The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (18 page)

to be, in a word, docile. Like well-broken riding mares, we were to do what

we were told, quietly and with the least amount of trouble for our handlers”

(1973, 164). To escape, Irish American women began producing highly crit-

ical, highly autobiographical novels.

Not surprisingly, these novels were not only autobiographical but also

feminist. Their works include some if not all of the following traits: The

purpose is to “change the world”; in other words, gender and politics are

intertwined (Schweikert 1986, 38). Connection and community and the

“struggle against patriarchy” are often prominent themes leading to feelings

of optimism about the prospect of future change. In these novels, male char-

acters are no longer the most interesting, and powerful women are no longer

monstrous or unfeminine. Instead, female experiences and value systems are

examined and more likely to be valued, leading women readers to identify

more easily with the characters and plots. The text/story is viewed as a mani-

festation of the author because these novels rely on a personal voice convey-

ing a sense of “interiority”—that is, the authors provide an inside look at the

character’s heart and mind, which in turn often triggers a desire to connect

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with the text (Schweikert 1986, 46–48). Feminist novels by Irish American

women refl ect most if not all of these traits. As Maureen Howard notes, “it

is in the telling of our stories that we reveal how bound we are to the rituals

of family life, yet how we strain against them” (1997, xi–xiii).

Some Irish American women writers were able to balance this strain

through the use of humor, for using comedy lessened the severity of ques-

tioning the church (Del Rosso 2005, 149). Maureen Howard learned from

the master—or mistress, in this case. “For a woman coming of age in the

1950s,” she wrote, “to read Mary McCarthy was a jolt in the right direc-

tion. That direction is the arrow (a bright, pulsing neon) pointing upstairs.

Upstairs is the head bone, gray matter” (1975, 195). McCarthy’s satire,

political critiques, and feminist messages laid the contextual groundwork for

Howard’s scathing
Bridgeport Bus
(1965).

Set in Howard’s hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the novel

explores “the thematic roots of her own Irish Catholic upbringing” (Fan-

ning 2001, 344). When compared with Howard’s memoir,
Facts of Life
, it

becomes clear that she based the novel on her family members; however, to

protect the innocent, the real life characters’ roles are reversed and enlarged

on—the sarcastic comments of Howard’s father are placed into the mouth of

the fi ctional Mrs. Keely; her lonely, put-upon brother’s personality is grafted

onto the character of Mary Agnes—while the need to escape one’s roots

becomes a journey from present to future as well as from past to present.

In short, Howard takes the traditional Irish trope of a daughter who has

devoted her life to caring for a widowed parent and turns it on its head.

Howard’s protagonist, Mary Agnes Keeley, is thirty-fi ve years old.

Rather than endure a life of self-immolation in service to her widowed par-

ent, “Ag” decides to leave home to experience life and discover herself, a

quest characteristic of the feminist novel. In terms of maturity, Ag is a teen-

ager; consequently, the novel revolves around her loss of sexual innocence.

The plot is framed by Ag’s rejection of the church because she associates it

with her hypocritical Irish Catholic mother whom she has supported since

high school (while her brother went off to Fordham). Because her mother

has nothing better to do, most battles entail church-related guilt. When Ag

cannot attend a Novena because she has a French class, Mrs. Keeley begins a

familiar refrain: “‘God knows’—she started the harangue right away—‘you

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were brought up a good Catholic girl, that you should choose a lot of dirty

French books over your religion. And thank the good Lord’ (with a tremolo)

‘your father is not here to see you an ingrate to your mother’” (Howard

1961, 10).

Tired of feeling belittled and ultimately betrayed by her mother, Ag

moves to New York, fi nds an apartment and a job, and begins a relation-

ship with her coworker, Stanley. Perhaps because he is the fi rst man she has

slept with, she believes she has fallen in love. However, she panics when it

is time to meet Stanley’s mother and impulsively sleeps with a young art-

ist. Throughout this period, the novel breaks from chronological narrative

to pursue Ag’s streams of consciousness, thus illustrating Howard’s “impa-

tience with narrative conventions [as] part and parcel of healthy contempt

for strictures on behavior that stifl e the soul groping toward change for the

better” (Fanning 2001, 342–43). After subsequent encounters with the art-

ist, Ag fi nds herself pregnant, so she moves home, grows increasingly out of

touch with reality, and kills her mother.

As the novel ends, thirty-seven-year-old Ag has been confi ned to a Cath-

olic home for wayward girls to await the birth of her illegitimate child. When

she asks why she was put there, a nun tells her to “pray to God.” Periodically,

the girls are “herded to Mass,” where altar boys cover the rail with doilies

“as if the swollen penitent girls who straggled up the aisle were not quite

clean” (Howard 1961, 303–4). Taken piece by piece, these scenes are more

funny than damning; taken as a whole, however, they offer a satirical view of

Howard’s perception of the church’s hypocrisy.

At the same time, Ag’s gradual mental disintegration exemplifi es a theme

common among novels of the era, whose authors refl ect their Cold War anxi-

eties and middle-class angst through their characters’ demise: “a man (occa-

sionally a woman) is doing pretty well by external measures; yet somehow

the tension between his [or her] aspirations and his [or her] quotidian social

existence grows unbearable. He [or she] stops doing what people expect . . .

and enters a period of disorientation and disreputable experiment” (Ohm-

ann 1984, 393). This theme can be found in Salinger’s
Franny and Zooey
,

Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint
, Bellow’s
Herzog
, Updike’s
Rabbit
trilogy—as

well as Mary McCarthy’s
The Group
, with heroine Kay’s committal and

apparent suicide. But anyone familiar with Howard’s work recognizes the

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82 | T H E B A N S H E E S

same theme, not to mention its stylistic brilliance. The same is true of Maeve

Brennan’s swan song, the novella
Springs of Affection
, and runs throughout

the works of Flannery O’Connor.

Fiction by O’Connor and Cullinan are permeated with themes asso-

ciated with traditional Irish American Catholicism: overbearing mothers,

guilty daughters, and unnecessary veneration, if not fanaticism, for the reli-

gious life. O’Connor published her second novel,
The Violent Bear It Away
,

in 1960. In an interview, she summarized it as dealing with “vocation.” The

main character, Tarwater, could become a religious fanatic like his great-

uncle Old Tarwater—whom she describes variously as a “crypto-Catholic”

(Wells 1962, 71) and as echoing her own Catholic beliefs (Daniel 1962,

C2)—or choose the more secular path exemplifi ed by his school teacher

uncle, Rayber. This plot (and these characters) refl ect the confl ict between

secular and religious life, a favorite O’Connor theme. Like
Wise Blood
, this

novel explores the lives of “youths cursed by self-loathing” because of their

own weakness and inability to break with their “parents,” another theme

running throughout her oeuvre (Hendin 1970, 58–61).

O’Connor passed away in 1964; shortly thereafter her second collection

of short stories,
Everything That Rises Must Converge
, which later won the

National Catholic Book Award, was published. O’Connor always maintained

that she did not write for Catholics alone (Motley 1958, 29). Nevertheless,

as a Catholic, she said, “death has always been brother to my imagination. I

can’t imagine a story that doesn’t properly end in it or in its foreshadowings”

(quoted in Mullins 1963, 35). That certainly describes the stories in this col-

lection of angry children, overbearing mothers, and sudden death.

Elizabeth Cullinan’s short stories featuring priests refl ect Irish Ameri-

can women writers’ ambivalence about the church. In “Estelle” (1976)

and “Voices of the Dead” (1960) this feeling is symbolized by setting the

matriarchs’ home in the “shadow of the church” (Almeida 2001, 89). “The

Reunion” (1961) contrasts the veneration of priests with the guilt of a failed

priest. “The Ablutions” (1960) features Father Fox, a precursor to Father

Phil in
House of Gold
. Like Father Phil, Father Fox is extremely close to

his mother but secretly despises his sister and her family, who live with

his mother in the family home—which he also hates: “the remembrance

of the old house devastated him, driving away, as it always did, the peace

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and self-respect that twenty years of separateness from them had built in

him” (Cullinan 1960, 103). With the publication of
House of Gold
(1969), all

of these traits came together, exemplifying “contemporary Irish American

domestic fi ction at its best . . . a defi nitive portrait of crippling psychic dam-

age that can occur within Irish-American families” (Fanning 2001, 335).

In this novel, the protagonist and eldest daughter, Elizabeth Carroll,

and her siblings gather for an event familiar to Irish and Irish American fi c-

tion: the dying of the matriarch. Through the lens of the dutiful daughter,

Cullinan reveals the power of the Irish American mother over her children’s

and grandchildren’s lives and the pervasive effort of the matriarch to silence

and control. In so doing, Cullinan debunks a number of sentimental Irish

American stereotypes: the saintly Irish Catholic mother (Mrs. Devlin), the

willing self-immolation of a daughter (Elizabeth) to care for her widowed

parent, and the self sacrifi ce of children (Father Phil, Mothers Mary James

and Helen Marie), who give their lives to the church.

As the novel opens, Mrs. Devlin is dying and her children, now grown,

return to the family home. Each of them evidences the damage of an over-

bearing, overly religious mother, but her daughters suffer the most. Elizabeth

and her family have recently moved out of Mrs. Devlin’s home. Elizabeth

feels guilty for having moved, even though she served as her mother’s house-

keeper and her family lived in her mother’s attic. The nuns, Mother Mary

James and Mother Helen Marie, who entered the convent in their early teens

at their mother’s bidding, are far from saintly: they cannot get along with

each other but say nothing, for they have been taught to restrain their words

and thoughts. To deal with such problems, Mother Mary James turns to

Librium, Mother Helen Marie to sleep. Through these characters, Cullinan

seems to confl ate, if not equate, Mrs. Devlin’s control with the power of the

church, as evidenced in the book’s title and the inappropriate, gold-plated

touches throughout the house (remnants of the Devlin’s fi ftieth wedding

anniversary celebration).

With characteristically Irish and Irish American gallows humor, Cul-

linan illuminates the psychic debts accrued by Irish Catholic women whose

families seek respectability in the United States. Her characters struggle to

resist the oppressive obedience fortifi ed by an immigrant culture of anxiety

and give voice to the psychological experience of creating an identity within,

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84 | T H E B A N S H E E S

and despite, the constrictions of the Irish American culture of church and

family. This sense is best illustrated in the novel’s conclusion. After Winnie

learns that her grandmother has died because of misdiagnosis and neglect

by their so-called family friend, Dr. Hyland, she does not hesitate to say

so. When the doctor’s wife gushes that Mrs. Devlin’s life was “‘Not long

enough . . . for those she’s left behind,’” Winnie sees her opening:

“‘I agree,’ Winnie said. ‘That’s why it’s too bad she wasn’t operated on

when she fi rst got sick. Then, maybe her life actually would have been lon-