Perspective and Gender in Torrey and Baker

Torrey’s Boy employs a second person, stream of consciousness piece that immediately begins with a list of condescending commands, “Grab a chain out back of the old Ford…make sure you attach the chain right” (120). The list reads as the narrator’s ideas of “how to be man” complete with tenets of masculinity such as work, domestic tasks (taking out the garbage), and what car to get (not a car a truck). For the first half of the piece, I was extremely turned off by its “how to be a man list,” thinking that the second person is a difficult perspective for an author to master without seeming commanding and condescending to the reader. This individualist perspective has a limited view and reveals the unreliability of the narrator. 

I found the piece more engaging when I considered who the possible intended audiences could be, the self, a father figure, a son? Maybe it could even be read as all three. As the piece continues it devolves into a more manic list. Its insistent reminders, “don’t forget to take out the trash, the paper said the garbage pick-up date has changed, don’t forget” (120), reveal the narrators insecurities about his ability to perform the laundry list of masculine roles. Such a short piece, similar to Hill’s Glory Days is difficult to contextualize. The somewhat out of place italics, “what if I don’t want to be a mechanic, but a violinist” (121) suggest that the narrator’s thought process is attempting to reconcile what his father/society expects of him, and in turn what he expects from himself, and what he actually desires.

The narrator in Baker’s Losing Shawn, Losing Me, similarly to Boy, grapples with what she is supposed to want (adoption) and what she actually wants (to keep Shawn). The setting of 1967 is ripe with negative ideas of what “bad girls” do, the need to hide because “Nice girls didn’t get pregnant” (82). Although the narrator is 18, the voice feels immature and as though she does not have any agency as a character, that she is being pushed along by her parents, their gendered expectations and shame. Despite the immature voice there are moments in the piece where she breaks through, or at least it becomes obvious she is aware of her lack of agency, “I am in a state of suspended animation” (86).

Similar to Torrey, Baker employs italics to express the intricacies within the narrator. Baker’s italics offer the caseworker’s perspective of Deborah. As a reader, being wary of Deborah’s immature voice, another perspective helps build trust. The italics clearly represent the tension between her own desires and what she is supposed to do, “She seems to have a good deal of feeling about the baby, while making it clear that she would rather abort it” (79). The gender role that unfolds in the story is disturbing: unmarried pregnant women are sent to a jail-like maternity home to hide their bodies, as representations of something “bad” from public view while they took classes in domestic training, “I was going to have to go back in the world as good marriageable material, and the classes would help us become good wives” (86). The maternity home and adoption process silence Deborah’s countercultural and maternal experiences. And in Torrey, the Boy’s toughness tries to silence his “sissy” tendencies. 

-Andrea