The Member of the Wedding's kitchen as a colonial space

At the beginning of The Member of the Wedding, twelve-year-old Frankie Addams is spending most of her time in the kitchen of her father’s house. Her two companions there are Berenice Sadie Brown, her family’s African American cook, and John Henry, her six-year-old cousin. Upon first reading, the kitchen seems a space of stasis and repetition, where “The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer” (1). It is possible to read this novel as the story of Frankie’s escape from the kitchen. This reading would posit that entrance into the world of white middle-class adulthood in the 1940s American South must entail a casting-off of the place where Frankie, a middle-aged black servant, and a much-younger male who is Frankie’s “blood kin” found common ground.

            This view would also cast the kitchen as belonging to but not necessarily encompassing the location of childhood. It exists within the larger domestic space of the house, where Frankie’s father can occasionally be found, but if we read the novel as an account of the inevitable casting-off of that domestic space, then it might be more appropriate to view the kitchen as the in-between place from which Frankie is compelled to adulthood by a pronounced lack of the agency she seeks. The kitchen is located within the house, but it’s also a place where people who don’t strictly belong to the house can congregate. Berenice is an employee, John Henry an extended family member. Though one can argue that Frankie, on the cusp of her departure, belongs more in the kitchen with these two than in the center of the house with her father, this interpretation of the novel also makes it important to see the kitchen as a place that can’t support its own kind of community—it is merely a jumping-off point.

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, in her essay on creoleness and the early American novel, argues that the colonial space of Saint Domingue was seen by colonizers as able to support economic production only, though in reality it was a site of social reproduction as well. It is possible to view Member’s kitchen as a kind of colonial space: a location separate from the main action of the story, where the larger culture of the novel can store the in-between, “unjoined” pubescent Frankie until she is ready to participate in that action. In other words, the kitchen’s role is to grow a functioning adult. But I would complicate this understanding of the physical and narrative space of the kitchen by arguing, as Dillon does with Saint Domingue, that it is a site of social reproduction for its three inhabitants.

John Henry, Berenice and Frankie repeatedly alter the larger world’s cultural markers to fit their kitchen-world. They change language until their words “rhyme with each other and sound strange” (1). They create an imaginary economic system around their card games, where John Henry is “in debt; he owed Berenice more than five million dollars” (3). Most significantly, the wall of the kitchen is covered in John Henry’s drawings, despite disapproval from outside authority: “Having already ruined the wall, he [John Henry] went on and drew whenever he wished…At first her father had been furious about the walls, but later he said for them to draw all the pictures out of their systems, and he would have the kitchen painted in the fall” (7).

The idea that John Henry can only change the rules temporarily, until the fall when his changes will be painted over, brings me to the place where my analysis must diverge from Dillon’s. Dillon argues for a lasting understanding of the early American novel as creole, suggesting that an identity created by a historically and geographically specific colonial situation can have a legacy that remains significant, and an application outside its geographical space. Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry all eventually leave the kitchen, as the narrative has insisted that they would from the beginning. But it is not clear that their connecting identity as kitchen-dwellers can be maintained in any way after they leave that space. As we near the novel’s close, we are made to understand that even within the kitchen, there has been a limit to what the three can share: for Frankie, “It was impossible to understand his [John Henry’s] point of view. And he did not understand her either” (121). Dillon does not suggest that in Saint Domingue creoleness is an identity completely untroubled by considerations of other difference such as race or gender, but she does allow for a collective understanding between creole people, and it is that collective understanding that allows her to move creoleness forward. By contrast, the identity of kitchen-dweller, dependent upon only three inhabitants, does not manage to survive to the end of Member. John Henry dies and haunts the kitchen as a ghost, but Berenice and Frankie align themselves with other groups, as was their goal even when they coexisted in the kitchen. How are we to understand, then, a group that temporarily reproduces itself within a given space, but whose members don’t understand themselves as doing so, either during the time of reproduction or after its end?