"In The Member of the Wedding (1946), a twelve-year-old tomboy named Frankie Addams—who has a boy's name, a crew cut, and wears masculine clothes—suddenly falls in love with her brother Jarvis's wedding one summer during World War II. For the bulk of the novel, Frankie fantasizes about being part of the ceremony and even the marriage that follows it. But at the wedding itself, she is a mute spectator, and the newlyweds rather violently exclude her from their honeymoon getaway car.
Early critics read Member as a coming-of-age tale in which Frankie trades in the verdant, ambisexual imaginings of childhood first for illusions of feminine excess and then for a properly adult social life. ... [L]ate-twentieth-century critics have read the novel as a classic 'coming out story.' As with Ann Bannon's Beebo Brinker and other lesbian pulp novels that succeeded Member, Frankie's boyish body predicts her trajectory toward her newfound relationship with Mary Littlejohn in the last chapter, which represents the beginning of her recognition that she desires not weddings but other girls."
Freeman, Elizabeth. "The We of Me: The Member of the Wedding's Novel Alliances." The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 45-7. Print.
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