Fantasies of Gender

ENCOUNTERING FRANKIE IN CARSON MCCULLERS' THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, we recognize a familiar dynamic in this prepubertal girl masquerading as a boy—a regressively oriented fantasy constructed in the attempt to solve conflicts generated by the progressive forces of development. As McCullers helps us to understand, Frankie is afraid of the psychological separation implied by the move into puberty (Dalsimer, 1986) as well as the increasing pressure of the drives as her body begins to mature. The crisis from which she is attempting to retreat has been precipitated by her largely fantasied sexual activity with a boy. Frankie wishes for an ideal world where people can "instantly change back and forth from boys to girls which ever way they felt like and wanted." Frankie does not want to be "caught," as she puts it—she wants to feel "loose," unseparate, mutable. Perhaps it is not surprising either that her next transformation is as F. Jasmine, the femme fatale who unwittingly seduces a soldier. Frankie sees herself as a freak, but to the reader her inner crisis precipitated by the demands of approaching puberty is familiar territory, as is her representation of the dimensions of this crisis through the mutability of gender.

In contrast, we are shocked and profoundly disturbed when we slowly realize that the archly feminine Divine of Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers recalls her childhood as the boy Culafroy. We struggle to understand Divine as a symbolic transformation of Culafroy's childhood—that in his metamorphosis as Divine he has become the miraculous virgin he adored. He/she has become himself/herself by becoming the Other. Although the character Divine gives literary form to Genet's idea of the infinite possibilities for metamorphosis in any given identity at any given moment (Coe, 1968), Divine's organization around fantasies of degradation, asceticism, and masochism seems fixed, immutable; an abyss seems to separate her from the boy Culafroy.