93 pages • 3 hours read
Joyce Carol OatesBig Mouth & Ugly Girl
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 16-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Ursula’s mother convinces her to come to a modern dance performance with her and Lisa in Manhattan. The family jokes that Ursula only agrees because her mother promised a lunch before the matinee. Thinking of dance and Lisa’s body, Ursula reflects on her own fluctuating weight. She notes she never measures her weight; it is a boring fact. Ursula remembers quitting the swim team, which the reader now learns was based on her embarrassment over her weight, not external pressures.
Ursula never told her parents why she quit the basketball team or how disgusted she was with the treatment of Matt at school, though her mother has since told her how proud she is of Ursula’s actions. Ursula was recently crowded in the hall by the Brewer twins, Muriel and Miriam, daughters of a bigoted local reverend named Ike. The twins confronted her, calling Ursula a big horse and a Jew-girl (though Ursula later tells the reader she is not Jewish), and jeering at her for defending Matt.
It has become common knowledge at school that Ursula stuck up for Matt. Ursula thinks about all these events over lunch before the show; she also notices that Lisa is only picking at her food. Five minutes into the dance event, Ursula escapes, angering her mother in doing so. She goes to an art exhibit, where she is inspired by a passage on the unexplored genius of many female artists from a book called The Obstacle Race by Germaine Greer.
Walking back to meet her mother and sister at the Lincoln Center, Ursula mistakes an ice skater for Matt and hurries away, blushing. On her way she also sees a group of women slightly older than her, dressed like punks with facial piercings. She and the women exchange waves. Ursula thinks, “It felt good. They were Ugly Girls, too” (121).
Chapter 17 Summary
Matt goes for another hike in the mountains. His family life is getting more tense, and his parents’ relationship is more strained than usual. At home he finds his mother crying in the bathroom over a piece of mail: a newspaper clipping about the bomb scare with the words “your neighbors are not safe we are not going to forget” scrawled in red letters over it (124).
Matt’s mother no longer feels safe in the community. She insists they will move away and keeps the clipping to show Matt’s father, who she says family life is not “real enough” for (125). Matt tells her that maybe home life is “too real” for his father. He tries to comfort his mother and apologizes for his “big mouth” (126) getting them into this mess. His mother refuses to listen to him and walks away angrily.
Chapter 18 Summary
In homeroom, which they share, Ursula notices Matt has become more despondent and now sits by himself at lunch. She considers sending another email to him but does not. Ursula keeps noticing the Brewer twins at school and suddenly realizes that they must have reported Matt’s cafeteria joke as a legitimate threat. Upon confrontation, the two sisters confess but tell Ursula that she can’t prove they lied about what they heard.
Chapter 19 Summary
It becomes common knowledge that the Brewers informed on Matt. Rumors spread that one of the sisters had a crush on Matt and took revenge when he “snubbed” her, and that Ursula and Matt are dating. Rumors also spread that the Donaghys are suing the school district.
At Ursula’s locker, a group of junior girls ask what she thinks of the Donaghy’s lawsuit. Ursula angrily insists it is no one’s business but their own. For a moment, the focalization shifts to this group to comment on how odd “Big Ursula” (134) is, especially considering her normal and successful family. Additionally, “this new rumor about Ursula Riggs and Matt Donaghy was so ridiculous, you almost wished it might be true” (134).
Chapter 20 Summary
Matt is still absent from school. An article in the Westchester Journal confirms the Donaghy’s lawsuit, with the Donaghy family now named for the first time. Reading it, Ursula’s father is insensitive to the seriousness of the issue but does say he considers the suit a mistake. When questioned on how Matt might feel, Ursula storms out, unwilling to admit any closeness between them.
Chapter 21 Summary
Matt is called a fag, chased, and beat up on a flight of icy stairs by a group of jocks led by school bully Trevor Cassity. They run away laughing, mockingly telling him to sue them.
Chapter 22 Summary
Ursula’s mother is giving her the silent treatment for her behavior at the dance event. Ursula notices Lisa’s moods are becoming sourer and that she is eating less. She worries that the competitive aspect of ballet, especially the need to maintain a low weight, is negatively impacting Lisa. She reflects, “It scared me that Lisa was going through what I’d gone through on the swim team” (142).
Ursula sees her mother as a negative influence on Lisa, supporting ballet and defending Lisa when Ursula goads the two into discussing anorexia. After dinner Ursula goes upstairs to read The Obstacle Race, which she borrowed from the library. Thinking about Matt, she inexplicably decides to hike the Windy Point Trail in the Rocky River Nature Preserve this weekend.
Chapter 23 Summary
Matt goes for another hike. He feels guilty for everything, including being assaulted. Like his emails, he wants to erase these events. He twice imagines dying on his hike: “I could die here… and be happy” (147). It becomes clear Matt may be intending to kill himself.
On his hike Matt decides to scale an ice-covered ravine. His boots and hands repeatedly slip on the way up.
Chapter 24 Summary
Ursula finds Matt crouched at the edge of the ravine. She thinks he is about to jump and rushes into action, talking to him kindly and trying to convince him to hike on with her. In this moment “Ugly Girl seemed to have departed. It was just me, Ursula” (151). Matt hesitates at the edge, and Ursula can see him preparing to jump. Then he decides not to and heads back down the cliff with Ursula. On the walk he tightly grips her hand.
Chapters 16-24 Analysis
These chapters provide significant narrative insight into Ursula’s development into an adult; they also detail the deepening repercussions that the school rumors have on Matt.
Chapter 16, and to a lesser extent Chapter 22, details Ursula’s growth into a woman, as she develops her own tastes and adult ideas of femininity. In Chapter 16 Ursula confronts the Brewer twins, who mean to attack her based on grounds of her oddness as an individual and an image of femininity. She later goes to a dance show with her mother and sister; by departing the dance event—dance is a passion the other two women in her family share—Ursula also rejects this feminine image. She gets closer to her own image of womanhood upon finding a passage from The Obstacle Race by Germaine Greer, a book on fine art and its under-representation of female artists. In passing a group of other “Ugly Girls” (young women who follow a punk aesthetic), she sees another image of successful femininity she can identify with. In discovering more of her own identity, Ursula also discovers more of her voice. In an echo of her desire to speak up for Matt against her mother’s instruction, Ursula again defies parental law in an attempt to address her younger sister’s growing eating disorder—and the possible damage that ballet’s body image standards are doing to Lisa’s health and psyche.
Though Ursula is clearly on a path toward greater maturity, she still refuses to admit her feelings for Matt. When her father asks about Matt, she becomes angry and embarrassed, though she is still upset by the injustice of what is happening to him.
For Matt, the picture is somewhat darker. In these chapters Matt is more deeply ostracized than ever before. He is beat up due to his family’s lawsuit against the school, and his family is targeted with anonymous hate mail because of his actions—a sort of ransom note that foreshadows Pumpkin’s abduction. Because of this letter, Matt also witnesses the disintegration of his parents’ relationship and his mother’s depression, and as a collective consequence he comes close to suicide. The bleak whiteness of a winter hike symbolizes that Matt wants to erase the past, erase his words, erase his experience. It is Ursula who saves him from this impulse, again showing her heroism and compassion.
The Brewer twins are also introduced in these chapters. These are the girls who, influenced by their father’s hateful mindset, reported Matt as legitimately dangerous even though they knew his words were a joke. The text implies that their actions are a consequence of bad parenting, suggesting that even the story’s antagonists are simply adolescents who need guidance, just like Matt and Ursula. The positioning of their father as a fundamentalist reverend with a racist and bigoted perspective draws on another social issue in the United States. In emphasizing this issue in the American national identity, Oates clearly cautions us to be aware and thoughtful of the problems in our communities before we sensationalize them.
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