Yuniarti, Rika (2026) FRANKIE’S IDENTITY CRISIS IN CARSON MCCULLERS’S THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING (1946). Undergraduate thesis, Faculty of Humanity.

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Abstract

This research thesis discusses Frankie Addams' identity crisis in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) within the scope of Stuart Hall's cultural identity theory. The purpose of this study is to analyze how social exclusion and subject position construct Frankie Addams' fragmented identity, to examine how lack, division, and unstable identification are articulated through Frankie Addams' actions, naming practices, and attempts at belonging, and to investigate how the transition from Frankie to F. Jasmine and Frances rearticulates, rather than resolves, her identity by the end of the narrative. The research applies cultural studies criticism through intrinsic literary analysis focusing on character and characterization, setting, and conflict. The findings show that Frankie Addams' fragmented identity is culturally constructed through her systematic exclusion from every recognized social grouping available to her and through the structural inaccessibility of the subject positions her world makes available. These conditions are constituted, from the outset, by the experience of lack and division, manifesting in fantasy-based identification and escalating behavioral instability. Moreover, this study demonstrates that while Frankie Addams' rearticulates her identity by the novel’s end through the processes of identification and reconstitution, this constitutes not a full resolution but a provisional rearticulation of subject position that confirms identity as always in process.
Keywords: Identity Crisis, Fragmented Identity, Social Exclusion, Subject Position

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