Subversion And Deconstruction: The Other In The Member Of The Wedding

Although a vast research has been done into Carson Mc Cullers’ s The Member of the Wedding from the perspectives of New Criticism, Feminism together with Queer theory, focusing on the novel’s theme of spiritual isolation, genre of bildungsroman, the features of Southern grotesque as well as the feminist track and protagonists’ lesbian tendency, little light has been shedded on the novel’s marginalized characters, the adolescent girl Frankie Addams, the sissy boy John Henry, the middle-aged black woman cook Berenice Sadie Brown as well as some minor characters like Honey Camden Brown and the black prisoners in the jail. They, to some extent, are positioned on the inferior oppressed party among the items of binary oppositions(man-woman, white-black). This essay attempts to study their marginalized state with the aid of the notion of the Other and logocentrism together with Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist idea of différance and supplement. The result that the Other are actually active warriors in fighting against the dominant culture, subverting and deconstructing the binary opposition ideas instead of being suppressed to silence by the dominant patriarchal power, as the feminist argued, is yielded in this research. This research will definitely contribute to the future study on the The Member of the Wedding from the Deconstructionist perspective.