the heart is a lonely hunter by carson mccullers

She has invested too much in her own sharply defended and defensive outsiderness. Frankie claims to dream of belonging, but, as Berenice knows, she has little interest in fulfilling that dream. As Ethel Waters plays Berenice, we see in her face Baldwin’s sad realization: Frankie may choose to be an outcast, but Berenice has no choice. James Baldwin once said that whites cleaved to the very thing that he, as a black person, could not afford: the romance of innocence. Now Frankie is moving on, away from Berenice’s 'preaching.' In the 1952 film adaptation of 'The Member of the Wedding,' the director, Fred Zinnemann, draws a telling visual comparison between Berenice’s heavy black body draped in black-a Masha of the Mason-Dixon Line-and Frankie’s lithe white figure darting here and there, her speech glowing with a nearly unbearable romanticism, like a Nina, unmindful of her imminent fall.

You think you going to break into that wedding, and then Jesus knows what else.' You think you going to march down the center of the aisle right between your brother and the bride. 'But I don’t see how it is a warning applied to me.'. It was just my misfortune they all turned out to be the wrong pieces. What I did was to marry off little pieces of Ludie whenever I come across them. Therefore, I had to go and copy myself forever afterward. 'I loved Ludie and he was the first man I loved. To illustrate her point, she talked about her late husband, Ludie, and the men she’d been drawn to since his death: Berenice tried to warn Frankie against the sad allure of a love that remains forever beyond one’s grasp. Then she fell in love with the romance-or her idea of the romance-between her brother and his fiancée, her 'we of me,' as she called them. A year ago, McCullers writes, Frankie felt like 'an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.' Her fears-which were largely existential no mere adolescent quirks, these, since Frankie serves as McCullers’s stand-in-dominated her home. They are Berenice Sadie Brown, a middle-aged colored housekeeper, and Frankie Addams, a thirteen-year-old motherless white girl who has grown up in the house under Berenice’s charge. Everything else has been packed up-everything, that is, except the memories of the two women in the room, as they supervise the noisy comings and goings of movers. There’s little in the room: a chair, a stove. We’re in the closing moments of Carson McCullers’s 1946 novel 'The Member of the Wedding.' The setting: a well-worn kitchen in a small Southern town during the Second World War. Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum

The heart is a lonely hunter by carson mccullers