her, and John Henry is present because Frankie wants juvenile companionship to counter that of Berenice. Although she realizes that she is not yet capable of understanding the activities of the adult world, however, Frankie, aided by John Henry, symbolizes the almost divine nature often assigned to the child. Frankie knows certain truths, as Berenice occasionally confirms in bewilderment, because the girl’s mind has not yet been spoiled by the mundane concerns that obscure those truths. Her almost innate, although selective, knowledge is part of a literary and philosophical ideology most clearly typified by the Wordsworthian view of children. Yet Frankie’s strongest understanding is also the most ironic: She realizes that she is incomplete and is terrified by reminders of that fact. In her earnest efforts to belong, to be completed, she is driving herself toward adulthood, in which one loses the innate knowledge she possesses.

Berenice, one of McCullers’s most interesting characters, serves multiple functions. Just as she is employed to care for Frankie in many ways, she is also the pivotal character upon whom the novel depends on several levels of development. In simple terms, she is a counterexample of Frankie’s search to belong and to love. Although McCullers’s familiar theme of such unending search persists in Berenice, she illustrates that love, even when directed toward a vague objective, has the eventual effect of grace. In addition, she is a surrogate mother upon whom Frankie depends, made more credible by being representative of the black parent figure of many southern novels. Frankie is locked into dependence upon Berenice, but it is dependence from a distance; although she longs to be independent of Berenice and all other authority figures, Frankie knows intuitively that she is not old enough to ignore Berenice. She knows the woman has a function in her life, has necessary information to which she has not yet been exposed. She does not want to block Berenice out entirely (while the servant speaks to her, Frankie puts her fingers in her ears, but not enough to prevent Berenice’s voice from reaching her) since if Frankie did so she would have to confront life later as an adult without sufficient data.

Frankie knows instinctively that ignoring Berenice is only self-defeating. Berenice is, therefore, like an oracle; and she comes from the ancient literary tradition of the blind or one-eyed person who speaks the truth clearly because of missing vision. Berenice has a glass eye (“glass” and “truth” are related etymologically in Latin); so Berenice sees truth through her glass eye, not through her physically functioning one. McCullers is thus able to elevate the group in the kitchen to mythic dimensions: Berenice is the oracle, John Henry is her acolyte, and Frankie is the pilgrim-initiate.

By emphasizing Frankie’s progressive learning and by concentrating primarily on the emotions and experiences of only three days in Frankie’s life, McCullers achieves the effect of gradually increasing the reader’s expectations. By the end of The Member of the Wedding, the reader has been led to believe that the day before the wedding is Frankie’s “last afternoon” in town—if not literally, then at least figuratively. This increasing momentum, however, is not followed by a fulfillment of expectation; Frankie is essentially unchanged by the trauma of disappointment. It is suddenly apparent that the initiation of youth into adulthood through artificial, specific rites is a myth. The search for belonging is an unending one; it is simply one’s orientation toward that search that can change by the natural process of maturing. In fact, as Berenice’s life illustrates, the childlike element of selectively believing in salvation can be concomitantly protective, making both life and the search for social identity not only possible but also bearable.