The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (45 page)

blindly followed the anti-feminist propaganda spewed by their leaders, Irish

American women rejected such essentialist nonsense.

Ann Beattie’s
The Doctor’s House
(2002) may be her most Irish Ameri-

can novel, for it explores the icy domineering matriarch, the problems caused

by alcoholism, the impact of the past on the present, and “lives affected by

extremes of dissipation [and] profl igacy . . . the . . . inability to express love

and compassion in private; [and] a penchant stylistically for . . . satiric modes”

(Fanning 2001, x). Beattie tells the story of a dysfunctional family from three

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points of view: a son, a daughter, and their alcoholic mother. Through dis-

parate stories covering the same events, it becomes clear that their behavior

stems partly from mistreatment by the doctor (the children’s egotistical, pro-

miscuous father), but even more so because of neglect by their self-centered,

irresponsible mother. Jacqueline Carey’s
The Crossley Baby
(2003) also ques-

tions the post-9/11 reifi cation of marriage and motherhood. When Sunny

and Jean’s unmarried sister Bridget dies, leaving behind eighteen-month-old

Jade, it is assumed that homemaker Sunny will take the child. But Jean, a

highly motivated workaholic, surprises Sunny and everyone else when she

decides to keep the baby. This decision and its aftermath provide the novel’s

narrative focus, for both women believe the other is wrong. As such, the

novel inscribes characteristics of traditional Irish and Irish American feuds

(Carey 2003, 295).

Susanna Moore’s
The Big Girls
(2008) utilizes journalistic techniques

by drawing on current statistics as well as interviews with female prison

inmates. Their stories bring to light the nation’s sexist, racist, prison-sen-

tencing guidelines. The majority of women in prison are there because they

were raped, abused, assaulted and fought back, or possessed drugs. Accord-

ing to the Bureau of Justice, although “female inmates largely resemble male

inmates in terms of race, ethnic background, and age . . . women are sub-

stantially more likely than men to be serving time for a drug offense,” while

approximately 50 percent “reported prior physical or sexual abuse” (Snell

1994, n.p.). Such statistics support Elie’s prediction about the use of jour-

nalistic information in the twenty-fi rst century while underscoring ongoing

sexual discrimination, as well as the need for third-wave feminism. Thus

this novel once again demonstrates Irish American women writers’ facility at

rendering feminist literary history.

Elaine Ford, Jean McGarry, and Joyce Carol Oates also remind us that

feminism is still necessary. The short stories in Ford’s
The American Wife

(2007) focus on the drawbacks of traditional sex roles, including the “femi-

nine mystique” still experienced by housebound mothers. As early as 2002,

Jean McGarry’s
Dream Date
was exploring disappointing male/female rela-

tionships, while
A Bad and Stupid Girl
(2006) emphasizes the importance of

female friendships. Joyce Carol Oates reprises these themes throughout her

seventeen novels between 2000 and 2010. Many of these—such as
Faithless

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(2001),
Beasts
and
I’ll Take You There
(2002),
The Tattooed Girl
and
Rape:
A Love Story
(2003)—focus on a daughter’s ability to survive the loss of her

mother. With
Mother. Missing
(2005) and
After the Wreck I Picked Myself Up,

Spread My Wings, and Flew Away
(2006), Oates explores mother-daughter

relationships, whereas
Black Girl, White Girl
(2006) and
The Gravedigger’s

Daughter
(2007) examine feminist themes of race, class, and identity. In

My Sister, My Love
(2008) she draws on the Irish penchant for satire as she

deconstructs the American love affair with celebrity. With a nod to Alice

McDermott, the plot and setting of
A Fair Maiden
(2009) share a resem-

blance to
Child of My Heart
—although with the usual dollops of Oatesian

suspense. Regardless of theme, Oates can never be charged with a lack of

creativity.

Nor can Maureen Howard.
Big as Life
(2001) is the second of a quartet

of novels expounding on art and nature, preceded by
A Lover’s Almanac
(set

in winter), followed by
The Silver Screen
(a summer novel), and ending with

The Rags of Time
(in the fall). Set in springtime,
Big as Life
features three

sections—April, May, and June—each of which offers stories of hope and

renewal set within a distinctly Irish American context. In “April,” Marie

Claude goes back and forth in time as she considers the possibilities of a

new relationship; in “May,” the Irish immigrant Nell Boyle draws on the

past even as she learns to move forward by observing her Irish American

family; in “June,” Howard revisits Lou and Artie from
A Lover’s Almanac
,

goes further back to recast the marriage of John James Audubon, and then

returns to the present to illustrate the infl uence of nature on her own works.

What makes these works Irish American, as well as particularly apt, given

the post-9/11 anti-feminist propaganda, is Howard’s ongoing theme that

we cannot afford to mythologize, sentimentalize, or live in the past (Durso

2008, 73). Rather, we need to “force observation, destroy nostalgia” (How-

ard 2001, 11).

Granted,
The Silver Screen
moves back in time, to the late 1920s when

“talkies”—movies with sound—were coming into being. In this, as in many

of her previous novels (particularly
Grace Abounding
), Howard is concerned

with the development of a woman’s voice, and with it, agency and inde-

pendence. However, in this series Howard moves away from her usual per-

sona. Rather than featuring a version of herself at this stage of her life, her

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heroines are young artists in their thirties. She returns to this persona (an

older version of Maggie Flood in
Expensive Habits
) in
The Rags of Time

(2009). Although some critics found the novel’s many threads diffi cult to

follow, they are easy to track if you’ve read her previous novels, for in this one

she attempts to tie together all the loose ends. Moreover, Howard’s criticisms

of George W. Bush (referred to as “the Cheerleader”) and her outrage over

his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remind us of her communal loyalty as well

as Irish American women’s roles as banshees.

Search for the word “war” in
The Rags of Time
and you will get ninety

hits; search for “Iraq” and another dozen turn up. Read for pleasure and you

fi nd lines such as the following: “Today I am outraged by the use of cam-

oufl age in the desert. Disguises nothing, you’ve noticed? With sophisticated

surveillance devices, there’s no need for blotches simulating mud and sand.

Camoufl age of a sort is worn by the Cheerleader, his business suit, navy or

gray. You’ve seen him bounce down the steps of Air Force One, sprightly,

airy. Crossing the tarmac, he waves us off, the palm of his hand denying

access as we watch the evening news. Thumbs-up, he gives us the fi nger; his

tight-lipped smile, mum’s the word” (Howard 2009, 6). Whether Howard is

writing about
War and Peace
, the Civil War, Afghanistan or Iraq, her mes-

sage is clear—young men and women are being maimed and dying for a lost

cause—and it is the Cheerleader’s fault.

The fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century was dominated by lying,

greed, abuse, and betrayal. Given the misinformation about Weapons of

Mass Destruction and yellow cake uranium, the torture of prisoners at Abu

Ghraib, the betrayal of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the mishandling of disas-

ter aid after Hurricane Katrina, rendition and the recession, Bernie Madoff

and the Wall Street collapse, anger seems an obvious reaction. While this

stance does not characterize all twenty-fi rst-century Irish American wom-

en’s novels, it is emblematic of the most extreme of third-wave feminists

such as those by Colleen Curran,10 Martha O’Connor, and Gillian Flynn.

These writers refl ect the views of second-wave radical feminists inasmuch

10. The Irish American Colleen Curran is not to be confused with her Irish

Canadian doppelganger, Colleen Curran, a playwright.

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as their characters rebel against being members of “the most fundamentally

oppressed class within a misogynistic Western patriarchal culture; the view

of gender as a system that operates to ensure continued male domination;

. . . and the understanding of the diversity of male sexual violence against

women as an institution within the power structure of patriarchy”—views

originally espoused by Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly,

and Audre Lorde (Madsen 2000, 153), and updated by the gadfl y Daly in

Welfare
(2010), which, like Evelyn Murphy’s
Getting Even
(2006), cites the

earnings gap, governmental family policies, and the ongoing division of

labor as factors in women’s poverty.

The novels of Curran and her peers expose a culture that “keep[s]

women in a subordinate position where they are dominated by men” (Mad-

sen 2000, 153). Equally important, these novels answer Dworkin’s com-

plaint that “the stories of female suffering, of the brutal violence that women

experience, do not get told” (quoted in Madsen 2000, 162). In Dworkin’s

eyes, radical feminism provided an “accurate analysis” of women’s condi-

tions, an outlet for women to vent their frustrations against these con-

straints, and therefore a means of survival “not based on self-loathing, fear,

and humiliation, but instead on self-determination, dignity, and authentic

destiny” (Madsen 2000, 35). Third-wave Irish American novels get some of

this right. Curran and O’Connor seem to echo Lorde’s argument that “The

Erotic [Is] Power”: “To experience the erotic is to ‘do that which is female

and self-affi rming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society’”

(quoted in Madsen 2000, 168). This seems to work for the female characters

in third-wave novels—until their partners reject them in yet another display

of patriarchal power.

Third-wave feminists are generally defi ned as “women who were reared

in the wake of the women’s liberation movement of the seventies” (Baum-

gardner and Richards 2000, 15). These women did not have to fi ght their

mothers’ battles; they were raised to believe that “girls can do anything boys

can,” and thus possess a confi dence often foreign to their mothers. Third-

wave issues include child abuse, self-mutilation, eating disorders, and body

image, as well as depression, rape, physical abuse, sexual agency, birth con-

trol, and abortion rights—major themes in twenty-fi rst-century Irish Ameri-

can women’s novels (Baumgardner and Richards 2000, 17–21).

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Gillian Flynn’s writing provides the antidote for the post-9/11 infan-

tilization of women. As
Entertainment Weekly
writes, “Flynn coolly demol-

ished the notion that little girls are made of sugar and spice in
Sharp Objects
,

her sensuous and chilling fi rst thriller” (Cruz 2006, n.p.). Published in

2006,
Sharp Objects
is the third of three closely related third-wave nov-

els. It was preceded by Colleen Curran’s
Whores on the Hill
and Martha

O’Connor’s
The Bitch Posse
.11 These works share a number of disturbing

parallels, which suggest they may be more representative of this generation

than older readers are aware. Each novel features a trio of outcast teenage

girls: Flynn’s antagonists are Kylie, Kellsey, and Kellsey, all thirteen, led by

Amma, also thirteen; Curran’s girls—Astrid, Juli, and Thisbe—are fi fteen;

O’Connor’s—Rennie, Cherry, and Amy—are high school seniors. All are

alienated from their parents and their peers. They drink and take drugs,

they are sexually active, and they are cutters. Although all profess “girl

power,” they are obviously depressed and—contrary to assertions that the

slut is actually a rebel (Wolf 1990)—suffering from low self-esteem due to