Richardson 1 Laura Richardson Ms. Bagwell IB World Literature 15 May 2016 Word Count: 1270 The Member of the Wedding The Member of the Weddingwritten by Carson McCullers is a gothic novel about a young girl named Frankie Addams and her coming of age. A large portion of the action in this novel takes place in the kitchen. The kitchen goes through a dramatic change throughout the book and eventually becomes unrecognizable as the original kitchen. The author, Carson McCullers, uses the transformation of the kitchen to represent that the American society during the 1940s was insistent that childhood had to cease to exist in order for a child to mature. McCullers used the description of the old kitchen as a means of representing children’s eager to mature and to demonstrate the repression of childhood creativity. McCullers describes the kitchen as a “sad and ugly room” (McCullers, 9). Often times a kitchen is viewed as the atrium of the house, the room where the family gathers and converses. This would normally have a positive connotation, but in this novel, McCullers wanted to use a normally happy room as sad and depressing to show the confusion of children due to the repression of creativity. The kitchen was “covered… with queer, child drawings as far up as [the] arm would reach. This gave the kitchen a crazy look… and it made Frankie sick” (6). These drawings were labeled ‘childish’ not by Frankie, but rather by society. The 1945 society condemned extravagant expressions of creativity, such as the drawings on the walls, as childish and immature, and founded a social norm that lambasted these outbursts. Without the comprehension of societal norms, Frankie would have been comfortable in the kitchen since it was filled with her drawings and her own creativity, but evidently Frankie had become obsessed with the idea of maturing. Frankie realized that her childish drawings were symbolic of her age and her youthful manner and this
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