The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (43 page)

tons. Because this is an alien social milieu and her parents commute daily to

the city, Theresa seems displaced in this rural, albeit beautiful, setting, which

stands in stark contrast to the prevailing theme of death. Unlike McDer-

mott’s
Charming Billy
, here death is presented not as a cause for celebration

of the afterlife but as stark and inevitable. After one of the neighbors’ cats,

Curly, is killed, Theresa recalls, “It was not Curly anymore, that lifeless thing

Debbie had cradled, not in my recollection of it. It was the worst thing. It

was what I was up against” (McDermott 2002, 169). Nor does Daisy’s death

lead to refl ections on eternal life; rather, refl ecting on its imminence, Theresa

has “a fl ash of black anger that suddenly made me want to kick those damn

cats off the bed and banish every parable, every song, every story ever told

by me, about children who never returned” (179). Nature has supplanted

religion; love and morality have been displaced by dispassionate curiosity, if

not cynicism.

In this McDermott was an outlier, for a surprising number of Irish

American writers returned their characters to the church after 9/11. In fact,

her 2006 novel,
After This
, represents a cautious step in that direction. Like

many Irish American post-9/11 novels,
After This
goes back in time—in

this case, to post–World War II—to trace the growth of a family as it moves

through the rest of the century and its changing mores. This setting allows

McDermott to explore issues of sexuality, moving from a young Catholic cou-

ple’s marriage through sex, childbirth, and child-rearing, and then through

the daughter’s unwed pregnancy and consideration of abortion, gently illus-

trating the illogic of the church’s stance in the process. McDermott exam-

ines the cultural expectations surrounding motherhood and the restrictions

of patriarchy, reprising early themes of family, parenthood, and Catholicism

while demonstrating the many changes that have occurred in the church and

society. Ultimately she concludes that while many things have changed, the

basics remain the same: family is important; faith conquers grief.

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This should come as no surprise, as such movement has historic paral-

lels, particularly among the Irish. As Emmet Larkin explains, prior to the

famine, “The growing awareness of a sense of sin already apparent in the

1840s was certainly deepened as God’s wrath was made manifest in a great

natural disaster that destroyed and scattered his people. Psychologically and

socially, therefore, the Irish people were ready for a great evangelical revival”

(1972, 639). This revival occurred after the famine when attendance at

Mass increased from 33 percent in 1840 to 90 percent by 1850. Part of this

increase was attributed to the Vatican’s insistence on improving the morals

and the examples set by the priests (just as it did following the pedophilia

coverups in the late twentieth- and early twenty-fi rst centuries). This “devo-

tional revolution . . . provided the Irish with a substitute symbolic language

and offered them a new cultural heritage with which they could identify and

be identifi ed and identify with one another” (649).

Pre-9/11, the American people were already suffering from a sense of

guilt and trauma. Post-9/11, the cultural historian Diane Negra notes that

Irishness—as well as a return to the church—was “mobilized to stave off

an anxious, traumatized perception of American identity” (2006, 365). In

sum, the devotional revolution was just as true of twenty-fi rst-century Irish

Americans as it was for nineteenth-century Irish. Following 9/11, church

attendance increased by 25 percent, while 64 percent of Americans said reli-

gion was “very important” (Zelizer 2002, n.p.). Among American Catho-

lics, weekly attendance at Mass rose from 33 percent in September 2000,

to 36 percent by January 2001, to a high of 39 percent by February 2002,

after which it declined to the previous average (CAR A 2005). This return is

refl ected among Irish American women writers who prior to 9/11 were more

likely to criticize than to embrace the church.

Erin McGraw’s
The Baby Tree
(2000) takes on the church’s stance regard-

ing abortion and female clergy. The heroine, Kate Gussey, is a Methodist min-

ister married to her second husband and living at the buckle of the Bible belt,

southern Indiana. Obviously, Kate’s character is designed to make a political

statement. If she were Catholic, she could not be a priest, divorced,
or
remar-

ried. Throughout, Kate’s inner turmoil is foregrounded, thus positioning the

book within the genres of the feminist novel and Irish American private lives.

At the same time, Kate’s external actions as pastor and protector of her fl ock

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

cross the boundaries into the traditionally Irish American male arena of public

life. Kate carries on the role of the priest who perceives “religion as an active

force, literal as well as symbolic, in their lives” (Fanning 2001, 326). Indeed,

in her “insistence on life’s religious import and [her] avowed moral pur-

poses,” Pastor Kate continues the pattern established in the works of Andrew

Greeley, Father John Roddan, John Boyce, William McDermott, and John

Talbot Smith (316). Yet none of these men would be likely to defend a young

woman’s right to choose—and that is the crux of
The Baby Tree
.

But whereas
The Baby Tree
questioned the church’s stance on female

ministry and abortion, McGraw’s post-9/11 collection,
The Good Life

(2004), fi nds solace in the institution. Perceiving her mother as the cause of

her problems, Tracy (a recurring character) religiously reads her daily affi r-

mations and writes best-selling psychobabble prescribing self-love exempli-

fi ed in the mantra, “I have nothing to apologize for” (McGraw 2004, 107).

However, when she is called home to help care for her mother, Tracy fi nds the

affi rmations childish against her mother’s barrage of guilt trips. Ultimately,

Tracy fi nds peace after attending Mass, where she weeps uncontrollably and

forgives her mother. This response—recounted much more humorously than

this rendering—sounds suspiciously like a return to the church, or at least an

awareness of the need for faith in a higher power.

Lisa Carey’s
In the Country of the Young
(2000), whose plot is reminis-

cent of Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
, deals more with myth than religion as the

ghost of a young Irish girl teaches a contemporary man to love. Conversely,

Carey’s
Every Visible Thing
(2006) suggests the negative effects of leaving

the church as well as the positive effects of return. In the aftermath of their

eldest child’s disappearance, the Furey family is thrown into disarray. Too

depressed to function, Mrs. Furey takes to her bed while Mr. Furey, a rising

star at Boston College because of his research on angels, rejects those val-

ues. Throughout their parents’ turmoil Lena and Owen, the two remaining

children, fend for themselves. Lacking parental guidance as they move into

adolescence, they search for identity in the hope that it will provide them

answers. Ultimately it does, but not until the family rekindles its faith.

This resolution offers an interesting allegory for twenty-fi rst-century

Catholicism. As in Joyce Carol Oates’s
We Were the Mulvaneys
,
when a

woman fails to fulfi ll her sacred obligation of motherhood, the entire family

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suffers. Yet even as they fall away from their faith, the church remains with

them and guides them back to the fold. The novel’s conclusion (as well as

its title) suggests the role of faith in this reconciliation:
Every visible thing in

this world is put in the charge of an angel
(Carey 2006, 305).

Confi rming Elie’s prediction, many Irish American women approached

these themes laterally “using journalism, memoir, essay, narrative history,

and historical fi ction to make our story fresh and strange” (Elie 2008, 15).

The fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century saw more than the average from

Irish Americans. In 2005, Mary Gordon published
Pearl
, a Christian alle-

gory set in Ireland. The pure and perfect martyr, Pearl is the daughter of

Maria and (ostensibly) Joseph. Gordon’s second memoir,
Circling My Mother

(2007), takes readers back to the glory days of the Catholic Church when

priests were treated like kings. In 2009 she goes all the way with her nonfi c-

tion work,
Reading Jesus: A Writer’s Encounter with the Gospel
,
in which she

ponders the contradictions and ambiguities raised in the books of Matthew,

Mark, Luke, and John. The Pulitzer prizewinner Madeleine Blais’s memoir,

Uphill Walkers
(2002), covers the same period but in a loving, humorous

tone as she recalls the task faced by her widowed mother in raising and

supporting her fi ve girls, as well as the role of the church in keeping their

heads above water. So does Maureen Waters’s
Crossing Highbridge
(2007),

in which she describes growing up as a girl in Brooklyn’s Highbridge area in

the 1930s and her gradual disillusionment with the church.

Like their Irish counterparts, Irish American women used memoir not

only to establish their identity but also to place it within the context of

their changing culture (Grubgeld 2004, xi). Indeed, the burgeoning of

Irish American women’s autobiographies following 9/11 suggests a setting

parallel to that described by Shane Leslie in his 1916 memoirs: “the suicide

of a civilisation called Christian and the travail of a new era to which no

gods have been as yet rash enough to give their name” (quoted in Grub-

geld 2004, xx). In
I Myself Have Seen It
(2003), Susanna Moore once again

returns to Eden—her home state of Hawaii—to explore its vanishing past

and avoid dealing with the sullied present. In her second memoir,
Light

Years: A Girlhood in Hawaii
(2009), Moore focuses on her personal story

(which bears great resemblance to her fi rst three novels), interweaving this

account with the books that helped make her a writer.

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Other memoirs center around a key fi gure in the authors’ lives. Tess Gal-

lagher’s
Soul Barnacles
(2000) is a hybrid memoir/biography that traces the

relationship with her husband Raymond Carver through letters, interviews,

journal entries, and excerpts from his work. Kathleen Finneran’s
The Tender

Land
(2000) revisits the relationship with her institutionalized brother to

better understand her own life. Jennifer Finney Boylan takes on two roles

as she describes her transformation from male to female in
She’s Not There

(2003). Ann Patchett recounts her friendship with Lucy Grealy in
Truth and

Beauty
(2004), while Kelly Corrigan recalls her father in
The Middle Place

(2008). Jeannette Walls demonstrates how she managed to escape the infl u-

ence of her family in
The Glass Castle
(2006) and then goes further back,

performing “an act of literary ventriloquism” (Jiles 2009) by retelling (and

sometimes recasting) her family’s genesis through the voice of her grand-

mother in
Half-Broke Horses
(2009).

Memoirists look at the past to better understand the present. Novelists,

on the other hand, might set their works in the past to escape the present.

The poet Alice Fulton’s fi rst novel,
The Nightingales of Troy
(2008), tells the

stories of the Garrahan women in Troy, New York, as they move through

the twentieth century, to demonstrate how women’s lives and responsibili-

ties remain unchanged. Likewise, Lisa Carey’s
Love in the Asylum
(2004)

begins in the present at a northeastern asylum where patients Alba and Oscar

meet and fall in love. Carey furthers our understanding of Alba by add-

ing a third story, hidden in the asylum’s library, where she discovers letters

from a woman to her son after her husband committed her. These letters

suggest women’s lot in the early twentieth century as well as the parallels

with the twenty-fi rst. One letter notes, “We are made to walk in lines here.

Lines of naked women shuffl ing toward the showers, lines marching over

the fenced-in grounds for daily exercise. A circus procession of exhausted