The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (36 page)

1. Jean Swallow’s 1983 study,
Out from Under: Sober Dykes and Our Friends
,

found that “38 percent of lesbians are alcoholics and another 30 percent are problem

drinkers” (Faderman 1991, 282).

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1994, 77–78). And she is hooked: “it seemed that every time a woman kissed

me and touched me was like something that had never happened before. Still

it’s like that. Kind of a shock. . . . With a woman I felt whole, not differ-

ent. . . . I was willing to sacrifi ce all for that moment” (269–71).

Growing up in an Irish Catholic family at midcentury, it is not surpris-

ing that Myles suffered from depression and feelings of rejection. In “1969,”

she writes: “I was going down to get some coffee and the Boston Globe to

make me be something. Everything I did was something to fi x me. With all

my heart I was trying to be dead. . . . The attention of women was softer and

more pleasing [than men’s], but I didn’t know there was anything you could

do with those feelings. The best solution I ever arrived at was to try and con-

trol myself and be dead. . . . I wasn’t normal, I never would be (Myles 1994,

107–17). Such feelings echo those expressed by Radclyffe Hall’s heroine,

Stephen Gordon, who laments that “the loneliest place in this world is the

no-man’s-land of sex” (quoted in Gilbert and Gubar 1989, 218).

Of course, Myles had been warned. The Vatican’s 1988
Letter to the Bish-

ops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons
stated

that homosexuals should “expect increasing violence directed against them

when they advocated publicly for civil legislation to protect their behavior.”

This letter’s “un-Christ-like hatred” against homosexuals paralleled its treat-

ment of women, a stance evident since the Reformation. Then, in 1992, the

Vatican’s new Catholic catechism pronounced that homosexuality was not

a choice and that gays and lesbians should not be “unjustly” discriminated

against—a stance that anticipated the 1994 decision by the American Psy-

chological Association that homosexuality was “neither mental illness nor

moral depravity” (Peters 2003, 179). These mixed messages were refl ected

in Irish American women’s gay and lesbian novels.

Ann Patchett’s
The Magician’s Assistant
(1997) demonstrates both the

humanity and the tragedy surrounding the AIDS epidemic in a story of a

woman who loved, and lived with, a gay man, exploring their relationship

and the aftermath of his death from AIDS. Dorothy Allison and Stephanie

Grant deal with the issue metaphorically. In her 1998 novel,
Cavedweller
,

Allison indirectly explores sexuality, drawing on the metaphor of spelunk-

ing to represent her character’s exploration of lesbian tendencies. Grant uses

similar strategies. Her 1995 novel,
The Passion of Alice
, might be viewed as

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a modern version of Rudolph Bell’s
Holy Anorexia
: “holy anorexia—broadly

defi ned to include all historically relevant types of self-starvation by pious

women—has existed for centuries in western European society and is but

one aspect of the struggle by females striving for autonomy in a patriarchal

culture” (Bell 1985, 86). In other words, “anorexia was agency for women in

the Middle Ages” (21). Taking a more modern approach,
Catholic Girlhood

Narratives
posits that one of the factors contributing to anorexia is “sexual

suppression.” Certainly suppression of homosexual desires would fall into

this category (Evasdaughter 1996, 8).

When the novel opens, Alice has been hospitalized at a treatment center

for people with eating disorders following cardiac arrest induced by severe

malnourishment. In the prologue she explains that “anorexics differentiate

between desire and need. Between want and must” (Grant 1995, 2). These

young women fi nd agency in their ability to recognize their desire and con-

trol it. But Alice begins to lose control after meeting Maeve Sullivan, one

of the overeaters. In the process of making Alice aware of her body, Maeve

ignites desire. When their love affair founders, Alice stops eating; however,

when she realizes that Maeve will not come back to her, Alice is furious.

In the process, she comes to an important realization: “After all this, after

all the wanting and not wanting and trying-not-to-want, desire itself was

a disappointment. It lacked agency. I had been afraid of it so long without

realizing how ineffectual it could be. . . . Desire was a choice I could make

or not. Nothing more” (256).

With this, Alice realizes that she had in fact already made that choice:

she had not only decided to love a woman, but also to love one as imperfect

as Maeve. Somehow, this epiphany provides the impetus to return to life. If

the key to anorexia is controlling desire, but desire is ineffectual, then it is

not to be feared. Obviously, this conclusion simplifi es a complex psychologi-

cal condition.2 Nevertheless, in this fi n de siècle novel, anorexia is represen-

tative of the divided self “neatly separating mind and body, good and evil,

upstairs and downstairs” (Showalter 1990, 118). When Alice realizes that

she loves women and that desire is not to be feared, this division disappears.

2. As Marya Hornbecker demonstrates in
Wasted
, insight is not a cure.

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

Blanche McCrary Boyd’s persona deals with her emerging recognition of

homosexuality by relying on symbolic renaming and misidentifi cation amid

a haze of alcohol and drugs. Such artistic strategies represent “the most

notably original form of the lesbian novel to emerge [since] the late 1980s,”

for in their focus on “
speaking
ourselves out of oppression, of ending silence

as a path toward liberation,” such writers aided “the development of lesbian

culture” (Zimmerman 1990, 212–15). Since her fi rst novel,
Nerves
, was pub-

lished in 1973, Boyd’s fi ction illustrates the gradual development of lesbian

novels described in
“Romancing the Margins”?: Lesbian Writing in the 1990s
.

Like other works in this genre, Boyd plays with the concept of lesbian iden-

tity (Griffi n 2000, 1). Whereas
Nerves
suggested the protagonist’s growing

dissatisfaction with heterosexual relationships,
Mourning the Death of Magic

found the heroine ultimately exploring her homosexuality. In the conclu-

sion of
The Revolution of Little Girls
(1991), Boyd’s persona, Ellen Larraine,

fi nally comes out.

This is not an easy transition. Throughout the early months of her

fi rst stable relationship, she is tortured by hallucinations of three little girls.

These hallucinations resemble the Dr. Jeckyll/Mr. Hyde phenomenon in

the 1890s. During the sexually repressive and restrictive Victorian age, it

was impossible for women to lead a double life. Although lesbian tendencies

were recognized in the early twentieth century, as late as post–World War II,

psychoanalysis posited that women’s “transgressive desires” merely resulted

in feelings of guilt. Men might act on their feelings, but women could not.

Instead, they were diagnosed as suffering from a split personality. How-

ever, like Boyd’s hallucinations, studies of multiple personalities revealed

that women were more likely to possess at least three. As Elaine Showalter

explains, “In the United States especially, duality always seemed insuffi cient

to . . . cope with the confl icts in women’s roles that were a major factor in the

American phenomenon of multiple personality” (1990, 119–21).

In her 1995 memoir,
The Redneck Way of Knowledge
, Boyd revisits many

of the settings, characters, and incidents originally discussed in her fi ction.

This approach illustrates Teresa de Lauretis’s description of lesbian writing

in the 1990s: “the writer struggles to inscribe experience in historically avail-

able forms of representation, . . . each writing a rereading of (one’s) expe-

rience” (quoted in Griffi n 2000, 1). Such intertextuality typifi es feminist

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fi ction of the 1990s, whose strategies also include mixed genres: meta-fi c-

tion, self-refl ection, parody, fantasy, and irony. These methods are particu-

larly specifi c if not essential to lesbian fi ction, whose authors keenly feel the

“lack of an authorized/authentic script for the articulation of lesbian desire”

(Andermahr 2000, 15). With her 1997 novel,
Terminal Velocity
, Boyd draws

on these strategies to articulate her persona’s burgeoning desire. This novel

is clearly intertextual. Many of the details fi rst recounted in her memoir re-

emerge in this and earlier novels, making it easy to trace the parallels. More-

over, the graphic sex scenes suggest that Boyd rejected the notion of eliding

lesbian sexuality observed during the 1980s and 1990s (Griffi n 2000, 5).

Although the 1990s novels of Irish American lesbians are full of such scenes,

they were devoid of love, contributed nothing to the plot, and may have

contributed to the demise of the lesbian novel (Zimmerman 1990, 224).3

Feminism was also threatened by its own. Within the academy, some

feminist scholars took external rejections to heart and began a period of “self

critique” marked by the rise of theory. Strongly infl uenced by the work of

Michel Foucault, feminist scholars moved away from critiques of larger social

institutions to a more intense focus on the body, the subject, and subjectivity

(Ferguson, Katrak, and Miner 1996, 29). In a surge of self-refl exivity, schol-

ars such as Charlotte Brundson began to question the duality between the

terms “femininity” and “feminism,” clearly demarcating the beginning of

third-wave feminism (evidenced in the popularity of the Riot Grrls). Rather

than refl ecting outwardly on bodies of oppression, too often feminist refl ec-

tion moved inward, focusing on internal divisions instead of the need for

political change. As feminism became more institutionalized, the movement

shifted further toward theory, with academics postulating that theory was

superior to action, a stance that oversimplifi ed and denigrated second-wave

3. Mary Jo Bona’s discussion of “Gay and Lesbian Writing” refutes this stance.

Such works proliferated in the 1990s, thanks to the development of gay and les-

bian presses (e.g., Alyson, Naiad, Seal, and Firebrand); the development of special

series among academic presses, for example, Columbia University’s “Between Men/

Between Women,” Duke’s “Series Q,” and NYU’s “The Cutting Edge”; and the

growth of gay and lesbian literary journals such as
James White Review
and
Common

Lives/Lesbian Lives
(2004, 212).

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

activism. Consequently feminism became “more of a ‘career’ and less identi-

fi able as oppositional politics.” This tendency inadvertently created a parallel

professional track intent on “trashing feminist work” rather than working

toward change (Whelehan 1995, 128–32).

In 1994, the rightwinger Christina Hoff Sommers published
Who Stole

Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women
. Although she declared her-

self a feminist, she used the book to attack her so-called sisters. She labeled

some women “gender feminists—angry, strident, and intellectually bank-

rupt,” and others “equity feminists—who care about equality for women

but refuse to look at the world through gender-colored lenses” (Ginsberg

and Lennox 1996, 187). The former, she maintained, had become the gate-

keepers for Women’s Studies programs, while the latter were viewed more

favorably because they contributed “to a grander conservative agenda”—

arguments dismissed as “largely anecdotal” and “simplistic” (187–89).

An unfortunate example of this mindset is Gabrielle Donnelly’s
The

Girl in the Photograph
(1998). At fi rst, this appears to be a feminist mystery

novel, for the plot traces Allegra O’Riordan’s efforts to learn more about

her mother, who died when Allegra was only three. Allegra is a liberal who

dislikes the church’s stance on women and whose two best friends are gay

men; she has a strong voice, essential for her work as a stand-up comedienne;

she is sexually liberated, having had numerous relationships and defi antly