The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (33 page)

and cousin Maria Shriver gained fame as a television personality. Eileen Col-

lins was the fi rst woman to pilot the space shuttle; in 1999, she became

the fi rst woman to command one. That same year, Kathleen Sullivan had

the honor of becoming the fi rst woman to head Stanford Law School. As

increasing numbers of women melded work with philanthropic activities,

Mary Pat O’Connor inaugurated the Brigid Award luncheon to recognize

Chicago’s professional women “whose lives and work refl ect the sense of jus-

tice, generosity, and compassion” exemplifi ed by St. Brigid of Ireland (Dezell

2001, 90).

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Indeed, the 1990s witnessed a burgeoning Irish popularity. In 1993,

Notre Dame and New York Universities established the fi rst endowed cen-

ters for Irish Studies; by 1996, twenty-six universities offered Irish Studies

courses. Such increases refl ected not only the widespread existence of Irish

immigrants, who comprised 18 percent of the U.S. population, but also the

desire of newly suburban Irish Americans to retain their ethnicity (Dolan

2008, 305–6). In keeping with Irish American women’s history of academic

achievement, this decade saw the publication of signifi cant scholarly works.

Doris Kearns Goodwin published a second edition of her biography of Lyn-

don Johnson in 1991; four years later,
No Ordinary Time
(1995), which

described the partnership between Theodore and Eleanor Roosevelt during

World War II, came out, followed a year later by
Character Above All: Ten

President
, and her memoir,
Wait Till Next Year
, in 1998.

The religious theologian Mary Jo Weaver published
Springs of Water in

a Dry Land: Catholic Women and Spiritual Survival Today
and was promptly

awarded the 1993 Midwest Book Achievement Award for “Best Religious

Book.” Two years later, the tenth-anniversary edition of her groundbreak-

ing work,
New Catholic Women: A Contemporary Challenge to Traditional

Religious Authority
, came out. This was followed by two politically oriented

edited collections:
Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America
(1995)

and
What’s Left?: Liberal American Catholics
(1999). Unlike many antholo-

gies, these were collaborative efforts; each section emerged from working

groups and expert critiques before being submitted for publication (Weaver

1994, x). During this period, realizing that “wherever [she] went, the rules

for gender inequality still applied” (McGoldrick 1994, 222), the fourth-

generation Irish American Monica McGoldrick moved from family therapy

per se to a more specifi c focus with
Women in Families
(1991),
You Can Go

Home Again
(1995), and
Re-Visioning Family Therapy: Race, Culture, and

Gender in Clinical Practice
(1998).

In literature, the 1990s were hailed as the “feminization of the liter-

ary market” thanks to an “absolute burgeoning of fi rst-rate women writ-

ers” (Showalter 2009, 495). This area was dominated by Irish American

women. Alice McDermott’s
Charming Billy
(1999) won the National Book

Award for Fiction.
Time Magazine
listed Mary McGarry Morris’s
A Danger-

ous Woman
(1991) as one of the “Five Best Novels of the Year,” as did the

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American Library Association Library Journal. Morris’s
Songs in Ordinary

Time
(1995) was equally popular: it made the
New York Times
“Best Sellers”

list, was featured on Oprah’s Book Club, and became a TV movie. Eileen

Myles’s co-edited book,
The New Fuck You
, won the Lambda award in 1996,

while her poetry won again in 1999. During the 1990s, Anna Quindlen,

Maureen Dowd, and Gail Collins were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for their

columns in the
New York Times
, as was Eileen McNamara for the
Boston

Globe
(Dezell 2001, 115). The memoirist Lucy Grealy won numerous awards

for her poetry as well as the Whiting Writer’s Award in 1995 (University of

Iowa); in 1998, her best friend and biographer, Ann Patchett, was short-

listed for the Booker Award. But no one could top Joyce Carol Oates. Dur-

ing the 1990s alone, Oates earned the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence

in the Art of the Short Story, the
Boston Book Review’s
Fisk Fiction Prize, the

Bram Stoker Award, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. She was also co-

winner of the Heidemann Award for one-act plays, twice-nominated for the

Pulitzer, and a contender for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book

Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award.

Irish women were also recognized for their work in drama and tele-

vision. Anna Manahan and Marie Mullen won Best Featured Actress and

Best Actress awards, respectively, for Martin McDonagh’s
Beauty Queen of

Leenane
(1998). On television,
Northern Exposure
had strong-willed Mag-

gie O’Connell,
Murphy Brown
centered around the eponymous single mom

and star reporter,
The X-Files’
co-star was the Irish Catholic FBI agent Dana

Scully, MD, and Emmy-winner Rosie O’Donnell was a favorite daytime talk

show hostess. Considering that as late as 1990, Irish American women out-

numbered their male counterparts by 30 percent, the presence and accom-

plishments of these women should come as no surprise (Dezell 2001, 110).

Roles for women in specifi cally Irish fi lms were more refl ective of their

heritage. In
The Crying Game
(1992), Miranda Richardson played a murder-

ous IR A member.
The Playboys
(1992),
The Snapper
(1993), and
Circle of

Friends
(1995) protested the Irish Catholic law prohibiting extramarital sex

(Almeida 2001, 87). The 1993 fi lm,
In the Name of the Father
, Jim Sheri-

dan’s Oscar-nominated version of the trial of Gerry Conlon and the Guild-

ford Four, starred Emma Thompson as tough-minded Gareth Peirce, the

lawyer who defended them.
Some Mother’s Son
(1996), co-written by Tony

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

George and Jim Sheridan, starred Helen Mirren and Fionnula Flanagan as

mothers who try to save their sons’ lives during the 1981 hunger strike in

Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison.

In a decade dominated by action movies starring steroid-fueled muscle

men, a few women’s movies nonetheless stood out.
The Piano
,
The Wide

Sargasso Sea
,
The Age of Innocence
,
Portrait of a Lady
,
Shakespeare in Love
,
The Cider House Rules
, and
Girl, Interrupted
reminded viewers of the rights

women had won regarding marriage, mental health, and abortion. Other

fi lms featured strong women determined to make it in a man’s world. Sigour-

ney Weaver’s Lt. Ripley reappeared as feisty as ever in
Alien 3
, while Frances

McDormand’s portray of the pregnant female cop Marge Gunderson was

one of the bright lights in
Fargo
. Jodie Foster portrayed a valiant FBI agent

in
The Silence of the Lambs
and Cameron Diaz played a doctor in
There’s

Something about Mary
, while Susan Sarandon and Gina Davis shot a would-

be rapist and refused to go quietly in
Thelma and Louise
. The divorcées in

The First Wives Club
got revenge on their philandering husbands, whereas

in
Get Shorty
, Rene Russo was clearly the brains of the outfi t. Of course,

not every movie offered positive images.
Pretty Woman
tried to make pros-

titution look fun, while
Basic Instinct’s
Sharon Stone and Juliette Lewis in

Natural Born Killers
most likely scared every man in the room.

Actually, the dearth of such negative fi lms is somewhat surprising, con-

sidering that every period of feminist success has been followed by a back-

lash. Just as the Reagan administration made it socially acceptable to criticize

feminism in the 1980s, early successes in the 1990s were once again followed

by hostile responses later in the decade. Indeed, the antifeminist backlash

of the 1990s paralleled the strategies of a decade earlier. Critics used “the

very hard-earned
gains
of the feminist movement against women; women’s

successes [were] turned around as the very reasons for women’s
losses
” (Fer-

guson, Katrak, and Miner 1996, 50–51). This backlash was not without

consequence.

Whereas the decades prior to 1990 refl ected a predominantly feminist

stance among Irish American women writers, the 1990s suggest a more

refracted sensibility. Mary Gordon’s memoir,
Shadow Man
(1997), moves

away from women’s issues to describe her search for the truth about her

father; moreover, rather than continue her feminist themes, Gordon uses

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this tract as a way to extract further literary revenge against her maternal

aunts. Although loyal second wavers such as Maureen Howard, Joyce Carol

Oates, and Anna Quindlen continued writing feminist novels, the previ-

ously neutral or uncommitted—like Tess Gallagher, Alice McDermott, Bob-

bie Ann Mason, and Beth Lordan—tended to subsume feminist issues by

featuring both male and female protagonists, a tendency suggesting move-

ment beyond “women’s writing” per se. Overall, this mixture of genres and

messages refl ected the “postmodern concept of hybridity” (Showalter 2009,

501–5)—something Irish Americans have practiced for years.

Equally important, such mixed messages again typifi ed the fi n de siècle.

As in the 1890s, novels of the 1990s suggested the state of mind accompany-

ing the century’s end illustrated through deliberate breaks with literary con-

ventions. Even as most Irish American women’s novels promoted feminist

themes and issues, they could be further categorized by their use of nontra-

ditional structure, nonchronological narratives, and multiple points of view;

nontraditional themes, almost all of them featuring divorced or unhappily

married women rather than traditional conclusions ending in marriage; and

nontraditional mores, usually in the form of violence and/or sexual anarchy.

This chapter illustrates the prevalence of these traits throughout the decade.

Fractured Fairytales

Maureen Howard’s
Natural History
(1992) epitomizes the fi n de siècle prac-

tice of nontraditional themes and structure. Instead of chronological nar-

ratives told from a single point of view, the timeline is fractured, recounted

by multiple narrators. Such strategies exemplify the end of a century, which

in turn has become associated with a “myth of the temporal that affects

our thought about ourselves, our histories, our disciplines.” Thus crisis and

change at the fi n de siècle are “more intensely experienced, more emotionally

fraught, more weighted with symbolic and historical meaning, because we

invest them with the metaphors of death and rebirth that we project onto the

fi nal decades and years of a century” (Showalter 1990, 2).

Of course, Maureen Howard was unconventional long before century’s

end. Like her previous novels,
Natural History
is semi-autobiographical,

nonsequential, and highly experimental. The main characters are fi ctional-

ized versions of Howard’s parents residing in her hometown of Bridgeport,

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

Connecticut; their children, James and Catherine Bray, personify Howard

and her brother. Like Eavan Boland, Howard uses cartography to establish a

sense of place. Like absolutely no one else, Howard evokes present and past

through stylistic experimentation.

The heart of the novel, “Museum Pieces,” is bookended with chapters

under “Natural History,” which tell James’s and Catherine’s stories as they

refl ect on their childhoods and the paths of their adult lives. “Museum Pieces”

includes eight chapters: four narratives and four experimental pieces. Among

the latter, “Closet Drama” relies on one of Howard’s favorite tropes—a

play—to round out the story of James’s life. “The Lives of the Saints” recalls

Catherine’s youthful infatuation with the saints as well as James’s travels to

County Mayo while fi lming a movie about the Irish Revolution. Most dar-