The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (35 page)

takes what might be viewed as sentimental artifacts and turns them into

something that will “force observation, destroy nostalgia” (11), knowing

that such backward looking can only conceal the truth and contaminate life

(Durso 2008, 73). Yet Howard herself includes instances of her own artistic

awakening (Fanning 2001): listening to Wagner’s
Ring
cycle on the radio

and later, commenting on the infl uences of Twain, Hawthorne, and Cather:

“
sentences, whole paragraphs . . . which I knew to be grand
, la vrai chose,
even

when I did not understand the jokes, the parables, the writers’ passion for words

or their passions
” (Howard 1998, 224).

Like many traditional novels, Artie and Louise eventually reunite; in

fact, as the novel comes to a close, Louise is nursing their newborn infant.

But once he falls asleep, she returns to her fi rst love. Walking home from the

art supply house, baby in tow, she escapes the present to dream of future

artistic endeavors wondering—like Howard—“what will it come to?” (270).

Sexual Anarchy

Feminist waters were further muddied with the 1992 arrival of Hillary Clin-

ton as First Lady. Hillary’s activism elicited both “boiling resentment and

. . . adoring worship . . . symptoms of contemporary feelings about feminist

intellectuals” (Showalter 2009, 322). When she asserted that women in the

1990s wanted not only “a right to have control over our own destinies,

and to defi ne ourselves as individuals; but where we also acknowledge that,

whether it’s biological or social, women want to be part of relationships as

well,” conventional wisdom might have agreed. Instead—in yet another

example of fi n de siècle misogyny—Hillary was viciously castigated. Like the

1990s, the 1890s were believed to be a period of “sexual anarchy.” In Eng-

land and France, women called for equality via movements that “challenged

the traditional institutions of marriage, work, and the family.” As a result,

many men viewed women as maddening aliens, while the women consid-

ered such males self-pitying conservatives trying to defend an “indefensible

order” (Showalter 2009, 7).

Mary McGarry Morris’s novel,
A Dangerous Woman
(1991), paints a

picture of alienation with the story of Martha Horgan, or “marthorgan” as

the local children call her. Martha has never fi t in. Apparently suffering from

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Asperger’s or Tourette’s Syndrome, “all her tics and rituals were only parts of

other things, engine-revving incantations against fear and failure” (Morris

1991, 50–51). With Martha, as with all her fl awed heroines, Morris points

out the misunderstandings and indignities women—especially women who

speak out or refuse to conform—must endure. Martha’s life is hell, often of

her own making, but also the result of victimization by men. As a teenager,

local boys trick her into the woods, where they tear off her clothes and

threaten to rape her. Yet in a fi ne display of the double standard, when the

incident is reported, the story is reversed. “Martha had somehow asked for it,

. . . she had brought it on herself with her attractive fi gure and her peculiar

ways” (Morris 1991, 8).

The novel’s action resumes fi fteen years later, but the victimization con-

tinues. First Martha is fi red after her accusation of stealing is used against

her. Next her sister’s handyman seduces and impregnates her. When she goes

to tell her girlfriend, the woman’s boyfriend will not let her in. Mistaking his

manhandling for a sexual advance, Martha grabs a knife, stabs him to death,

and blood-covered, staggers down the street. When her pregnancy begins

to show, the authorities try to force her to admit she was raped. Finally her

seducer confesses that he was drunk and took advantage of her. “But Mar-

tha won’t call it that,” he says. “She thought it was love. And maybe it was”

(Morris 1991, 357). That is all she needs.

Martha survives. Moreover, like Maureen Howard’s Mary Agnes Keely,

she does so with the realization that “it was no great sin to be, at last, alone”

(Howard 1961, 309). Morris’s Marie Fermoyle is another oddity—a divorced

woman in a Catholic community rife with sexual anarchy. Adultery, extra-

marital sex, teenage sex, and worst of all, sex with a priest fl ourish among

the many characters in
Songs in Ordinary Time
(1995). Daughter Alice is the

neediest. Lacking her mother’s approval and her father’s presence, she looks

for love from other outcasts and fi nally fi nds it with the family priest. But like

Martha Horgan, Alice is strong. Despite the priest’s weepy pleas, she breaks

off the affair and goes away to college. Like all of Morris’s female characters,

these women are survivors.

It is probably no coincidence that this novel emerged during the revela-

tion of widespread sexual abuse among priests. Although the Pope expressed

dismay about the damage done to children, he was equally worried about the

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impact of these revelations on the church. Similarly, many bishops responded

either by sending the miscreants to be “rehabilitated,” blaming the media, or

absolving themselves, since priests were considered “independent operators.”

Despite conservative estimates revealing that abuse had occurred at the rate

of 375 minors per year over the previous forty years (that’s 15,000 victims),

only 10 percent of priests considered this a signifi cant problem. Likewise,

although parishioners found the practice deplorable, they did not leave the

church; rather, they blamed the Vatican for not dealing with the problem

more forcefully (Dezell 2001, 180–81).

Mary Jo Weaver’s edited collection,
What’s Left?
(1999), addresses

these and other social issues. In “Resisting Traditional Catholic Sexual

Teaching,” she points out that unlike its weak-kneed stance on priestly ped-

erasty, the church has had no problem laying down the law to gays and

women about sexuality, homosexuality, abortion, divorce, and remarriage.

Whereas parishioners generally accepted ecclesiastical mandates regarding

birth control pre-Vatican II, the debacle of
Humana Vitae
led them to

view subsequent encyclicals as patriarchal and paternalistic, denying women

“moral agency.” Yet rather than leave the church, for many dissent became

“a necessary (if not painful) part of their Catholic identity” (91). As a result,

Catholics for Free Choice (CFFC) was formed. CFFC supported the radical

notion that sex was not just for procreation, questioned whether a celibate

clergy could or should speak knowledgeably about sexual matters, and—

as in Weaver’s 1985
Catholic Women
—faulted the church for ignoring the

rights and needs of women, particularly sexual freedom and freedom of

choice (, 92).

But Anna Quindlen’s 1994 novel,
One True Thing
, suggests that the

church was not the only institution punishing sexually independent women.

When the novel opens, Ellen Gulden, an outspoken, goal-oriented feminist,

is working in New York; however, she is soon coerced by her father into

moving home to care for her cancer-ridden mother. Ellen leaves the job she

loves because her father, whom she emulates and adores, demands it—even

though he refuses to ask his sons to come home from college, to hire a nurse,

or to participate in his wife’s care- giving. When Ellen objects, he has the

nerve to accuse her of being heartless, “something many people said George

Gulden had never had at all” (30).

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Initially, the novel juxtaposes Ellen’s efforts to continue her job while

working in and from the home. She begins to respect the mother she once

dismissed, to realize how selfi sh and unfeeling her father is, and to recognize

these same traits in herself. This coming of age comprises the fi rst half of

the novel. After her mother dies, Ellen is arrested for her murder. In practi-

cally every case, men view women as the enemy: Ellen’s father refuses to visit

her in jail or to post bail; her boyfriend tells prosecutors Ellen wished her

mother were dead; the prosecutor does his best to damn her. Women are her

primary supporters. While awaiting the grand jury hearing, a former teacher

posts bail, gives her a home, and loans her money for a lawyer. For this the

teacher is rumored to be a lesbian. But ultimately, women persevere. As the

novel closes, Ellen remarks, “someday I will tell my father [what caused her

mother’s death] although there is a great temptation to leave the man I once

thought the smartest person on earth in utter ignorance” (385).

The anti-feminist backlash was furthered by the very people who

most loudly proclaimed their patriotism—the white male members of the

Heritage Foundation. Whereas the 1980s saw this cohort claiming reverse

discrimination (against themselves), in the 1990s their targets were Others—

“immigrants, gays and lesbians . . . women and children” (Faludi 1991, 52).

Unfortunately, these attitudes were not limited to the Heritage Foundation.

In 1992, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who went on to become Pope

Benedict XVI) issued
Some Considerations concerning the Catholic Response

to Legislative Proposals on the Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons
,

which essentially
supported
discrimination. This missive, which reaffi rmed

his 1986 letter suggesting that homosexuals possessed “a more or less strong

tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” resulted in some priests

refusing communion to homosexuals (Weaver 1999, 99–101). In Boston,

as late as 1999, women were still excluded from Boston’s Clover Club and

the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade was “off-limits” to gays and minorities

(Dezell 2001, 40). Likewise, in New York City, members of the Ancient

Order of Hibernians, with the support of the Catholic Church, barred LGBT

people from the parade—a move resulting in the establishment of the Irish

Lesbian and Gay Organization—whose members rejected the conception of

Irishness as white, male, Catholic heterosexuals (Cochrane 2010, 117–18).

Not coincidentally, the 1990s saw the beginning of research on the sexual

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harassment of homosexuals in the academy, which revealed multiple exam-

ples of homophobia throughout the decade. To fi ght back, lesbians began to

come out, speak out, and publish stories of their harassment.

Lesbian novels also refl ected the fi n de siècle mindset. In late nine-

teenth-century art, female lovers were depicted as mirror images of each

other (Dijkstra 1986). In literature, the “divided self of the fi n-de-siecle

narrative . . . solved [homosexuals’] social and sexual problems by neatly

separating mind and body, good and evil, upstairs and downstairs” (Show-

alter 1990, 118). Likewise, late twentieth-century lesbian writers defended

themselves by exiting the closet via metaphorical side doors, following their

foremothers’ footsteps by devising “aesthetic strategies” to underscore their

alienation from traditional literary genres (Gilbert and Gubar 1989, 218). In

Eileen Myles’s case, this division is literally represented through the fi ctional

character of “Eileen Myles.”

In
Chelsea Girls
(1994), Myles’s persona is an alcoholic. Her alcoholism

is a result of a genetic predisposition inherited from her father as well as a

common “side effect” arising from confl icts about her sexual orientation.1

In no particular order, Myles describes her bouts of drinking supplemented

with a range of drugs; her lifelong feelings of displacement and inferior-

ity; and warring feelings of homophobia and lesbianism. With discussions

of tampons (“crammers”) and menstruation, sexual liaisons and orgasms,

Myles embodies sexual anarchy. But she leavens these rants with vignettes

describing her father’s death, shopping with her mother, or the little things

you do when you’re in love. Although the harsher stories are compelling (like

watching a train wreck), the soft ones make you like her.

Myles’s descriptions of sex are graphic, too graphic to report here. In

“Popponesset,” she describes being gang-raped but blames herself for being

drunk. She often seems self conscious, guilty, or apologetic—and vulner-

able: “I only know in the midst of passion she would always betray me like

pleasure was a hook she used to throw me. I was just a poor fi sh” (Myles