Read The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Online
Authors: Sally Barr Ebest
Tags: #Social Science, #Literary Criticism, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Feminism & Feminist Theory, #European
the Protestant explanation, but when luck and prayer collided in heaven”
(Blais 2001, 75).
Blais’s contemporary, Mary Gordon, born in 1949, was raised by an
exceedingly devout Irish Italian Catholic mother: from 1935 until her
death more than sixty years later, Anna Gordon was a member of the
Working Women’s Retreat Movement. For these women, mostly widowed
or unmarried, this group “provided a situation in which their spiritual life
could be taken seriously,” brought similarly minded women together, and
provided, in essence, a room of their own where they could get away from
their families. Several times a year, the women traveled around the country
to meet, usually in a convent, attend Mass, listen to sermons and talks by
the priests, and visit their friends (Gordon 2007, 105). These retreats led
to enduring friendships not only among some of the women but also with
some of the priests. Unlike the current climate in which priests are almost
by default considered suspect, clergy in the mid-1950s “were treated like
princes—no, like kings. . . . Nothing was too much to do for them. . . . You
will say that I am naive, that many of these women served priests sexually,”
but the ethnic composition of the midcentury church provided a crucial
distinction: “I am talking of the American Church in the triumphalist
years of 1920–60, a church entirely under control of the Irish, who had no
toleration for the wink-wink, nudge-nudge, ‘we’re all human after all,’ ‘a
man’s a man’ comprehension found in other parts of the world” (Gordon
2007, 131–32).
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Sex and the Irish American Woman Writer
Prior to World War II, Freudian theory had seemed like the key to women’s
emancipation. Acceptance of Freud’s belief in the necessity of “freedom from
a repressive morality to achieve sexual fulfi llment” could be observed in the
fl appers’ bobbed hair, short skirts, smoking, drinking, and independent life-
styles. But after the war, Freudian psychology was used to explain women’s
unhappiness. Drawing on the obsolescent notion of penis envy, everyone
from sociologists, teachers, clergymen, and counselors, to advertisers, mag-
azine editors, and pop psychologists attributed Freudian theory to every-
thing “wrong” with American women. Indeed, such widespread beliefs were
responsible for women’s sudden stasis, if not regression. As Betty Friedan
explains, “Without Freud’s defi nition of the sexual nature of woman to give
the conventional image of femininity new authority, I do not think several
generations of educated, spirited American women would have been so easily
diverted from the dawning realization of who they were and what they could
be” (1963, 104–5).
This decade saw the introduction, acceptance, application, and misappli-
cation of Freudian theory, which “led women, and those who studied them,
to misinterpret their mothers’ frustration, and their fathers’ and brothers’
and husbands’ resentments and inadequacies, and their own emotions and
possible choices in life” (Friedan 1963, 103). Eugene O’Neill’s
A Long Day’s
Journey Into Night
(1956) certainly casts women in a sadly dependent and
destructive light, as does Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1951). An often-cited academic study of such misapplication is
Modern
Woman: The Lost Sex
, which enjoyed wide popularity, and in many, a wide-
eyed acceptance of claims such as, “The more educated the woman is, the
greater chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less severe” (Farnham and
Lundberg 1947, 142). Actually, the authors blamed all of society’s ills on
women, “from alcoholism to crime to war—to ‘neurotic’ career women who
abandoned their children to the care of others, neglected their husbands,
and competed with men in a man’s world” (Woods 2005, 136). In postwar
society, the stay-at-home mom was considered essential to American success,
for her nurturing presence and welcoming hearth provided a safe place to
escape the competitive world of the gray fl annel suits.
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42 | T H E B A N S H E E S
Like the generations before them, Irish American women writers not
only refused to accept this mindset, but they also displayed their resistance
in their fi ction. Carson McCullers appears to be the fi rst Irish American
woman to come cautiously out of the closet. All of McCullers’s work contains
a “signifi cant homoerotic theme.” This is not to say that her works feature
specifi cally lesbian or gay characters. Rather, “same-sex love” is a given in
McCullers’s fi ction. This should not be surprising, for McCullers’s “crushes”
on female partners permeated her marriage. Still, McCullers should not be
considered lesbian per se. Since she also pursued affairs with male partners,
married and remarried Reeves McCullers, and believed herself to be a man
born in a woman’s body, it is easier to call McCullers bisexual. Nevertheless,
her literature and her friendships suggest a knowledge of gay and lesbian
codes and lifestyles (Kenshaft 1996, 220–22).
One of the main characters in her fi rst novel,
The Heart Is a Lonely
Hunter
, is the tomboy Mick Kelly. Although Mick loses her virginity to
Harry Minwitz, the description of her orgasm—“like her head was broke off
from her body and thrown away” (McCullers 1940, 55)—is unprecedented
in heterosexual novels of the time. But not within pseudo-Irish American
pulp fi ction. During the 1950s, a spate of supposedly Irish American lesbian
novels emerged. Between 1957 and 1962, Ann Bannon published fi ve les-
bian novels featuring Beebo Brinker. Although these novels were acclaimed
for their treatment of sexuality, Ann Bannon was not Irish; she was Ann
Weldy. Claire Morgan’s lesbian novel
The Price of Salt
sold over a million
copies, but Morgan was actually Patricia Highsmith. Isabel Miller’s
Patience
and Prudence
features a loving lesbian couple; however, “Miller” is actually
Alma Routsong (Bona 2004). In contrast, McCullers remained true to her-
self despite a somewhat schizophrenic sexuality.
McCullers’s second novel,
Refl ections in a Golden Eye
(1941),
established
her reputation as well as the genre of the Southern gothic. The plot includes
a murderer, a madwoman, and a “homoerotic triangle,” one of whom is a
dwarf. McCullers’s third novel,
The Member of the Wedding
(1946), is also
a somewhat autobiographical bildungsroman recounting the coming-of-age
of another tomboy, Frankie Addams. Frankie—who sports a crew cut—
“wanted to be a boy and go to the war as a Marine. She thought about
fl ying aeroplanes and winning gold medals for bravery” (23) and wished
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that “people could change back and forth from boys to girls whichever way
they felt like and wanted” (97). McCullers’s novella,
The Ballad of the Sad
Café
(1951), was written during her stay at Yaddo, where she suffered from
unrequited love for Katherine Anne Porter (Showalter 2009, 370). This is
not typical Irish American fare.
Nor was Mary McCarthy’s book of short stories,
The Company She Keeps
(1942), which offers sordid details of a divorcee’s dalliances, most notably in
“The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” This story describes Meg Sergant’s
seduction by/of an unattractive traveling salesman, Mr. Breen,5 during their
cross-country train trip to the West Coast. Divorced and engaged to a new
man, Meg coolly analyzes the seduction and her alternating feelings of plea-
sure and disgust for herself and Breen. Intermittently self-aware, at one point
she realizes, “Dear Jesus . . . I’m really as hard as nails.” Vowing to redeem
herself, she goes to bed with Breen again, thinking, “This . . . is going to be
the only real act of charity I have ever performed in my life; it will be the only
time I have ever given anything when it honestly hurt me to do so” (114).
McCarthy’s novels and memoirs from this era display a marked disregard
for the sanctity of marriage. In scenes more graphic than 1950s readers of
women’s novels were accustomed to, McCarthy’s works explicitly address
sex, usually adulterous.
A Charmed Life
(1955)—a roman à clef satirizing
McCarthy’s relationship with Edmund Wilson (Brightman 1992, 243)—is
perhaps most notable for the rape scene between Miles/Wilson and Mar-
tha/Mary after both have remarried.
She wanted it, obviously, or she would not have asked him in. The angry
squirming of her body, the twisting and turning of her head, fi lled him with
amused tolerance and quickened his excitement as he crushed his member
against her reluctant pelvis. . . .”Don’t,” she cried sharply. . . . She sat up in
indignation, and his hand slipped in and held her breast cupped. . . .”Please
don’t,” she begged, with tears in her eyes, while he squeezed her nipples
between his fi ngertips; they were hard before he touched them; her breath
was coming quickly. . . . Compunction smote him; he ought not to have
5. In yet another example of McCarthy’s satire, the amoral Mr. Breen shares his
name with the Catholic League fi lm censor of the time, Charles Breen.
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44 | T H E B A N S H E E S
done this, he said to himself tenderly. Tenderness infl amed his member.
Clasping her fragile body brusquely to him, he thrust himself into her with
short, quick strokes. A gasp of pain came from her, and was over. (McCar-
thy 1955, 199–203)
In keeping with the tradition of Irish American women writers, McCar-
thy’s frank departures from conventional fare anticipated societal changes
emerging in the late 1940s. In 1948, Alfred C. Kinsey revolutionized the
way Americans thought about sex with the publication of
Sexual Behavior in
the Human Male
. Although this study was followed in 1953 by
Sexual Behav-
ior in the Human Female
—which demythologized the belief that women
were unable to enjoy sex—American consciousness seemed more attuned to
male pleasure. The 1950s saw the entrée of Hugh Hefner’s
Playboy
maga-
zine, which essentially “legitimized sex outside the marriage bond.” The
popularity of Vladimir Nabakov’s
Lolita
(1955), which glamorized statutory
rape, underscores this mindset. But not everyone agreed. Margaret Mead,
whose anthropological study
Male and Female
(1949) had cautioned against
allowing women to take men’s jobs and glorifi ed women’s essential feminin-
ity, condemned Kinsey for potentially undermining morals; consequently, in
1954, the Rockefeller Foundation, which had funded Kinsey’s research, cut
off his grants (Woods 2005, 139–40).
Paralleling these schizophrenic attitudes, the novels of this decade might
be classifi ed as refl ecting the “three faces of Eve”—the housewife/mother,
the intellectual, and the bad girl (Showalter 2009, 290). Mary McCarthy’s
characters in
The Oasis
(1949) and
The Groves of Academe
(1952) represent
“the intellectual.” In
The Oasis
she satirizes the “intellectual passivity” of
liberals, most notably Philip and Nathalie Rahv (Hardwick 1972, xiv). In
The Groves of Academe
, she argues for academic freedom (within limits)
through the predicament of Henry Mulcahy, fi red by the president of his
university for supposedly being a Communist sympathizer, while satirizing
the resultant protests from his liberal colleagues.
A Charmed Life
(1955) and
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(1957) reprise her “bad girl” persona, Meg
Sergant.
A Charmed Life
exacts revenge on ex-husband Edmund Wilson,
while
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
does the same to her abusive aunt
and uncle. Both novels explore the female persona’s sexuality. In so doing,
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McCarthy “began to create a new image for American women” (Showalter
2009, 398).
This image extended well beyond the message of unhappy married life
implicit in Irish American women’s prewar writing. Forced to give up their
jobs, their new-found independence, and the accompanying satisfaction and
self esteem, many women developed feelings of anger, frustration, and guilt.