward were comparable to cultural forms seen elsewhere and, accordingly, exemplified prominent patterns in global modernity.”8

In demonstrating global patterns of corresponding behavior and belief, these writers (Duck examines McCullers alongside Lillian Smith, Erskine Caldwell, and several others) were predicting a shift in southern identity that is endemic to the South's twenty-first-century cultural moment. It is this shift that Martyn Bone designates as a “transnational turn” in contemporary southern life, one in which the South, transformed by global flows of capital, information, and people, is “no longer (if it ever was) the rooted, backward-glancing locus of Agrarian lore.”9 James L. Peacock grounds this conception when he argues that, despite the continued cultural and political rhetoric of an antimodernist, “unreconstructed” South, many contemporary southerners are coming to share “a sense of community and identity beyond national, geographic, or other restrictive boundaries.” And what they are sharing with others beyond those boundaries is a sort of contingent regionalism, where what counts as regional for southerners comes to mean a series of cultural and community values that a southerner recognizes as less authentic than useful—useful when operating within a nation whose economic and cultural life is increasingly global in its reach.10

We can come to a clearer understanding of Duck, Bone, and Peacock's arguments about contemporary shifts in regional identity when we consider what cosmopolitanism itself has come to mean. Kwame Anthony Appiah has argued for a contemporary definition of the term as a belief that “we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship.”11 But in designating a cosmopolitanism grounded in ethical responsibility, Appiah is not arguing for a dilution of groundedness by some abstract sense of a universality of values, or of a rootlessness that supersedes ties to a specific geography: “The points of entry to cross-cultural conversations are things that are shared by those who are in the conversation. They do not need to be universal; all they need to be is what those particular people have in common.”12

If all this still seems unfortunately abstract, we should be aware that Appiah, Peacock, and others are less concerned with proposing or predicting specific political or social structures of global citizenship than they are in attempting to articulate the impact of contemporary global flows of information, money, and people on the lived experience of those who have historically resisted modernity by recourse to a notion of regional identity. Since the 1990s, as Mary E. Odem has pointed out, mass immigration from Latin America has given rise to “a new multiethnic South.”13At the same time, what Scott Romine refers to as “the balkanization of mediated space” in an environment of pervasive electronic media has caused the very concept of “southern” to become recontextualized. 14 In such an environment, southerners are being forced to recognize their regional lives in comparison to, and at times in conversation with, the lives of others who would formerly have been invisible to them, or else kept at a comfortably safe distance.

We might think of cosmopolitanism, then, as a shrinking of the distance between conceptions of regional and global, and the emergence of a narrative language which articulates that shrinkage. To be sure, cosmopolitan, as a term, certainly goes back a long way. We often think of it in terms of its Greek roots cosmos and polis—world and citizen—and thus a cosmopolitan is “a citizen of the world.”15 But although cosmopolitanism might be an ideal of global citizenship for some, the term is less a designation of a political or social goal than it is a description of a cultural process. Ulrich Beck makes this point when he argues that the increasing interconnectedness of world capital markets, international flows of people, and global exchanges of culture are examples of contemporary “cosmopolitanization.” This is “a process in which the universal and the particular, the similar and the dissimilar, the global and the local are to be conceived, not as cultural polarities, but as interconnected and interpenetrating principles.”16 We might say, then, that cosmopolitanism is what happens when people find themselves negotiating their sense of themselves as local subjects with increasing cognizance of their participation in larger, global networks and exchanges. Cosmopolitanism is not a state one reaches after having made some linear movement from rural backwardness to urban sophistication, nor is it an exchange of parochial boundedness for some larger, expansive vision of broader horizons. To be a cosmopolitan is to be involved in an act of circulation, where one balances and negotiates a series of geographically-based cultural, economic, and community ties.

A number of globalization theorists consider a cosmopolitan process as a pairing of the local and global dyad, as Beck does in the passage cited above.17 But for many southern whites, local places were often microcosms of southern regional identity, small places that stood in for a broader regional sensibility, and stages upon which regional tensions were enacted. Many white southerners who perpetrated violence against blacks and maintained Jim Crow segregation saw themselves as upholding the southern way of life from their local vantage points and playing their part in a broader southern belief in white racial hierarchy.18

Even for those southerners, however, regional identity was a fraught concept. When we think of regions, many of us often think of real places or “authentic” parts of nations which have otherwise been compromised by technology, population growth, environmental destruction, or simply by “the modern,” however we choose to define that term. But regions also provide, as they did for southerners who count themselves as regional subjects first and foremost, fuel for resistance to larger national projects. Frank Davey has considered this kind of regionalist resistance in terms of Canadian regionalism; he argues that rural Canadian subjects often find their identity as actors who are resistant to what they think the nation-state embodies: control, development, cultural homogenization, and change.19 But they also often deceive themselves into thinking their identity as regional subjects is somehow authentic, natural, and not complicit with the nation-state against which they array their regional sensibilities. Regionalism provides a sense of agency to local subjects, gives them a “resistant” relation to the nation as a whole, but it also masks the self-deception and ideological complicity in which that resistance is often engaged. Regions, then, are places that both regional and national subjects think they know, even though both have invested the concept of region with meaning in order to serve particular national and regional ends. And southern whites conceived of their regional selves, particularly in the years immediately prior to and during World War II, in an especially self-conscious and contradictory manner.

But the purpose of this essay is not to map this shift of southern regionalism from a conflation of resistance and complicity to a more contemporary project of transnationalism. Rather, I want to argue for Carson McCullers as a writer who imagined and longed for such a shift in southern identity at a time when the South was on the cusp of the massive changes brought by the Great Migration, the Civil Rights movement, and contemporary global flows of people and information. McCullers's work anticipates the effect on the South of such transformative events, and we can see in both The Ballad of the Sad Café and The Member of the Wedding a writer struggling to find a way to bring the regionally specific into conversation with, and perhaps confrontation with, an emerging sense of the globally different.

McCullers's Angle of Vision
At the time of her publishing success with her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), McCullers was thought of in some quarters as one of a group of new southern writers who held up the South to critical scrutiny—in good company with Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, and Faulkner, all three of whom W.J. Cash lumped together in 1941 as members of the “hate-and-horror school” of southern writers.20 But Richard Wright saw in her work a way of looking at the South that was unlike that of her literary contemporaries. In his August, 1940 review of that first novel, Wright argued:

To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.21

More than a few critics have pointed to this review and those lines as evidence of McCullers's elevated racial consciousness,22 as though Wright's praise simply authorized a white southerner like McCullers to write about blacks. But Wright's choice of words here is significant, for “angle of vision” was a phrase that he had used several years earlier, in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937). There, Wright called on black writers to recognize regionally based racial experience in terms of that experience's global context, and asked that his contemporaries come to see such experience in terms of its parallels to broader international, colonial, and postcolonial pressures. In saying that McCullers's “angle of vision” allowed her to “rise above the pressures of her environment,” Wright was not simply commending McCullers for painting authentic sounding black portraits. Rather, he saw McCullers's novel as expressing a particular relationship to region.

In articulating that relationship, McCullers did not deny the value of regional experience; rather, she privileged a negotiation between regionally specific cultural expressions, beliefs, behaviors, and histories, and global influences. In Wright's view, Mc-Cullers does not abandon her environment in this novel—she is still writing “southern fiction”—but in taking an objective step back from the South, McCullers finds a vantage point from which to place southern black and white characters within a global sweep. In effect, she maps southern black and white relations onto what Arjun Appadurai describes as a broader “ethnoscape.” Appadurai defines the term as the flow of human traffic in a postcolonial era and its influence on hitherto regionally bounded ethnic identities: “By ethnoscape I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest-workers, and other moving groups and persons constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree.”23

In McCullers's first novel, her “landscape of persons” serves to paint a portrait of the South as a contingent regional space, one whose black and white characters have the potential to recognize one another as regional players in a drama with global implications, and to see their southern lives as a necessary basis for making connections to international others. But that novel, like many of McCullers's early short stories, was one she wrote while still living in the South. In her 1948 essay, “How I Began to Write,” McCullers remarks that it was an imagined New York City that became, from her earliest days, “the mise en scène of the first novel I wrote when I was fifteen years old,” complete with anachronisms such as “ticket collectors on the subway” and “New York front yards.”24 The city represented a gateway that would transport her from the “feudal society” of the South to the expansive world she hoped to one day inhabit. In her mind, the “distant city of skyscrapers and snow” was no Leviathan waiting to swallow up the specialness of southern life, but a metropolitan platform from which she would “make my mark in the world.”25 Louis D. Rubin sums up many critics' readings of McCullers's New York longings as an abandonment of a provincial South she saw as irredeemable.26 But if McCullers's early vision of New York was that it would “make her dreams come true,” the New York in her fictions appears not as the national end point to an outward migration from the provinces, but as a symbol of an international expansiveness she wanted to interweave with her southern background.27

When we think of McCullers as having a global vision, we should consider that “global,” for McCullers and for many southerners, was less a specific set of international political, economic, or ideological structures and more of a generalized sense of openness, freedom, and movement. What counted as global for McCullers came into focus, for the most part, only when she contrasted this vague “global sensibility” with a regionalism she defined as bounded, caught, and restricted, but also resonant, communal, and resistant to the anonymity and homogenization that many southerners associated with modernity. In McCullers's work, the world tends to intersect with the South as a force that destabilizes racial and gender categories. But even as these destabilizations prompt southerners to transcend the particulars of their regional identities, they also afford them the opportunity to make use of those identities within a larger cosmopolitan conversation.

McCullers's first publication following The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections In A Golden Eye (1941), was written prior to her relocation with her husband, Reeves, to New York in mid-June 1940, and was initially serialized in two issues of Harper's Bazaar magazine.28 The novel is a brutal satire of Fort Benning, the Georgia army base where McCullers frequently sought refuge while an adolescent, and in it she skewered the base and its inhabitants as embodiments of both institutionalized racism and sexual repres-sion.29 Although Reflections in a Golden Eye won some praise among northern reviewers, one of its major effects was to widen the distance between McCullers and her former southern neighbors. Upon a brief return to her family home in 1941, an alleged Ku Klux Klansman called to say that he and his friends were going to get her that night. She had been a “nigger lover” in her first book, he said, and now she had proven herself “a queer,” as well. Carson's indignant father waited all night on the front porch of their Starke Avenue home to greet the Klansmen with a loaded shotgun and was disappointed when no one attempted to carry out the threat.30

McCullers's growing prominence as a writer served to publicize the longstanding ideological gap between herself and Columbus, but it is difficult to overstate the effect that moving to New York from the South had on her. The United States was moving closer to involvement in the Second World War throughout 1940 and 1941, and McCull-ers's move to New York coincided with that city's transformation into a focal point for America's rearmament. After her resettlement in a house on Middagh Street in Brooklyn during the autumn of 1940 following a separation from her husband, McCullers found herself in a New York whose international character was more apparent than it had been during her earlier forays to the city as a student. Sherill Tippins describes the New York that McCullers encountered in particularly lyrical terms:

That autumn of 1940, the Brooklyn waterfront had become an increasingly exciting destination. While the war had virtually ended the luxury liner traffic between Europe and New York, emptying many of Manhattan's piers, Brooklyn's docks served primarily cargo and were now benefiting from a frantic rerouting of world trade. African and South American freighters brought their aromatic spices, coffee, and other goods to Brooklyn instead of Britain or France, picking up American automobiles and manufactured goods for the journey home. . . . The few British and Dutch ships that arrived slipped into the docks with their guns and camouflage paint like harbingers of doom—the British freighters fetching food for their beleaguered homeland while the struggling Dutch maintained a single route between Brooklyn and the East Indies. 31

As the city around her grew more central to world events than it had been in her earlier fantasies, McCullers's social life became increasingly diverse. The house she occupied in Brooklyn was part of a communal experiment she had dreamed up with George Davis, her editor at Harper's. The idea was to create a salon of sorts, “a sanctuary for themselves and others who were also, for financial, political, or any other reason, finding it difficult to focus on their work.”32 Over the next year McCullers would share the house with the poet W. H. Auden, stripper-turned-writer Gypsy Rose Lee, Paul and Jane Bowles, Christopher Isherwood, and Richard Wright and his wife, Ellen, and their children.

In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the New York Café had been a grim joke; the inviting name of Biff Brannon's gloomy gathering spot for lost souls was an ironic symbol of just how far from the bright lights of New York the town's residents actually were. But in the Sand Street bars of Brooklyn, McCullers found herself entranced by the “dancing, music, and straight liquor at cheap prices” that the transient dockworkers enjoyed, and was fascinated by “the vivid old dowagers of the street” who have “a stable list of sailor pals and are known from Buenos Aires to Zanzibar.”33

It may have been at this point that McCullers began to see conjunctions between behavior that violated social conventions and gender norms and the destabilizing and disruptive effects of global expansiveness. Having become part of the artistic and intellectual milieu that centered around her new dwelling in Middagh Street, McCullers ventured forth one night with Auden and Davis: “it was at a bar in [Sand] Street . . . that I saw and was fascinated by a remarkable couple. Among the customers there was a woman who was tall and strong as a giantess, and at her heels she had a little hunchback. I just observed them once, and it was not until some weeks later that the illumination of The Ballad of the Sad Café struck me.”34 In McCullers's head, this scene of freakishness performed so publicly seemed to epitomize the end point of her South-to-North journey. Returning back to Georgia shortly afterwards, McCullers imagined the giantess and hunchback couple as agents who would transform a South of alienation and isolation into one that embraced contingency and difference.

A Southern Cosmopolitan Ideal
The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), originally published in a single issue of Harper's Bazaar, begins with a description of a desolate southern town where “the winters. . . are short and raw, the summers white with glare and fiery hot,” and where “on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do.”35This is similar to the description of the town in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, where “the sky was a glassy brilliant azure and the sun burned down riotously bright.”36 But in Ballad, the narrator does more than simply give a description. “When your shift is finished there is absolutely nothing to do” we are told, and the unseen narrator also reveals that there was once a café in the town which, though it has “long since been closed” is “still remembered” (Ballad 4). And it is the narrator who remembers it, looking around at the town's current desolation while also looking back towards its vanished glory. Quite unlike McCullers's previous texts, The Ballad of the Sad Café announces itself as being about place, and about place as more than a backdrop against which estranged southern characters contrast themselves. What happens in this story is important, but where it happens is even more so.

The narrator tells us that at one time Miss Amelia Evans, a “dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man,” lorded over the town (Ballad 4). She thrived in it economically, but excluded herself and was excluded from the social life of her neigh-bors—not that they had much of a social life, as they were “unused to gathering for the sake of pleasure.” There was mill work and “an all-day camp meeting” on Sunday, but “though that is a pleasure, the intention of the whole affair is to sharpen your view of Hell and put into you a keen fear of the Lord Almighty” (Ballad 22). But the town's poverty and religious fundamentalism changes when a hunchback named Lymon, who purports to be Amelia's “double first-cousin,” arrives in town and begins a relationship with her. Once the two move in together, the hunchback, “scarcely more than four feet tall” and “with crooked little legs [that] seemed too thin to carry the weight of his great warped chest and the hump that sat on his shoulders” (Ballad 7), transforms himself into a flamboyant dandy, and he and Amelia convert her general store into a café, “the only place of pleasure for many miles around” (24). As their relationship develops the café flourishes, becoming a haven and refuge for “bachelors, unfortunate people, and consumptives” (55). But in every way it becomes a symbol for a new kind of southern identity, a place in which the freakish Amelia and Lymon share their difference with the mill workers and “old country couples”: “the new pride that the café brought to this town had an effect on almost everyone, even the children. For in order to come to the café you did not have to buy the dinner, or a portion of liquor. . . . There, for a few hours at least, the deep bitter knowing that you are not worth much in this world could be laid low” (55).

The café represents McCullers's southern cosmopolitan ideal, a space where the embrace of otherness she found in her communal situation in Brooklyn and saw enacted in the Sand Street bar became regionalized by its projection onto the Columbus of her youth. In other words, the café allows for a negotiation between these figures' otherness and the sense of shared regional identity the townspeople earlier used to define themselves against the Amelias and Lymons in their midst. Rachel Adams argues that freakishness and queerness function in parallel in McCullers's work, and that those characters in her fiction who challenge normative categories of identity and sexuality highlight the “tyranny of the normal” in a “repressive social order unable to recognize the queerness at its center.”37 Similarly, Sarah Gleeson-White asks us to read Amelia's refusal to adhere to conventions of southern womanhood as a direct threat to the social order of the town.38 In Ballad, however, we see that repressive social order coming to terms with such challenges to normativity. The bond Amelia and Lymon shared may have seemed impenetrably other to some, but many in the town were more than willing to accept them and their alliance: “The good people thought that if those two had found some satisfaction of the flesh between themselves, then it was a matter concerning them and God alone” (Ballad 25).

What is significant in the novel is not the lovers' challenge to southern conventions of gender or behavior as such, but the effect the public display of Amelia and Lymon's alliance of strangeness has on the town. Once they are established as a couple, their café becomes a space in which disruption of all safe assumptions becomes expected and even celebrated: “When [Lymon] walked into the room there was always a quick feeling of tension, because with this busybody about there was never any telling what might descend on you, or what might suddenly be brought to happen in the room. People are never so free with themselves and so recklessly glad as when there is some possibility of commotion or calamity ahead” (Ballad 39). And this, we might say, is what McCullers's cosmopolitanism is ultimately all about. McCullers, while interested in what otherness actually meant, is even more fascinated with the way in which a confrontation with otherness served to throw the self-deception of normative white southerners into bold relief. More than heralds of social change, McCullers's freakish characters exist to force southerners to join in a larger conversation. Appiah speaks of cosmopolitanism in this way when he argues that “conversations across boundaries of identity—whether national, religious, or something else” don't need to lead “to consensus about anything, especially not values; it's enough that [they help] people get used to one another.”39 For McCullers, if southern society was going to change it would not be because intransigent southerners became reconstructed, but because they learned to find points of engagement with those whom they previously had ostracized.

In the novel's conclusion, however, McCullers's dream of placing her personal symbol of New York internationalism into engagement with her neighbors' southern regionalism collapses as quickly as she conjured it. The bleak finale of the novel, in which the café is destroyed when Lymon betrays Amelia and enters into an alliance with Marvin Macy, only underscores McCullers's certain knowledge that cosmopolitan interventions in southern regional identity could not persist in the South as it then stood. The selfish, acquisitive, materialistic agendas of people like Macy would win out over the sharing, exchange, and tolerance that the café symbolized and that McCullers dreamt of seeing in Columbus. At the novel's conclusion as in its beginning, bored, desperate creatures like the unseen narrator have “absolutely nothing to do in the town. Walk around the millpond, stand kicking at a rotten stump, figure out what you can do with the old wagon wheel by the side of the road near the church. The soul rots with boredom” (Ballad 70).

The Ballad of the Sad Café is a frustrated lament for the impossibility, as McCullers then saw it, of southerners bringing their regional lives into conversation with global experience. Following the narrator's admission of frustration, McCullers added a coda where the narrator witnesses a chain gang, “just twelve mortal men, seven of them black and five of them white boys from this county” sing a work song in unison: “the music will swell until at last it seems that the sound does not come from the twelve men of the gang, but from the earth itself, or the wide sky” (Ballad 70–71). But it isn't the work gang who recognize the relationship between the song and “the earth itself,” it is an alienated outsider like the narrator, saddened that the only choice is to recognize the latent but unrealized potential in white and black southerners to engage their voices with a chorus that spans the globe.

Southern Space, Cosmopolitan Self
The coda to Ballad asks us to see the shift in regional identity allowed by the café as both a missed opportunity and as a portent of things to come. In her next novel, The Member of the Wedding, a work she wrote concurrently with Ballad, McCullers continued to develop her project of imagining a cosmopolitan South. By 1946, the South's white and black populations had been transformed by both the New Deal and the war economy, and McCullers's novel is shot through with intimations that the South upon which she had projected her New York bar was on the verge of becoming something quite different all on its own.

The novel's protagonist, Frankie Addams, feels as though she is “an unjoined person,”40 and longs to leave the South for just about anywhere: “Every day she wanted more and more to leave the town: to light out for South America or Hollywood or New York City. But although she packed her suitcase many times, she could never decide to which of these places she ought to go, or how she would get there by herself” (Member 277). Frankie's wanderlust stems from a variety of sources: her sense of herself as somehow freakish because of her height and apparent gender ambiguity, and her sense that she is excluded, for unknown reasons, from the community of her peers. What seems to give Frankie a new sense of urgency to leave is her feeling that, just as the notion of normative gender is confining for her,41 the borders of her southern world are artificially constrained when she measures them in light of the United States' increasing global reach:

It was the year when Frankie thought about the world. And she did not see it as a round globe, with the countries neat and different-colored. She thought of the world as huge and cracked and loose and turning a thousand miles an hour. The geography book at school was out of date; the countries of the world had changed. . . . She wanted to be a boy and go to the war as a Marine. . . . The war and the world were too fast and big and strange. To think about the world for very long made her afraid. . . . She was afraid because in the war they would not include her, and because the world seemed somehow separate from herself. (Member 275)

Frankie's global yearnings are less an affirmation of the glories of war, though, than they are an acknowledgment of the way in which the war reveals that the boundedness of her southern existence is out of date. Listening to the radio, she hears “a mixture of many stations: a war voice crossed with the gabble of an advertiser, and underneath there was the sleazy music of a sweet band” (Member 263). The globally unfamiliar is seeping into the regionally familiar, and Frankie cannot help but compare the restrictions of her southern life to what she imagines is a whole world of experience that lies elsewhere. Frankie's yearnings to escape the South soon settle on a fantasy involving her brother, Jarvis, her brother's bride-to-be, Janice, and herself. Jarvis is a soldier stationed in Alaska and Frankie fantasizes that he and his new bride will take her away with them to travel the globe:

We will just walk up to people and know them right away. We will be walking down a dark road and see a lighted house and knock on the door and strangers will rush to meet us and say: Come in! Come in! We will know decorated aviators and New York people and movie stars. We will have thousands of friends, thousands and thousands and thousands of friends. We will belong to so many clubs that we can't even keep track of all of them. We will be members of the whole world. (356)

Harilaos Stecopoulus sees Frankie's fantasy as an embrace of another kind of normativity—internationalism as an accomplice of approaching American triumphalism: “No doubt influenced by media accounts of the delighted welcome accorded U.S. soldiers in Italy and France, Frankie imagines that the wedding troika will receive an enthusiastic embrace from all the world's peoples, irrespective of their particular attitudes toward the

United States.”42 But such a reading is not entirely fair: although it is clear that Frankie's language suggests a touristic attitude, we need to acknowledge that her obsession with foreignness stems from a need to connect her southern experiences to those of others, rather than a desire to sample from a buffet of foods of all nations. Her idea of membership in a club of world peoples may be naïve, ignorant of the racial, economic, and class disparities of those who actually populate that world, but we need to give Frankie her due: her particular, embracing vision of global identity exists overwhelmingly to counter the kind of disconnected, confining life she sees in the South around her.

For Frankie recognizes that, as estranged from the townspeople as she is, those townspeople are also estranged from one another. Discussing her frustrations with Berenice, her family's black house servant, she argues that her need to connect globally is a direct reaction to a fundamental problem with the way that her fellow southerners interact with one another: “You are walking down the street and you meet somebody. Anybody. And you look at each other, the eyes make a connection. Then you go off one way. And he goes off another way. You go off into different parts of town, and maybe you never see each other again. Not in your whole life” (Member 354). Berenice acknowledges this sense of disconnection, telling Frankie that “we all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we don't know why. But we caught anyhow.” As Berenice sees it, however, Frankie's physical departure from the South as she envisions it is not going to free her: “And maybe we wants to bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself.” And blacks in the South, Berenice reminds Frankie, are “caught worse than you is. . . . Everybody is caught one way or another. But they done drawn completely extra bounds around all colored people. They done squeezed us off in one corner by ourself. So we caught that first way I was telling you, as all human beings is caught. And we caught as colored people also” (Member 357).

It is clear to Berenice that Frankie's solution to southern “caught-ness,” to leave, will not solve the essential problem of southern identity. Berenice recognizes that she, too, is caught, limited to playing the role of mammy for this white family and imprisoned in a system of restricted opportunities. Nonetheless, as she explains, “we try in one way or another to widen ourself free”—in her case, by resonating with an affirmative southern African American community.43 She had lived for a time in Cincinnati with her first husband but returned to carve out a tolerable life for herself in the South: “While Frankie was thinking, Berenice had changed into her Sunday clothes, and now she sat reading a magazine. She was waiting for the people who were due to meet her at six o'clock, Honey and T.T. Williams; the three of them were going to eat supper at the New Metropolitan

Tea Room and sashay together around the town” (Member 278). Berenice loosened herself from the rigid confines of her southern social role, finding a place in the South in a way Frankie has not: “When Berenice said we, she meant Honey and Big Mama, her lodge, or her church” (Member 291). Frankie herself, skeptical of the rewards afforded by white privilege and unable to find a southern way to be the freak she sees herself to be, cannot identify with anything in the town and so can only dream of international journeys that take her as far from the South as possible.

The solution, it seems, is for Frankie to find a way to reorder her understanding of the relationship between the South and the world from the strict dichotomy of southern=bad, global=good of which she has convinced herself. In her discussion with Berenice, she admits her longing to escape masks a deeper and more fundamental problem of identity:

“I believe I realize what you were saying,” F. Jasmine 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 walk around and you see all the people. And to me they look loose.” “Wild, you mean?”

“Oh, no!” she said. “I mean you don't see what joins them up together. You don't know where they all came from, or where they're going to. For instance, what made anybody ever come to this town in the first place? Where did all these people come from and what are they going to do? Think of all those soldiers.”

“They were born,” said Berenice. “And they going to die.”

F. Jasmine's voice was thin and high. “I know,” she said. “But what is it all about? People loose and at the same time caught. Caught and loose. All these people and you don't know what joins them up. There's bound to be some sort of reason and connection. Yet somehow I can't seem to name it.” (Member 358)

Frankie's thoughts about being both “caught and loose” in the South and her need to find a way to name that condition are at the heart of the emerging, globally connected southern identity that McCullers had been working to articulate all along. In Frankie's statement, there is an echo of Peacock's contention that “as a world citizen, one identifies with some kind of entity that claims global scope. One shares a sense of community and identity beyond national, geographic, or other restrictive boundaries. In so doing, one edges toward empathy, necessarily identifying somewhat with the other without become the other.”44 And we might say that a cosmopolitan citizen doesn't replace her sense of self with some new vision of being part of a global entity, so much as she expands the boundaries of her regional self to include exchanges, engagements, and intersections with people and ideas that carry global resonance.

In other words, Frankie needs to find a way to feel at home in the South but remain unencumbered by what she sees as its regional limitations. Frankie's movement toward this end comes gradually as she finds new ways to connect with the town around her. Intending to pay a final farewell to the town before leaving with her brother and his bride, she finds herself seeing it as if for the first time. Passing the jail, she remembers that she “knew some people who had been locked up in jail, all of them colored.” But this reminder of the unforgiving nature of southern apartheid is soon replaced with an image of a thriving social life that exists alongside that racist structure: “voices sounded slurred and from a distance came the jazz of a piano and horn. Children played in alleyways, leaving whorled footsteps in the dust. The people were dressed for Saturday night, and on a corner she passed a group of jesting colored boys and girls in shining evening dresses” (Member 361). Earlier, Frankie had recalled going to the House of Freaks at the Chattahoochee Exposition where she had been particularly dazzled by the HalfMan, Half-Woman, and felt these physical and social outcasts reaching out to her in a gesture of common kinship (272). But now the streets themselves “reminded F. Jasmine of a carnival fair. There was the same air of holiday freedom; and, as in early morning, she felt herself a part of everything, included and gay” (368).

Frankie is no less freakish than she was earlier, but her angle of vision on the South is changing. She now actively seeks out moments that will balance both her acknowledgement of the oppressive structures of the South and her engagement with its regional specifics. Following her violent self-defense against a sexually aggressive soldier—itself a symbolic rejection of her romance with American military power—she attends her brother's wedding. Her fantasies of joining with the wedding couple are dashed when “she watched the car with the two of them driving away from her, and, flinging herself down in the sizzling dust, she cried out for the last time: ‘Take me! Take me!'” (Member 376). Embittered, she resolves to still “go into the world,” but “if she could not go in the way she had planned, safe with her brother and the bride, she would go, anyway” (381). She considers hopping a freight train to the North or, failing that, shooting herself, but is instead taken home by her father. While she awaits him in the Blue Moon Café (where she had her assignation with the soldier), Frankie “turned to the others in the room, and it was the same with all of them and they were strangers” (388).

Frankie momentarily came to see that she might have a place in the town after all, but the emotional trauma of the wedding debacle drives her, at least temporarily, back to her earlier, embittered outsider-self. And following this tragedy she is treated to several more: Frankie's younger cousin, John Henry, dies after a bout with meningitis, and Honey Brown, Berenice's foster brother, high on marijuana and cocaine, is arrested and sentenced to eight years in a work gang after breaking into the store whose white owner had sold him the drugs in the first place (Member 389–90). But Frankie's tragedy and frustration seem to come to an end, even as the world around her deteriorates. Following her moment of estrangement in the Blue Moon, Frankie finds herself suddenly enmeshed in a new relationship which resolves her earlier sense that “the world was too far away, and there was no way any more that she could be included” (387). Her friend Mary Littlejohn and she have formed a close alliance, and Frankie now dreams of traveling the world with Mary someday.

At first glance, with Frankie suddenly comfortable with her life in the South while her brother passes away and Berenice's half-brother is sentenced to hard labor, we might see this conclusion as an indication of Frankie's embrace of the very structure of white privilege her earlier, freakish, self had resisted. Stecopoulus, in particular, argues that Frankie becomes, at the end, just another ally of America's post-World War II imperialist agenda: “Separated from her erstwhile companions, a thirteen-year-old Frankie embraces her new friend, Mary, and their gleeful plans to travel around the globe. The earlier desire to join the world via the military gives way in this final turn to a new impulse: that of traveling as a moneyed American unconcerned with warfare.”45 Brinkmeyer echoes this reading; in his analysis of Frankie as having degenerated from a kind of antifascist rebel into “a giddy adolescent,” he maintains that the novel's conclusion shows Frankie as “happily accepting her designated place in the cultural order” and as one who now “mindlessly follows the ritual enforced by southern tradition.”46

However, we need to see Frankie's end as part of a complex series of events that McCullers compacts into the novel's last few pages, and that lead us towards a very different reading. After all, rather than move to the suburbs with Frankie and her family, Berenice “had given quit notice and said that she might as well marry T.T.” (Member 388), a sign that, as the war winds down, she, like many blacks in the South, has found even more resolve to live a life that is both economically and socially independent of this white family. Although her foster brother has been sentenced to hard labor, we are also told that “Berenice had got a lawyer and had seen Honey at the jail” (391). It may be quixotic for Berenice to fight the southern legal system, but it is telling that the novel ends with her resolved both to lead an existence independent of the Addams's and also to use the legal tools at hand to fight for justice.

Mary Littlejohn, moreover, is not just Frankie's new female friend, but someone who joins with Frankie in an alliance of estrangement. Because Mary is Catholic, Berenice is skeptical of the girl, but for Frankie this quality only adds to Mary's allure: “This difference was a final touch of strangeness, silent terror, that completed the wonder of her love” (Member 389). It is not too much to say that Frankie and Mary's relationship represents at least a potential counter to the conformist structure of southern womanhood that Frankie continues to avoid. Adams sees the Frankie-Mary friendship in this light, when she argues that Mary's mother's refusal to allow Frankie and Mary to visit the Freak Pavilion together is less a sign that Frankie now rejects association with freakishness, and more an indication of the two girls' “recognition that the world is composed of freaks, that they no longer need to secure their own normality by exploiting a less fortunate Other.”47 Frankie may no longer be embittered by her southern existence, may no longer long to leave, but she has also come to see a place in the South for freaks like her.

At the novel's conclusion Frankie simply sees less of a dichotomy between the larger world and her limited southern space, and McCullers is leading us toward that area of negotiation between global and southern. The Member of the Wedding is not the story of Frankie's accommodation to southern social conventions or postwar American imperial fantasies. It is a portrait of a southern cosmopolitan identity as McCullers imagined it, where freakish outsiders who dream of escaping beyond their southern geographical boundaries find a place for themselves within a peculiar regionalism that they now view from a global perspective.

This navigation between regional identities and global horizons is made clear to us in the novel's final paragraphs. After Frankie tells Berenice she received a letter from her brother in Luxembourg, she makes a particularly telling juxtaposition: “‘There is a basement in the new house. And a laundry room.' She added, after a minute, ‘We will must likely pass through Luxembourg when we go around the world together'” (Member 392). Frankie's language here is a jumble of “loose” and “caught” imagery: her description of the suburban southern life with which she is about to engage shifts to her thoughts of world travel with her female partner. Mary's arrival at the novel's conclusion is not an indication of Frankie's entombment within a normative structure, but a moment that speaks to Frankie's emerging ability to break down the distinctions between South and world, an ability further underscored in the novel's final lines. Earlier Frankie said, “I am just mad about Michelangelo” (Member 389), a statement that indicates her continued longing for a European otherness that could draw her away from where she lived. But now the line is altered: “I am just mad about______,” she says before she is interrupted by “the ringing of the bell” as Mary comes to call (392). The blank in the line indicates Frankie has relieved herself of her Michelangelo obsession, but also that McCullers wants to grant Frankie the possibility of a new language, one that will be defined following Mary's entrance into her new domestic life.

Certainly, the ultimate implications of the new relationships into which McCullers has flung her characters remain unclear to us as the novel closes, and it is true that Mc-Cullers offers no critique of the postwar United States and its enabling of neo-imperialism as the Cold War took shape. But McCullers is less interested in taking a political stance on America's role in a postcolonial world, and more in what happens to people who find themselves in a South whose illusion of exceptionalism is rapidly eroding. She shows what it might look like for a frustrated, globally focused southern outsider to find a space for herself that is both within and without the South, a space that both Michelangelo and her own doorbell can fill. And even if the South as it stood in 1946 didn't allow for very many examples of the southern cosmopolitanism that McCullers longed for, there is no question she saw them appearing on the horizon.

If, as Scott Romine puts it, the contemporary southern narrative is “an archive of improvisations grounded in space and time, a register of imagined relations to artificial territorialities” subject to prevailing “coded territorialities” which have been rendered unstable,48 then it is useful to read McCullers as a writer who imagined a breakdown in southern certainties, mannerisms, and regionalisms under the impact of a globalization that, in her era, had only begun to exert its pressures. And as the war progressed, the crushed idealism McCullers expressed in The Ballad of the Sad Café gave way to the far more hopeful, if still ambiguous, anticipation of a more globally engaged, postwar southern identity in The Member of the Wedding.

The cosmopolitanism that McCullers reached for was an ideal, a shared conversation between region and world, and one she hoped would transform the South she knew into some very different entity. We can see this ideal playing out as the twenty-first-century South moves, uncertainly and imperfectly, into an era where what had counted as “southern” no longer applies, and where the freakish outsiders McCullers loved so much have begun to feel right at home.

Notes
1. Karen Dubinsky, “Everybody Likes Canadians: Canadians, Americans, and the Post-World War II Travel Boom,” in Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumerism, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Shelley Osmun Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2001), 323.

2. Virginia Spencer Carr, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), 422.

3. Carson McCullers, “Article on Georgia,” n.d. Carson McCullers Collection, Ms. Series 1, Box 1.4, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas, 1.

4. Ibid., 10

5. Ibid., 28.

6. Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2010), 289.

7. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., The Fourth Ghost (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2009), 229.

8. Leigh Anne Duck, The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2006), 178.

9. Martyn Bone, “The Transnational Turn in the South,” in Transnational America: Contours of Modern US Culture, ed. Russell Duncan and Clara Juncker (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), 233.

10. James L. Peacock, Grounded Globalism (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2007), 17.

11. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (New York: Norton, 2006), xv.

12. Ibid., 97.

13. Mary E. Odem, “Latin American Immigration and the New Multiethnic South,” in The Myth Of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), 242.

14. Scott Romine, The Real South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2008), 17.

15. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005), 214.

16. Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006) 72–73.

17. For more “local/global” negotiations, see Saskia Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization (New York: Norton, 2007); also, Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997).

18. This southern reliance on the local space as a stage upon which reenacted fantasies of racial hierarchy and resistance to modernity “smacked of Fascism” to many northern critics. See Brinkmeyer, 46.

19. Frank Davey, “Towards the Ends of Regionalism,” in A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing, ed. Christian Riegel and Herb Wylie (Edmonton: Univ. of Alberta Press, 1997), 1–17.

20. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1965), 379. Such an assessment of McCullers has a parallel in James N. Gregory's assertion that McCullers left the south because it was “too parochial for her bohemian sense of self” and that “she fled back to New York, vowing never again to live in the land of her birth, planning only to return to renew her ‘sense of horror.'” The Southern Diaspora (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005), 186.

21. Richard Wright, “Inner Landscape,” in Richard Wright: Books and Writers, ed. Michel Fabre (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1990), 221.

22. “He admired her writing, particularly her deeply sensitive depiction of the Negro doctor in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” in Constance Webb, Richard Wright: A Biography (New York: Putnam, 1968), 196; “Wright was curious. How could this white woman have been brought up in the South (which she surely must have been to write this book) and come away with such a profound understanding of black people?” in Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Holt, 2001), 229; “He hailed this young writer as the first Southern novelist capable of portraying a black character

as easily and with as much accuracy as a white,” in Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), 208–09; “It was an unusual statement for an African American writer to make in 1940, and Carson's fellow authors at Bread Loaf looked forward to meeting the child prodigy who had been thus praised,” in Sherill Tippins, February House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 26.

23. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” in Theorizing Diaspora, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 25–48.

24. Carson McCullers, “How I Began to Write,” in The Mortgaged Heart (Boston: Mariner, 2000), 251.

25. Carson McCullers, Illuminations and Night Glare (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 279.

26. Louis D. Rubin, “Carson McCullers: The Aesthetic of Pain,” The Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1977): 265–66

27. McCullers's move to New York was one she would accomplish only after a series of fits and starts: she first relocated to Manhattan at the age of seventeen in the winter of 1934–1935, in a failed attempt to establish herself there in some way before returning back home. Over the next two years she would return again to take writing courses at New York University and Columbia, and would write her first novel in Fayetteville, North Carolina, before she made her final move North in the summer of 1940.

28. In the October and November 1940 issues.

29. Harilaos Stecopoulos reads the novel as very much influenced by current events. In particular, he brings our attention to the widely publicized lynching of African American Private Felix Hall at Fort Benning in early 1941, and asks us to see this event as indicative of the racially charged atmosphere of the time that may have contributed to McCullers's depiction. See Reconstructing The World (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2008) 104–9.

30. Carr, 136–37.

31. Tippins, 78.

32. Ibid., 35.

33. Carson McCullers, “Brooklyn is My Neighborhood,” in The Mortgaged Heart (Boston: Mariner, 2000), 218–19.

34. McCullers, Illuminations, 32.

35. Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café (Boston: Mariner, 2005), 3. Page numbers hereafter cited parenthetically.

36. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Boston: Mariner, 2000), 6.

37. Rachel Adams, “‘A Mixture of Delicious and Freak': The Queer Fiction of Carson McCullers,” American Literature 71, no. 3 (September 1999): 556, 557.

38. See Sarah Gleeson-White, Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2003), 72–73.

39. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 85.

40. Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding, in Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (Boston: Mariner, 1987), 257. Page numbers hereafter cited parenthetically.

41. Like so many of McCullers's outsider characters, Frankie looks and sometimes feels differently gendered. We are told that she had “grown so tall she was almost a big freak, and her shoulders were narrow, her legs too long. She wore a pair of blue track shorts, a B.V.D. undervest, and she was barefooted. Her hair had been cut like a boy's, but it had not been cut for a long time and was not even parted” (258). She also feels constrained by the need to enact a strictly normative gender role; in the world of her imagination, “she planned it so that people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls, whichever way they felt like and wanted” (338).

42. Stecopoulos, 119.

43. Ibid, 354.

44. Peacock, 49.

45. Stecopoulos, 124.

46. Brinkmeyer, 248–49.

47. Adams, 575.

48. Romine, 17.