The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (16 page)

Molesters”), and an analysis of same. Again like Howard, as well as Brennan

3. Letter to Susanna Araujo, 2008. Cited in Susanna Araujo, “I’m Your Man:

Irish American Masculinity in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates,” in Ebest and McIn-

erney,
Too Smart to Be Sentimental
, 157–70.

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

and McCarthy, Oates satirizes the aspirations and affectations of the upper

middle class, poking fun at the huge houses and requisite maids, the moth-

ers’ ennui and affairs, the fathers’ uneasy distance from their own children,

and the children’s subsequent alcoholism, drug use, and homicidal impulses.

She also shared their resentment of (and revenge on) the white male literati at

the
Partisan Review
, who did their best to exclude women writers, through

her characterization of Moe Malinsky, a “‘professional intellectual’ and radi-

cal editor of
The Transamerican Quarterly
” (Showalter 2009, 393).

During this decade, Oates published
A Garden of Earthly Delights

(1966),
Expensive People
(1968), and
them
(1969). She intended these novels

to be “critiques of America—American culture, American values, American

dreams—as well as narratives in which romantic ambitions are confronted by

what must be called ‘reality’” (Oates 1966, 221)—a theme characteristic of

Irish American women’s novels in the 1960s. The sardonically titled
Garden

of Earthly Delights
features migrant workers, while
Expensive People
, in the

tradition of Kathleen Norris, satirizes the suburban nouveau riche. Unremit-

tingly grim,
them
looks at the post-Depression era, reads like the muckraking

exposes of Norris’s brother-in-law, Frank Norris, and features doomed hero-

ines as hapless as Mary McCarthy’s. Women get pregnant or beaten, they

are worn down by childbearing, take to drink, lose their husbands. As Clara

says in
Garden
, “There had been nothing else in the world for them, noth-

ing, except to give themselves to men, some man, and to hope afterwards

that it had not been a mistake. But could it be a mistake? There was no other

choice” (Oates 1966, 147).

Critics such as Richard Ohmann have claimed that Americans’ postwar

middle-class status led to dissatisfactions that translated into narratives of

illness; however, Irish American fi ction was more likely to parallel the mes-

sage implied in the works of Mickey Spillane, who correlated the author’s

agency with that of his characters (Hoberek 2005, 17). As befi tting a writer

who suffered from chronic illness and lack of agency, Flannery O’Connor

confl ated the two. Drawing on interviews with O’Connor’s mother, Jose-

phine Hendin argues that the theme of entrapment running throughout

the later stories refl ects O’Connor’s dependence on her mother. Worse, the

“code of Southern genteel womanhood” (against which Margaret Mitchell

and Carson McCullers similarly rebelled) dictated that young women be

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pleasant and keep their personal business to themselves. Hendin points out

the problem with this mindset: “But what if one’s ‘business,’ one’s most

essential feelings are not the stuff pretty gestures are made of? What if, from

girlhood, you have known you loathe the Southern belle you are supposed

to become? What if you have felt ‘other’ and ‘different’ in a milieu that is

horribly embarrassed by anything unconventional? And what if your busi-

ness later on is dying slowly, being fi lled with impotent rage at your own

weakness? And what if, through it all, no one will even tolerate your ‘fussing’

about it?” (1970, 12)

O’Connor displaced her anger and frustration by fi ctionalizing it (Hen-

din 1970, 13). This strategy certainly describes the stories in
Everything That

Rises Must Converge
. Written after O’Connor had lived as a semi-invalid with

her mother for ten years, they feature obnoxious yet loving mothers and

equally obnoxious but well-educated sons who believe themselves superior

to everyone. In the opening story as well as in “Greenleaf”—originally pub-

lished in 1956, the year after O’Connor could no longer walk (Liukkonen

2008)—and “The Comforts of Home,” the mother dies. In “A View of

the Woods” and “The Lame Shall Enter First,” children die because of an

adult’s self-righteous beliefs. O’Connor sublimated her frustration in char-

acters whose unexpected rage often takes readers aback. These fi ctional sons

and daughters resent the need to depend on mothers whose overbearing

ways keep them in a state of perpetual adolescence (Hendin 1970, 14–15).

Indeed,
Everything That Rises Must Converge
might also be called
Everyone

Who Grows Up Must Confront His Parents
, for practically every story con-

cludes with a confrontation leading to a parent’s death. If the adult child is

unable to cause the death, he collapses. Like O’Connor, these angry adult

children are wholly reliant on their mothers even as they long to rebel, feel

guilt-ridden, and fear punishment (99).

To deal with these feelings, O’Connor often created doubles—mothers’

doubles so that the violence is shifted to a look-alike, children’s doubles who

enact vengeance on the offending parent, or animals who do the job guilt-

free for the angry child. In the title story of
Everything That Rises
, Julian

Chestney’s mother has a heart attack caused by her double—a black woman

wearing a hat just like hers—who conveys Julian’s rage through her anger at

Mrs. Chestney’s racism. “Revelation” (1964) is set in a doctor’s waiting room

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

where Mrs. Turpin converses with a woman she considers her equal about

the failings of their inferiors, including the woman’s unattractive daugh-

ter, Mary Grace, who cannot help but overhear. In the story’s denouement,

Mary Grace attacks Mrs. Turpin, her mother’s doppelganger, in retaliation

for their mirth at her expense. In “The Comforts of Home” (1960), Thomas

is furious because his mother has allowed Star, a convicted “nimpermaniac,”

to stay with them. Although Thomas intends to shoot Star, he accidentally

kills his mother, who is Star’s mirror image (Hendin 1970, 116–17). To

punish Sheppard, the self-righteous father in “The Lame Shall Enter First”

(1962) who ignores his son Norton while trying to rehabilitate the misfi t

Rufus, Rufus befriends Norton and convinces him to hang himself. Surely

it is no accident that in almost every case, the angry “child” is a weak, needy

intellectual. Like her predecessor Kathleen Conway, O’Connor exposes the

psychic damage infl icted by a domineering Irish American matriarch.

Fouling the Catholic Nest

By focusing on female experiences and value systems, Irish American women

in the 1960s produced novels with which millions of women could identify.

Mary McCarthy and her contemporaries were the inspiration for generations

of women because they wrote about “a woman’s domestic strategies, her

fi nances, her female friendships, her minute biological concerns” (Donohue

1996, 95–96). Anyone who has read these novels and biographies recognizes

the constant interweaving of fi ction and reality—a reality that includes Irish

American women’s relationship with the Catholic Church. Herein lies an

interesting contradiction. Despite their assimilation in the 1960s, the feminist

novels of Irish American women often suggest the infl uence of their Catholic

background, for throughout most of the twentieth century, Irish Americans

still defi ned themselves as American Catholics (Meagher 2005, 146).

When Kay Peterson declared that “Birth control . . . was for those who

know how to use it and value it—the educated classes” (McCarthy 1963,

75), Mary McCarthy took on not only the church but also the birth con-

trol movement itself, which was aimed at “controlling” the growth of the

working class. Since the majority of the working class was Catholic and thus

prohibited from practicing birth control, this propaganda was viewed as

a deliberate slight. The church did not dispel this perception. During the

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period in which
The Group
occurs, contraception had just been accepted

by most Christian, non-Catholic denominations. Only the Catholic Church

refused to budge, instead issuing
Casti Connubii: On Christian Marriage
,

which stated that “any use whatever of marriage, in the exercise of which the

act by human effort is deprived of its natural power of procreating life, vio-

lates the law of God and nature, and those who do such a thing are stained

by a grave and mortal fl aw” (quoted in Tobin 2008, 211). In addressing

this and other taboos, McCarthy effectively spat in the face of the Mother

Church.

Although McCarthy rejected the Catholic Church, she was unable to

shake its tenets—a tendency characteristic of most Irish American women

writers of this period. McCarthy’s confl icted attitudes, characters, and

behavior stem from her heritage, for despite her ostensible antifeminism she

struggled with “the Church’s restrictive defi nition of women, and a his-

torically and culturally Irish fatalism” (Donoghue 1996, 87–88). And even

though McCarthy grew further and further from the mores of her Catholic

girlhood, she could not escape herself. Despite her antifeminist statements,

her characters represent confl icting tensions as they are pulled between the

desire for sexual and intellectual freedom and their internalized Catholic

sense of guilt (Donoghue 1996, 93).

Catholic women are not generally associated with feminism. This group

was not involved in feminism’s fi rst wave (1898–1920), which was closely

tied to women’s suffrage, because it was “implicitly anti-Catholic . . . vilify-

ing the growing Catholic working-class political leadership of cities, such as

Boston and Chicago, as the epitome of ‘rum, Romananism, and rebellion’”

(Ruether 2003, 3). However, between 1920 and 1950 many of the Catholic

lay movements became involved with leftwing political issues, among them

feminism. Founded in 1956, the Conference of Major Superiors of Women

(CMSW) quickly grew disenchanted with Rome. Although twenty thousand

women religious had willingly responded to the Vatican’s request for Ameri-

can sisters to serve in Latin America, the Pope refused to reply to the sisters’

unanimous petition to have representation on panels dealing with their own

lives. Consequently, under the direction of Sister Marie August Neal, the

CMSW distributed the National Sisters’ Survey to ascertain the degree of

support for structural change within the church (Weaver 1985, 83–84).

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

During the 1960s and 1970s, groups such as the Grail—Catholic lay-

women who believed women had the potential to change the world—and

the Catholic Family Movement (CFM) promoted a feminist agenda linked

with social action. Both groups ran afoul of church authorities (Kalven

2003, 6–7). Following Vatican II, Grail members began to question Rome’s

authority over their lives; consequently, their leadership decentralized into

three task forces: “the bonding of women, the search for God in traditional

and nontraditional ways, and liberation.” In 1968, the National Assembly of

Religious Women (NARW) declared itself an explicitly feminist movement

committed to giving all Catholic women a voice and engaging in feminist

social justice initiatives such as the ER A, fi nancial rights, and protection

from domestic abuse (Weaver 1985, 126–28). Perhaps even less popular with

the Catholic hierarchy was the so-called Army of Three—Patricia Macgin-

nis, Lana Clarke Phelan, and Rowena Gurner—who started the movement

to put abortion rights in the hands of women rather than male doctors,

lawyers, or politicians. Begun in the late 1960s, this work continued into the

next decade as they and other women worked to overturn antiabortion laws

(Baehr 1990). Thanks to their efforts, NAR AL—the National Abortion and

Reproductive Rights Action League—was founded in 1969.

An Irish-born Catholic, Maeve Brennan did not much concern herself

with religion, for thanks to Eamonn de Valera, the church had become inter-

twined with the Irish government and was more or less taken for granted.