Essay Questions

What deductions can you make about Frankie’s self-hatred?

McCullers elucidates, “This was summer when Frankie was sick and tired of being Frankie. She hated herself , and had become a loafer and a big no good who hang around the summer kitchen: dirty and greedy and mean and sad. Besides being too mean to live, she was a criminal. If the Law knew about her, she could be tried in the courthouse and locked up in the jail. Yet Frankie had not always been a criminal and a big no good.” Manifestly, Frankie is enduring an identity crisis which condenses her self-esteem. She is not content with being herself. Consequently she neglects herself as a strategy to handle her feelings of lowliness. Her criminal activities imply that she feels that she should agonize for being Frankie.

Provide a psychoanalytic deconstruction of the statement “she could feel them leaving her.”

McCullers expounds, “Frankie closed her eyes, and though she did not see them as a picture, she could feel them leaving her. She could feel the two of them together on the train, riding away from her. They were them, and leaving her, and she was her, and sitting left all by herself at the kitchen table. But a part of her was with them, and she could feel his part of her own self going away, and farther away; farther and farther, so that a drawn-out sickness came in her, going away and farther away, so that the kitchen Frankie was an old hull left at the table.” Psychoanalytically, Frankie’s visualization of Jarvis and his bride surmises that she is unconsciously afraid that her brother would divert all his affection to his wife after the wedding and forget her. She is unconsciously envious that the matrimonial would widen the distance between her and her brother. She dreads being forgotten by her brother although she does not explicitly acknowledge it.