The Collected Stories of Carson McCullers contains nineteen stories including A Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Critics generally cite these two pieces as McCullers' best work. All of McCullers' signature themes are addressed in these nineteen stories: wounded adolescence, loneliness in marriage, and the tragicomedy of life in the South -- of life in general.

A Member of the Wedding is written in an oddly static manner, and yet it is compelling. George Dangerfield of The Saturday Review of Literature writes that although, "nothing occurs here, (every page is) filled with a sense of something having happened, happening, and about to happen. This is in itself a considerable technical feat; and, beyond that, there is magic in it." McCullers' uncanny perception in portraying emotion and action is near its apex in The Member of the Wedding. The novellas concise length works to maximize its effect on the reader.

In A Member of the Wedding Frankie Addams is an awkward adolescent deep into puberty. She feels as if she is a complete outcast. She is ostracized from the neighborhood clubhouse so she spends her summer in the kitchen with the cook, Berenice Sadie Brown, and her cousin, John Henry West. Her life is a desperate monotony. When she finds out that her brother is returning from Alaska to marry his sweetheart she finally feels a bit of excitement. Frankie seizes upon this solitary bit of excitement. She fantasizes about the trip to Winter Hill (where the wedding will take place) and about how happy and exciting their married life will be.

Frankie longs to be a member of some group. She wants to have a network of friends and to live a life of excitement. This desire is exacerbated by radio and newspaper reports of World War Two, which fill her head with fantasies of exotic places and peoples. The marriage and subsequent honeymoon of Jarvis, and his bride, Janice, seem to Frankie the perfect way to fulfill her need to belong, and her desire for travel and adventure. Frankie believes she will be able to join her brother and his new bride on the honeymoon and in their married life:

At last she knew just who she was and understood where she was going. She loved her brother and the bride and she was a member of the wedding. The three of them would go into the world and they would always be together.

Frankie renames herself F. Jasmine. She begins warning Berenice and John Henry that she's not coming home after the wedding. At the wedding in Winter Hill, she is unable to find a time to tell Jarvis and Janice of her plans to go with them on the honeymoon. When it comes time for them to depart for the honeymoon, F. Jasmine has to be dragged from their car, screaming "Take me! Take me!" She returns home in a furious snit, and that night she decides to run away from home and take a train north. To her despair, she is apprehended by "the Law" at the Blue Moon before she can make her escape.

Jumping ahead to late November... Frances and her father are going to move to a new house with her aunt and uncle; theirs is painfully empty since John Henry recent death from spinal meningitis. Berenice has given "quit notice". And Frances has a friend, whom she finds terribly sophisticated and with whom she plans an exciting and peripatetic future.

The other major work included in this book is The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Literary critics often associate Carson McCullers with the "grotesque," the abnormal figures of society who repulse people as much as they mystify them. Unlike other writers, who would rather hide these people in dark corners of the literary landscape, McCullers embraces them by letting them tell their own story. No where else is this embrace more evident than in The Ballad of the Sad Café.

This work was first published in Harper's Bazaar in August of 1943. It centers on a small, dilapidated southern town. The novella focuses on the bizarre love triangle between Miss Amelia Evans, the proprietor of the local café and prominent townsperson, Cousin Lymon, the hunchback and general mischief-maker, and Marvin Macy, the criminal and estranged husband of Miss Amelia. Within the context of this triangle and the ballad literary structure, McCullers beautifully expresses her views on love, spiritual isolation, and community.

The novella begins with the exact picture of isolation: a town, which "itself is dreary...lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world" Brilliantly, McCullers uses this setting to embody her major theme of isolation and so personifies the town as the first character of the work. Along the town's main street stands a neglected old building which has a "curious, cracked look that is very puzzling". Mysteriously, each afternoon a face "sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes" observes the town through the windows in this building. The narrator soon reveals to the audience that the old building used to be a local café, owned by Miss Amelia Evans, that served as a welcoming meeting place for everyone in the town. At this point, McCullers flashes back to the time before the café existed to explain not only its origin but the beginning of the love triangle which changes the lives of everyone involved.

Lymon Willis, a hunchback, comes to town and asks to see Miss Amelia. He charms himself into Miss Amelia's life by explaining their relationship as distant cousins. Rather than dismiss this rather grotesque stranger, Miss Amelia surprises the entire town and leaves it "puzzled and talkative" when she welcomes him as Cousin Lymon, a guest in her home. However, rumors begin to circulate the next day as Miss Amelia never emerges from her house. A group of eight or ten men decide to congregate on Miss Amelia's porch and demand answers surrounding her new house guest. In another surprising move, Miss Amelia does not chastise the men but, under the influence of Cousin Lymon, offers them alcohol to drink in the store. No longer do they have to go out back and drink furtively like common thieves. This remarkable evening "was the beginning of the café" for it establishes community and "company and a genial warmth" so nourishing to the spirit.

Cousin Lymon transforms Miss Amelia. For someone who "cared nothing for the love of men and was a solitary person", she becomes attached to Cousin Lymon. Physically, she changes, she becomes a softer looking person. As the lover, she has assumed a new role in the town beyond that of proprietor, distiller, and local physician. However, she is uncomfortable with this new role, a common situation in McCullers' fiction. Perhaps this role is complicated by the sexual ambiguity of both her and Cousin Lymon.

Regardless of allusions to androgyny or homosexuality, the relationship with Cousin Lymon brings Miss Amelia great happiness and it continues uninterrupted for four years. During that time, the café expands into a proper establishment. It brings pride to the town, builds community, and allows people to ignore the feeling that they don't have much to live for. Along with the café, Miss Amelia's love for Cousin Lymon continues to grow as well. At this point in the novella, McCullers writes one of her most famous passages: her explanation of the relationship between the lover and the beloved. In this passage, she concludes that the lover and the beloved "come from different countries". In fact, "the beloved fears and hates the lover...for the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain."

Miss Amelia's worst nightmare becomes realized when Marvin Macy, her first husband, comes back into town once released on parole. The love triangle forms and intensifies almost immediately since Cousin Lymon tries hard to impress Marvin Macy. Cousin Lymon even betrays Miss Amelia by inviting Marvin Macy to stay at Miss Amelia's own house. Yet she suffers the presence of Marvin Macy out of her fear "that she would be left alone" by the hunchback if Macy left the house. She suffers out of fear of spiritual isolation and out of the control love has over her.

The novel reaches its climactic point when the tension between Marvin Macy and Miss Amelia escalates into a fight on Ground Hog's Day. McCullers infuses so much symbolism into her choice of this day. Snow accompanies Marvin Macy's arrival and the metaphorical winter of negative emotions he brings into the town as well. Therefore, on Ground Hog's Day, the fight will determine how much longer the winter will last. They begin to wrestle and struggle. However, when Miss Amelia begins to choke Marvin Macy, Cousin Lymon intercedes and jumps on Miss Amelia, knocking her down and freeing Marvin Macy from her grasp.

Cousin Lymon's betrayal emotionally destroys Miss Amelia. She suffers more when, together, Lymon and Marvin Macy rob her of important and sentimental possessions in both her home, her still, and her café, leaving her essentially impotent and abandoned, her worst fears realized.

Contrasted with this rather dismal ending is the optimistic epilogue to the novella, entitled "The Twelve Mortal Men." McCullers uses this epilogue depicting the life of a chain gang to describe how even joy can exists amongst hard labor. She writes that when the men on the chain gang begin to sing, their music "causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright". Most importantly, McCullers emphasizes the power of community at the end, that "just twelve mortal men who are together" have the ability to make this music and overcome their suffering.

There are seventeen other works in the book. They are short stories, including: A Domestic Dilemna, The Sojourner, A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud., Wunderkind, and Sucker.

The central theme of McCullers' work is the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. Her characters are usually outcasts and misfits whose longings for love are never fulfilled.

Perhaps the best way to end this piece is with Carson McCullers' own words:

All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.


It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.


There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.


Recommended: Yes