A Child's Imagination

"She would put on her father's glasses with the jeweler's loupe attached and, scowling busily, dip them in gasoline. She worked with the lathe, too. Sometimes a little crowd of sidewalk lazies would collect to watch her from the street and she would imagine how they said: "Frankie Addams works for her father and makes fifteen dollars a week. She fixes the hardest watches in the store and goes to the Woodmen of the World Club with her father. Look at her. She is a credit to the family and a big credit to the whole town" (65).

I love these parts in the text when McCullers shows Frankie's imagination at work. This passage is found when she is sitting in her dad's store. She sits at his bench, puts his glasses on, and pretends to be hard at work on a watch. When I read this passage I recalled how I use to do the same kinds of things when I went to my dad's office. I would type away at the computer and pretend that clients would come in and I would advise them on what stocks to buy. This image is the epitome of what I think of when I think of a child.

Imagination is so vital to childhood and I think that it is an important theme in this novel. Frankie's imagination is one of the attributes that allows the reader to see that she is very much still daddy's little girl. However, Frankie, as all children are, is anxious to do grown up things and to find her meaning in life. She uses her imagination to speed up the process of growing up. I think that her obsession with the wedding has something to do with her desire to be "in the know," something that always makes girls if not seem, feel mature. It seems like Frankie is in that stage where she is still a child with grand fantasies and exaggerated stories, but, she is beginning to feel the woes of adolescence.

Q: Is Frankie's discontent and fear just the result of being an adolescent or is there an underlying issue that is causing her to be unhappy and afraid?

-Amber Riley