“She did things and she got herself in trouble. She broke the law. And having once become a criminal, she broke the law again, and then again. She took the pistol from her father’s bureau drawer and carried it all over town and shot up the cartridges in a vacant lot. She changed into a robber and stole a three-way knife from the Sears and Roebuck store.”
Psychoanalytically, Frankie is engaging in Projection. She projects her antagonism and frustration by engaging in deliberate delinquency. She thinks that partaking in the criminal acts will mollify the existential crisis which she is weathering. She engrosses in deliberate disparaging activities for she is exasperated with her existence.
“One Saturday afternoon she committed a secret and unknown sin. In the Mackean’s garage, with Barney Mackean, they committed a queer sin, and how bad it was she did not know. The sin made a shrivelling sickness in her stomach, and she dreaded the eyes of everyone. She hated Barney and wanted to kill him. Sometimes alone in the bed at night she planned to shoot him with the pistol or throw a knife between his eyes.”
The secret sin alluded to in this passage is sexual intimacy. Frankie has forfeited her purity. She is in denial about the loss; hence, she yearns to hurt Barney. According to Frankie’s feelings, Barney is the foundation of her fall; hence, she should be wounded. The forfeiture of naivety is distressing for Frankie for it materializes when she is still a minor.
"I’ve been ready to leave his town so long. I wish I didn’t have to come back here after the wedding. I wish I was going somewhere for good. I wish I had a hundred dollars and could just light out and never see this town again."
Frankie is utterly Avoidant; her aspirations designate that she is uncomfortable in the town for it conveys her invisibility, delinquencies, and sins. She holds that moving out of the town would obliterate all the adversative memoirs which she accredits to it.
