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

Nicholas S.

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The use of borders in Richard McCann's "My Mother's Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame"

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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.

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

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[...] or is it something that is sinful, shameful, something to be shunned, something to be denied and hidden from everyone, including themselves—and, ultimately, faced with these emotions and troubling questions, the person refuses to identify what is inside themselves, to slip into denial of their unkempt yard.” And the last sentence in the introductory paragraph indicates the consequences of this life of isolation and self-denial, and also how such a circumstance is brought about by the exclusionary effects of borders and divisions with the neighborhood: “After its initial occupants moved away, the corner house remained vacant for months.” First, it suggests that the homeowners in the “turned-around house” were placed at the margin of the neighborhood, on the corner of the block, and therefore excluded and divided from the rest of the neighborhood, unwelcome. [...]

[...] As Eve Sedgwick identifies in the fourth of her “Seven Axioms” in Epistemology of the Closet: immemorial, seemingly ritualized debates on nature versus nurture take place against a very unstable background of tacit assumptions and fantasies about both nature and nurture” (Sedgwick, p. 40). In other words, the social boundaries and borders that shape us, and the assumptions about those boundaries, are not as rigid as they may appear, a similar argument that McCann's text advances. In fact, the line veneer had already been splintered from the table's edge, as though someone had nervously picked at it while watching which appears in the second paragraph of McCann's story, suggests such malleability of identity. [...]

[...] This desire to claim an identity not defined by outside boundaries and borders leads the narrator understand the malleable nature of identity, how the boys straddle the categories of and through their transvestitism: ] he could not understand that this was himself, as was also and at the same time the boy in overalls and Keds. He was split in two pieces—as who was not?—the blond wave cresting rigidly above his close- cropped hair” (McCann, p. 555). These lines acknowledge the dual identity that is constructed when the boys dress up in the narrator's mother's clothes; they are at once becoming something different, something socially unacceptable, while at the same time remaining the adolescent males who wear jeans and overalls and sneakers and other traditionally male articles of clothing. [...]

[...] The obvious tangible distance between the narrator and the father indicates a separation between acceptable and deviant behavior—as a subtext to the scene, the father voices concerns about Denny, saying, makes me nervous,'” an implication that there is, number one, something off or queer about the boy, and an unspoken worry that Denny may be having an effect on his own son—demonstrating the utilization of boundaries: on one side there is the mainstream, and on the other side, there is everything apart from it, where the narrator stands “awkwardly.” The use of the word “awkwardly” also underscores the alienation felt when placed in a role of the Other. [...]

[...] Furthermore, whereas activities that fall outside of the fixed borders of acceptable male adolescent behavior must be performed in secret, McCann illustrates the ease and acceptance which brash displays of boyish masculinity is tolerated in the society of Carroll Knolls: ] and then sometimes Bucky, hoping to scare the elementary school kids, would lead his solemn procession of junior high ‘hoods' down the block, their penises hanging from their unzipped trousers” (McCann, p. 553). This image of a group of boys brandishing their penises as weapons, as instruments of fear, shows how embraces of boyhood and masculinity is something that can be performed in public without worry of reproach, while any displays that fall outside of gender-appropriate acts must be kept hidden, initiated only in privacy, something to be ashamed of. [...]

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