Self-Perception and a Nickname

The narrator of Mary McCarthy’s short story, “C.Y.E.,” depicts the story of her childhood and how it was shaped by the Catholic boarding school she attended. As she tells her story, the reader finds that two mean girls who emotionally bullied the narrator majorly affected her life. In the retelling of her story, the narrator’s view of her former self gradually changes throughout the story. She begins to tell of herself as a young girl who tried desperately to be perceived as normal and is defensive of her actions at this time. As the story progresses, the narrator views herself as weak and shameful in the way that she dealt with her bullies and this resentment towards her actions boiled over, causing her to become the new mean girl.

When the narrator first introduces herself as a young girl. She has just joined a new school run by a catholic convent. At this point in the story, the narrator views herself as “ambitious,” wanting to befriend the “most exciting and powerful girls” in her school (180). In retrospect, she sees herself as “naïve” because she thinks that she only has to be herself to befriend such girls. This foreshadows a coming change in the way that the narrator will view herself in the upcoming story. As she moves along in the story, she tells of two girls that are highly revered in the eyes of the girls at school. Elinor Henehan and Mary Heinrich were not the typical mean girls that one sees in the movies. They were “funny, lazy, dangling girls,” with an “insouciant attitude toward convent life” (181). The two gained their power of popularity through the emotional distress they inflicted upon other girls. This was done by doling out confusing nicknames that did not make much sense and by simply laughing at what seems like everything about a particular girl. Their laughter was ‘unnerving” because of its “general, almost abstract character” (181). It wasn’t long until their sights fell upon our narrator. Try as she might to stay under the radar, the two dubbed her “CYE.” At first she tried to forget about the name, however that tactic did not work. With the whole school knowing that she had been ‘branded,’ she was now in complete isolation, left to contemplate what the nickname meant and what part of her was the root of her issues. As she dwelled on her nickname, she knew that she had some “spiritual taint” and though she did not know what it was exactly, she “felt its existence almost tangible” (183). So, the narrator has now changed from perceiving herself as being perfectly fine and normal to having something completely wrong with her that she knows is there, however she cannot put her finger on what it is. She now has self-doubt and is dissatisfied with who she is.

The narrator eventually graduates from her self-loathing stage to one of acceptance. She has “accepted the nickname, made a sort of joke of it,” and actually started calling herself by ‘Cye.’ The narrator looks at this decision and says that what she chose “was actually the more shameful” decision she had made (184). By this confession, the narrator is admitting that she views her former self as being weak. She did not stand up for herself and took the hits that kept on coming. She chose the cowardly way of dealing with the baggage of her nickname. At the end of the story, the narrator leaves school, drops her nickname, and then comes back and replaces Elinor and Mary. She hands off her despised nickname to a “pale, plain girl” that could potentially remind her of the young girl she once was. Instead of embracing the vision of being one of the “beautiful girls” that she so longed to be, she is now the one doling out what affected her so negatively.