Out of the pantheon of authors of modern Southern literature, Carson McCullers is arguably one of the best writers to emerge from the genre in the twentieth century. With his intricate weaving of character development, he creates characters that impact the reader memorably and come to life with the power of their own nature. Two such characters emerge from his famous short stories: Frankie Addams from The Member of the Wedding and Miss Amelia Evans from The Ballad of the Sad Café. These characters are unique as they both struggle to fit into the feminine ideal of Southern society and are isolated from the "normal" life of a Southern woman. Both Frankie and Miss Amelia address gender issues as nontraditional women attempting to take on masculine roles in their communities, where departing from the "status quo" is seen as untrustworthy and threateningly different; these issues ultimately separate them from traditional Southern society. Because Frankie and Miss Amelia do not settle for traditional roles of Southern womanhood, their actions cause conflict in their behavior, their controlling mindset, and their families. The behavior of both Frankie and Miss Amelia is generally perceived as strange in each of their stories. . Frankie has difficulty connecting with the other girls her age around her, girls who were once her confidantes but "now they had this club and she wasn't a member...they said she was too young and bad" (McCullers 265). As a result, Frankie resorts to spending his free time with his cousin who is half his age. She also has difficulty sleeping alone at night and until the beginning of the novel had previously slept in a bed with her father for comfort as a child. During her sleepovers with him... in the middle of a sheet of paper... and a mentality, a lifestyle that states: "I don't want realism, I want magic!"... I'm not telling the truth, I'm telling what should be the truth! (Williams), pushing her to drastic actions such as meeting a soldier in a bar when she was twelve. Frankie clearly has an internal struggle with the old transition from girl to young woman, and in the absence of a mother figure, she is forced to figure out the changes happening within her with strange company; this, along with her violent tendencies, separates her from her family and old friends. Her father's estrangement from his daughter also has a peculiar way of affecting her, as she "began to have a grudge against her father and they looked at each other with almond-shaped eyes" (McCullers 276), which isolates her from the only parental figure she has and who has never been consistently available to her from the beginning.