The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (27 page)

he and Elizabeth had lived together; however, her lack of maturity doomed

their relationship. Recalling this, Elizabeth realizes the myth on which her

beliefs were based: “Love will come to you, love beyond everything. It will

change your life forever” (274). Almost simultaneously, she realizes that she

does not love Tupper. Knowing he will smile at this and tell her she’s sim-

ply afraid of falling in love, she says nothing. Instead, as the novel closes,

she boards a train at Penn Station for an extended business trip and “looks

around the car. In a little while, she’ll get up to get a small bottle of wine.

Maybe even meet someone on the way, invite him back to her seat. He’ll see

her manuscript bag and ask, What are you, a musician? A doctor? A traveling

saleswoman? . . . If she likes him, she knows she’ll lie” (290).

Although
A Bigamist’s Daughter
was published in 1982, its conclusion

(and its heroine) echo Mary McCarthy’s “The Man in the Brooks Brothers

Shirt,” published four decades earlier. Despite the desire to be strong and

independent, both sets of female characters are doomed by society’s mes-

sages. Just as McCarthy’s pre-feminist women are gradually transformed into

compliant wives and mothers because neither their husbands nor postwar

America would tolerate their independence, McDermott’s confl icted femi-

nist characters refl ect the Heritage Foundation’s efforts “to turn the clock

back to 1954 in this country” (Faludi 1991, 230), a time when notions of

true love prevailed.

While the Heritage Foundation promoted motherhood, it simultane-

ously targeted the Women’s Educational Equity Act (WEEA) in the belief

that it represented a “money machine for a network of openly radical femi-

nist groups” (quoted in Davis 1981, 442). Reagan obliged by gutting its

budget (Faludi 1991, 260). When GOP Congresswoman Margaret Heckler

succeeded in restoring 40 percent of these cuts, members of Phyllis Schlafl y’s

Eagle Forum were appointed to the WEEA board to ensure that its “femi-

nist agenda” was curbed. They did so largely by rejecting grant proposals

aimed to counter sex discrimination, justifying their decisions by denying

that discrimination existed (Faludi 1991, 262). After the WEEA was demol-

ished and its female staff dismissed, the Reagan administration installed men

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in many of the formerly pro-woman agencies. Gary Bauer was appointed to

head the “family policy” arm of the Education Department. He is perhaps

best known for “The Family: Preserving America’s Future,” in which he

attacked women who worked, used day care, divorced, bore illegitimate chil-

dren, or lived in poverty as a “result from personal choices.” His proposed

solutions: “bar young single mothers from public housing; revive old divorce

laws to make it harder for women to break the wedding bonds; deny contra-

ceptives to young women”; and give tax breaks to women who stay home and

have babies. Married women, of course (Faludi 1991, 264).

Mary Gordon takes on this mindset in
Men and Angels
(1985). The pro-

tagonist, Anne Foster, is a mother of two who holds a doctorate in art his-

tory. Her husband, also a PhD, is a professor at tiny Selby College. Anne is a

stay-at-home mom, but not by choice: “if the college didn’t quite know what

to do with women students and faculty, it knew even less what to do with

faculty wives” (14). When she is commissioned to write the catalogue for an

upcoming exhibition of a female artist’s works, Anne hires Laura to care for

her children. Some critics maintain that the plot explores “confl icts between

materialism and spirituality,” calls for ecumenism, and sympathetically por-

trays Laura to indirectly underscore this need (Watanabe 2010, 200–201).

But given the overbearing infl uence of the Heritage Foundation during this

decade, it could also be argued that rather than representing the evangelistic

arm of the Apostolic Church, Laura personifi es the rightwing, for she is an

ignorant, self-centered, hypocritical, born-again Christian who believes she

is “the chosen of the Lord” (8).

As the story opens, Laura is fl ying home from London after being dis-

missed from an au pair position because her religious fervor disturbed her

employers’ children. When Helene, a fellow passenger, begins sharing stories

of her own faith, “Laura stopped listening but looked as if she was listening

with love. She knew the woman was a fool. But perhaps the woman could

help her” (Gordon 1985, 8). After she tells Helene she has nowhere to go,

Helene suggests Laura accompany her to Selby: “In America the women

do not want to take care of their children,” she tells Laura. “They say they

want to fi nd themselves. I did not know that they were lost.” The woman

laughs and Laura laughs with her, “pretending that she understood” (10).

Not surprisingly, when Laura’s religious machinations fail to convert Anne

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or her children, she takes her own life—an idealized end to the New Right’s

crusaders.

Gordon’s 1989 novel,
The Other Side
, takes another swing at the pro-

motherhood faction. Although it has been called “mean-spirited” and “a blan-

ket indictment of a people” (Fanning 2001), it is not so much an indictment as

it is “a rather long-winded exploration of the sort of unhappy family that has

long been in the forefront of Irish and Irish American writing” (Wall 1999, 37).

This multigenerational novel traces the lives of elderly fi rst-generation Irish

American parents Ellen and Vincent MacNamara, their children, grandchil-

dren, and great-grandchildren—all of whom have been psychically damaged

by cruel, absent, or neglectful mothers. The title, a phrase used by immigrants

referring to Ireland, suggests that this tale of neglect stems from Ellen’s physi-

cally and psychologically absent Irish mother, who hid herself away because

she kept having miscarriages: “She was nearly always pregnant, or getting over

the loss of a child. But she was never whole with child” (Gordon 1989, 90).

Her mother’s absence contributes to Ellen’s inability to nurture her own chil-

dren, Magdalene, Theresa, and John, who perpetuate this behavior.

To frame the story, Gordon uses a familiar Irish trope: the gathering of

the clan to await the death of the matriarch, Ellen. In developing the plot

and exploring the mother’s infl uence on her children and subsequent gen-

erations, Gordon expands on Elizabeth Cullinan’s
House of Gold
, both in

number of characters and by alternating points of view. However, in playing

with the phrase “the other side,” Gordon not only allows it to suggest the

children’s points of view but she also slyly develops the characters by pick-

ing from her own family tree. Practically every character exhibits traits of

Gordon’s maternal aunts described in her memoirs,
The Shadow Man
(1996)

and
Circling My Mother
(2007). In other words, rather than indicting the

Irish, Gordon is mostly damning the Italians while perpetuating the Irish

penchant for family feuds.

In detailing the many characters peopling her life, Mary Gordon gets to

tell “the other side”—her side—of the story. She is able to revenge the slights

against her mother and herself and preserve happy memories of her bigoted

father. At the same time, Gordon extracts “revenge” by refuting every ste-

reotype perpetuated by the Heritage Foundation: in this novel, there are no

successful marriages, no smooth courtships, no happy mothers. As such, this

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novel serves as the perfect illustration of Rebecca du Plessis’s (1985) theory

that twentieth-century feminists examined and then delegitimized every sex-

gender trope invented by man.

Despite these successes, some women felt that feminism had overplayed

its hand. In 1984, Germaine Greer published
Sex and Destiny
, an unfortu-

nate tome lamenting that feminism had superseded childbearing, a wholly

unintended interpretation that led to subsequent “feminist complaints of

the 1980s—involuntary singlehood, involuntary childlessness, loneliness”

(Showalter 2009, 298). In 1985, Betty Friedan reiterated what she had fi rst

reported in
The Feminine Mystique
: young women once again felt guilty and

alone, pressured to be superwomen on the job and in the home (Greene

1993, 12). The feminist Nancy Miller summed up these feelings when she

wrote, “Choosing motherhood or refusing it has proven to be more complex

than we feminists had bravely imagined in our consciousness-raising groups

of the early seventies” (quoted in Showalter 2009, 299).

Such feelings are explored in Ellen Currie’s
Available Light
(1986). The

main character, Kitty, assumes that her lover, Jacques Rambeau, will des-

ert her, and he does not disappoint. Currie advances the plot by presenting

Kitty and Rambeau’s points of view in alternating chapters where additional

characters are introduced: Mick, Kitty’s Irish mother; Eileen, Kitty’s sister;

and Dorinda, a pregnant wild child who tries to sleep with every man she

encounters. Each character refl ects a different side of motherhood. The ste-

reotypical Irish mother, Mick constantly criticizes her daughters but loves

them fi ercely. When Kitty calls to bemoan Rambeau’s absence, Mick con-

soles her, saying, “there’s nothing to roar and cry about, no nothing, you’ll

do rightly.” Longing for comfort, Kitty asks, “I will?” to which her mother

replies, “Och aye . . . you little hooer, you wasn’t new when he got you”—

and hangs up the phone (15). Eileen so badly wants a child that she tolerates

Gordon, her philandering husband, and eventually succumbs to hysterical

pregnancy, stuffi ng her clothes to appear with child. Dorinda, the only char-

acter who
can
become pregnant, shows neither interest in motherhood nor

concern for the fetus. She drinks, takes drugs, and sleeps around while seek-

ing a buyer for her baby.

Available Light
earned rave reviews. Maureen Howard called it “an

extraordinary book, truly a fi ne work.” It is all that. But it is also a thematic

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mess. Simultaneously, it refl ects anti-feminist propaganda, which claimed

that feminists could not be happy in a relationship, by tracing Kitty’s worry

before and misery after Rambeau leaves, yet questions the pro-motherhood

stance promoted by the Reagan administration by illustrating various unfi t

mothers as well as concerned potential fathers. At the same time, Kitty is

portrayed as an independent career woman who gradually grows stronger

and happier without Rambeau. Then the plot comes full circle by providing

a decidedly post-feminist conclusion: Kitty and Rambeau reunite and live

happily ever after.

Conversely, Maureen Howard’s
Grace Abounding
(1982) explodes 1980s

propaganda about sexuality, education, and mother-daughter relationships,

while
Expensive Habits
(1986) sends forth potent political messages regard-

ing marriage, motherhood, and women’s work. In
Grace Abounding
, How-

ard’s decidedly unmerry widow, Maude Dowd, is horny. She so wants a man

that she deliberately takes dark and dangerous back roads in the hopes that

she will be stopped for speeding or her car will break down and she will be

ravaged by a stranger. The plot periodically switches from straightforward

narrative to fantasies such as seduction by a policeman, a “truck driver jack-

ing me up” (4), sweaty teenage hitchhikers, gas station attendants, and a gift

shop proprietor—who eventually becomes Maude’s lover. But despite her

plans for the future and pleas that he divorce, he abandons Maude, sneaking

out of town without even a goodbye note.

Throughout this interlude, Maude and her teenage daughter Elizabeth

essentially trade places. While Maude excitedly hides her affair, Elizabeth

remains calm and responsible, doing her homework and practicing her sing-

ing each night. However, as Maude recovers her equilibrium and discovers

her daughter’s talent, Howard shows us how Irish American women survive:

not with a man, but with education. Mother and daughter move to New

York, where Maude attends Columbia to become a counseling psychologist

while Elizabeth studies voice at Juilliard. In this environment they do not

revert to their traditional roles; rather, they are “living like roommates” (90).