Clemson University TigerPrints All Theses Theses 5-2010 The cS arf Club Mari Ramler Clemson University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Ramler, Mari, "The caS rf Club" (2010). All Theses. 835. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/835 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE SCARF CLUB A Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts English by Mari E. Ramler May 2010 Accepted by: Keith Morris, Chair John Warner Jillian Weise ABSTRACT A novel comprises this creative thesis, which has been submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of Master of Arts in English literature. This manuscript is the story of Lucy Merdock and how two major losses during her senior year of high school change the way she sees herself. ii DEDICATION For Jed. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’d like to express my gratitude to the following people for their help with this project: Dan K. for reminding me what high school felt like; Bryant and Andrew G. for their descriptions of South Africa; Surge M. for Scarf Club advice and suggestions; Jamee E. for some great stories and introducing me to the character of Perry; Kevin K., Amanda W., Shoe B., and Jared P. for all things cross country; and Coach for being Coach. I’d also like to thank some key readers: Allyson S., Bryan B., and John S. Thanks to Keith Morris, my committee chair, and Jillian Weise for their excellent feedback. Special thanks to John Warner for teaching me how to shape a novel. Thank you, Dr. Bennett, for your mentorship. Halfway through this draft, I had a baby, got really sick, and wound up on bed rest. I would not have completed this book if it hadn’t been for my mom. Thank you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page TITLE PAGE .................................................................................................................... i ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... ii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................ iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................. iv INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1 PROLOGUE .................................................................................................. 7 CHAPTER ONE .......................................................................................... 11 CHAPTER TWO ......................................................................................... 30 CHAPTER THREE ..................................................................................... 35 CHAPTER FOUR ........................................................................................ 40 CHAPTER FIVE ......................................................................................... 46 CHAPTER SIX ............................................................................................ 60 CHAPTER SEVEN ..................................................................................... 65 CHAPTER EIGHT ...................................................................................... 76 CHAPTER NINE ......................................................................................... 84 CHAPTER TEN........................................................................................... 92 CHAPTER ELEVEN ................................................................................... 96 CHAPTER TWELVE ................................................................................ 103 CHAPTER THIRTEEN ............................................................................. 105 CHAPTER FOURTEEN ........................................................................... 108 v CHAPTER FIFTEEN ................................................................................ 115 CHAPTER SIXTEEN ................................................................................ 119 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ......................................................................... 123 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN............................................................................. 132 CHAPTER NINETEEN............................................................................. 135 CHAPTER TWENTY ............................................................................... 139 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE ...................................................................... 149 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO ..................................................................... 157 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE ................................................................. 158 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR ................................................................... 161 CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE ..................................................................... 166 EPILOGUE ................................................................................................ 174 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 176 vi INTRODUCTION Narratives as disparate as Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit give voice to anomalous adolescent female protagonists, characters traditionally deprived of an accepted narrative. McCullers’s Mick Kelly is a tomboy who secretly dreams of music but experiences bewilderment regarding the suicide of her unconventional friend, Mr. Singer, who is an adult deaf-mute. Winterson’s narrator in her memoir-like novel centers on the origins of her lesbianism and its subsequent consequences on her family and religious life. Outcasts in their social circles due in part to their limited upbringing, specifically as it has evolved from a particular place / region, both struggle to find a voice within their respective religious and regional confines. The House on Mango Street , To Kill A Mockingbird , and Antigone by Jean Anouilh also affirm the voice of female adolescents who function as Others within their worlds. How characters evolve from the effects of their physical locales—their values and belief systems, their social hierarchies, and their subsequent relationships—is a fascination of mine, as is the protagonist’s relationship with place. These differing narratives taught me to view place not only as a character itself within the novel, but also as the shaping mother from whom these protagonists are born. A Hispanic Chicago neighborhood, Maycomb, Alabama, or ancient Thebes, these bildungsroman settings explore the conflict of identity—both finding and maintaining it in spite of class, gender, and social spheres. Like these female adolescent narrators, Lucy Merdock struggles to find identity, voice, and affirmation in The Scarf Club . Carson McCullers explores similar themes through sexual dysfunction in her fiction. The social displacement of the Other and the triangles she employs to illustrate Mr. Singer and Miss Amelia’s isolation were helpful to me as I wanted to stage the same sense of displacement and Otherness in the characters who are members of The Scarf Club. Merdock, Shoe, and Amanda Lindell; Merdock, Shoe, and Michael; Merdock, Katy Wren, and Michael; Shoe, Michael, and Todd Coleman—all of these changing triangles serve as constellations illuminating the Otherness of the narrator and the attempts she makes to place herself in a social system substituting for the one she has lost with Coach’s death, the cross country team. I also drew on Robert Penn Warren’s Band of Angels ’ basic pattern of a female narrator who tells her story and comes to a patch-work sense of self by seeing herself through the lens of the different men in her life. Lucy Merdock also sees herself through the lens of the male characters in her life, particularly Shoe, Michael, and Coach. As she orbits around the men in the novel, Merdock is presented with various senses of self. Warren’s more popular novel, All the King’s Men , utilizes a self-conscious narrative, one in which the narrator’s healing can only happen through the telling of another man’s history. Both of these elements were crucial beginning points to me as I decided to use an adolescent female narrator who is trying to recover from two major losses which happen during her senior year of high school. Coach’s death in the middle of cross country season causes Merdock’s displacement in her upper middle class high school and also provides the catalyst for Merdock to join Speech and Debate class where she meets Michael. Michael’s suicide produces her incredible sense of guilt. In both of his novels, Warren’s narrator carries the plot with a strong voice which enables him to cobble 2 together a unified story from the many sub-stories his brightly colored cast introduces. I worked to make Merdock’s trait of approach-avoidance characteristic of her voice, since the novel focuses on several other strong characters who could threaten to steal her story. I wanted The Scarf Club to have a strong, dominant female voice, but I also wanted that voice to falter in the attempt to