Grotesque Encounters with Adolescence: Reading Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding

This paper takes the grotesque as a model of subjectivity that offers compelling inroads to understanding adolescence. Bakhtin notes that the grotesque ‘seeks to grasp in its imagery the very act of becoming and growth, the eternal, incomplete, unfinished nature of being’. I argue that Carson McCullers' novel, The Member of the Wedding (1946 McCullers, C. 1946/1987. Collected Stories of Carson McCullers, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.  [Google Scholar]), is largely about this ‘act of becoming’ in its heightened form, at the time of early adolescence, and I explore the ways in which puberty estranges 12‐year‐old Frankie Adam from her old body and her old self, resulting in encounters with the uncanny.