The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (24 page)

his nephew) dances maniacally, suggests the possibility of reincarnation.
The

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Sixth Sense
, the story of a young boy who sees—and is ultimately helped

by—dead people, continues this theme. One could not move much farther

from the church, although Maura Stanton’s
Molly Companion
(1977)—

whose eponymous heroine shares some parallels with the journalist Nellie

Bly, is set in 1864 and tells a love story during the wars between Paraguay

and Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay—is a good try.

Other reactions were less extreme. With easy access and increased

acceptance of artifi cial birth control, women gained control of their bodies;

with the profusion of labor saving devices, women were no longer tied to

their homes. According to the theologian Andrew Greeley, “These chang-

ing structures challenged the assumption of traditional Church teaching

about family life, birth control, family planning and size, and women’s

place in the home.” Coinciding with the feminist movement was the rise of

what Greeley termed the “personalist revolution”: “the call for individuals

to become more fully themselves” (1985, 21). For women, this revolution

centered around hotly contested canonical issues—abortion, women’s roles

in the church, women’s ordination—in sum, women’s rights. Between 1973

and 1975, the National Coalition of American Nuns publicly denounced a

study by the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Pastoral Research and Practices

because it refused to support the ordination of women; a young American

girl took her plea to become an altar girl all the way to Rome; a woman

who had run an abortion clinic was denied a requiem mass; and priests

were ordered to deny Communion to members of NOW (Seidler and Meyer

1989, 79).

This anger was refl ected in Irish American women’s autobiographical

novels, wherein individuals subordinate the church to the needs of the indi-

vidual. Writers following this path strive to overcome their past—represented

by Catholicism—which they view simultaneously as “repressive” and “an

ethical ideal and a source of security.” Within the Catholic autobiographi-

cal novel, the death of a parent and the child’s reaction generally parallel or

stand as a metaphor for the “dissolution of American Catholic culture”—a

theme evident in Gordon’s
Final Payments
. Whereas men grieve their loss

of faith, women write about the promise of a life without the restrictions of

religion. Meaning is located in relationships rather than institutions (Gan-

dolfo 1992, 162).

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

Given the patriarchal authority of the church, these opposing viewpoints

should come as no surprise. Mary Gordon herself suggests that this distinc-

tion led women toward collaboration and the view that other women were

important, key themes in her work. This tendency also becomes evident in a

novel’s characterization: whereas male writers feature the lone wolf, females

put their characters into a pack. These women tend to be seeking some sort

of “awakening”—not religious or spiritual, but psychological. “Characteris-

tic of the female vision of American Catholicism is a refusal to either glory in

or condemn the past but to note its strengths as well as its weaknesses. There

is no reductive identifi cation of the Church with oppression, but a realization

that the situation is far more complex” (Gandolfo 1992, 163–71).

Such feelings are illustrated in Irish American fi ction of the 1970s, for it

refl ects the attitudes and, at times, the animosity generated by the feminist

movement amidst the church’s infl exibility. Such work “offers Catholicism

two different visions of American individualism. The fi rst . . . is ostenta-

tiously ‘Catholic,’ clinging to the name in an assertion of autonomy that does

not simply reject heteronomy [read patriarchy] but appropriates its codes.”

Especially in the years following
Humana Vitae
, women writers’ views of

reconciliation differed considerably from those of the opposite sex. Although

women in the 1970s were realizing that the church was out of touch and its

doctrines diffi cult to preserve in the modern world, they also understood

that because of their experiences they were better able to understand life’s

temptations as well as the church’s role in helping them to persevere. For

these writers, Catholicism took on a Proustian shape, its importance “lim-

ited to a ‘remembrance of things past’” (Gandolfo 1992, 109–13). Recon-

ciliation occurs when these writers reveal how their early religious training

framed their contemporary behavior. Elizabeth Savage’s
A Good Confession

(1975) is a good example.

Like Maeve Brennan’s Delia Bagot, Maureen Howard’s Laura Quinn

and Mill Cogan, and Blanche Boyd’s Lena and Martha, Elizabeth Savage’s

Meg O’Shaughnessey Atherton evinces what Betty Friedan termed “the

problem that has no name,” the ennui of the American housewife. Although

Meg holds a bachelor’s degree, she does not work and she has no children;

she had a dog, but he ran away and she has no desire to replace him. She and

her husband, Spencer, do not quarrel; they just don’t talk. As the novel opens

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Meg is confronted by her husband’s mistress. Although Meg’s fi rst response

is, “‘You realize I’m a Catholic?’” she nevertheless decides to leave him.

Meg is plunged back into childhood memories when she is summoned

to the deathbed of her grandfather, Big Jim. He and his wife, Kate, raised

Meg, so naturally she will go home. With the move to this setting, Savage

reincarnates the Irish American trope of children returning to honor their

dying parent, or in this case parent-substitute. At the same time, Savage uses

the fi gure of the grandmother (Kate)—a recurrent trope among Irish Ameri-

can female poets—as a reserve of wisdom (Monaghan 2004, 344). Clearly

such a fi gure will lend commonsense advice and stability to her granddaugh-

ter’s life. This change of scene also allows Savage to alternate between past

and present to illustrate the infl uence of Meg’s grandparents as well as her

relationship with Val, a teenage crush who spurned her for the priesthood.

The combination of a cheating husband and a rejecting boyfriend elicit

acerbic comments about the male sex typical of 1970s feminist novels. Spen-

cer “defeated me with a cold, sustained courtesy such as I had never seen

on Mahoney Street” (34). In response to a misstatement from Val, Meg

remarks, “But then, men are dense” (35). Recalling Spenser’s annoyance

at her illness, she echoes Maeve Brennan: “But then, I understand many

men are annoyed when their wives are ill. They at fi rst—say for the fi rst

three hours—seem sympathetic; after that it becomes a nuisance, and then

an affront. Malingering is suspected” (193). Such feelings are regularly con-

trasted to the relationship she recalls between her grandfather and grand-

mother. Watching Big Jim put his arm around Kate’s shoulder or pat her

hand, Meg refl ects, “I thought that was what marriages were like” (65). Such

recollections gradually soften Meg’s feelings toward her adulterous husband,

leading her to realize: “I don’t hate Spencer. Perhaps it is not much fun to

live with someone bored and disappointed.
Let not the sun go down upon they

wrath
,” she recalls, a lesson she learned from Kate (83–84). “By and large,

and barring the odd case, Kate never wasted much sympathy on women

who lose their husbands. She said they probably hadn’t been generous,” to

which Meg counters, “I don’t know how you’re to be generous to a man

who prefers another woman’s generosity.” Yet after refl ecting on her role in

this marriage, she recalls Spenser’s comment, “‘You don’t share anything, do

you, Margaret?’” (107).

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

The problems between Meg and Spencer occur, in part, because theirs

is a mixed marriage. Meg’s attitude toward the church refl ects the 1970

mindset—insular yet critical, just like Irish siblings. Although she notes that

“many of us escaped our faiths,” she has not “escaped all the way.” So when

Big Jim dies, Meg immediately calls Spencer: “At the end you must go back,

if only because you have promises to keep. Perhaps from now on it would be

better for Spenser and for me, and perhaps not. But it was my promise for

which I was responsible, and not his.” In a decade when women were leaving

and divorces soaring, Catholicism made all the difference.

When comparing degrees of confl ict in the church between the 1960s

and the 1970s, women’s issues stand out as “statistically signifi cant” (Seidler

and Meyer 1985, 86). Organizations within the church, such as the Leader-

ship Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), a group of feminist nuns,

began to speak out against injustice toward women (Ruether 2003, 5). Their

study packet,
Focus on Women
, issued in 1975, decried the historical oppres-

sion of women, argued that the church had been a major force in these

efforts, and called for women to unite and refuse “to accept such ‘institutional

injustice.’” Similarly, the Grail, a “noncanonical Catholic women’s religious

‘order’” established in 1921, developed an increasingly feminist outlook in

the 1970s that attracted women religious leaders across sects. Although most

Grail members viewed themselves as “100 percent loyal Catholics,” many

had begun to dissent following
Humane Vitae
. “With each succeeding state-

ment on sexuality issues—contraception, divorce, abortion, homosexuality,

use of condoms for prevention of HIV/AIDS, ordination of women—both

dissent and Church efforts to control it have increased” (Kalven 2003, 35).

In the 1970s, the second model of the Catholic novel was develop-

mental, often leading to abandonment of the church. This fi ction, “which

focuses on the search for a true religious self, is, not surprisingly, most evi-

dent in women’s fi ction” (Gandolfo 1992, 157). Prior to Elizabeth Cullinan

no authors offered an alternative vision of the church.4 In
House of Gold
,

Cullinan presented an extended allegory revealing the authoritarian repres-

4. These views are echoed in the Irish American Susan Cahill’s memoir,
Earth

Angels: Portraits from Childhood and Youth
(New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

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sion of the past and the possibility of a new vision of American Catholi-

cism. These themes resurface in her short story collections In
The Time of

Adam
(1971) and
Yellow Roses
(1977). As her persona, Louise Gallagher,

says, “Fish will always mean Catholic to me, and . . . Catholic meant Irish

and Irish meant lower class” (1977, 83). Even though Cullinan was second

generation Irish American, she still felt the sting of her “immigrant” status.

Thus it is perhaps not surprising that both collections “may be seen as Irish

American escape stories” (McInerney 2008, 103).

Cullinan manifests this desire in recurrent themes and characters. One

of the most prominent is the fi gure of the arrogant priest, an omnipresent

character in her 1960 short stories. This fi gure becomes more menacing in

“Only Human.” Juxtaposed with the nuns’ and her family’s fond remem-

brances of Father Jim, his niece Marjorie recalls how he was “always tak-

ing you aside and telling you, in that beautiful, cultivated voice, some dirty

joke; always, when he kissed you, touching you some place he shouldn’t

have touched you; always those wet kisses” (Cullinan 1971, 150). Although

Cullinan seems to blame the church for its priests’ arrogance, she fi nds the

strictures imposed on women even more repressive. This theme is illustrated

in her female personae.

In three interrelated stories—“Yellow Roses,” “An Accident,” and “A

Forgone Conclusion”—Louise Gallagher contemplates ending her affair

with Charlie, her married lover. Needless to say, any mention of his wife

makes her “begin to dislike him” but also “to dislike herself.” More damning

is her recollection of their early fl irtation before he married. When Louise

asks, “Why can’t you marry me?” his response, “It’s out of the question”—

because he is Protestant and she, Catholic—prompts her to throw his yellow