Read The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Online
Authors: Sally Barr Ebest
Tags: #Social Science, #Literary Criticism, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Feminism & Feminist Theory, #European
But rather than suffer silently or wait for widowhood, Irish American women
expressed these feelings through accounts of domestic pressures, thwarted
ambitions, divorce, and depression.
Maeve Brennan focused on marriage and motherhood, neither of which
was fulfi lling. Her posthumous collection,
Springs of Affection
, features
short stories originally published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which
recount the unhappy union of Rose and Hubert Derdon, whose portrayal
is said to reveal “the emotional landscape of Ireland” (Bourke 2004, 173).
But this landscape is not so different from Brennan’s America: housewives
are unhappy, husbands resentful. Rose and Hubert alternately long for and
loathe the other, even going so far as to dream of each other’s death. Hubert
so dislikes his wife that he avoids her whenever possible. “Her pretensions,
the pitiful air she wore of being a certain sort of person, irritated him so
much that he could hardly bear to look at her on the rare occasions—rare
these days, anyway—when they went out together” (Brennan 1966, 72). Yet
he never confronts her, preferring instead the silence and avoidance Lawrence
McCaffrey attributes to Irish men, for when Hubert fi nds himself about to
address the issue, he “would have to stop himself, because he could begin
to feel his anger against her getting out of hand. The anger was so dreadful
because there seemed to be no way of working it off. It was an anger that
called for pushing over high walls, or kicking over great towering, valuable
things that would go down with a shocking crash” (Brennan 1966, 78).
Maureen Howard’s memoir,
Facts of Life
, is less angry but more cynical.
In her determination to be the ideal wife, Howard became “the compliant
young matron.” As a young faculty wife, she played the role even as she clung
to the hope that someday she would move beyond “the hot competition in
the hors d’oeuvres department” (1975, 76). In fact, she
was
moving along,
for in 1960, she published her fi rst novel,
Not a Word about Nightingales
,
which describes a man’s attempts to fl ee his wife and conventional job only
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46 | T H E B A N S H E E S
to return in the end to resume the “dull garment of his past” (61). Despite
favorable reviews, Howard apparently saw the work as a refl ection of her life
at the time. “I wrote a mannered academic novel, actually a parody of that
genre and so at a further remove from life. If there is any strength there . . .
it can only be in what I wanted that book to refl ect: a sense of order as I
knew it in the late fi fties and early sixties with all the forms that I accepted
and even enjoyed: that was the enormous joke about life—that our passion
must be contained if we were not to be fools” (1975, 80). But Howard was
not laughing. Viewing herself in the mirror, she laments, “I am as dull as the
picture I ripped out of the frame, dull as the idea of a mirror over the couch.
Impersonation of wife and mother. I have begun to wonder what I am like
in real life” (1975, 86).
Irish American women writers did not accept the status quo. Despite
their Catholic upbringings, they greatly exceeded the national probabilities
for divorces in their time. Although the divorce rate had declined to a steady
rate of 2.5 percent by the end of the 1950s, these authors out-performed
their peers. They also embraced the fad of seeking psychoanalysis to under-
stand themselves and self-medicated with drugs and alcohol to avoid the
pain. Mary Doyle Curran divorced her fi rst husband; over the course of her
life she suffered from depression and alcoholism, for which she sought help
through psychoanalysis (Halley 2002). Louise Bogan married and divorced
twice; she also suffered from “nervous breakdowns” and depression and was
hospitalized three times over a thirty-year period (Bogan and Limmer 1980,
xxvii–xxxiv). Maeve Brennan married and divorced; suffering from alcohol-
ism and mental illness during her last years, she had to be institutionalized
(Bourke 2004). Carson McCullers married her husband Reeves, divorced
him, and married him again (Showalter 2009, 370). Mary McCarthy mar-
ried four times, divorced thrice. She began undergoing psychoanalysis while
married to Edmund Wilson, ultimately seeing three different psychiatrists
before declaring them unnecessary (Brightman 1992, 229). Maureen How-
ard, married twice and divorced once, also sought analysis at one point.
Describing her early married life, she writes sardonically, “Look, I’m per-
fectly happy. . . . I’ve fi nally learned not to want things I cannot have” (How-
ard 1975, 174).
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Unmarried and childless, Flannery O’Connor’s stories nonetheless
refl ect the frustration engendered by a lack of independence. After graduat-
ing from the Georgia State College for Women in 1945, O’Connor moved
north to enter the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There she worked
with key Southern writers such as Robert Penn Warren. The short stories she
published there—“The Geranium,” “The Barber,” “Wildcat,” “The Crop,”
“The Turkey,” and “The Train”—established her reputation. In 1948 she
was invited to continue working on her writing at Yaddo, the Writers’ Col-
ony in Saratoga Springs, New York. There she found an agent, Elizabeth
McKee, who placed “The Capture” with
Mademoiselle
, “The Woman on the
Stairs” in
Tomorrow
, and “The Heart of the Park” and “The Peeler” in the
Partisan Review
. After leaving Yaddo, O’Connor tried living in New York
but found she preferred a less populated area, so she moved to Connecticut
to live with her friends Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, both Catholics and writ-
ers. During that period she fell ill and was diagnosed with lupus, causing
her to return home to live with her mother in 1951. Initially they resided
congenially: “You run the farm and I’ll run the writing,” O’Connor told her
mother (quoted in Getz 1980, 28).
Following an interview, Richard Gilman wrote, “her mother, who enters
into so many of her stories as the fulcrum of their violent moral action . . .
was a small, intense, enormously effi cient woman, who, as she fussed strenu-
ously and even tyrannically over Flannery, gave off an air of martyrdom”
(1969, 26). In so doing she reinforced another key Irish American archetype:
the domineering matriarch. After 1955—when O’Connor’s dependency
on her mother increased and her mobility decreased owing to the need for
crutches—this persona takes on a greater presence (Liukkonen 2008). In
stories prior to that date the mother fi gure is interfering but not infuri-
ating. She may be the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
(1953) whose bull-headed actions cause her family’s death (Hendin 1970,
149). Mrs. Hopewell in “Good Country People” (1955) could be channel-
ing Regina Cline O’Connor, for she “thought of her [daughter] as a child
though she was thirty-two years old and highly educated. . . . She thought
of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor
stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any
normal
good
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48 | T H E B A N S H E E S
times” (O’Connor 1955, 170, 173). This tone, as well as the adult child’s
gender, begins to shift in 1955, for O’Connor would not go so far as matro-
or patricide (Hendin 1970, 99). Nevertheless, O’Connor “was among the
American women writers of the fi fties who confronted matrophobia, or the
fear of becoming one’s mother” (Showalter 2009, 401). Forced to live with
her mother as an adult, O’Connor knew fi rsthand the tensions of this life.
Because she never married, O’Connor’s works evoke fi erce arguments
among critics regarding her feminist side. Some claim that O’Connor
avoided the reputation as a “lady writer” by focusing her satire on male char-
acters (Showalter 2009, 402). Whereas early versions of
Wise Blood
feature
strong, positive women characters, by the publication of
The Violent Bear
It Away
, they had virtually disappeared. Thus the doctorate-holding Joy in
“Good Country People” is not only hideous and deformed but also dis-
plays poor fashion sense, while her genteel backwoods mother “could not
help but feel that it would have been better if the child had not taken the
Ph.D.” (O’Connor 1955, 175)—an indirect slap at the postwar Freudians
who advocated housewifery.
Apparently Carson McCullers did not fear that stigma, for feminist
themes permeate her work.
The Ballad of the Sad Café
is emblematic of
women writers’ struggles against male domination, a necessity in the face
of increasingly aggressive, bellicose attacks on “female autonomy” exempli-
fi ed in the works of William Faulkner and Henry Miller.6 Tall and tough,
the character of Miss Amelia Evans suggests no need for men (Gilbert and
Gubar 1989, 148). Descriptions of her wedding and brief (unconsummated)
marriage to Marvin Macy support this reading. However, Miss Amelia’s
subsequent involvement with the hunchback dwarf Lymon Willis and even-
tual fi ght with Macy years later—in which she is ultimately defeated because
of Lymon’s intervention—offer a strong allegory for woman’s status at the
time. After her defeat, Miss Amelia has been transformed from “a woman
6. This feeling is evident in male reviewers’ delight in the eventual capitulation
of the heroine, as well as the primary critical focus on male characters rather than the
females. For further examples, see Huf, “Carson McCullers’ Young Woman with a
Great Future Behind Her,” in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
.
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with bones and muscles like a man” to “thin as old maids are thin when they
go crazy” (McCullers 1951, 70). Like McCarthy’s characters, women may
fi ght but they cannot win.
Although this situation was true across the country, it was particularly
dire in the South, where women were expected to be ladies once they reached
the age of consent (Heilbrun 1979). This losing fi ght against femininity is
exemplifi ed in McCullers’s tomboy characters (Westling 1996). After Mick
Kelly loses her virginity she essentially loses her freedom, for she is now
afraid of the dark, and so unable to roam the streets; after Frankie Addams
enters puberty and becomes fi rst F. Jasmine and then Frances, she transforms
into a silly teenager much less attractive than her tomboy persona.
The memoirs of Caryl Rivers and Maureen Waters, born before the war
(1937 and 1939, respectively), adumbrate the feminist concerns of their baby-
boomer successors. Rivers’s childhood games alternated between arguing
and fi ghting. “I was convinced that being a girl was an O.K. thing. Could I
not do anything the boys could do, and do it better? Except, of course, pee
on target” (1973, 20). Rivers grew increasingly disenchanted during high
school. To her, the nuns’ insistence on the rhythm method implied that it
was “a woman’s duty to be a brood mare, even it if destroyed her health, her
marriage, her family life, and kept them all in bleakest poverty.” The idea
that it was “better to die in the state of grace than to commit [the] mortal
sin” of using contraceptives was unacceptable (1973, 185).
Maureen Waters had similar experiences. “Nobody played with dolls,”
she writes. “What a strange group of girls we were, children of immigrants,
fi ghting for a toehold in the promised land.” As Waters grew older these atti-
tudes intensifi ed. A teenager in the 1950s, she writes, “the last thing in the
world I wanted to be was a housewife. In high school my electives were math
and science; I wouldn’t be caught dead in home economics.” The last straw
occurred at her all-girls college. Because there were no males, the female stu-
dents became responsible for responding to the chaplain during Mass, a role
Waters assumed with pleasure. However, when she learned that she would
not be allowed on the altar, that she would have to kneel “on a pretty little
prie-dieu
just outside the sanctuary,” she rebelled. “Despite the thrust of my
religious upbringing or, paradoxically, because of it,” she writes, “I expected
to be treated like everyone else, men included” (2001, 95).
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