Tomboyism and Familial Belonging in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding : Queer Sentiments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article brings queer-theoretical scholarship on the Southern Gothic into dialogue with the history of childhood and sentimental studies. Published in 1946, Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding introduces readers to Frankie Addams, an awkward, unruly adolescent protagonist who resists the rigid gender and sexual norms of early twentieth-century Southern United States. While McCullers’s writing is often characterized as “Gothic” and “unsentimental,” this paper argues that her tomboy narrative invokes and revises the sentimental Bildungsroman of the mid-nineteenth century. Specifically, McCullers draws upon sentimental tropes of non-traditional families as she reimagines Frankie’s “family.” Like many sentimental child protagonists, Frankie endures the early fracturing of her nuclear family due to the death of her mother but forges a surrogate family with her African American housekeeper, Berenice Sadie Brown, and her cousin, John Henry West. Through her juxtaposition of queer children and non-normative families, McCullers critiques heteronormative institutions and rituals, meditates upon issues of membership in the body politic, and demonstrates how sentimentalism crystallizes persistently around the intersections of race, girlhood, and the family.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".