The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (11 page)

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

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 45

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 45

7/3/2013 4:10:28 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:28 PM

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).

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 46

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 46

7/3/2013 4:10:28 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:28 PM

1 9 0 0 – 1 9 6 0 : A H E A D O F T H E I R T I M E | 4 7

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

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 47

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 47

7/3/2013 4:10:28 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:28 PM

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
.

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 48

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 48

7/3/2013 4:10:28 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:28 PM

1 9 0 0 – 1 9 6 0 : A H E A D O F T H E I R T I M E | 4 9

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).

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 49

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 49

7/3/2013 4:10:28 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:28 PM