Big Mouth & Ugly Girl

“What a long distance it seemed, walking from the rear of the classroom to the front, and to the door, as everyone stared. There was a roaring in Matt’s ears.” 

Matt has just been approached by the police and asked to leave his classroom for questioning. A natural performer, Matt was working on a playscript at the moment of this interruption. Now embarrassed to have to “perform” in front of his class, Matt reveals a shy quality beneath his Big Mouth persona.

“There was Ursula Riggs, who was an excellent student, a serious girl with an interest in biology and art, and there was Ugly Girl, who played sports like a Comanche and who had a sullen, sarcastic tongue.” 

Oates captures the concept of the teenage search for identity and self-assurance through the bivalent personality of Ursula Riggs. Initially created to protect Ursula from embarrassment over her body, Ursula’s Ugly Girl persona is a defiant personality that also embodies Ursula’s natural athleticism, principled morality, and rejection of authority and gender norms. As the novel goes on, Ursula realizes that her truest self is neither Ursula Riggs nor Ugly Girl but a union of the two poles. As such, this quotation connects directly to a much later statement by Ursula, which acknowledges that Ugly Girl is “like a uniform, or a skin” (240) suitable for some occasions but not others.

“Life consists of facts, and facts are of two kinds: Boring, and Crucial. I figured this out for myself in eighth grade. Wish I could patent it! A Boring Fact is virtually any fact that doesn’t concern you. Or it’s just trivial, a nothing fact. (Like the annual rainfall in, let’s say, Bolivia. Crucial to the Bolivians, but Boring to everyone else.) I know the Crucial Facts of Ugly Girl’s life are Boring Facts to others. Yet, to Ugly Girl, they are Crucial. There’s one test of a Crucial Fact: It hurts.” 

Chapter 2 reveals that middle school was when Ugly Girl first developed as a persona, a tool to help Ursula cope with her embarrassment around her body and departure from the swim team. Reading here that her concept of Boring and Crucial facts also emerged in eighth grade suggests it is part of the