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
women, constantly moving in one straight line” (52–53). As writers such as
Charlotte Perkins Gilman clearly demonstrated, crossing the line is grounds
for commitment.8 Through reading this woman’s memoirs, Alba comes to
8. See also Phyllis Chesler,
Women and Madness
; Rebecca Shannonhouse,
Out
of Her Mind: Women Writing About Madness
; Denise Russell,
Women, Madness,
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understand her problems, herself, and her father’s role in her commitments.
At the same time, this novel reminds readers of man’s renewed, if not ongo-
ing, control over women.
Erin McGraw’s second novel,
The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard
(2008), based on the real-life story of her grandmother, Bess McGraw, also
goes back in time.
Seamstress
tells the story of Nell Plat’s marriage at age
fi fteen to an abusive husband, her escape from him and their two baby
girls. Although twentieth-century Irish American women’s novels moved
from depicting loving mothers to exposing controlling matriarchs, before
9/11 none had featured a mother literally abandoning her children. In the
twenty-fi rst century, McGraw deconstructs and then resurrects this para-
digm. Even though she could not bond with her fi rst two children, Nell is
a loving mother to her third child, Mary, and she gradually learns to love
the others. Reprising Irish American themes, McGraw plays with the con-
cept of ethnic doubling. With husbands one and two, Jack and George, she
reincarnates Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. Among Nellie’s daughters, doubles
abound. McGraw also fuses two Irish American traits—private and public
lives. In her early collections, women were either discontented stay-at-home
moms or frustrated single working women. With
The Seamstress of Holly-
wood Boulevard
, we see a confl icted but ultimately loving mother and strong
working woman.
Stephanie Grant also steps back in time with
Map of Ireland
.
Whereas
her 1992 novel,
The Passions of Alice
, sublimated homosexual desire through
anorexia,
Map of Ireland
relies on pyromania as a metaphor for Ann Ahern’s
lesbian desires. This novel is set in South Boston in 1974 when the city
began forcefully desegregating the public schools, much to the chagrin of
the Irish Catholics living there. Historically communal and resistant to
interlopers—especially nonwhites—Irish Americans living in South Boston
and Charlestown rioted over integration.9 These political disparities pro-
and Medicine
; Susan J. Herbert,
Questions of Power: The Politics of Women’s Madness
Narratives
.
9. Tim Meagher puts this into perspective, however, by noting that thanks to
economic success, many Irish Americans had already left the neighborhood by this
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vide the demographic context for Grant’s novel. Conversely, through a plot
set in Boston centering around adoption and reconciliation between black
and white families, Ann Patchett’s
Run
(2007) suggests that the Irish have
moved beyond this era.
Run
is a mesmerizing novel starring Tip and Teddy Doyle, black broth-
ers adopted by former Boston mayor Bernard Doyle and his wife, Bernadette.
Although she dies before the action begins, this novel is very much about
matriarchal power, for her infl uence fl ows throughout; likewise, although
the boys’ birth mother has been absent throughout their lives, her decisions
impact their futures (Patchett 2007, “P.S.,” 7). Initially their adoption is
viewed as a back story, recalled as their characters are developed—one skinny
and serious, the other slumped and scattered. Then tragedy strikes. As Tip
starts to cross the street during a snowstorm, he is knocked to the ground.
“Immediately he heard the sound of another hit and then another” (39). His
savior has pushed him out of the way of an oncoming car only to be struck
herself, much to the horror of her eleven-year-old daughter, Kenya. The rest
of the novel traces the tangled aftermath.
Patchett describes the plot as “Joe Kennedy-meets-the-
Brothers Kar-
amozov
[for] it is a story about a father who is trying to raise one of his sons
to greatness” (2007, “P.S.,” 5). At the same time, it is a story about family
and communal loyalties—“the family of community, and the family of coun-
try, and the family of responsibility.” Written in the years following 9/11,
Run
calls for more of that. As Patchett sees it, Doyle is saying to his sons,
“You have a responsibility to the world. You can’t have received so much, and
be willing to only follow your own heart’s desire” (“P.S.,” 9).
Communal Loyalties
9/11 marked the end of an era for Irish Americans. Prior to that date, “popu-
lar culture equated Irishness with a re-essentialized, simplifi ed epistemology
point, thus suggesting that such insular communities were more or less anachro-
nisms. Outside of Southie, Democratic Irish American congressmen were instru-
mental in promoting the Civil Rights Act and open housing bill, which infuriated
denizens of the old community and led to their defection from the party (2005,
231–32).
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. . . as pleasingly anachronistic.” But after the tragedy, Irishness—personi-
fi ed by members of the NYPD and FDNY—became code for whiteness and
innocence, which generated “counternarratives of innocence and virtuous
heroism . . . [that] cast men as heroes or villains and largely reduced women
to the role of mourners” (Negra 2006, 365) and thus somehow reduced
Americans’ anxiety.
This feeling was not necessarily shared by some elements of the Irish
American diaspora. Although they might have later regretted their choice,
more Catholic Irish Americans voted for George W. Bush than for John
Kerry in the 2004 election, even though Kerry himself was a practicing
Catholic. As the
Irish Voice
reported, Catholics preferred Bush over Kerry
by a margin of 52 to 47 percent. This further shift toward the Republican
Party confi rmed the growing affl uence of Irish Americans; at the same time
it underscored the fact that “Irish American” was no longer a static identity,
but rather “fl uid and mobile” (Cochrane 2010, 8–10)—a fact evidenced in
the growing number and variety of Irish American women’s novels. More
troubling, particularly given the Irish American support for Bush, was the
impact of 9/11 on more recent Irish immigrants. Even though none of the
9/11 hijackers had been in the United States illegally, the Bush administra-
tion focused its attacks on immigrants, a move that negatively impacted Irish
American relations (Cochrane 2010, 85).
Thanks to the Bush administration’s “zero tolerance policy,” resulting
in the swift passage of the Patriot Act and establishment of the Department
of Homeland Security, immigration laws were so tightened after 2001 that
Irish emigrants felt not just unwelcome, but squeezed out. Groups rang-
ing from the Ancient Order of Hibernians to the Irish American Unity
Conference viewed these actions as detrimental to Irish Americans, a fear
confi rmed with the expansion of Homeland Security’s Bureau of Customs
and Border Protection Act, which suddenly allowed INS offi cials to deport
undocumented people without benefi t of a hearing by an immigration judge.
Although this law was not aimed at Irish emigrants, many were caught and
some were held at gunpoint, manacled, and imprisoned with hardened crim-
inals before being deported (Cochrane 2010, 88–90). Given the backlog
in immigration hearings, some people were incarcerated for months. And
although the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform lobbied intensely, it was
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ineffective largely because Irish Americans no longer held the political clout
wielded by their forebears (97–102).
No longer a melting pot, America’s post-9/11 enforcement of immigra-
tion restrictions meant that undocumented Irish emigrants found it practi-
cally impossible to obtain citizenship, let alone a driver’s license. As recently
as 2004, Jack Irwin, the assistant to New York governor George Pataki,
lamented: “People are up in arms and the Emerald Isle Emigration Center
is at the forefront of trying to do something about it. Hopefully it will be
squared away because you have a tonne [
sic
] of people affected by it, there
could be 100,000, it is not just the Irish, it is every ethnic group” (quoted
in Cochrane 2010, 94). Irish American groups lobbied against these restric-
tions, but they were no match for the Bush administration’s terror-driven
rules. And while the Irish government generally applauded this anti-terror-
ist stance, its younger citizens, who had been raised to value neutrality and
thus abhorred even the violence in Northern Ireland, were fi rmly antiwar
and demonstrated against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (Cochrane
2010).
Internationally, the United States’ reaction to 9/11 initially impeded
peace talks with Sinn Fein and the IR A. Prior to the attacks many Irish
Americans tended to support the IR A, but the crumbling Towers put an
end to that. This anti-terrorist/anti-Sinn Fein feeling only increased among
members of the Bush administration after Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams vis-
ited Cuba and one of his representatives, Niall Connolly, was arrested while
visiting Columbia. Irish American relations further deteriorated in 2003
after Adams denounced the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. They
worsened in 2004 following a series of “terrorist” events in Ireland: the IR A
was blamed for a £26 million robbery of the Northern Bank in Belfast and
the murder of Robert McCartney. The IR A’s threat to hunt down and kill
McCartney’s murderer (suspected to be one its own) did not help, nor did
a plan for Gerry Adams to visit the United States to meet with Senator Ted
Kennedy and Congressman Peter King, for both snubbed him (Cochrane
2010, 76). Although the perpetrators in both cases were arrested, the IR A
was blamed, Sinn Fein was considered “guilty by association,” and Washing-
ton began to repudiate its Irish allies, even refusing a visa for Sinn Fein’s Rita
O’Hare, director of its Washington headquarters.
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Yet there was a positive side to this imbroglio: thanks in part to pres-
sure from Irish Americans, Gerry Adams persuaded the IR A to halt military
activity and limit itself to politics, which resulted in voluntary disarmament
and ultimately reestablishment of the Good Friday agreement in May 2007.
Still, resentment remained. The Irish (like most of the world) deplored the
actions of the Bush administration, viewing the United States as “quasi-
fascist” (Cochrane 2010, 78).
Amidst this wave of resentment and recrimination, second- and third-
wave Irish American women remained faithful to their feminist roots. This
sense of “communal loyalty . . . a sense of commitment rooted in the con-
crete community” is distinctively Irish American: “the confl ict between
such communal loyalties and the values and circumstances of the American
environment—values of individualism and circumstances of economic abun-
dance and racial and ethnic diversity—has been the central dynamic of the
history of the Irish in America” (Meagher 2006, 610). Historically, Irish
Americans exceeded Americans of other ethnicities in “sociability, localism,
trust, and loyalty” (Dezell 2001, 75). Although this trait has been faulted for
the failure of earlier generations of Irish American
males
to move up the eco-
nomic ladder, this was never a problem for their female counterparts. It was
the women—“the mothers and aunts, the teachers, the nuns—who brought
the wild Irish into the modern world” and the middle class (Dezell 2001,
89). As the previous chapters have demonstrated, Irish American women
had the motivation and desire to get an education, fi nd a job, move up,
and get out. And while Irish American male writers may have characterized
this desire as “shallow, lightheaded, and easily bedazzled by the frivolous”
(Meagher 2006, 623), it enabled Irish American women to attain fi nancial,
political, and intellectual independence. At a time when so many Americans