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.
Themes
The Fallibility and Incapacity of Adults
Big Mouth & Ugly Girl is a novel about adolescents coming of age and discovering new truths of their world. Among these revelations is an understanding of the fallibility of the adults they previously considered somehow different and more knowledgeable than themselves. Big Mouth & Ugly Girl presents adults in much the same way as it presents children: as confused slaves to gossip and reputation who struggle with issues much larger than themselves.
The issues adults fumble through in this text include the possibilities of domestic terrorism (Mr. Parrish) and lawsuits upward of $50 million (the Donaghys and the accused: Mr. Parrish, Reverend Brewer, and the school district). Ill-equipped to deal with these gargantuan issues, adults also fall victim to much smaller problems, such as marital strife, depression, and loneliness, issues that afflict both Matt’s and Ursula’s parents and directly impact the children.
Oates presents adults as largely stumbling through life and therefore lacking much capability in guiding the text’s adolescent protagonists. As she writes, “Mr. Parrish was smiling in that strained hopeful way adults have when they want you to think something they aren’t a hundred percent certain of themselves. So if you go away thinking it, they can think it, too. Or maybe” (92). This and other lines suggest that adults are just as unsure as children but must act as if they have authority.
One instance of mistaken judgment of events occurs when Ursula’s mother instructs Ursula not to bear witness to Matt’s innocence. She does so to protect Ursula’s academic prospects, but it is Ursula’s decision to defend Matt against her mother’s wishes that earns her strong college recommendation letters from the Rocky River High administration.
Another example is Mr. Parrish. Though he admits he does not believe Matt poses a serious threat to the school, he feels obligated to report the bomb scare and embroil himself and the Donaghy family in an issue that spirals well beyond his control. This choice actively contradicts the role Mr. Parrish should take as school principal, as a steward who guides the adolescent characters away from harm. Matt’s father’s explosive reaction upon Matt asking him to cancel the lawsuit against the school is another example of adults’ incapacity and the irony of this incapacity: The Donaghy lawsuit is for damages to Matt’s mental health, but the continuation of this suit only causes Matt more damage.
The Ubiquity of Social Performance
The concept that every individual is a social performer is crucial to the text, in which the idea of performance is manifested in several levels. For instance, in Chapter 1 Matt is writing a play—one kind of performance. When questioned by the police, he is embarrassed to have to exit the room in front of everyone: “What a long distance it seemed, walking from the rear of the classroom to the front, and to the door, as everyone stared” (6). Concerned with what people think of him, Matt is also a zealous performer when trying to get attention, such as when he jokes about blowing up the school, a performance that causes him much duress throughout the novel.
Matt admires Ursula because she acts with “pride” (185), uncaring of what people think of her. Although Matt does not perceive it, Ursula acts so proud through her constructed persona Ugly Girl, which is a performance that allows her to conceal her insecurities about her body: “Ugly Girl. She was like a uniform, or a skin” (240). This indicates that even those that seem to disdain what other people think of them are also performers. Even Ursula’s and Matt’s parents, who are concerned with their reputations and those of their children, demonstrate that even adults are concerned with how others see them.
The Damaging Effects of Rumors and Gossip
The plot of Big Mouth & Ugly Girl details the continuing consequences of a single rumor—that Matt planned to blow up the school, a joke that others treated as a legitimate threat. The immediate effects of this rumor—Matt’s questioning by police—cause a chain reaction in the novel: Matt’s family decides to sue the school; Matt is socially ostracized and physically assaulted, and he considers suicide; and a bully kidnaps Matt’s dog. Throughout the text Rocky River High School is the setting where gossip is most seeded. Often, as in Chapter 32, when the students gossip about the relationship between Matt and Ursula, Oates depicts gossip as dialogue detached from any speaker. With this technique, the author suggests that once spoken, gossip exists irrelevant of its speaker and immediately moves beyond them toward unknown consequences.
Importantly, gossip also causes Ursula to come to Matt’s aid. Her heroic personality is partly defined by her refusal to listen to gossip or grant it credence. When everyone around her is abuzz with rumors and opinions about the Donaghy family lawsuit, it is only Ursula who insists “that’s their business” (133). This is also the quality in Ursula that Matt admires most; it is the reason he calls her “1 individual in 1 million” (161), the only person in Rocky River who does not fall victim to gossip.
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