The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (31 page)

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religious heritage amidst a harmful and repressive environment. Less radical

than Mary Daly, Weaver argued that the church needed to rethink its hierar-

chical structure, respect women’s contributions, and recognize their frustra-

tion. To aid in change, she suggested that the feminist movement offered a

positive model for governance through its respect for pluralism, democratic

governance, and collegiality (Weaver 1985, 39)—elements that seemed to

follow naturally from Vatican II.

Pope John Paul II did not support such changes. During the 1980s

alone, he:

• reiterated his refusal to ordain women into the priesthood,

• no longer allowed priests to receive dispensations to become laicized,

• warned against taking the changes initiated under Vatican II too far,

• ordered priests to refrain from politics,

• threatened activist and independent orders of sisters, ordering them to

conform or resign,

• attempted to expel females—directors, teachers, and students—from

seminaries,

• tried to force sisters to wear religious habits,

• refused to allow altar
girls
,

• maintained his stance against birth control,

• ordered pro-choice nuns to retract their support of abortion,

• expressed support of traditional church teachings against homosexual-

ity, and

• decried in vitro fertilization.

In other words, he attempted to counteract if not contravene the changes of

the past decade (Seidler and Meyer 1989, 163–64).

The Pope’s actions contributed to two different approaches in Catholic

women’s novels of the 1980s: “Visions of Reconciliation” and “Visions of

Individualism.” The former entails reconciling one’s life experiences with

the church’s dictates, while the latter yields a “privatized Catholicism” in

which individuals subordinate the church to their own desires (Gandolfo

1992, 144). Mary Gordon’s
The Company of Women
(1980) refl ects the fi rst

category. As usual, Gordon praises and faults the church only to come full

circle by her conclusion.

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Readers familiar with Gordon’s memoir,
Circling My Mother
(2007),

will recognize this novel as a homage to her mother, Anna. Widowed when

Mary was seven, Anna Gordon raised her daughter among a company of

women—friends she encountered each year as part of the Catholic Working

Women’s Retreat Movement. This group respected women’s spiritual lives,

brought similarly minded women together, and in essence provided a room

of their own where they could get away from their families. Several times a

year, the women traveled around the country to meet, attend Mass, listen

to sermons and talks by the priests, and visit their friends. These retreats led

to enduring friendships not only among some of the women but also with

some of the priests.

This is precisely the situation in
The Company of Women
. The brilliant

and doted-on Felicitas Maria Taylor is obviously Gordon’s persona, just as

Felicitas’s mother Charlotte resembles Gordon’s mother, Anna. The novel is

divided into three sections. The fi rst recounts young Felicitas’s relationship

with Father Cyprian and her mother’s friends during their summer retreats.

Cyprian represents the traditional church, for under his tutelage Felicitas

learns that “woman is always a sexualized, inferior being. . . . For Cyprian,

woman equals weakness, an inability to engage the true nature of the Catho-

lic mysteries; to be orthodox one must be the opposite of womanish: manly”

(Del Rosso 2005, 41).

Part 2 moves away from this company when Felicitas enters college. At

fi rst it appears that she has fallen for Cyprian’s opposite—a man who is dis-

honest, profane, undisciplined, immoral, unfaithful—her professor, Robert

Cavendish. Yet the aptly named Felicitas (“the ultimate antifemale martyr”)

has obviously internalized Cyprian’s beliefs (Del Rosso 2005, 42). When

Cavindish tells Felicitas he is “hoping to become her lover,” she replies, “It

would be the greatest honor in the world” (Gordon 1980, 114). To spend

more time with him, she moves out of her mother’s apartment and into the

one Robert shares with two other women—a situation that parallels the ser-

vile relationship her mother and her friends share with Cyprian (minus the

sex). When, inevitably, Robert tells her, “‘It’s just not working,’” Felicitas

begs, “‘Just tell me what I’m doing that you don’t like and I’ll change it’”

(197). When he says the problem is her belief in monogamy, she immediately

sleeps with a boy downstairs and gets pregnant.

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Part 3 recounts the aftermath: Seven years later, after considering and

rejecting abortion,8 Felicitas has had her baby and decided to marry Joe, a

man she does not love, because he will take care of her and her daughter.

This action, as well as the novel’s denouement, counter the belief that Felici-

tas “emerges as a more sophisticated and independent thinker, particularly

with respect to the subordination of women in the church” (Labrie 1997,

257). Although Gordon has been castigated by critics for her depiction of

the Roman Catholic Church, in this novel, at least, she emerges “ostenta-

tiously Catholic.”

Writers who maintain visions of reconciliation try to retain their indi-

vidualism without rejecting the church. Under this category, the 1980s saw

three strong novels and two very weak ones. Among the latter, Kathleen

Ford’s
Jeffrey County
(1986) and Diana O’Hehir’s last literary effort,
The

Bride Who Ran Away
(1988), basically toe the party line: marriage and

motherhood are idealized goals to be obtained at almost any cost. More

impressive and considerably more sophisticated are Caryl Rivers’s
Virgins

(1984), Susan Minot’s
Monkeys
(1986), and Elizabeth Cullinan’s
A Change

of Scene
(1982). Like Rivers’s memoir,
Aphrodite at Mid-Century
(1973),

Virgins
details the infl uence of the Catholic Church, parochial education,

and the incipient feminist movement on the mindset of teens during the

Eisenhower administration. This confl uence leads to refl ections on the

necessity of remaining a virgin as well as the confl ict between marriage and

a career. When the main character, Peggy, complains, “‘sometimes I wish

we weren’t Catholic. It’s so
hard
,’” her boyfriend Sean replies, “‘Well, we

are. We just have to be better than other people because we have informed

consciences’” (Rivers 1984, 86). Conversely, Rivers’s subsequent novel,

Girls Forever Brave and True
(1984), which follows up on the characters

fourteen years later, exemplifi es visions of individualism. The younger char-

acters try to conform yet rebel against what they view as “the absurdities

8. As she makes clear in “Abortion: How Do We Really Choose?” Gordon is

pro-choice; nevertheless, in this essay and “Abortion: How Do We Think About It?”

it is equally obvious that Gordon is cognizant of the personal, logical, and theologi-

cal aspects involved in making that choice.

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occasioned by attempting to deal with modernity through authoritarian-

ism” (Gandolfo 1992, 144).

Elizabeth Cullinan’s
A Change of Scene
(1982) conveys a similar theme.

Ann Clark, Cullinan’s persona, has moved to Ireland to escape her messy

personal life—an affair with a married man, explored in Cullinan’s earlier

collections,
Yellow Roses
and
In the Time of Adam
.
As Ann says in chapter 1, “unlike most of my friends I wasn’t about to move into marriage. I was

in love, but the man was already married, unsatisfactorily but fi rmly, or so it

seemed to me, for I’m a Catholic, though this man made me question what

I’d previously taken for granted about religion and everything else—leav-

ing me emotionally stranded in the process” (1982, 3). This bildungsroman

traces Ann’s exploration of Ireland and herself as she makes new friendships,

enjoys new relationships, learns what she wants out of life and where she

belongs. Eventually she meets Michael Flynn. Because her friends warn her

off Michael, she balances her interest by going out with other men, viewing

her willingness as a favor, but (like Mary McCarthy’s Meg Sergant) hoping

she meets none of her friends when she’s out with them (Cullinan 1992,

199). What gives her pause is a priest’s advice. When he asks if Michael will

marry her, she responds quickly, “‘He’ll marry an Irish girl.’ It was the fi rst

time I’d said that to myself or to anyone else.”

“‘Then drop him,’” the priest replies. ‘Don’t waste your time. . . . And

make it defi nite’” (Cullinan 1992, 275). And so she does.

Cullinan is one of the few Irish American female novelists expressing

a relatively positive outlook during this decade. Perhaps because of their

Catholic backgrounds, but more likely because of the political climate, Irish

American women writers of the 1980s rarely allowed a utopian vision to fl our-

ish. In fact, a number of novels seem to suggest a third category—visions of

independence, or results of a life without spiritual guidance—in which char-

acters often fall victim to the double standard, with the sexually adventur-

ous abandoned if not punished. In this regard, the protagonists once again

parallel their 1880s precursors, for the New Woman of that age was also “the

nervous woman,” a trait that can be found in many of the 1980s fi ctional

mothers. But whereas the former exhibited these traits via “anorexia, neur-

asthenia, and hysteria” (Showalter 1990, 40), the latter suffer from depres-

sion or alienation. This should come as no surprise, for “throughout much

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of Irish American literature, reality seems to be not an option but simply

the hand dealt. Given those limits, despair is avoided either through escap-

ism—in particular into alcoholism—through faith, or by imbuing reality . . .

with imaginative richness so that phenomena originally perceived as limits

or boundaries take on greater signifi cance than merely the limitations of real

life” (Jacobson 2008, 124).

In Diana O’Hehir’s
I Wish This War Were Over
(1984), a negligent

mother escapes into alcoholism, leaving behind her seventeen- and nine-

teen-year-old daughters Clara and Helen. This novel stands out, not only

for its heroine’s evolution from “familial bondage to self-defi nition” (Fan-

ning 2001, 333), but also for its inclusion of a female alcoholic. For the

Irish Catholic woman, alcoholism is considered a sin because it causes her

to be unreliable if not unable to fulfi ll her obligations of motherhood.

Consequently, pain and guilt are compounded (Dezell 2001, 133). Such

is the case in this novel, which ends in the ultimate escape—suicide. Tess

Gallagher escapes by placing her characters in a setting nontraditional for

Irish Americans—the Pacifi c Northwest. In
The Lover of Horses
(1986) she

explores the power of memory and imagination, the loss of language, the

effects of mistranslation, the need for faith, and their effects on identity

(Ryan 2008). Ann Beattie’s novels
Falling in Place
(1980) and
Love Always

(1985) interrogate the angst of this generation. But Jean McGarry’s
Airs of

Providence
(1985) and Tish O’Dowd Ezekial’s
Floaters
(1984) best exem-

plify this malaise.

Floaters
describes life as a Catholic girl growing up in midcentury Amer-

ica. Like so many Irish American protagonists of the 1980s, the narrator is

an “abandoned” child in that her mother—referred to throughout as “the

fat woman”—is distant. Her aunts are of no help, for they are mired in their

roles as housebound baby makers, producing as many as twelve children,

mourning their premature deaths, and often descending into mute alcohol-

ism as a result. Fanning dismissed the novel as “slanted toward the nega-

tive” (2001, 330). But women’s lives in the 1950s were not always positive.

Moreover, Ezekiel redeems herself once the narrator fi nally wends her way

to adulthood. As she matures she realizes that “Something had made her

[mother] sad and savage and had defeated her so that she wanted sometimes,

like Sampson, to bring all the world down around her” (1984, 168).