The use of borders in Richard McCann’s “My Mother’s Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame”

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

12 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

05/10/2009

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Literature

Oboulo.com selection criteria

$ 19.95 Add to cart

Summary :

Introduction
Examining the opening paragraph of McCann's story
1. Invoking the themes that will dominate every aspect of his story
2. Explanation of the 'turned-around houses'
3. Indicating the consequences of a life of isolation and self-denial
Malleability of identity
1. Key images that characterize the narrator as an outside
2. The scene at the bus stop and the motif of seperation
3. The scene following Denny's introduction to the text
4. The narrator's ability to shift from the public world outside his home
The narrator's understanding that what he is doing is socially unacceptable
Boundaries and defining borders of identity
Physical separation between father and son
Exploring the muddy aspects of his identity
Conclusion
Works cited

Abstract

Carroll Knolls-the setting of richard mccann's "My mother's clothes: The school of beauty and shame"-is a world defined by borders; it is divided by property lines, lot spaces, fences, gates, doors, and all other manners of boundaries and barriers. The author infuses the narrative with this motif as a backdrop for the more abstract borders of identity that the narrator navigates in the story. These divisive lines that run through the text make a fitting landscape for the narrator-an adolescent boy struggling with his inchoate sexuality-to grapple with the definitions of his identity: how does he fit into the rigid structure of this world? Where does his homosexuality-unidentified and unexpressed, except vaguely, during the timeline of the retrospective4 narration; though accepted by the present-day narrator: "[...] this costume having become the standard garb of the urban American gay man"-place him among the social and sexual roles of his community (mccann, p. 557)? He feels like an outsider, an other, so how does he come to some level of personal and societal acceptance? At the same time, though he is outside the agreed-upon sexual normalcy of an adolescent boy in Carroll Knolls, dressing up in his mother's clothes and experimenting with gender play and transvestitism, he adheres to other conventionally male or masculine activities with ease and without inner conflict; he plays War, a characteristic pastime of a young male child, "a game in which someone stood on Stanley Allen's front porch and machine-gunned the rest of us, who one by one clutched our bellies as if choking on blood, and rolled exquisite death throes down the grassy hill" (mccann, p. 552). This fluidity of sexual roles, as queer theorist Diana Fuss, in Inside / Outside: lesbian theories, gay theories, puts it, "call[s] into question the stability and ineradicability of the hetero / homo hierarchy" (Fuss, p. 1). In other words, gender roles, though apparently rigid and impassable, can be redefined. Even embedded inside a community and inside a world constructed of borders, the boundaries within one remain unset, fluid, and malleable-a point the text sets out to make to the reader.