Finny’s Cross-Dressing Episodes After Stopping Medication and His Hospitalization

Finny’s cross-dressing episodes after he stops taking his medication turn an attempted escape from one constraint into a brief, exuberant public upheaval, then into hospitalization and a return to the classroom. Recalled by William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the episode is marked by a stark reversal: Finny’s apparent freedom and happiness give way to treatment imposed by his soon-to-be ex-wife and a return to the appearances he had previously maintained.

Background and First Signs

The episode occurs during the final days of the Vietnam War. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. suggests that the withdrawal from Southeast Asia may have influenced Finny to flee his marriage. Finny’s own apparent reasoning links that decision to stopping his medication: if he could do without his wife, perhaps he could do without his medication as well. The narrative identifies that assumption as mistaken, without offering a diagnosis or reducing the episode to a clinical explanation.

The change is visible from the first day off medication. Finny becomes unusually garrulous and good-natured, and appears in eyeliner and mascara. On the second day, after the residual medication has cleared from his system, the change becomes a full public performance: he wears a black satin dress, pearls, and high heels, and strides through the Modern Languages hallways calling out blessings and urging people to open their windows. His appearance and exuberance unsettle the department’s ordinary routines, making the corridors a stage for a brief reversal of its usual order.

A Public Performance

Finny frames the release as letting a dragon loose to fly away and lay waste to other kingdoms. He speaks from atop unsteady high heels, overcome with rapture to the point that tears run through his mascara. His language presents the episode as liberation, while the physical details make that liberation precarious and exposed.

The department responds in sharply different ways. Teddy Barnes, then department chair, locks himself in the office William Henry Devereaux, Jr. later occupies and refuses to come out. Paul Rourke threatens Finny if he does not leave his office. June Barnes offers the practical advice that pearls should not be worn before five. Billy Quigley, who usually has little use for Finny, welcomes him, offers him a seat and a drink from his flask, and jokes about his appearance. These responses range from fear and hostility to dry correction and rough hospitality; the episode briefly rearranges who is able to unsettle whom, without erasing the risks involved.

Hospitalization and Return

Finny’s freedom and happiness are short-lived. By the time the last Marine is evacuated from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, his soon-to-be ex-wife has him hospitalized and medicated again. The account describes the result as a return to disheartened heterosexuality and male attire, language that records the narrator’s framing of the outcome rather than supplying a clinical account of Finny’s experience. After a month-long convalescence, Finny returns to the classroom in Modern Languages.

He brings half a dozen new exercises on the distinction between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, a subject that already defines his teaching. The return restores the department’s routine, but not its esteem for his classroom performance: William Henry Devereaux, Jr. describes Finny’s subsequent teaching as arrogant, incompetent, and excruciatingly tedious. The episode therefore ends not with a simple resolution, but with a return to familiar institutional life after an intense interruption; Finny’s outward presentation is again controlled, while the narrator’s account leaves the costs and meaning of that control unresolved.