The intolerable burden of feminity in Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café

Carson McCullers' sexual ambivalence and her growing identification with masculinity are reflected in her fiction, in which she explored the identity of women in the conservative patriarchal American South. This paper analyses the futile attempt to escape from conventional femininity, which is perceived as a trap of impotence and submissiveness, in an adolescent and an adult character. Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding is forced to renounce her ideal of universal love because of the imposition of a restrictive femininity. In The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Amelia Evans pays for her rejection of traditional female roles with her grotesqueness and with her eventual destruction by two cruel vindictive males. Carson McCullers limits her fiction to the level of the individual and the family, to personal crises and love relationships, to the restricted spaces she is familiar with: small towns in the Deep South, with their sidewalks, bars and stores; intimate spaces such as houses and kitchens. But this limitation, for some typical of women's fiction, is more apparent than real, since the wider issues of gender, race and class are manifested, especially in a traditional society like that of the South, precisely in the sphere of the family and the individual. And it is there that the writer, intent on exploring the life of concrete individual characters, can really perceive those issues. In this paper I concentrate on a characteristic shared by two of the most complex and fully developed female characters of Carson McCullers: the attempt to escape femininity, to which they maintain either an attitude of ambivalence (Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding) or of outright rejection (Miss Amelia in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe).