Psychological Trauma in McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding

Abstract

This present research is an attempt to study the psychological traumatic behavior of the characters, especially the protagonist in McCullers' The Member of the Wedding. Trauma theory has emerged as a recent perspective to study primarily the disintegrated subjectivity in literary works through the thought models of modern psychologists Freud and Cathy Caruth and other contemporary contributors. Here the protagonist, Frankie, exhibits split personality in its extreme form. Other characters to display such disordered behavior in one or the other. My point is to capture such abnormalities through the responsive act-outs of these characters to the different occasions so as to prove such act-outs psychological in nature, and especially with the case of the protagonist, traumatic in nature. This thesis employs recent theories on trauma, PTSD, Historic- cultural trauma and personality concepts by the different contributors to study the traumatic nature. Unconscious repository plays a great impact upon the subject, yet trauma ascends far more than that to create disjointed subjectivity in the same subject. Trauma thus appears to be the extreme stage of all mental disorder. It can be termed as "extreme form of unconscious". There is no doubt that trauma presents a unique set of challenges to understanding. Frankie behaves both in sane and insane way over the short span of three days. Thus, the crux of this thesis is to reflect on psychological imbalance is a grave fact. Individual and society as a whole could suffer silently, though physically they appear sound. To avoid this, responsible familial and the societal actors should assume their role pro-actively in order to establish healthy psychological atmosphere for the minors and the powerless.