The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (38 page)

opposites, with the female possessing the lesser or negative traits. But after

Eliot’s death, fi n de siècle narratives discarded their traditional structure,

particularly closure ending in marriage (Showalter 1990, 17–18). This trend

is especially evident in the works of Irish American women, for practically

every 1990s novel dwells on unhappy marriages or bitter divorcees. Anna

Quindlen looks at the Scanlan family’s marriages in her fi rst novel,
Object

Lessons
(1991), while also inscribing the end of insular, ethnic communities

in the early 1960s. In fact, this cultural breakdown is one factor in the fam-

ily’s ongoing squabbles. Quindlen reinforces this message in Connie Scan-

lan’s closing advice to her daughter about marriage: “it’s not just a man. It’s

your house, your kids, your family, your time, everything. Everything in

your life is who you marry” (318). Ann T. Jones underscores this message in

A Country Divorce
(1992). Set in Ireland during the 1930s, Jones tells the

story of confi rmed bachelor Morgan Riley’s marriage to Minnie Vaughn,

who neglects to tell him she is pregnant by another man. Needless to say,

when the truth is revealed, the marriage is over. Susanna Moore’s third

Hawaiian novel,
Sleeping Beauties
(1993), which includes scenes of domestic

violence, reiterates these messages: marry your own kind.

Even in the 1990s, attitudes toward marriage and divorce refl ected

Irish American women’s confl icted relationship with the Catholic Church.

Despite reservations about the church’s dictums, 85 percent of American

Catholics continued to attend Mass regularly and millions were outraged

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at Sinead O’Connor’s symbolic shredding of the Pope’s picture on
Satur-

day Night Live
—even though she did it to protest the Irish prohibitions on

contraceptives, abortion, and divorce (Almeida 2001). At the same time,

90 percent of American Catholics refused to support the ban on artifi cial

contraception and the majority disagreed with the bar on divorce (Dezell

2001, 163). Thus it is somewhat surprising that in novels describing abusive

spouses and unhappy marriages, many characters remain unhappily married;

less surprising is the fact that among those who divorce, the children suffer.

In Jean McGarry’s
The Courage of Girls
(1994), Loretta Costello St. Cyr

is married to the domineering Daniel. Although he swears he loves her, Dan-

iel continually demeans her, then is surprised that she remains “like a corpse”

when they have sex (17). Although Loretta leaves him for awhile, she eventu-

ally returns. There is no hint that their lives will be different, but Loretta will

persevere, for—in a line echoing Maureen Howard’s
Facts of Life
—she has

decided “just to resign myself to nothing” (81). Susan Minot’s novels con-

tinue this sad song. In her second novel,
Folly
(1992), Lilian Eliot Finch (like

Edna Pontillier in the
The Awakening
) is confi ned by the strictures proscrib-

ing women’s behavior. Since
Folly
is set amidst World War I, just eighteen

years after
The Awakening
, these mores are not surprising, especially in staid

Boston society. Like Mrs. Pontillier, Lilian awakens when she experiences

sexual desire for the enigmatic Walter Vail. But after Walter goes off to war

without a word, Lilian marries Gilbert Finch. Lilian’s folly is in holding on

to her infatuation with Vail throughout her marriage until fi nally, at middle

age, she sees the man for what he is.

In developing her style, Minot appears to draw on Mary McCarthy’s
The

Group
. Although Minot is not primarily concerned with skewering her char-

acters, she too exposes the emptiness of lifestyles centered around childcare

and homemaking. As in
The Group
, Minot’s novel traces the lives of Lilian

and her girlfriends as they fall in love, marry, fl ourish or fail, with Lilian (like

McCarthy’s Kay Petersen) at the center. Since only one of Lilian’s friends

has attended college, their aspirations are not so high as McCarthy’s Vassar

graduates; nevertheless, over the course of the novel Minot exposes simi-

lar themes: alcoholism, depression, adultery, and man’s inconstancy. Lilian

has learned to tolerate it, but her friend Irene cannot. Increasingly drunk,

she (again, like Kay Peterson) appears to commit suicide. In a conclusion

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refl ecting the fi n de siècle tendency away from the closure of a happy mar-

riage, the novel’s fi nal pages fi nd Lilian vowing to stay with Gilbert. Never-

theless, she says: “I don’t have to like it, and if you come right down to it, I

won’t. But at least I won’t moon after things. My parents did not raise me to

behave like a fool” (278).

This message is echoed in Eileen Fitzgerald’s
You’re So Beautiful
(1996).

Throughout, Fitzgerald’s characters refl ect on their past and present lives,

conjure violent revenge scenarios, and fantasize about escape. All are realis-

tic, for none reach satisfactory conclusions; they simply end, a strategy that

reinforces the sense that they are trapped, their only escape through death

or dreams. In
Lies of the Saints
(1996), Erin McGraw similarly deconstructs

marital relationships. In “Blue Skies,” for example, Ray and Constance strug-

gle with the aftermath of alcoholism—sobriety and distrust, respectively—

taking a realistic look at the damage a suspicious spouse can wreak on a

relationship as well as the diffi culties of letting go and rebuilding. In
House

Work
(1994), Kristina MacGrath underscores the impact of the church on

unhappy marriages. The schizophrenic Guy Hallissey cannot cope with his

wife, his three children, or even his furniture, which he believes is moving.

When Guy’s illness escalates into carousing, wife Anna takes the children

and leaves—an unsanctioned act in the days before divorce and working

wives. “‘Mrs.,’ said Father Rawley. He would consider excommunication.

‘Your place is with him,’ he told her, ‘He’s a good man’” (74).

Bobbie Ann Mason’s 1990’s books also focus on marriage. Her mem-

oir,
Clear Springs
(1998), pays homage to her mother, an orphan raised by

her aunt’s family. Details from this work appear in practically every novel.

Feather Crowns
(1993) is set in the rural Kentucky of Mason’s grandpar-

ents and extended family, thus reminding readers of the harsh, hard scrabble

lifestyle of tobacco farmers.
Spence + Lila
is a fi ctional version of Mason’s

parents’ marriage, set (like Maeve Brennan’s) in the same house—a four-

square, built by her father—outside Mayfi eld, Kentucky, where Mason grew

up. Again like Brennan, the novel includes specifi c factual details, such as her

mother’s decision to work outside the home as well as the characters’ super-

stitions and unschooled patois refl ecting a “lowland Scots” heritage (Mason

1998, 38). In these settings she pursues timeless feminist themes: the guilt

of sexual desire, the community of women, the demands of motherhood, the

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burden of grief (and concomitant guilt) on a relationship, the need for com-

munication, and the effort necessary to make a marriage work.

Motherhood and, more subtly, abortion are addressed in Ann Patchett’s

The Patron Saint of Liars
(1992). In a 2011 interview with
The Guardian
,

Patchett mentioned that she had no desire to have children. “I never wanted

children, never, not for one minute, and it has been the greatest gift of my

life that even as a young person I knew. . . . Children are wonderful but

they’re not for everybody” (Rustin 2011).
The Patron Saint of Liars
explores

this conundrum. Rose Clinton is married to a man she does not love, so

when she becomes pregnant she leaves him because she believes she would

not be a good mother, traveling to St. Elizabeth’s Home for Unwed Moth-

ers to put her child up for adoption—which does not trouble her as much

as the prospect of leaving once she has given birth. Fortuitously, the home’s

groundskeeper proposes and agrees to raise the child as his own. The novel’s

last section describes the impact of Rose’s unmaternal feelings on her daugh-

ter, Sissy. “We’d never gotten along,” Sissy notes. “It wasn’t that we fought,

exactly. We hadn’t even progressed that far. . . . The unspoken pact was that

we ignored each other” (249). Although this is uttered casually, it is clear

that Sissy misses her mother’s love. Using multiple points of view, Patchett

explores both the physical and psychological sides of maternity. Jacqueline

Carey’s second novel,
The Other Family
(1996), similarly reinforces the edict

against divorce by looking at its effects—anger, depression, and drugs—on

the children. As the abandoned daughter Joan Toolan says, “Once upon a

time the center of my life had been fi rm. . . . All this came unmoored when

our mother left us” (Carey 1996, 12–13). When her cousins’ family similarly

disintegrates, they echo her anger: “‘How did you stand it when your parents

split up?’ Budge asks. ‘I wish they would both die’” (185). Although this is

a novel with a strong comic sense, its message about marriage and mothers

comes through strongly.

Alice McDermott’s
At Weddings and Wakes
(1992) and
Charming Billy

(1999) offer up more unhappy marriages. In the former, she uses a member

of the third or fourth generation of Irish immigrants to deconstruct her

family members’ unhappiness. The narrator is one of the Dailey children—a

daughter, like most of McDermott’s narrators—who listens to her mother,

aunts, and step-grandmother and observes their angry, eventually tearful

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interactions. As in her previous novels, McDermott fractures timelines, mov-

ing between present and past to develop a fuller picture, but also “to support

more largely thematic concerns regarding the impact of time on memory and

the story-making that is not only memory’s key function but also a hallmark

of the Irish American literary tradition” (Jacobson 2008, 123).

These images emerge throughout the course of the Dailey children’s

biweekly, day-long summer treks with their mother from the suburbs into

New York City, highly detailed reversals of the Irish emigration as they move

“west to east” (McDermott 1992, 55), from the New World back to the Old

as personifi ed by their aunts and grandmother. Behind each woman lies a sad

story. Their grandmother, Momma Towne, married the aunts’ father only to

have him die within the year, so she “quickly became not merely a stranger to

resent and accommodate but the only living adult to whom they were of any

value” (27). Capitalizing upon these circumstances, Momma Towne quickly

takes on the characteristics of the “martyred, manipulative Irish mother”

(Dezell 2001, 104). Aunt May, a former nun, fi nally marries and then dies

four days later. Aunt Agnes is an executive secretary who, lacking a husband

or a vocation, has devoted herself to studying “the fi ner things” and “in her

misanthropy . . . found all else, all the soiled, dull, and tasteless things about

humankind, somehow appalling” (McDermott 1992, 111). A spinster, Aunt

Veronica has descended into alcoholism.

But the children’s mother—the only married sister—suffers the most.

Each visit begins with her usual laments. “But who thinks of me?” (25).

“He’s not the man I married. . . . I’m not having the kind of life I wanted”

(34–35). The plaints escalate until, mixed with late afternoon cocktails, the

arguing begins, each woman believing her life the worst, and ends with sob-

bing. “Too many women in too small a place, they would say later . . . or,

later still, too much repression, too much pity, too much bad luck. And then

fi nally, convinced they’d hit the mark at last, too much drink” (124). The

enervating Old World ends with the husband’s arrival. Although he has been

the object of scorn throughout the day, only he can save them—a dynamic

that clearly parallels the housewife’s malaise described by Friedan in
The

Feminine Mystique
.

This novel marks the last of McDermott’s explicitly feminist works.

Henceforth—perhaps as she moved into middle age, perhaps in a refl ection

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