Setting and character development in Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

Tales of the City

Mary Ann in the City

Early on in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, Connie tells Mary Ann, "Relax hon… Give it time. This city loosens people up." (6) The message being that the setting of San Francisco in the 1970s and 80s was a place of loose social and cultural standards. An analysis of the city, even in retrospect supports the idea that many aspects of San Francisco are in fact associated with free thought and action, especially with regard to sexuality and homosexuality. Mary Ann as a character realizes in many ways the reality of this early statement, of a loosening of character, as her traditional cultural standards are stretched by countless happenings in Maupin's fabled City.

Maupin's Tales of the City, in many ways, was an opening to the broader world the context of the 1960s, 70s and 80s ideal San Francisco, where anything could and did happen. Mary Ann befriends countless individuals who are not as they seem, or who ultimately are exactly what they seem, freethinking and acting spirits attempting to get along in a world that does not accept them. In San Francisco and more specifically in the crazy home that Mary Ann stumbles into these people are not only accepted they are embraced as family. This work will argue that a single relationship, in the context of the envisioned San Francisco can illuminate both the liberal character of the city and the extreme associated with Mary Ann's transformation, Mary Ann's relationship with Anne Madrigal.

Mary Ann as a fictional character represents, to some degree the exposure of the rest of the world i.e. The conservative rest of the world, epitomized by Mary Ann's home town of Cleveland, to the ideations and realities that exist in San Francisco, where diversity becomes wholly accepted, at least in the ideal. (Billingham, 93) San Francisco had a reputation from the beginning of the "summer of love" in 1967 when thousands of people descended on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco to "live free" and express themselves through what many considered the beginning of the sexual and social revolution. Even before this the Beat counterculture literature and psychedelic art movements emerged from the San Francisco area. (Grunenberg & Harris 310) All of these movements led to the reputation of San Francisco as envisioned by Maupin in Tales of the City.

The quintessential example offered here in this very brief essay is that of the relationship May Ann has with Anne Madrigal. Madrigal is a construct of self, she is not as she seems and lives a life wholly constructed by her. First she is not a woman but a transgendered man. This ideation, even in the 1980s was just emerging as one that was even known let alone accepted as a way of being and yet Maupin's character, without to much stereotyping is a foundational example of a "normal" concerned but liberal woman, with elaborate dress and great concern for her charges. One of the very first things she says to Mary Ann is "I have no objection to anything." (Maupin 14)