| Carson McCullers(1917-1967)is a famous American writer in the 20th century. She left behind an impressive literary legacy when she died in 1967: four novels, a novella, two plays, twenty short stories, about two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children's verse, and a handful of poems. Among these, The Member of the Wedding (hereinafter referred to as MW), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of the Sad Caféare very famous. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942 and her second one in 1946 respectively, the New York Drama Critics'Circle Award and a Gold Medal by the Theatre Club, Inc. in 1950.The thesis is a study of the grotesque feature of the novel MW. McCullers'works are said to represent alienation, loneliness, lack of human communication and the failure of love, by most critical readers who hold that the grotesque only forms a negative, unproductive view of the world and human activity. This thesis intends to employ Bakhtin's grotesque theory and reevaluates the grotesque in MW, showing that the grotesque in MW has affirmative and revolutionary power. In MW, the heroine Frankie resists the feminine world of the southern belle. She looks and behaves like a boy. It seems that the highly oppressive burden of social expectation cannot accommodate the girl's difference. Frankie is analogous to the"unruly woman"of carnivalesque forms. Frankie resembles the Bakhtinian fool of carnival when she attempts to become a woman clumsily. Through her gender insubordination, she unsettles the status quo of the southern patriarchies, the seemingly easy distinction between feminine and masculine which underpins stable gender identity. Frankie is grotesque, because she provides a challenge to any concept of a finished and clear gender identity. She has expectations for an unconventional bright future, and is ever receptive to alteration. Bakhtin's grotesque theory can lead to a fuller understanding of the novel and Frankie in her revolutionary challenge to traditional identity.
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