The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (44 page)

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,

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 206

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 206

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

T H E N E W M I L L E N N I U M | 2 0 7

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

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 207

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 207

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

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

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).

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 208

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 208

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

T H E N E W M I L L E N N I U M | 2 0 9

. . . 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

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 209

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 209

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

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

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.

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 210

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 210

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:33 PM

T H E N E W M I L L E N N I U M | 2 1 1

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