The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (10 page)

the Protestant explanation, but when luck and prayer collided in heaven”

(Blais 2001, 75).

Blais’s contemporary, Mary Gordon, born in 1949, was raised by an

exceedingly devout Irish Italian Catholic mother: from 1935 until her

death more than sixty years later, Anna Gordon was a member of the

Working Women’s Retreat Movement. For these women, mostly widowed

or unmarried, this group “provided a situation in which their spiritual life

could be taken seriously,” brought similarly minded women together, and

provided, in essence, a room of their own where they could get away from

their families. Several times a year, the women traveled around the country

to meet, usually in a convent, attend Mass, listen to sermons and talks by

the priests, and visit their friends (Gordon 2007, 105). These retreats led

to enduring friendships not only among some of the women but also with

some of the priests. Unlike the current climate in which priests are almost

by default considered suspect, clergy in the mid-1950s “were treated like

princes—no, like kings. . . . Nothing was too much to do for them. . . . You

will say that I am naive, that many of these women served priests sexually,”

but the ethnic composition of the midcentury church provided a crucial

distinction: “I am talking of the American Church in the triumphalist

years of 1920–60, a church entirely under control of the Irish, who had no

toleration for the wink-wink, nudge-nudge, ‘we’re all human after all,’ ‘a

man’s a man’ comprehension found in other parts of the world” (Gordon

2007, 131–32).

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Sex and the Irish American Woman Writer

Prior to World War II, Freudian theory had seemed like the key to women’s

emancipation. Acceptance of Freud’s belief in the necessity of “freedom from

a repressive morality to achieve sexual fulfi llment” could be observed in the

fl appers’ bobbed hair, short skirts, smoking, drinking, and independent life-

styles. But after the war, Freudian psychology was used to explain women’s

unhappiness. Drawing on the obsolescent notion of penis envy, everyone

from sociologists, teachers, clergymen, and counselors, to advertisers, mag-

azine editors, and pop psychologists attributed Freudian theory to every-

thing “wrong” with American women. Indeed, such widespread beliefs were

responsible for women’s sudden stasis, if not regression. As Betty Friedan

explains, “Without Freud’s defi nition of the sexual nature of woman to give

the conventional image of femininity new authority, I do not think several

generations of educated, spirited American women would have been so easily

diverted from the dawning realization of who they were and what they could

be” (1963, 104–5).

This decade saw the introduction, acceptance, application, and misappli-

cation of Freudian theory, which “led women, and those who studied them,

to misinterpret their mothers’ frustration, and their fathers’ and brothers’

and husbands’ resentments and inadequacies, and their own emotions and

possible choices in life” (Friedan 1963, 103). Eugene O’Neill’s
A Long Day’s

Journey Into Night
(1956) certainly casts women in a sadly dependent and

destructive light, as does Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire

(1951). An often-cited academic study of such misapplication is
Modern

Woman: The Lost Sex
, which enjoyed wide popularity, and in many, a wide-

eyed acceptance of claims such as, “The more educated the woman is, the

greater chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less severe” (Farnham and

Lundberg 1947, 142). Actually, the authors blamed all of society’s ills on

women, “from alcoholism to crime to war—to ‘neurotic’ career women who

abandoned their children to the care of others, neglected their husbands,

and competed with men in a man’s world” (Woods 2005, 136). In postwar

society, the stay-at-home mom was considered essential to American success,

for her nurturing presence and welcoming hearth provided a safe place to

escape the competitive world of the gray fl annel suits.

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

Like the generations before them, Irish American women writers not

only refused to accept this mindset, but they also displayed their resistance

in their fi ction. Carson McCullers appears to be the fi rst Irish American

woman to come cautiously out of the closet. All of McCullers’s work contains

a “signifi cant homoerotic theme.” This is not to say that her works feature

specifi cally lesbian or gay characters. Rather, “same-sex love” is a given in

McCullers’s fi ction. This should not be surprising, for McCullers’s “crushes”

on female partners permeated her marriage. Still, McCullers should not be

considered lesbian per se. Since she also pursued affairs with male partners,

married and remarried Reeves McCullers, and believed herself to be a man

born in a woman’s body, it is easier to call McCullers bisexual. Nevertheless,

her literature and her friendships suggest a knowledge of gay and lesbian

codes and lifestyles (Kenshaft 1996, 220–22).

One of the main characters in her fi rst novel,
The Heart Is a Lonely

Hunter
, is the tomboy Mick Kelly. Although Mick loses her virginity to

Harry Minwitz, the description of her orgasm—“like her head was broke off

from her body and thrown away” (McCullers 1940, 55)—is unprecedented

in heterosexual novels of the time. But not within pseudo-Irish American

pulp fi ction. During the 1950s, a spate of supposedly Irish American lesbian

novels emerged. Between 1957 and 1962, Ann Bannon published fi ve les-

bian novels featuring Beebo Brinker. Although these novels were acclaimed

for their treatment of sexuality, Ann Bannon was not Irish; she was Ann

Weldy. Claire Morgan’s lesbian novel
The Price of Salt
sold over a million

copies, but Morgan was actually Patricia Highsmith. Isabel Miller’s
Patience

and Prudence
features a loving lesbian couple; however, “Miller” is actually

Alma Routsong (Bona 2004). In contrast, McCullers remained true to her-

self despite a somewhat schizophrenic sexuality.

McCullers’s second novel,
Refl ections in a Golden Eye
(1941),
established

her reputation as well as the genre of the Southern gothic. The plot includes

a murderer, a madwoman, and a “homoerotic triangle,” one of whom is a

dwarf. McCullers’s third novel,
The Member of the Wedding
(1946), is also

a somewhat autobiographical bildungsroman recounting the coming-of-age

of another tomboy, Frankie Addams. Frankie—who sports a crew cut—

“wanted to be a boy and go to the war as a Marine. She thought about

fl ying aeroplanes and winning gold medals for bravery” (23) and wished

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that “people could change back and forth from boys to girls whichever way

they felt like and wanted” (97). McCullers’s novella,
The Ballad of the Sad

Café
(1951), was written during her stay at Yaddo, where she suffered from

unrequited love for Katherine Anne Porter (Showalter 2009, 370). This is

not typical Irish American fare.

Nor was Mary McCarthy’s book of short stories,
The Company She Keeps

(1942), which offers sordid details of a divorcee’s dalliances, most notably in

“The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” This story describes Meg Sergant’s

seduction by/of an unattractive traveling salesman, Mr. Breen,5 during their

cross-country train trip to the West Coast. Divorced and engaged to a new

man, Meg coolly analyzes the seduction and her alternating feelings of plea-

sure and disgust for herself and Breen. Intermittently self-aware, at one point

she realizes, “Dear Jesus . . . I’m really as hard as nails.” Vowing to redeem

herself, she goes to bed with Breen again, thinking, “This . . . is going to be

the only real act of charity I have ever performed in my life; it will be the only

time I have ever given anything when it honestly hurt me to do so” (114).

McCarthy’s novels and memoirs from this era display a marked disregard

for the sanctity of marriage. In scenes more graphic than 1950s readers of

women’s novels were accustomed to, McCarthy’s works explicitly address

sex, usually adulterous.
A Charmed Life
(1955)—a roman à clef satirizing

McCarthy’s relationship with Edmund Wilson (Brightman 1992, 243)—is

perhaps most notable for the rape scene between Miles/Wilson and Mar-

tha/Mary after both have remarried.

She wanted it, obviously, or she would not have asked him in. The angry

squirming of her body, the twisting and turning of her head, fi lled him with

amused tolerance and quickened his excitement as he crushed his member

against her reluctant pelvis. . . .”Don’t,” she cried sharply. . . . She sat up in

indignation, and his hand slipped in and held her breast cupped. . . .”Please

don’t,” she begged, with tears in her eyes, while he squeezed her nipples

between his fi ngertips; they were hard before he touched them; her breath

was coming quickly. . . . Compunction smote him; he ought not to have

5. In yet another example of McCarthy’s satire, the amoral Mr. Breen shares his

name with the Catholic League fi lm censor of the time, Charles Breen.

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

done this, he said to himself tenderly. Tenderness infl amed his member.

Clasping her fragile body brusquely to him, he thrust himself into her with

short, quick strokes. A gasp of pain came from her, and was over. (McCar-

thy 1955, 199–203)

In keeping with the tradition of Irish American women writers, McCar-

thy’s frank departures from conventional fare anticipated societal changes

emerging in the late 1940s. In 1948, Alfred C. Kinsey revolutionized the

way Americans thought about sex with the publication of
Sexual Behavior in

the Human Male
. Although this study was followed in 1953 by
Sexual Behav-

ior in the Human Female
—which demythologized the belief that women

were unable to enjoy sex—American consciousness seemed more attuned to

male pleasure. The 1950s saw the entrée of Hugh Hefner’s
Playboy
maga-

zine, which essentially “legitimized sex outside the marriage bond.” The

popularity of Vladimir Nabakov’s
Lolita
(1955), which glamorized statutory

rape, underscores this mindset. But not everyone agreed. Margaret Mead,

whose anthropological study
Male and Female
(1949) had cautioned against

allowing women to take men’s jobs and glorifi ed women’s essential feminin-

ity, condemned Kinsey for potentially undermining morals; consequently, in

1954, the Rockefeller Foundation, which had funded Kinsey’s research, cut

off his grants (Woods 2005, 139–40).

Paralleling these schizophrenic attitudes, the novels of this decade might

be classifi ed as refl ecting the “three faces of Eve”—the housewife/mother,

the intellectual, and the bad girl (Showalter 2009, 290). Mary McCarthy’s

characters in
The Oasis
(1949) and
The Groves of Academe
(1952) represent

“the intellectual.” In
The Oasis
she satirizes the “intellectual passivity” of

liberals, most notably Philip and Nathalie Rahv (Hardwick 1972, xiv). In

The Groves of Academe
, she argues for academic freedom (within limits)

through the predicament of Henry Mulcahy, fi red by the president of his

university for supposedly being a Communist sympathizer, while satirizing

the resultant protests from his liberal colleagues.
A Charmed Life
(1955) and

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(1957) reprise her “bad girl” persona, Meg

Sergant.
A Charmed Life
exacts revenge on ex-husband Edmund Wilson,

while
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
does the same to her abusive aunt

and uncle. Both novels explore the female persona’s sexuality. In so doing,

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McCarthy “began to create a new image for American women” (Showalter

2009, 398).

This image extended well beyond the message of unhappy married life

implicit in Irish American women’s prewar writing. Forced to give up their

jobs, their new-found independence, and the accompanying satisfaction and

self esteem, many women developed feelings of anger, frustration, and guilt.