The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (26 page)

resentative Jeanne Kirkpatrick. In the Senate, George Mitchell was majority

leader; in the House, Thomas Foley was the Speaker. After Reagan’s re-

election, the House of Representatives, led by Democratic opponent Tip

O’Neill, supported a resolution in favor of the Anglo-Irish agreement, which

helped broker peace between the two countries. Thanks to Reagan’s friend-

ship with Margaret Thatcher and promise to help sustain the International

Fund for Ireland, England supported the agreement (Almeida 2006, 560–

61). Finally, as one of Reagan’s last acts, he appointed Anthony Kennedy to

the Supreme Court in 1988.

“Only in retrospect would it become apparent that Ronald Reagan was

a shell, a stereotypical actor who went from one role to the next, who served

as a façade for an inner core of advisers who in most respects actually ran

the United States,” writes Randall Bennett Woods (2005, 454–56). Ron-

ald Reagan, famous for his recollections of an ideal childhood, had a father

who was an often-unemployed, peripatetic, debt-ridden alcoholic. Beloved of

rightwing conservatives, Reagan voted Democratic in the 1930s and 1940s.

Fond of recounting tales of World War II heroism observed at the front, he

never left Hollywood. President of the Screen Actors Guild, he betrayed

writers, directors, and even fellow actors during the Red Scare. Remembered

for his speech supporting Barry Goldwater, he plagiarized much of it from

Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Churchill (Woods 2005, 445–56).

The man who ostentatiously prayed in public, supported prayer in

schools, claimed to be “born again,” and was beloved by Irish Catholics was

a Protestant who rarely attended church. Although he was twice divorced

and estranged from his children, he promoted family values—even as he

and his cronies tried to cut funding for child care, refused to support the

Equal Rights Amendment, blocked the rights of women to sue employers for

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sexual discrimination, and outlawed Medicare and Medicaid-funded abor-

tions for poor women, promoting as an alternative “chastity clinics” (Woods

2005, 478–79). In his autobiography, Tip O’Neill attempts to explain Rea-

gan’s mindset: “Maybe it all boils down to the fact that one of us lost track

of his roots while the other guy didn’t. . . . As a man of wealth, [Reagan]

really didn’t understand the past thirty years. God gave him a handsome face

and a beautiful voice, but he wasn’t that generous to everyone. With Ronald

Reagan in the White House, somebody had to look out for those who were

not so fortunate” (1987, 330–31).

From the beginning Reagan’s goal, articulated by the Heritage Foun-

dation, was “to turn the clock back to 1954 in this country.” Indeed, the

New Right’s argument—“that women’s equality is responsible for women’s

unhappiness” (Faludi 1991, 230)—echoed the postwar propaganda blitz to

get women out of the workplace and back into the home, where they suppos-

edly belonged. The gains of the 1970s had threatened the traditional white

male power structure: anti-Communists, economic conservatives, anti-abor-

tion activists, and evangelicals (Davis 1991, 434). Believing they were losing

power, members of the New Right felt the need to resurrect their status.

They did so by attacking the women’s movement. Feminists were confl ated

with the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, which was demonized as

potentially destroying the traditional family and depriving the paterfamilias

of his rightful role. More outrageously, feminists were castigated as “moral

perverts” and “enemies of every decent society,” who would “turn the coun-

try over to women.” Still, such attacks underscored the growth and infl uence

of the women’s movement in the last decade (Faludi 1991, 231–32).

To counter these gains, within a year of Reagan’s election the Heritage

Foundation issued its
Mandate for Leadership
. This document essentially

warned that feminists were taking over and proposed countermeasures to

lessen their gains. The fi rst of these was the oxymoronic Family Protection

Act. Its title was intentionally misleading, for its goal was to overturn every-

thing the women’s movement had attained in the previous decade: “elimi-

nate federal laws supporting equal education; forbid coed sports; require

marriage and motherhood to be taught as the proper career for girls; deny

federal funding to any school using textbooks portraying women in non-

traditional roles; repeal all federal laws protecting battered wives from their

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husbands; and ban federally funded legal aid for any woman seeking abor-

tion, counseling or a divorce” (Faludi 1991, 234–36).

Although these actions were appalling, they were not new; rather, they

typifi ed the fi n de siècle mindset, which generally emerges approximately

twenty years before the century’s end. In Britain and France, for example,

the 1880s had been notable for fears regarding “sexual anarchy” that gave

rise to sexism, homophobia, and sexual scandals. These social upheavals led

to moral outrage manifested in social purity campaigns and demands for

anti-woman legislation coupled with pro-family initiatives (Showalter 1990,

3). Such historical precedent suggests that the 1980s were ripe for exploita-

tion. More important, just as the 1880s saw reaction to such heavy-handed

tactics through art and literature that questioned and ridiculed these fears,

so did the 1980s. The majority of novels by Irish American women exposed

the hypocrisy, if not the naïveté, of every fear, every prejudice, and every

mandate regarding the sanctity of marriage and purity of maternity.1

Whereas the sainted mother had been a stock character in early Irish

American sentimental novels, throughout the 1980s she became an object

of scorn as she repeatedly failed or abandoned her daughter. Irish American

women’s novels of this decade feature crazy, addicted, abusive, distant, teen-

age, and working mothers—all of them bad. Such characterizations did not

denigrate women per se; rather, they questioned the government’s sexist

attitudes by pointing out its fallacies. The only exception was the lesbian

mother, for her goodness helped remind the Reagan administration that

homosexuals were people too. In every regard, Irish American women were

again ahead of their time. Whereas “most women novelists were, during the

1980s, engaged in the ‘privatization and depoliticization of their concerns,

the sentimentalization of the family, the resignation to things as they are’”

(Greene 1993, 200), Irish American women took a stand: they rejected

those myths.

1. One exception is the trade paperback novelist Nora Roberts, née Robertson.

Her fi rst novel,
Irish Thoroughbred
, was published in 1981; by 1984, she had pub-

lished twenty-three more. Although she claimed her works were feminist because her

female characters have to work at winning “this incredible guy,” such a statement

actually underscores her misunderstanding of feminism (quoted in Krug 2012, n.p.).

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She Is Not Like Other Mothers

Susanna Moore’s autobiographical novel,
My Old Sweetheart
(1982), is one of

many to address the reifi cation of mothers and motherhood.2 In this plot, the

eldest daughter is fi guratively abandoned because of her mother’s madness.

She and her siblings are then literally abandoned when their philandering

father “controls” the madness by sending his wife away. This theme has many

predecessors—Charlotte Bronte’s
Jane Eyre
, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The

Yellow Wallpaper,” Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
, and Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sar-

gasso Sea
, to name just a few. In retelling her mother’s story, Moore reminds

us that this tradition continued into the late twentieth century.

Early on, Lily knows her mother is different: “She is not the kind who

bandages cuts, Lily thought. She is not like other mothers, who make gro-

cery lists and wear undergarments. Other mothers do not forget that you

go back to school in September. . . . Although she preferred her mother,

sometimes she was frightened” (5). These fears lead Lily to guard her mother

and tend to her younger siblings. Yet after learning that her mother has “left

them” (has been committed to a mental institution), Lily’s response is typi-

cal: she wonders “what she might have done to drive her mother away” (73).

Moore’s subsequent novel,
The Whiteness of Bones
(1989), also questions

the reifi cation of mothers. Another version of
My Old Sweetheart
, Moore’s

main characters, Mamie and Claire, have a remote mother and a dead father

and thus are left to fend for themselves, with tragic consequences. This theme

recurs in Bobbie Ann Mason’s
In Country
(1985), when the protagonist Sam

(Samantha) is abandoned by her mother after she remarries and moves to the

city. Always one to upset conventional wisdom, Erin McGraw’s fi rst book of

short stories,
Bodies at Sea
(1989), turns this theme upside down. “Accepted

Wisdom” and “Finding Sally” reverse the traditional Irish theme of a child’s

self-immolation in the service of her abandoned or widowed parent: in these

stories, it is the lonely, needy parents who live their lives around their chil-

dren, to no avail.

2. See Wadler’s interview, “Dark Work, Written in a Sunny Spot,” in
The New

York Times
, June 21, 2007, D6, for the many parallels between Moore’s life and that

of her personae’s.

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Alice McDermott’s fi rst novel,
A Bigamist’s Daughter
(1982), tells yet

another story of an abandoned daughter. Growing up, Elizabeth’s father

was seldom at home, always coming and going without warning, suppos-

edly for a government job. When Elizabeth meets Tupper Daniels, who is

writing a novel about a bigamist, she begins to suspect her father. Eliza-

beth is an editor at Vista, a vanity press, and Tupper is one of her authors.

Because Elizabeth is young and attractive and has confi ded her suspicions,

they begin dating. Although the attraction is mutual, Elizabeth wants to

fall in love, whereas Tupper hopes to discover the truth about her father and

use it as his conclusion.

A Bigamist’s Daughter
differs from McDermott’s subsequent works.

First, it is funny. Although the plot centers around Elizabeth and Tupper’s

relationship, it is interwoven with humorous stories about the hapless, hope-

ful, naïve authors. Second, love, sex, and even feminist concerns pervade.

Pondering her fi rst date with Tupper, Elizabeth realizes it has been almost “a

year since she’s had anyone in her bed . . . because waking up with the feel-

ing, ‘Oh shit, who’s this?’ makes for wonderful jokes but lousy mornings and

lousy days” (15). Yet Elizabeth makes the fi rst move, inviting Tupper to her

apartment, where they make love. As Tupper begins, “She closes her eyes and

begins the slow, downward movement, the saddest, the loneliest”—she com-

pares him to Bill, her former lover (67). As the current relationship develops,

she compares it to other couples, especially her friend Joanne’s. Married only

a month, Joanne already feels the magic is gone. She also makes compari-

sons with her parents, for Tupper wants material for his novel. Yet Elizabeth

retains control. Every time his questioning becomes too intrusive, she stands

up, moves away, tells him to leave.

Both actions and words suggest something of a feminist characteriza-

tion. In fact, when Elizabeth interviews for her position at Vista, she tells

her boss “she wanted a career, not a job. Thinking of Bill, she said she

thought it was important for every woman to have a career, something hers

alone, something that would remain hers, that she could remain dedicated

to, despite the ups and downs, gains and losses, of her personal life” (90).

But what Elizabeth truly desires is “real love, she wanted true attention”

(96). In other words, she is not so much a feminist as an idealist; like her

friend Joanne, her views of love and marriage are based on Barbie and

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Ken—the sentimental, unrealistic message promoted by government and

the media.

Bill’s story does not emerge until the novel’s end. After falling in love,