Learning How to Be Boys and Girls in Torrey, Randall, Serin, and Baker

Each of the pieces we read for this week employs a different strategy for telling the story and revealing the character of the narrator. Torrey's "Boy" is stream-of-consciousness, with only two italic interjections constituting the voice of the protagonist. Randall's "Daughter Rhymes with Laughter" uses language as a jumping off point for reflecting on her life. Serin's use of second person in "Some Family Stories," as well as the variety of topics, submerges a reader in the narrators perspective but not for long (the passages are quite brief). Baker's essay "Losing Shawn, Losing Me" is the most straightforward piece we read this week, in a conventional first person short story form, with the creative element being the use of italicized excerpts from the protagonist's medical record to support or challenge the narrative.

Last week I wrote about gender vis a vis embodiment, and I was a bit self-conscious to find myself analyzing this weeks readings through a similar lens. Admittedly, I am very used to reflecting on reading critically in Gender Studies classes and not very much in Literature classes. But the pieces themselves provoke a reading that is conscious of gender socialization, and it makes sense because coming of age has a lot to do with accepting, rejecting, or surviving socialization. Torrey's "Boy" is explicitly about the instruction he received from his father on how to be a man, and ultimately, how his own desires confounded those attempts at gender normalization. Randall has in common with Torrey that their pieces employ a non-explicitly linear inclusion of facts. In Randall, her digressions from the initial jumping off points at the beginning of each passage are what add depth and richness to otherwise commonplace rites of passage (for example, her inclusion of her dental history in the menstruation section). Serin negotiates gender socialization against the foil of her older sister's womanhood, by way of her ownership of her ethnic heritage. Finally, Baker's essay navigates young womanhood, forbidden young womanhood, and motherhood against the backdrop of a Vietnam-war era Bay Area.

Because of Baker's frank voice, transparency about her feelings, and inclusion of historic and geographic context, I was drawn into her story immediately. Because I am interested in the politics of pregnancy and motherhood, despised social statuses, coerced or semi-coerced institutionalization, and body horror, I was emotionally invested as well.

The beginning of the story is at the point of birth, looking up at the ceiling from a hospital bed, and then the previous months are filled in. During the first page, because of the title and the medical language, I thought the story was going to be about the baby dying. Maternity homes occupy such an interesting place in history, they were bigger right before Thatcher declared society dead and government began to divest in social services, they were places to hide the women performing the despised labor of creating life, and I'm sure there was as much variety between them as Baker describes were between the three homes she and her mother checked out.

As I mentioned before, the creative storytelling element here is the inclusion of passages ostensibly from Baker's medical file. They destabilize the narrative only slightly, with their tendency to depict Baker as a weepy drug user, but such is the gap between how we perceive ourselves and how those wielding institutional power perceive us. The most revealing moment of this story for me was when Baker refers to her path in pregnancy through the maternity home and into adoption in quotation marks - as an "option" (81). This is a wry nod to the reality, elaborated upon throughout the piece, that Baker didn't really have a choice, or rather, no viable or attractive choice. This moment is powerful because many pregnancy narratives, particularly ones involving accidental pregnancies or single/young mothers, lean heavily on the language of choice. Baker avoids that and tells a richer story--and reveals herself to be a more complex character--for it.