"An Infinite Dressing Room of Selves" by Jackie Hedeman
In the spring of my freshman year at Princeton, I enrolled in a class called “Know Thyself: Literature and the Art of Self-Discovery.” The course description spoke to the broad curiosities I held even then: “This seminar will examine a number of texts, ancient and modern, that explore the relationship between interpretation (how we ought to read) and ethics (how we ought to act), finding in literature a way of imagining human life as a work of art.” We read Emerson, Ovid, Dante, Fernando Pessoa, Donald Hall, J.M. Coetzee, Foucault, Plato, St. Augustine. The syllabus was heavy on white men (plus the frequently whitewashed St. Augustine), but at nineteen I had yet to begin to question this way of doing things. It was up to me to make these texts speak to me, to do the far reach and the heavy lift.
We kept spiral bound commonplace books. Part of our weekly homework was to record those passages from the week’s reading that most spoke to or moved us.
Plato: “I was filled, like an empty jar, by the words of other people streaming in through my ears…”
Coetzee: “We change from day to day and we also stay the same.”
Hall: “Heaven knows (at moments of anxiety magic thinking knows no let or hindrance; they are reading everything I write on this yellow pad)—I’ll take it, I’ll take it.”
Augustine: “Have mercy so that I may find words,”
This last I would have tattooed on my body eight years later. Those eight years were spent thinking about it, picking over the words, marveling at how the quote could speak to so many of my waking days.
In “Know Thyself,” we were asked to think outside the course syllabus, to mine our own sacred texts to find those words we couldn’t quite drop. I turned immediately to Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, a play following a group of secondary school boys preparing for the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams. These boys are not particularly well-to-do or savvy, so their teachers try to prepare them through various competing methodologies (broadly: arts & culture, facts & dates, gaming the system). Over the course of the play, the boys struggle to define their own desires and identities against each other and the opposing teaching styles. The History Boys spoke directly to the project “Know Thyself” proposed, most famously in a now overused, but no less true, quote.
Bennett: “The best moments in writing are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
This is how I felt about The History Boys, whose third string cast I had seen on stage in the West End the previous spring break. Wikipedia confirmed that it was the actor Thomas Morrison who ignited my fondness for Scripps, an aspiring writer, part-time glasses-wearer, cagey yet faithful believer, and all around decent human being—a character whose significance arises from his peripheral role as recorder of his schoolmates’ drama. This fondness deepened into identification when I came home and watched the film with the original cast reprising the roles they helped create. In the film adaptation of The History Boys, Jamie Parker plays Scripps whose first name is Donald, the movie informs us, though on stage he neither had nor needed one. His notebook and reading glasses are replaced in infamy by a baby blue sweater nicely pushed up over serviceable forearms. His closest friends are Stuart Dakin and David Posner. The way Scripps navigates Posner’s adolescent crush on Dakin, if you are a young woman of the same age, encountering the play for the first time and in some closet of description, is a delight to behold.
Scripps doesn’t offer sassy repartee; he’s not that kind of wingman. His character is primarily a sounding board, but his role in the play is more than that of a convenient interlocutor. These days, Scripps might be viewed as a model of nontoxic masculinity, if he had more lines. The plot of The History Boys would be the same if Scripps were replaced by a sister or a childhood friend or a piece of drywall, but the play would not be the same. Watching Scripps, in my senior year of high school, ready and afraid to leave one reality for another, I appreciated the fact that Scripps was both essential and peripheral. I had been Scripps. In school, P tells me about a boy she likes. M tells me about a boy he likes. R tells me about a girl he likes. T tells me about a boy she likes. B tells me about a boy she likes. I tell them oh, wow, so, wait, tell me more, and don’t offer much in return. I was the “Supportive Friend,” and I was the one burying my head in my hands at church, and I was the one writing it all down. Of course I took Scripps personally; with a character so lightly sketched it was easy to find myself in the ways he was both present and absent.
In Alan Bennett’s introduction to The History Boys script, he considers which boys carry pieces of him in them. Watching, and then reading, the stage play in that time before I knew where I was going to college, was the hand reaching out. At Princeton a year later, I felt the hand too: “I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.”
In college, I continued to be Scripps: P comes to visit and doesn’t ask me about myself. She invites confidences, but doesn’t pry. I know from long experience that anything I tell her will be treated as temporary fact, a place I am free to begin and not end. M comes to visit and I take him to pose by the statue of Abraham and Isaac, the one designed as a Kent State memorial, the one that looks like a precursor to a blowjob. We talk about books. R comes to visit and we go out for ice cream and I ask him if he’s seeing anyone and he answers. He doesn’t ask me the same question. He says, “You’ve always seemed happy in your own company.”
As we moved through the “Know Thyself” syllabus, I grappled to articulate the elements that went into knowing myself. I hammered away at myself like an interrogator. Does it help, knowing that everything you do is fodder for future stories? Are new experiences better for providing you with new material, or scarier for removing your history and the foundation of your stories thus far? I spent untold hours sitting in my dorm room considering the merits of checking off both the “Women” and “Men” box in the “Interested In” section of Facebook. In the end, I left them both unchecked, which felt like its own declaration.
As “Know Thyself” wound down, we were tasked with creating some work that brought our readings into conversation with each other and with ourselves. I decided to write a play, a Socratic dialogue between the writer Donald Hall, J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Scripps from The History Boys, and a Jackie Hedeman who takes interpretive risks with her life. The Jackie in the play is bemused, if a little alarmed, to discover that these characters have been brought in to help her figure herself out. (Jackie: “Don’t you mean, ‘figure you out’?” Donald Hall: “No.”)
Jackie is also candid with her insecurities. On becoming unremarkable at Princeton after a lifetime being “the one who’s good at writing,” she says, “Nothing about me sets me apart, now.” It’s not an unfamiliar feeling. She has already encountered it once before, in high school:
I remember looking at myself in the mirror at the beginning of sophomore year and wondering, “Do I have a personality?” Who am I, you know? (pause) I didn’t want that feeling to come back, but here it is again. […] There needs to be some draw. They have to want to get to know me. I don’t think I know yet what that draw is.
On page nine, after wading through a discourse on religious belief, Donald Hall says, “Let’s talk a bit about sexuality,” and Elizabeth Costello says, “Oh good lord. Must we?” before limiting the conversation to half a typed page:
Donald Hall: Stop avoiding the question.
Jackie: I don’t have an answer, really. At least not one I’m ready to commit to.
Donald Hall: Does that mean you’re unsure?
Jackie: It means I’m unsure in my surety. In other words, I’m pretty sure I like mangoes and not star fruit, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever know for sure until I try either or both.
Elizabeth Costello: Oh my.
Jackie: In theory.
Elizabeth Costello: And are you familiar with this sort of (she can’t bring herself to say experimentation and struggles for words as a result)…scientific whittling-down?
Jackie: To quote Alan Bennett (nodding at Scripps), “That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.”
Donald Hall: (laughs) That’s quite a good one.
Scripps: What can I say? I’ve worked with the best.
It’s a dodge within a dodge within a dodge, but it’s also a bold declaration, especially for the self I was in 2007. Writing the play, I leaned hard into the fact that my professor would be the only person to read it. It would be the best of both worlds: no one who mattered would have to bear witness to my vulnerability and I could still get heaped with praise for my delicate turn of phrase. The writing ego boost without the vulnerability hangover.
The History Boys is a queer play, but Scripps is undefined, and so he can be whatever I want him to be. When I was the straight friend, Scripps was the straight friend. When I was coming out to myself as queer, Scripps was waving Dakin off, asking him not to ask too many questions. Now, as I continue to own the contours of that queerness, Scripps is still there for me, in my head out of habit.
His blankness is precisely what I have needed at various points to project my own preoccupations. Pop culture, broadly, is an infinite dressing room of selves. At other times, I have found my bisexuality in Maggie Stiefvater’s YA series The Raven Cycle. I found openness to experience in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Devouring research and literature on the Cambridge Spies, I give myself permission to guard secrets.
My friend Anna Shea thinks that The History Boys is about how to be yourself without also becoming trapped. She offered this diagnosis after I mentioned to her that, re-watching the film at age thirty, out of the closet and done forever with school, I was no longer entirely sure what it was about. Past viewings had me convinced that it was about getting into college. Pedagogy. The closet. Friendship. Idealism. The shaping of a narrative.
Of course The History Boys is about all these things, but it’s mostly about seeking. Scripps is whatever I need him to be. He’s poised to go. I am poised to follow. We are on the right track, but the track is infinite.
In his final comments on the play, my professor wrote, “Held at the partial distance of fiction, the personal matters that you candidly address yield a meaning that, precisely because it is no longer strictly your own, may be shared with others and become a part of their own self-writing.” He concluded, “Your play earns an A and earns you an A for the course. Thank you very much for this exciting work.”
Jackie Hedeman (she/her) received her MFA from The Ohio State University and her BA from Princeton University. Her writing has appeared in Autostraddle, The Best American Travel Writing 2017, Electric Literature, Fugue, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat Fellow and a Charlotte Street Foundation 2019-2021 Studio Resident. With Molly Olguín, she is the co-creator of The Pasithea Powder, a scripted audio drama.
