The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (42 page)

post-9/11 mindset regarding the need to marry and bear children. In fact,

as the novel closes the main character actually thinks, “Something about the

scene was like the unreality of a movie ending . . . the warm, phony wrap-up”

(Mason 2005, 265).
Nancy Culpepper
repeats this message. As
The Chicago

Tribune
blurb puts it, this novel “honors our ideas of home, and the efforts

we make to keep it safe, to remake it and to fi nd it again.”

Following a string of feminist novels—as well as the recession—Jacque-

line Carey4 began catering to the public interest with
It’s a Crime
(2008). In

the tradition of Irish American women writers, Carey was perhaps the fi rst

to capitalize on the trend of developing chick lit heroines who “cope with

recession woes” (La Perla 2004, E1).5 Although
Chick Lit (2005)
authors

4. The novelist Jacqueline Carey shares her name with the historical romance

writer Jacqueline Carey, author of the Kushiel fantasy series.

5. In keeping with the tradition established by Irish American women writers,

Carey was the fi rst to publicize the recession through her fi ction. She was quickly

followed
, in 2009, by Tatiana Boncompagni’s
Hedge Fund Wives
, Wendy Walker’s

Social Lives
, Sarah Strohmeyer’s
The Penny Pinchers Club
, Michelle Wildgen’s
But
Not for Long
, Karen Weinreb’s
The Summer Kitchen
, and Jill Kargman’s
The Ex-Mrs.

Hedgefund
.

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 197

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 197

7/3/2013 4:10:32 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:32 PM

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

Mallory Young and Suzanne Ferris defend these works as “real women

responding to real-world situations” the fact remains that independence

emerges only after the money runs out (LaPerla 2004, E10). But Carol

Gilligan represents the most dramatic reversal. Whereas her 1982 study,
In

a Different Voice
, initiated feminist research on the psychology of women,

the main character of her 2010 novel,
Kyra
, attempts suicide when her lover

leaves and ultimately abandons her job and her career as an architect to fol-

low him to Europe.

Summing up this trend, Faludi writes, “The myth of American invinci-

bility required the mirage of womanly dependency, the illusion of a helpless

family circle in need of protection from a menacing world. Without that

show of feminine frailty, the culture could not sustain the other fi gment vital

to the myth, of a nesting America shielded by the virile and vigilant guard-

ians of its frontier” (145).6

The Devotional Revolution

In a 2008 essay, the theologian Paul Elie pronounced the twenty-fi rst cen-

tury the end of an era for Catholics. In the aftermath of 9/11, with the

discovery of sexual predators and complicit bishops, Catholic culture was in

disarray. You could see it in their writing: Catholic writers were “riven by the

tension between ‘an attraction to the holy and the disbelief in it,’” a stance

that had driven them to be “more critical than creative.” Rather than create

new fi ction, they “work[ed] with materials already at hand, using journal-

ism, memoir, essay, narrative history, and historical fi ction to make our story

fresh and strange.” Both the church and Catholic writers were “in arrested

development together” (Elie 2008, 14–16). Recent Catholic history sup-

ports that view.7

6. Lest Faludi be dismissed as another radical feminist, it should be noted that

fi ve out of seven reviews from major news outlets found her research impressive and

persuasive. Moreover, while the
Washington Post
reviewer David Greenburg suggests

that Faludi’s fears of feminism’s demise would likely be disproven by the 2008 elec-

tion of Hillary Clinton, it is now obvious that Greenburg was mistaken.

7. Little has changed since then: this charge was repeated as recently as 2012 in

Kurt Anderson, “You Say You Want a Devolution?”
Vanity Fair
, January.

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 198

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 198

7/3/2013 4:10:32 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:32 PM

T H E N E W M I L L E N N I U M | 1 9 9

In his encyclical
2004 Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the

Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World
, the then-

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger “demeaned feminist theory as inimical to the

common good of the church, the family, and society [and] argued against

women’s ordination,” in the process revealing not only hostility to women

but also to their accomplishments over the past four decades (Sister X 2009,

n.p.). Such hostility ignored the argument that contemporary women could

be both feminists and good Catholics (Cummings 2006). Indeed, a month

later the Vatican decided to investigate the Leadership Conference of Women

Religious. “Evidently the Vatican is concerned that the LCWR has not been

forthcoming about the magisterium’s teachings regarding the ordination of

women, the relation of the Catholic Church to non-Christian religions, and

the ‘intrinsically disordered’ nature of homosexual acts,” wrote Sister X (n.p.).

The Vatican was not concerned with the nuns’ quality of life, the dimin-

ishing number of women religious, or even its priestly predators and the $2

billion in related lawsuits; instead Rome worried that feminism might run ram-

pant within the convent. Moreover, its “secretive, unfriendly, and one-sided”

visitations suggested that among leaders of the Catholic Church, women were

still not trustworthy. Its visiting “team” included no women and precluded

the opportunity for any sisters to review the results. Most telling, Sister X so

identifi ed herself because she feared “disciplinary action” for speaking out.

Meanwhile, as local dioceses ensured that retired priests received housing,

medical care, and pensions, retired sisters were sometimes literally left out in

the cold—yet the priests’ caretakers were almost entirely female.

Ironically, while priests retain major positions of authority, women work-

ers now run the American Catholic Church, comprising 80 percent of parish

workers and roughly half of all diocesan, administrative, and professional

posts. Women are the teachers and principals in the Catholic schools and the

caretakers for the increasingly elderly population of Catholic sisters. At the

post-secondary level, women are the administrators who have taken the lead

in making higher education accessible for ethnic minorities. These women

do not necessarily want to be priests. And while they might prefer that the

Vatican change some rules, they are not put off by its intransigence. Rather,

they choose what guidelines they will follow and ignore the others—as well

as the Vatican (Dezell 2001, 177–85).

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 199

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 199

7/3/2013 4:10:32 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:32 PM

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

Eileen Myles’s nonfi ction novel,
Cool for You
(2000), refl ects this mind-

set with a vengeance. Like many of her twenty-fi rst-century contemporaries,

in particular the tradition practiced by lesbian writers (Zimmerman 1990,

50–51), Myles rejects the traditional narrative. In
Cool for You
she resists

convention by blending genres and presenting herself sometimes as narra-

tor, sometimes as character. This duality allows her to develop traditional

Irish American themes of isolation and the paradox of memory, recounted

in ironic and mocking tones, while at the same time exploring generally ver-

boten issues surrounding sex and sexual identity. Myles herself is a hybrid,

half Polish and half Irish American, Irish Catholic and lesbian, sometimes

middle class and sometimes lower class, depending on the severity of her

father’s alcoholism. Needless to say, alcoholism is a staple of Irish and Irish

American writing, but here too Myles blurs boundaries, describing her

father as a “better” alcoholic than others, kind and loving rather than angry

and loud. Perhaps because of this she tends to identify more with him than

with her mother, who in turn perpetuates the stereotype of the distant Irish

matriarch.

But Myles’s primary targets are sexism and the church. In a scattershot

style, she touches on various examples of the mistreatment of women—nuns,

young girls, elderly ladies, her grandmother, herself—by the males in her life

and the masculine hierarchy of the church. “I’ve often thought of a female

Christ. Mostly the world can’t take it . . . because of what a meaningless

display female suffering simply is. If you belittle us in school, treat us like

slaves at home, and fi nally, if you get a woman alone in bed just tell her she’s

all wrong, no matter what sex you are. . . . I mean if that’s the way it usually

goes for this girl what would be the point in seeing her half nude and nailed

up? Where’s the contradiction? Could that drive the culture for 2,000 years?

No way. Female suffering must be hidden, or nothing can work. It’s a man’s

world and a girl on a cross would be like seeing a dead animal in a trap”

(Myles 2000, 15–16).

This degree of anger is unique among Irish American women writers.

At the opposite extreme is Caitlin Macy’s satire,
The Fundamentals of Play

(2000), which owes a great deal to Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
.

But whereas Catholicism doomed the Brideshead progeny, in
Fundamen-

tals
Catholicism is the hero’s salvation. As in
Brideshead
, Macy’s characters

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 200

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 200

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

T H E N E W M I L L E N N I U M | 2 0 1

are privileged members of the upper class, attending the same private high

schools and private colleges. These characters parallel the roles set out by

Waugh. The narrator and “poor” friend is George Lenham. Playing the part

of the wealthy drunken best friend is Chat Wethers. The much-sought-after

love interest is the coolly uninterested Kate Goodenow. Waugh’s American

Rex Motram and winner of Kate’s hand is Harry Lombardi, a “foreigner” to

this set in that he has chosen to drop out of college. “Kate would cotton to

that fact—his dropping out—as much as I had. It was something new in her

world, at least new in her New York world” (Macy 2000, 85). Just as Waugh’s

novel takes place before World War I changes society,
The Fundamentals of

Play
is set in the early 1980s immediately prior to the Wall Street explosion

inaugurated by the World Wide Web.

But the Irish American Macy reverses the religious onus. Whereas

Brideshead’s
adamant Catholicism bred guilt and hypocrisy among the

Brideshead offspring and served as an obstacle to the daughter’s marriage

to the divorced Motram, the Episcopalian New Yorkers of
Fundamentals

ridicule Harry for being Catholic. After he drunkenly monopolizes a con-

versation, George muses, “most people would have started apologizing for

talking too much. But perhaps when confession is a part of your religion, it

is only natural to want to run through the whole guilty spiel in front of an

audience” (Macy 2000, 193). When Harry discovers that a casual encounter

has resulted in the girl’s pregnancy, he immediately takes responsibility and

breaks off his engagement with Kate—who immediately snags another blue-

blood and marries him the day she was to wed Harry. In this novel, it is the

non-Catholics who come off poorly. As George says to Harry, “‘You’re going

to be quite the martyr . . . I hate religious people’” (Macy 2000, 256–57).

More typical is Alice McDermott’s
Child of My Heart
(2002). Writ-

ten in response to the trauma of 9/11, the novel exemplifi es Elie’s fear that

Catholics had developed an “attraction to the holy and the disbelief it.” At

the same time the novel suggests Irish Americans’ disillusion with the Bush

administration’s profi teering, warmongering, and usurping of civil rights. As

such, the novel can be viewed as a farce—especially after one realizes that

the narrator is not an innocent fi fteen-year-old girl but rather a middle-aged

woman looking back on the summer of her defl owering (Hagan 2010, 191).

Indeed, although McDermott moves away from her traditional theme of

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 201

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 201

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

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

faith, recognition of this narrative voice leads to the realization that this is

not about the innocence of childhood and the purity of nature. A modern-

day bildungsroman, it traces the coming-of-age of Theresa, attained by los-

ing her virginity and her young cousin, Daisy, in a single summer.

Whereas McDermott’s previous works were set in Manhattan and Long

Island,
Child of My Heart
moves out of the city to the safety of the Hamp-