The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (20 page)

Doh, possessed of no ego at all, fetching and carrying for hubby with her hair

freshly done and the beef bourguignon simmering on the range, a pal who

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likes hockey, football, lacrosse, craps (you name it) because HE does, who

never nags, who keeps hubby thin, puts the big chair by the fi re for him and

slinks about in a black negligee if HE is in the mood. And she always,
always

spends an hour a day cross-examining herself to make sure she is Making

Marriage Work. She makes me want to throw up” (1973, 246)

Many women agreed. By 1970, women comprised 44 percent of the

workforce while the birthrate dropped from a high of 25.3 births per thou-

sand in 1957 to 14.8 by 1975 (Woods 2005, 367). Feminists took to the

streets to protest, met privately in consciousness-raising groups, and argued

for the inclusion of women’s literature, history, and accomplishments in the

academic curriculum. To do so, American women had to unlearn what they

had been taught and decondition the ingrained tendency to sublimate their

personal desires to serve their bosses, parents, boyfriend, spouse, or children

(Rich 1979).

Sexually Transgressive Writing

In addition to protesting for equal rights, feminists raised awareness of sti-

fl ing marriages, rape and domestic violence, and the desire for sexual free-

dom. On these issues, Irish American women were at the forefront. Whereas

Mary McCarthy and Betty Friedan represented the needs of Irish Catholic

and Jewish women writers in the 1960s, Mary Gordon encompassed both

categories. Her mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon, was Italian Irish while her

father, David Gordon, was a Jewish convert to Catholicism. This genetic

confl uence yielded a fi rst novel set in Queens, a middle-class Irish Ameri-

can borough, featuring female friendships, teen-age and adulterous sex, rape

and a lesbian relationship, domestic violence and self-loathing, priests and

politicians, repentance and forgiveness. In other words, Gordon took Mary

McCarthy’s themes away from the upper-class Episcopalians, set them in a

working-class Irish urban enclave, and added Catholics, priests, and guilt.

Like
The Group
,
Final Payments
was a hit. It spent fi ve weeks on
The New

York Times
“Best Sellers” list, was named a
New York Times
outstanding

book of 1978, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1979 alone
Final Payments
sold 1.25 million copies (Bennett 2002, 11).

After eleven years spent caring for her widowed, stroke-ridden father,

a retired rightwing conservative Catholic professor of medieval literature,

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Gordon’s Isabel Moore fi nds herself unable to mourn his death because she

is thrilled to be free: “I felt light, as from the removal of a burden, light as a

spaceman in a gravity less universe” (1978, 9). Taking a feminist stance often

misinterpreted as anti-Irish, Isabel rejects suggestions from the family lawyer

that she, a college graduate, become a housekeeper. She has no desire to join

“that network of Irish daughters, orphaned in their forties by the death of an

invalid parent, [working] always for less than minimum wages at jobs found

by some priest, some doctor, among their own kind” (26). Confl ating femi-

nism and Catholicism, Gordon explains, “I was brought up to take issues of

justice very seriously. . . . And what is feminism except a desire for universal

justice not bounded by gender roles?” (quoted in Wachtel 2002, 272).

Paralleling the feminist movement, Isabel’s progress is slow and some-

what recursive. Her distaste for servile jobs stems largely from her association

with Margaret Casey, the family housekeeper who hoped to marry Isabel’s

father and stop him from spoiling his daughter. A recurring fi gure based on

Gordon’s hated aunt,1 Margaret is a horrid old woman constantly whining

about her lot. Isabel wisely has no desire to join her company: “I always knew

who I was; I was not Margaret. It gave me a great freedom. I could do what-

ever I wanted.” This belief is fostered by Isabel’s father, who “always said he

was raising a Theresa of Avila, not a Therese of Lisieux: someone who would

found orders and insult recalcitrant bishops, not someone who would submit

to having dirty water thrown on her by her sisters in Christ” (27–28).

Although
Final Payments
garnered praise from critics, like
The Group
,

it caused an uproar among the people it skewered: in this case, Irish Ameri-

cans. A
New York Times
Book Review begins positively— “Along with her

unmistakable talent Mary Gordon shows great respect for her craft: she

cares about her diction, the rhythms of a sentence, the pacing of her para-

graphs”—but then continues, “Mary Gordon’s cleverness, like her heroine’s,

can be forced and somewhat parochial” (Howard 1978, 32). Charles Fan-

ning’s reaction is better-known and less tempered. Accusing
Final Payments

of being “fueled by personal rage and bitterness at the perceived excesses,

distortions, and injustices of Irish-American family life,” he describes the

1. See Gordon’s autobiography,
Circling My Mother
.

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

plot as movement “from a caricatured constriction to an exaggerated escape

into the open air.” The father is depicted as “an intolerant Catholic conser-

vative who makes William F. Buckley, Jr. look like Dorothy Day”; the fam-

ily priest as “a mawkish, alcoholic priest who retards Isabel’s growth”; and

the working-class Irish neighbors as fractious and irrational (2001, 329).

Later analyses accuse Gordon of blaming the bleak Irish American lifestyle

on “tragic defects in Irish culture” (Meagher 2005, 166) and criticize such

works as depicting “a parade of grotesques” (Ebest 2005, 182).

But Irish American sociological history suggests Gordon’s depiction

might be somewhat accurate—even though critics should take care not to

confl ate literature with sociology (Dezell 2001, 31). Regardless, such criti-

cisms refl ect Kerby Miller’s depiction of Irish Americans as overly concerned

with assimilation and respectability (Dezell 2001, 72). Clearly Gordon had

moved beyond this. In fact, the New Irish immigrant Eamonn Wall defends

the novel as representative of the genre. Noting that “Irish American writ-

ers usually present their ethnic group in an unfl attering light,” he explains

that “this modus operandi, which has long been a feature of Irish and Irish

American writing, is part of the writer’s historical inheritance,” a trait that

can be traced from James Joyce through Edna O’Brien and Dermot Bulger

(1999, 16). In this instance, Wall suggests that Gordon’s characterization

of Isabel Moore displays an understanding of how cloistered her life had

been and how poorly her upbringing had prepared her for adulthood. At the

same time, the plotline serves as an allegory for “the secondary role women

have been forced to play in Irish American families” (Wall 1999, 32–33)

while reminding us that most academics are more comfortable with Irish

Americans portrayed by male writers who focus on pubs, cops, and “boyos”

(Dezell 2001, 31).

A close reading of the novel, as well as Gordon’s 1989 memoir,
The

Shadow Man
, further refutes such criticism. As Maureen Howard did in

Bridgeport Bus
, Gordon draws on real-life personality traits to develop her

main characters and then changes their identities. She reverses her own

father’s virulent anti-Semitism, turning it into ultraconservative Catholicism

as a means of exposing the church’s treatment of women.
Final Payment’s

opening scene “refl ects the views of most Catholic feminists . . . that the

church’s attempt to accommodate feminist ideals in recent years amounts

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to ‘tokenism’” (Labrie 1997, 248–49). The priests are less than respectful:

constant visitors to Isabel’s home, they spend their time “determin[ing] the

precise nature of the Transubstantiation, fumbling for my name as I fresh-

ened their drinks” (Gordon 1978, 1). Such commentary suggests conscious-

ness, if not resentment, of the patriarchal relationships still present in the

1970s. But the burden of caring for her father and the apparent futility of

change—for him and for her—further contribute to Isabel’s rejection of the

church. Afraid of upsetting her father, she takes long walks while suppos-

edly attending Mass. Here too a bit of feminist anger creeps in: “when the

Church ceased to be inevitable, it became for me irrelevant. And then there

was the [Vatican II] Council, with its sixties relevance and relativity that

interested me not a whit” (Gordon 1978, 17).

Guilt also plays a role. Isabel illogically believes that her father’s stroke

was a reaction to his discovery of her in fl agrante with his star pupil, an atti-

tude refl ecting the church’s view of extramarital or adulterous sex as illness

or disease (Del Rosso 2005, 38). “My sex was infecting me; my sex was a

disease,” Isabel laments (Gordon 1978, 265). But although Gordon initially

personifi es the church through the character of Isabel’s tyrannical father,

through her refl ections she ultimately matures and gains self-knowledge,

in the process exploring her attitudes toward and rejection of the church.

Indeed, by the novel’s end, Isabel comes full circle. Her indifference fades as

she begins to mourn her father and fi nd solace in their shared faith. In this,

the family priest is the key to her return to the church and eventual escape

from self-immolation.

Although both Jeanna del Rosso and Charles Fanning maintain that

Gordon is explicitly anti-Catholic, her depiction of Father Mulcahy is actu-

ally positive and comforting. In fact, his phone call prompts her awakening.

Although he has never left the city, he offers to drive to upstate New York for

a visit. After they speak, he advises Isabel to take care of herself: “‘I think you

should leave here,’” he tells her. When Isabel protests that she has promised

to care for Margaret, he counters, “‘Even God breaks promises. . . . Here,’ he

said, squeezing a crumpled bill into my hand, ‘Get your hair done on me.’”

Again countering her refusal, he tells her, “‘Well, then, watch your weight,

honey. God gave you beauty. If you waste it, that’s a sin against the fi fth

commandment.’”

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

“‘Thou shalt not kill?’” she asks. “‘What does that have to do with it?’”

“‘It means slow deaths, too,’” he replies, and takes his leave (297).

A review of Gordon’s work notes that “neither in her fi ction nor in her

essays and interviews has Gordon ever revealed the personal vendetta against

the Irish that Fanning suspects” (Hoeness-Krupsaw 2008, 204). Rather, she

consistently hails her parents as “immigrant survivors” and credits the Cath-

olic Church as a “formative infl uence.” Another infl uence was Mary McCar-

thy, who praised the novel even before it was published. Likewise, Gordon

gives a nod to McCarthy in her second novel, writing: “She had been warned

about Mary McCarthy for years. Ever since
The Group
nuns had shaken their

heads and breathed her name as a warning to the better students. ‘What

good do all those brains do her? Four husbands and writing fi lth,’ they said.

It was a comfort to have that book with her. She felt accompanied by a daring

older sister whom defi ance had made glamorous” (Gordon 1980, 90). Just as

The Group
raised eyebrows in the 1960s through its exploration of feminist

issues,
Final Payments
epitomized Irish American women’s writing in the

seventies—as liberating—“for she employs traditional fi ctional elements to

new effects that eventually broaden the parameters of the traditional Irish

American novel” (Hoeness-Krupsaw 2008, 208).

In addition to
Bildungsromane
like Gordon’s, the 1970s saw the rise of

“feminist meta-fi ction—novels in which the author ‘revises’ traditional phal-

locentric messages by inserting a feminist plot which quite often abandons

the traditional path from parents’ to husband’s home” (Showalter 2009,

443). Like most Irish Americans, Joyce Carol Oates’s novels refl ect their

author. Although Oates is not so explicitly autobiographical as other Irish