Adolescent Girls and the Alternative Self : exploring Liminality and the Father in Carson McCullers

摘要

This essay seeks to make a deeper analysis on the way in which liminality is treated in Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding by means of offering a new perspective on how familiar and parental relationships, or the lack of such, affect Mick and Frankie’s development towards maturity. The aim of this essay is to explain to what extent their alienation is determined by the absence of the language of the father and whether or not the search for a parental figure is one of the key elements to understand the nature of the two narrations. In this essay I also consider how the lack of a strong familiar nucleus accentuates the two tomboy's loneliness. Furthermore, I take into consideration the way in which both Mick and Frankie find ways to reach emotional fulfilment; Mick through music and Frankie through the wedding. Finally, I focus on the discourse of the symbolic foils that, being an expression of their own exclusion in society, actually work to fulfil the protagonists’ expectations for parental figures.