Irishness in North American Women's Writing: Transatlantic Affinities 1137537892, 9781137537898

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Irishness in North American Women’s Writing Transatlantic Affinities Ellen McWilliams

Irishness in North American Women’s Writing

Ellen McWilliams

Irishness in North American Women’s Writing Transatlantic Affinities

Ellen McWilliams Department of English University of Exeter Exeter, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-53789-8 ISBN 978-1-137-53788-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Bernard Canavan, Night Thoughts This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

For John and James McWilliams With all my love

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Joachim Beug, Angela Bourke, Linda Connolly, Kate Costello-Sullivan, Patricia Coughlan, Alex Davis, Karen Edwards, Rowena Fowler, Regenia Gagnier, Jo Gill, Lee Jenkins, Tim Kendall, Lucy McDiarmid, Piaras Mac Éinrí, Anne Mulhall, Moynagh Sullivan, Reingard Nischik, Maureen O’Connor, Bernard O’Donoghue, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Tina O’Toole, Eve Patten, Niamh Pattwell, Vivian Valvano Lynch, Bronwen Walter, and Timothy Webb—the academics who built the ladder for so many of us and who remain amongst my most inspiring role models. I would like to thank the many people who supported this research at different stages and the friends, colleagues, and generous editors who offered encouragement and insight at key moments: Rebecca Barr, Sally Barr-Ebest, Claire Bracken, Susan Cahill, Claire Connolly, Eric Falci, Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, Marjorie Howes, Heather Ingman, Anne Sofia Karhio, Margaret Kelleher, Vera Kreilkamp, Gerardine Meaney, Tony Murray, Joanne O’Brien, Deirdre O’Byrne, Muireann O’Cinneide, Anna Pilz, Graham Price, and Paige Reynolds. I am especially grateful to Andrew Blades, Beci Carver, Gabriella Giannachi, Daisy Hay, Adam Hanna, Helen Hanson, Jo Harris, Eddie Jones, Kirsty Martin, Will May, Jo Parker, Henry Power, Debra Ramsey, Andrew Rudd, Laura Salisbury, Vicky Sparey, Lisa Stead, Corinna Wagner, Phil Wickham, and Amanda Williams for conversations about work in progress—I’m not sure I would have completed this book without their

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support. I owe a particular debt to Lucy McDiarmid for her literary tours of Manhattan and for being a source of gentle encouragement always. I am very lucky to work at the University of Exeter and alongside such kind and inspiring colleagues. I would like to thank all of my colleagues in the Department of English and Film at Exeter for restoring my faith in the idea of a University. Special thanks go to Gwen Morris and Jules Warner for their patience and kindness. I am grateful to Abe Foley, Jo Freer, Kate Montague, Peter Riley, Mark Steven, Rob Turner, Paul Williams, and all my fellow shipmates in the North American and Atlanticist Research Group at Exeter, for their friendship, collegiality, and good humour, and for making Research Away Days so very enjoyable. I am especially thankful to Sinéad Moynihan, whose own work has made such a vital contribution to the fields of Irish Diaspora Studies and Atlantic Studies, for being such a great colleague and friend, particularly during those times when I struggled to keep faith in the project. Vassar College and the New York Public Library provided access to special collections and I would like to thank the resident archivists, Dean Rogers and Tal Nadan, for their expertise and guidance. I am also very grateful to Jay Barksdale for providing a place to work in the Shoichi Noma Study at the New York Public Library. In recent years I have been the beneficiary of a Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship to NUI, Galway and would like to thank Martha Shaughnessy, Kate Thornhill, Daniel Carey, and Louis de Paor, for the warm Galway welcome. I spent time at the Clinton Institute at UCD and wish to thank Catherine Carey and Liam Kennedy for the opportunity to develop the research when it was still in the early stages. Gavin Christopher Doyle and Kate Smyth kindly invited me to share work as part of the Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Seminar Series at Trinity College Dublin and I gained a great deal from the vibrant postgraduate and postdoctoral community there. I am also very grateful for a Visiting Fellowship to the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University of Berlin. Foundational work for this book was completed at Fordham University, New York, with the support of a Fulbright Scholar Award and I am grateful for the generous assistance of the Fulbright Commission and for the warm welcome I received during my semester at Fordham. I learned a great deal about the Irish in New York from the Irish-American readers who attended the ‘Exile and the Irish Writer’ reading group at the Aisling Irish Community Centre in Woodlawn and it was a privilege to be in

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their company. I am also very grateful to Pat Mosley-Bowie and Richard Mosley in Ottawa for generously sharing their thoughts on the Irish in Canada and for being so kind on the many occasions I ambushed them with too many questions—it has been a pleasure to get to know them (albeit from a distance) and I have gained so much from their stories of family migration to the United States and Canada. Chapter 3 started out as two articles: ‘Avenging “Bridget”: Irish Domestic Servants and Middle-Class America in the Short Stories of Maeve Brennan’ (Irish Studies Review, 2013) and ‘“No Place is Home, It is as It should be”: Exile in the Writing of Maeve Brennan’ (Eire-Ireland, 2014) and I am grateful to the editors for permission to reproduce a revised version of that material here. I would also like to thank the editors of Women’s Studies for permission to reproduce material in Chapter 2 that was first published as an article, ‘Looking for Irish America in the Memoirs of Mary McCarthy’, in 2020. Bernard Canavan’s ‘Night Thoughts’ appears on the cover of this book and I am most grateful to Bernard for being so typically generous in granting me permission to use his painting in this way. Bernard Canavan’s achievements as an artist provide an unparalleled visual account of Irish emigrant history and it means a great deal to be able to feature his work here. Special thanks are due to the (at the time anonymous) readers of the final manuscript, Anne Fogarty and Caitriona Moloney, for providing such precise and rigorous reports and to Rebecca Hinsley and the editorial and production teams at Palgrave Macmillan for being so helpful at every stage. As always, I am thankful to, and full of appreciation for, the extended McWilliams-McCarthy family in King’s Lynn, Crick, Cambridge, London, Enniskeane and Tullow. The most important acknowledgements can be found on the dedication page of the book, but deserve to be repeated here. I would like to thank John McWilliams, whose understanding, patience, and love made this book and so many other things possible—there is no better first reader. My final thank you is to James McWilliams for bringing us immeasurable joy and changing our world to technicolour.

Contents

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Transatlantic Affinities: Irishness in North American Women’s Writing Ireland and Transatlantic Literary Studies: Points of Departure Transatlantic Irish Women: Literary and Historical Encounters Works Cited Unsettling Irish America: Self-Authorship and the Writing of Mary McCarthy Looking for Irish America in Mary McCarthy’s Life Writing Self-Authorship and Strategies of Evasion in the Memoirs of Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy and the Making of a New York Intellectual Works Cited Irish-American Immigrant Histories and Readings of Exile in the Writing of Maeve Brennan Irish Domestic Servants and Middle-Class America in Maeve Brennan’s Writing Avenging ‘Bridget’: Servant Insurrections in Maeve Brennan’s Short Stories Maeve Brennan’s ‘Long-Winded Lady’ in Exile

1 5 14 27

31 35 41 44 51

55 56 61 67 xi

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CONTENTS

Mapping the Metropolis and the Last Days of New York City Works Cited

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‘A Genetic Trait’: Alice McDermott’s Irish America Irish-American Futures in Alice McDermott’s Fiction Alice McDermott and the Lives of Irish-American Women ‘Second Edition’: Alice McDermott’s Transatlantic Forebears Works Cited

83 84 89 96 106

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The Lonely Voice: Alice Munro and Ireland Irish and Canadian Literary Revivals ‘The Same People Living in the Same Place’: Portraits of the Artist in James Joyce and Alice Munro Alice Munro’s Irish Compatriots Works Cited

109 110

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Irish-Canadian Connections: Jane Urquhart’s Historical Fictions ‘Where Is Here?’—Reading Canada and Ireland in the Fiction of Jane Urquhart The Trauma of Irish History in Jane Urquhart’s Away Adapting the National Tale: Jane Urquhart’s The Night Stages Works Cited Transatlantic Encounters in the Writing of Emma Donoghue Relocations: Emma Donoghue’s Literary Nomadism From ‘Hibernian Metropolis’ to Canadian ‘Bush Garden’: Unravelling the Nation in Emma Donoghue’s Landing Conclusion: The Woman Writer at Home and Astray Works Cited

Index

116 121 131

135 139 147 152 158

161 163 168 176 179 181

CHAPTER 1

Transatlantic Affinities: Irishness in North American Women’s Writing

In James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Stephen Dedalus declares during his late-night wanderings with Leopold Bloom that ‘Ireland must be important because it belongs to me’ (1993, p. 599). He places the power to fashion the story of Ireland in the hands of the Irish writer and intellectual and makes this precocious announcement in an episode in which he and Bloom debate the importance of a sense of national belonging—the scene ends when Stephen calls time on the conversation, in saying: ‘We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject’ (1993, p. 599). It is one of many moments in Joyce’s work when Dedalus expresses weariness at the limits of the national imaginary and turns his attention to the possibilities of transcending the same. If Irish writers after Joyce continue to encounter the challenge of taking possession of an idea of Ireland, what of those writers with a more distant view of this history, the writers of the Irish Diaspora? This book is especially interested in this question with regard to the relationship between Ireland and North America and those transatlantic exchanges imbricated in the privileges and burdens of tradition that are central to Joyce’s meditations on the predicaments of the Irish writer. For Alice Dermott, the dilemma of being outside of the terms of this debate, of being implicitly framed as ‘second edition’ (2003, p. 9), as one of her characters describes it in her 1998 novel Charming Billy, serves as a reflection of her position as a writer with Irish literary origins and inheritances—a position all too familiar to Irish emigrant and diasporic writers. In the case of the woman writer, this position carries © The Author(s) 2021 E. McWilliams, Irishness in North American Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1_1

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a double jeopardy when it comes to the powerful exclusionary processes that have historically elided the work of Irish women writers at home and abroad. The risk of being left ‘outside history’ (1990), as the poet Eavan Boland conceives it, has been an especially hazardous one for the woman writer charting a path between a powerful literary past and the possibilities of invention. Heather Ingman and Clíona Ó Gallchoir offer a full account of this complex history in the introduction to their recent History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (2018) and conclude: One of the chief insights of Anglophone feminist criticism since the 1970s has been the ways in which the construction of literary canons tend almost inevitably to marginalize and exclude women’s writing, usually on the grounds of inferior aesthetic quality. Although similar structures can be observed in the Irish case, the desire to align literary expression with the imagined nation has been a further, persistent obstacle to the recognition of women’s literary and cultural production in Ireland. (2018, p. 3)

This book offers a series of case studies of women writers in the United States and Canada who navigate this complex terrain, but do so from outside of the boundaries of the ‘imagined nation’, to borrow Ingman and Ó Gallchoir’s phrase. The discussions in the chapters that follow fall broadly within the critical paradigms of transatlantic literary studies insofar as they are most concerned with mapping the different routes that these writers take in imagining the transatlantic history of migration, acculturation, and belonging central to the making of the Irish Diaspora. The transatlantic affinities of the title encompass moments of resistance as well as recognition and affiliation and are primarily concerned with how these writers come to terms with different kinds of historical and literary inheritances. To borrow Stephen Dedalus’s formula, in terms of its relationship with Irish literary studies, the focus of this study involves if not changing, then reframing, the country and the subject in its exploration of the connections between the writers under discussion and a mutative idea of Ireland as homeland and the renegotiation of ideas of Irishness on new terms. It investigates the transatlantic crossings and connections that often involve a process of writing back, of reclamation and recovery, as well as reanimating or repurposing Irish literary and cultural legacies on new territory. In addition to rethinking the limits of the Irish literary canon, in tracing these imaginary journeys between Ireland and the United States and Canada, this study is also interested in revolutions

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in American and Canadian literary studies and the productive possibilities of transatlantic literary studies in terms of ‘the transnational turn’ called for by Shelley Fisher-Fishkin in her 2004 manifesto, ‘Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies’. Each of the writers to be given detailed attention in this book— Mary McCarthy, Maeve Brennan, Alice McDermott, Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Emma Donoghue—has a home within the corpus of North American fiction. Each has a distinctive and separate relationship with the imagined communities of the United States and Canada, as wellbeing connected by birth or ancestry to Ireland. Each, too, negotiates with the losses and gains of being—albeit in markedly different ways— ‘second-edition’, set apart from the apparent claims to authority and authenticity that too often marked the commitments and achievements of an Irish literary tradition. If, by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor’s definition in their germinal reader Transatlantic Literary Studies (2007), the transatlantic perspective foregrounds and reveals how ‘ideas of crossing and connection have helped to rethink the ways that national identity has been formulated’ (2007, p. 4) then the writers under discussion here call for full consideration of the place of crossing and connection in the emergence of Irish-American and Irish-Canadian literary culture and raise the question of how the same poses a challenge to the idea of a self-contained Irish literary canon. The study is loosely chronological and begins with Mary McCarthy’s recollections of early twentieth-century Irish America in her memoirs and the politics of resistance that characterize McCarthy’s relationship with Irishness; McCarthy emerges as a refusenik figure who resists being coopted by any grand narrative of Irish or American literature and whose work serves to dispute the prospect of a cohesive narrative of Irish America. Maeve Brennan’s movement between Dublin and New York, in both her life and the literary landscapes of her work, engages with the material histories of the Irish woman migrant, as well as reinventing the image of the artist in exile for the woman writer at mid-century. In doing so, Brennan disrupts the more familiar narrative of the Irish writer in exile while remaining sensitive to the lived experience of previous and less privileged generations of Irish women immigrants. As one of the most celebrated contemporary Irish-American novelists, Alice McDermott’s oeuvre charts the story of Irish America across the twentieth century and is deeply concerned with the intergenerational relationships of the family and the changing fortunes of Irish America.

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The study of women writers and Irish-Canadian cultural encounters is, in contrast to the large body of critical work devoted to Irish America, relatively underdeveloped, but three of the writers chosen for discussion here all offer points of entry for thinking about the different coordinates of Irish-Canadian literary connections. Alice Munro’s early work narrates the previously untold story of women’s lives in post-war Canada and does so during a period of literary renaissance in the early 1970s that saluted the ambitions of early twentieth-century Irish literature in subtle and nuanced ways. If Munro invents a new version of coming of age in Canadian literature in English in her early fiction, she does so by engaging with Irish forebears and contemporaries. Most particularly, Munro’s early collections place the Canadian short story in conversation with its Irish relative as a means of securing a foothold for the Canadian writer during a chapter of revival in Canadian literary culture. In the mode of historical novelist, Jane Urquhart charts the transitions and connections that tie Canada to Ireland and her work often takes the form of a literary letter from across the Atlantic that uncovers and rewrites all-important chapters in Ireland’s history from a new critical perspective. Emma Donoghue’s writing brings this process of charting transatlantic correspondences closer to the contemporary moment, by responding to the accelerated modernity of Celtic Tiger Ireland and, at the same time, reanimating familiar Canadian literary landscapes. Donoghue’s work represents a new kind of hybridity in writing about Ireland and Canada; it demonstrates a special interest in the possibilities of nomadism and is more concerned with journeys than any emotional attachment to origins or destinations. This is a pattern that can be traced back to Donoghue’s early work—in her short story, ‘Going Back’, a character describes how her lesbian identity made her feel ‘more of an exile for twenty years in Ireland than I ever have in the twelve I’ve been out of it’ (1993, p. 160)—a riposte to what historians and critics, most notably Seamus Deane (1986) and Roy Foster (1995) have characterized as the cultural fetishization of emigration as exile. In the light of the potential pitfalls of plotting a totalizing genealogy of the Irish-American and Irish-Canadian experience, or conforming to a prescriptive definition of transatlantic Irish literary studies, the chapters that follow are interested in how the stories and received myths of the Irish in North America are modelled and recast in the hands of these women writers, and how they negotiate with Irish historical and literary inheritances in the advancement of an Irish-American and Irish-Canadian

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literary narrative. While the remainder of this chapter will offer a survey of some of the key debates about Ireland as an Atlantic-facing culture, the chapters that follow demonstrate the need for an open-ended approach to reading the writers under discussion as transatlantic figures. The fact that these case studies include writers who were born in Ireland, but lived most of their lives in North America, or have a connection to Ireland by descent, or, as in the case of Emma Donoghue, hold dual nationality, means that any excessively prescriptive framework for analysing their work would be potentially limiting. The following sections set the scene in considering the key critical drivers of transatlantic literary criticism by surveying how the Irish have been positioned in relation to the history of Atlantic exchange and thinking about the place of Irish women and the Irish woman writer in this history.

Ireland and Transatlantic Literary Studies: Points of Departure The critical commitments central to the study of Atlantic-facing literary cultures are revealed in the adventurous table of contents of Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor’s Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (2007); the volume draws on key texts from postcolonialism, comparative literature, translation studies, travel writing, and studies of national identity and cosmopolitanism, a range of urtexts that is indicative of the broad church that comprises transatlantic literary studies. Foundational work by postcolonial theorists has a particular resonance, such as, for example, Edward Said’s investment in the idea that ‘nations themselves are narrations’ (1993, p. xiii) and Benedict Anderson’s model of the nation as ‘cultural artefact’ (1991, p. 4). The study of the ‘imagined community’ of Ireland, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, has most frequently been tunnelled through an understandable preoccupation with literary engagements with Anglo-Irish conflict and decolonization, political violence in Northern Ireland, and the transformation of post-Independence Ireland from the conservative, monoculture of the early decades of the twentieth century to the secular culture that emerged during the Celtic Tiger years and beyond. The rise of Diaspora Studies has posed a challenge to the idea of the nation as a self-contained object of study in the last thirty years—the launch of the journal Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies in 1991 heralded new possibilities for thinking about and theorizing the

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cultures of diasporic communities. The decade that followed saw the emergence of a new interest in transatlantic literary history, surveyed by Laura Stevens in a 2004 state of the field article for American Literary History, ‘Transatlanticism Now’. Since then literary scholars have tested new possibilities for challenging the limits of the national narrative in relation to both the history and lived experiences of global diasporic communities and in the exploration of a transatlantic literary history of circulation, transmission and exchange in the context of African, American, Canadian, British, Irish, Hispanic, and Lusophone culture and literature. At the same time, in thinking about moving beyond the national narrative, Colleen Glenney Boggs issues an important caution against establishing a ‘false dichotomy between nationalism and transnationalism’ (2007, p. 3) and insists that ‘the nation and transatlantic are deeply implicated in one another’ (2007, p. 4). In addressing this complexity, Macpherson and Kaufman note in New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies that ‘Transatlantic Studies suggests an evolving (though increasingly theorized) space. It shares its position with other, similar (though not equivalent) terms, such as circum-Atlanticism or, more widely, transnationalism, internationalism, globalization. These (contested) terms furnish the basis on which Transatlantic Studies defines itself – both with and against’ (2002, p. xii). Within this broader history, the emergence of new approaches to Irish literature—travelling under a number of the previously listed and contested umbrella terms—is a relatively recent development. Irish literary studies has begun to warm to its own version of the ‘transnational turn’ in, for example, Amanda Tucker and Moira Casey’ s volume Where Motley is Worn: Transnational Irish Literatures (2014) and Enda Delaney and Ciaran O’Neill’s 2016 special issue of Eire-Ireland, ‘Beyond the Nation: Transnational Ireland’. The most comprehensive intervention regarding Ireland and transatlantic literary studies to appear in recent years is to be found in the introduction to Alison Garden and Muireann Crowley’s 2015 special issue of Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations dedicated to ‘The Irish Atlantic and Transatlantic Literary Studies’. They take as one of their points of departure Fionnghuala Sweeney’s argument that in spite of the germinal influence of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), transatlantic literary studies has remained largely preoccupied with Anglo-American encounters. Sweeney writes:

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Despite the potential of the field to complicate the idea of the west/ern or move the debate on postcolonialism forward through recognition of the complexities of an Atlantic frame that includes Latin America, Africa, and a range of European postcolonial hinterlands, what has in fact occurred, largely as a result of the neglect of arguments regarding the nature and function of the state, or the state as empire, is a reconsolidation of an Anglo-American discursive matrix, with its attendant political and economic mores. (2006, pp. 118–119)

Crowley and Garden add an important gloss to this reading in noting that the case of Ireland has been largely overlooked in transatlantic literary studies and Irish literary studies has gravitated towards what Enda Delaney describes as an ‘island story’ in ‘Our Island Story? Towards a Transnational History of Late Modern Ireland’ (2011). They address some of the controversies and ambivalence surrounding Ireland’s postcoloniality before pausing to examine the growing critical interest in the connections between the Black Atlantic and the Irish Atlantic explored in volumes such as Maria McGarrity’s Washed by the Gulf Stream: The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature (2008), Peter D. O’Neill and David Lloyd’s The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (2009), Lauren Onkey’s Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identities (2009), and Kathleen M. Gough’s Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic (2014). This is also the focus of Sinéad Moynihan’s ‘Other People’s Diasporas’: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture (2013), which explores how ‘(re)imagining Irish diasporic experience in the United States in various ways – particularly as it relates to Irish interactions with African Americans – became absolutely central to representations of multicultural Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years’ (2013, p. 3). Crowley and Garden acknowledge the contribution of the work of historians of the Great Famine of the 1840s as being of special significance to advances in the history of the Irish Atlantic and pause to weigh up the meaning and limitations of discourses of ‘exile’ as opposed to ‘emigration’ in the study of Irish migration, before charting the broader shift in the field away from ‘Transatlantic Studies’ towards a new more expansive and inclusive ‘Atlantic Studies’. They are not dogmatic in advocating any one definitive terminology, but rather offer a valuable survey and explication of the current state of play of scholarship on Ireland and the Atlantic imaginary. The essays in the issue

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range across these possibilities and offer a model for what the ‘crossing and connection’ emphasized by Manning and Taylor might look like for the field of transatlantic Irish literary studies. In the following chapters, I will revisit a number of the determining preoccupations foregrounded by Crowley and Garden in the following ways: by attending to the differently inflected scepticism found in the work of writers such as Mary McCarthy and Maeve Brennan towards a totalizing narrative of Irish exile; by studying the self-reflexivity central to Alice McDermott’s invention of Irish America in her fiction and Alice Munro’s envisioning of Canada in her early work through literary intertexts that loop back to important Irish literary ancestors and near contemporaries; by considering the importance of Irish Famine Studies and recent work in Irish Memory Studies to understanding Jane Urquhart’s novels about Ireland and Irish migration; and by exploring an overriding determination in Emma Donoghue’s work to put a distance between the Irish writer and the idea of Irish literature as an ‘island story’, thereby challenging the cultural complacency upon which this paradigm rests. This work pulls at the threads of a model of Irish literary studies determined largely by domestic affairs with occasional attention to celebrated relocations on the part of the Irish writer who journeys onto the Atlantic imaginary—as in acclaimed novels such Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002), Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009), and Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (2013). The writers examined in this volume—some of whom have yet to receive the critical attention they deserve—demonstrate a sustained interest in how ideas of Irishness are produced, circulated, and maintained via transatlantic encounters and exchanges, as well as an acute consciousness of how the Irishness of the Diaspora is imagined and written on home territory. Writing across the century, these writers often proceed with a necessary suspicion of an essentialist model of Irishness when it comes to tracing lines of connection back and forth across the Atlantic and all pose a direct challenge to the seductions of exceptionalism, whether in the context of American, Canadian, or Irish literary history. In the preface to Transatlantic Literary Studies, Manning and Taylor configure Transatlantic Studies as a partial antidote to a self-contained, nation-based model of American Studies and open with a reminder of how American Studies after the Second World War sought to ‘stabilise and propagate “American values” in a world which had proved catastrophically volatile’ (2007, p. 1). Donald Pease offers a helpful taxonomy

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of different articulations of exceptionalism in The New American Exceptionalism: As a classificatory scheme, American exceptionalism has been said to refer to clusters of absent (feudal hierarchies, class conflicts, socialist labor party, trade unionism, and divisive ideological passions) and present (a predominant middle class, tolerance for diversity, upward mobility, hospitality towards immigrants, a shared constitutional faith, and liberal individualism) elements that putatively set America apart from other national cultures. While descriptions of these particulars may have differed, the more or less agreed upon archive concerned with what made America exceptional would include the following phrases: America is a moral exception (the ‘City on the Hill’); America is a nation with a ‘Manifest Destiny’; America is the ‘Nation of Nations’; America is an ‘Invincible Nation’. (2009, p. 8)

While exceptionalist modes of imagining the United States have received especially detailed attention and have been interrogated with particular zeal, Canada and Ireland have their own archives of exceptionalism and I am particularly interested in investigating how the writers chosen for study unsettle and disrupt mythologies of nationhood in their mediation of different kinds of Irish and North American literary encounters and exchange. For example, while figures such as Mary McCarthy and Maeve Brennan belong to different mileux, they share the common ground of the outsider in relation to Irish and American literary culture—in McCarthy’s case the intellectual outside of the American mainstream and in Brennan’s case, to borrow from Bronwen Walter’s characterization of the Irish woman migrant, the ‘outsider inside’ (2001) the literary circles of mid-century New York. Alice McDermott, often celebrated as a chronicler of Irish-American life, proceeds with alertness to the limitations of having her work framed by such a powerful history and a number of her novels are interested in experimenting with literary affiliations in ways that push beyond the restrictions of that narrative. American exceptionalism offers up a particularly inviting body of material for critique, but Canadian and Irish culture and, on occasion, its attendant scholarship have not been without their exceptionalist strains. At key moments, Canadian and Irish writing has also invested in beguiling, totalizing tropes that promise to capture an essential vision as in, for example, the Canadian literary renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s and the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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In Canada, the Massey Report of 1951 was a major agent of change in the establishment of new cultural bodies and agencies to support Canadian arts and culture and the decades that followed saw groundbreaking developments in Canadian literature. Margaret Atwood, a key player in the early 1970s, both in her role as editor at the House of Anansi Press which sought to promote the work of Canadian authors, and as author of the critical manifesto Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), offered extended reflections in her critical writing on coming of age in what she characterized as the cultural doldrums of Canada in the 1950s. At first glance, the manifesto for a new model for reading Canadian literature that emerges from studies such as Margaret Atwood’s Survival in the 1970s seems to pitch itself as a counter to American exceptionalism, in particular to ideas of individualism and the possibilities of an ever-expanding Western frontier: ‘Our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back, from the awful experience – the North, the snow-storm, the sinking ship – that killed everyone else. The survivor has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival; he has little after his ordeal that he did not have before, except gratitude for having escaped with his life’ (2004, p. 42). Like Douglas Jones’s Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (1970) and Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden (1971), Atwood attempts to invent a new critical apparatus that focuses in part on dominant wilderness motifs in Canadian literature. Tracing a history of Anglo-Canadian literature that stretches from the work of nineteenth-century writers such as Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Trail—both of whom have more than a walk-on part in the later chapters of this book—all the way to the work of her contemporaries, Atwood sets Canadian survivalism against American triumphalism and places the inhospitable Canadian North next to the limitless possibilities of the American West. Of course, in doing so, the critical model she deploys risks re-inscribing the very exceptionalist thinking it sets out to critique. Atwood’s later work contains its own reply to the problems of exceptionalism in the Canadian literary project of the early 1970s— in, for example, the way she unsettles some of her early critical convictions about writing the Canadian wilderness in Wilderness Tips (1991) and Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1996), and also, in more abstract ways, in her writing about global environmental disaster. Eva Mackey in The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada offers

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an analysis of versions of Canadian exceptionalism and argues that it supports ‘a (Western) belief system within which continuous moral and physical “improvement” – progress – is seen as necessary and natural. The subject of this improvement is an “entire governable population”, which implies that diverse peoples must be made “governable” (1999, p. 17, italics in original). Mackey is especially critical of the anglocentricism at the heart of such exceptionalism and argues that the critical commitments central to the Canadian literary renaissance of the 1970s rested unquestioningly upon ‘a settler point of view (lost in the wilderness) which erases Aboriginal people … white settlers take up a subject position more appropriate to Native people, in order to construct Canadians as victims of colonialism and U.S. imperialism, and to create Canadian identity’ (1999, p. 49). Cynthia Sugars offers a useful summary of how the dominant narrative of Canadian identity developed across the second half of the twentieth century: The postcolonial turn in the 1980s and 1990s, evolving from the climate of the 1960s and 1970s liberatory politics and counter-culture, contributed to the growing emergence of what would become the more profound attention to acts of memorialization and recuperation that we see in the 1990s. With the introduction of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988, there was increased attention to experiences outside the national mainstream but still clearly rooted within a national Canadian context. (2014, p. 8, italics in original).

Three of the writers to be examined here share their own disruptive relationship with the grand narratives of Anglo-Canadian literature. At the core of Alice Munro’s writing about rural Ontario in her 1971 short story cycle Lives of Girls and Women is a domestic world comprising ‘deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum’ (1982, p. 249), that turns inwards and away from any allegory of the nation and this comes about, in part, by an invocation of James Joyce’s world of the ordinary and the everyday and the primacy of the interior life, as well a discreet expression of affiliation with what Frank O’Connor calls the ‘submerged population’ (1963, pp. 17–18) so central to the work of the Irish short story writer. Furthermore, in forging the uncreated conscience of southern Ontario, Munro’s early collections find sympathy with the work of near contemporaries such as Frank O’Connor and Edna O’Brien. Jane Urquhart sets in play a different complication of national narratives in writing about

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some of the more traumatic chapters of Irish history. In writing about the Great Famine, most strikingly, she replies to a history of Anglo-Canadian women’s writing in the nineteenth century and brings Irish and Canadian history into contact in ways that require reading across national and literary boundaries. Emma Donoghue takes this process a step further by destabilizing both Irish and Canadian literary histories and situating the primary action of her novel between the Canadian wilderness and the Hibernian metropolis and by embracing narrative fragmentation and dissolution in a way that puts a distance between her work and any easy claims of origin. During Ireland’s own cultural renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century, the work of the Irish Literary Revival sought out new ways of writing about Ireland as an antidote to that image of Ireland excoriated in a manifesto published by the Irish National Theatre in 1897 as ‘the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment’ (1991, p. 378). Such buffoonery was the mainstay of troubling nineteenth-century caricatures of the Irish as well as producing and sustaining the figure of the stage Irishman in Victorian theatres. In conjuring up in its place an Ireland of ‘ancient idealism’ (1991, p. 378), figures such as ‘The Imaginary Irish Peasant’ as characterized by Edward Hirsch (1991) had a particular gravitational pull, as did a new preoccupation with the West of Ireland as a culturally sacred place, and a celebration of Irish folklore that sought to reconnect Irish writing in English with native tradition. For Diane Negra, the Revival serves as a key source not just for Irish exceptionalism, but also for the commodification of Irishness. In the introduction to The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture, she assesses the resurgence of global interest in Irishness since the mid-1990s and identifies a curious contradiction at the heart of it: In the realm of commodified Irishness there is now a price point for every taste and budget. While associations of Irishness with antimaterialism and whimsy have existed at least since the publication of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore, these associations are now ironically hypercommercialized. Virtually every form of popular culture has in one way or another, at one time or another, presented Irishness as a moral antidote to contemporary ills ranging from globalization to postmodern alienation, from crises over the meaning and practice of family values to environmental destruction. While fantasies of Ireland posit a culture unsullied by consumerism and modernity, Irishness is nevertheless a buy-in category

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and it comes in a staggering variety of consumable forms available across a broad spectrum of outlets. (2006, pp. 3–4)

To borrow Donald Pease’s formulation, artefacts in the Irish archive of Irish exceptionalism from this period might include polemics such as Douglas Hyde’s 1892 ‘The Necessity for De-anglicising Ireland’, with its vaunting of the Irish as ‘one of the most original, artistic, literary, and charming peoples of Europe’ (2015, p. 46) and the rhetoric of the Proclamation of Irish Independence of Easter 1916 and its invocation of the ‘august destiny’ of the Irish. The reply from Irish writers in the period, however, provided the fiercest response to the limitations of such archetypes. James Joyce’s ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ (1901), to name just one example, takes writers such as Hyde and Yeats to task for their failure to embrace the radical possibilities of a new Irish theatre and to be ‘the champion of progress’ (2008, p. 50). Joyce’s own work serves to undo any cloying or unthinking sentimental attachment to nationhood. At the same time, as Declan Kiberd and P.J. Mathews argue in the Handbook of the Irish Revival, to dismiss the Revival as a naïve experiment, ‘a repository of many backward tendencies’, is a misreading as Joyce’s work is deeply imbricated in the culture of the Revival (2015, p. 27). The immediate afterlife of the Revival found new expression in work such as Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934), but writers of midcentury such as Patrick Kavanagh and novelist and satirist Flann O’Brien were fiercely resistant to the utopian strains of the Revival. The same resistance is visible in the work of contemporary writers such as John McGahern and Edna O’Brien whose fiction tells the other side of the story in its visceral account of coming of age in post-independence Ireland and in later generations from Patrick McCabe to London-Irish dramatist Martin McDonagh, whose writing is particularly self-conscious and audacious in how it sets about dismantling Revivalist myths. The writers examined in this book, too, proceed, albeit from a distance, with a self-referential awareness of the burden of this most productive and successful period of literary mythmaking in Ireland. For example, Maeve Brennan, born in 1917, whose formative years in Dublin were lived in the wake of the Revival delivers a number of knowing replies to its powerful legacy. In one of her unpublished short stories set in the fictional New York suburb of Herbert’s Retreat, the lady of the house patronizes her Irish servant with stories of her own family connections

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to Ireland and contemplates building a Round Tower at the bottom of her garden in commemoration of her distant family connection to Ireland (McWilliams 2018). Such grandiose appeals to a romantic Ireland are set in sharp contrast to the impoverished reality of the Irish servants whose labour supports the life of ease from which such fantasies of origin spring. The other writers to be studied also proceed with an awareness of the hazards of exclusion and the risks of being relegated as ‘second edition’ that attend the Irish writer abroad. What they share in common is their contribution to contesting the idea that the Irish story is an ‘island story’ by tracing and charting histories of migration and diasporic afterlives and wrestling with powerful historical and literary influences that generate new ways of thinking about key chapters in Irish history and central paradigms of Irish culture. Their writing demonstrates a deep concern with the history of the Irish migrant as a figure of anxiety in the United States and Canada and histories of stereotyping and caricature. The work of these writers serves as an object of study for how transatlantic literary studies pulls against the power of exceptionalism by unsettling some of the received mythologies of Irish America or challenging the ‘two solitudes’ of Anglo- and French-Canadian literature as described in Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel of the same name. They foreground the migrant and diasporic histories central to the making of Canada and the United States and suggest there is a need to advance the relatively recent shift in the terms of the debate in Irish literary studies to more fully encompass the Irish Diaspora and the transatlantic Irish writer.

Transatlantic Irish Women: Literary and Historical Encounters In Transatlantic Women’s Literature, Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson issues the necessary reminder that ‘While women have been cast as the ones left behind in male narratives of adventure and quest, assuming the role of patient Penelopes awaiting their heroes’ returns rather than questing themselves, they have leading roles in women’s narratives of discovery, travel and escape’ (2008, p. 2). Macpherson’s critical formula speaks vividly to the history of the Irish woman migrant and women in the Irish Diaspora as for too long discussions of Irish woman at home and abroad were dominated by what Lambkin and Fitzgerald call the myth of the ‘stay at home female’ (2008, pp. 55–56). Indeed, according to Donald Harman Akenson, until the mid-1990s women were still the

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‘great unknown’ (1996, p. 157) in the story of the Irish Diaspora, something addressed directly in germinal studies such as Walter’s Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women (2001) and Breda Gray’s Women and the Irish Diaspora (2004). But if the history of women in the Irish Diaspora was for too long neglected in real terms, the image of the Irish woman migrant and her fetizishization as a figure of anxiety was all too visible in various stereotypes that dominated nineteenth-century print culture and persisted into the twentieth century. In The Irish-American in Popular Culture 1945–2000 (2007), Stephanie Rains traces ‘the ways in which the Irish American diaspora constructs and represents gender within the boundaries of their ethnic identity’ (2007, p. 144) from 1950s film to the annual and ongoing Rose of Tralee Festival. The malleability of the figure of the Irish woman in the larger history of American popular culture is striking; the most stylized and dominant figure of anxiety appears in the form of the working-class rebel, more often than not in the image of the Irish domestic servant examined extensively by historians such as Hasia Diner, Maureen Murphy, Margaret Lynch-Brennan, and others. She also appears as the ‘strong Irish mother’ studied by Breda Gray in Women and the Irish Diaspora, as the colleen of romanticized images of Irish women, or indeed the unruly woman or Banshee figure that Sally Barr Ebest invokes in her recent Literary History of Irish American Women Writers. In Outsiders Inside, Walter notes that the working class and more often than not deviant ‘Bridget’ is the most dominant of these types, but needs to be set against other seemingly more positive and even romanticized constructions of Irish womanhood—she draws special attention to Irish-American matriarchs who are ‘cast as pillars of family strength, applauded for keeping their families together and credited with advancing the collective status of Irish-Americans’ (2001, p. 64). Maureen Murphy argues in ‘Bridget and Biddy: Images of the Irish Servant Girl in Puck Cartoons, 1880–1890’ that a counter to the negative image of Bridget can be found in a dominant strand of Irish-American literature in a version of the domestic servant defined by ‘courage, resourcefulness, and selfsacrifice’ (2000, p. 152). However, she notes that these more positive characterizations appear as an antidote to the familiar and damning stereotype. In the taxonomy of formative images of Irish women migrants and their descendants, the image of Irish woman servant as outside the pale of the cultural norms of American domesticity and American womanhood wins out.

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Walter outlines the reason for the preponderance of the figure of Bridget. She describes the scale and far-reaching impact of the real history of working-class Irish women in Britain and the United States as follows: Over 80 per cent of Irish-born women in both the United States and Britain were recorded as domestic servants well into the twentieth century. They are still substantially overrepresented in these areas of work in Britain, as were the 1980s ‘illegals’ in the United States. The huge contribution of Irish women to domestic service links them to key processes in western industrialization, including constructions of white middle-class masculinity through the cult of domesticity, and the constructions of whiteness in both the United States and Britain. (2001, p. 2)

With this history of the exploitation of the labour of the Irish woman migrant in mind, this section will begin to unpack some of the literary and cultural histories of representing Irish women in the United Stated and Canada as a means of establishing what these writers were taking on in imagining Irish women’s lives in North America. There is a substantial body of work on this history and the representation of Irish women’s lives in the United States, but work on Irish women in Canada is not as expansive in spite of recent ground gained by Canadian Irish Studies. In this story of prejudice against Irish women, ‘Bad Bridget’ as she is described in a recent research project led by Leanne McCormick (Ulster University) and Elaine Farrell (Queen’s University Belfast)— holds a particularly significant position. Bronwen Walter notes that the figure of Bridget is unusual in that she holds her own alongside the stereotype of Paddy in the United States compared, for example, to the history of caricaturing the Irish in Britain, where Paddy had no such female companion. The scale of the dominance of Irish women servants is examined in ‘“For Love and Liberty”: Irish Women, Migration, and Domesticity in Ireland and America, 1815–1920’, in which Kerby Miller, David Doyle, and Patricia Kelleher outline how ‘As late as 1900, over 70 per cent of employed Irish-born women in the United States were engaged in domestic and personal service, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries single Irish women dominated household service in most American cities outside the deep south’ (1995, p. 54). The ubiquity of the Irish domestic servant in American life cannot, then, be underestimated and neither can the extent of the supporting role she played in enabling the aspirations of middle-class

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America and the cultivation of domestic and family values. But if the Irish woman servant was to become a symbol of middle-class legitimacy, she would also sometimes occupy the contradictory position of being a foil against which what Miller, Doyle, and Kelleher describe as the ‘Victorian values of cleanliness, punctuality and efficiency’ (1995, p. 55) were tested. In ‘Relinquishing and Reclaiming Independence: Irish Domestic Servants, American Middle-Class Mistresses, and Assimilation, 1850–1920’, Diane M. Hotten-Somers stresses how a lack of familiarity with cooking, cleaning, and household methods that were at the heart of American middle-class housekeeping led to difficulty for the newly arrived immigrant and put strain on relations with her employers and, as will be examined later, contributed to a particular and damaging strand in the representation of the Irish immigrant servant (2003, pp. 230–231). As Margaret Lynch-Brennan explains, in late nineteenth-century Ireland, women, especially in rural Ireland, were accustomed to domestic work, but it involved none of the refined duties central to the smooth running of the American middle class home in the cities of the North East (2009, pp. 11–13). In ‘How Bridget Was Framed: The Irish Domestic in Early American Cinema, 1985–1917’, Peter Flynn examines the impact of the Irish woman servant on American cinema. Flynn’s account of the extent of the problem of Bridget notes that of the 109 films that engaged with the history of the Irish in America during the period between 1895 and 1909, 28 featured the Irish domestic servant in a major role. His description of how she appears treads familiar ground: Bridget is a broad character, a wild, gesticulating clown leaving chaos and destruction in her wake. Like many comedies from the period, the Bridget films rely heavily on preexisting gags, circulated on the variety/vaudeville stage or in cartoons, joke books, and postcards. The focus of these jokes is the dim-wittedness of the Irish maid, her incompetence as a domestic, and her general resistance to feminine and domestic norms. A visual correlative to the maid’s numerous shortcomings is the fact that she is often advanced in age and physically unattractive. (2011, p. 10)

If Bridget holds a place towards the demonized end of the spectrum, during the early decades of the twentieth century, the romanticized Irish woman was alive and well in the popular work of Irish-American novelist Donn Byrne. Byrne’s Ireland—The Rock Whence I Was Hewn (1929)

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is a story of Ireland in the form of a romanticized fantasy, an enthusiastic exercise in exceptionalism that imagines both the author and his homeland—the rock whence he was hewn—as touched by an ancient spiritualism and Celtic integrity. It reads like a hymn to Yeats’s Celtic Twilight and struggles to contain the emotional effect of Ireland on the sensibility of the poet. In Private Histories: The Writing of Irish Americans, 1900– 1935, Ron Ebest describes Byrne as the ‘last great “American Celticist”’ (2005, p. 83) and argues that whatever excess of emotion his work might suffer from his popularity and influence make him an important figure in the early twentieth-century Irish-American canon: ‘despite the fact that his work is now forgotten, Donn Byrne in his time was arguably the most financially, critically, and popularly successful Scotch-Irish writer on the American landscape’ (2005, pp. 83–84). Byrne’s historical fiction about the Irish poet Raftery is especially florid. In Blind Raftery (1924), an early description of Raftery conjures up an image of the powerful hero poet at one with the elements: ‘He would push off fearlessly into the great Atlantic, his powerful arms and shoulders sending him through the water like a salmon, keeping course by the wind on his cheek…’ (1924, p. 9). But Byrne reserves his most sentimental vocabulary for Hilaria, Raftery’s wife and guide, an idealized image of Irish femininity at its most refined: ‘They parted, for now came the soft tread of Hilaria on the stairs. The door opened, and the gentle lavender perfume of her came to Raftery where he sat. Her silken skirts rustled. She was like a flower coming into the room, some slight velvet flower’ (1924, p. 12). The expansion of the Irish-American literary canon from mid-century onwards and the emergence of key figures such as Edward McSorley, James T. Farrell, Mary McCarthy, and later, Elizabeth Cullinan and Mary Gordon sought to contest such nostalgic images; these writers rooted their work in a realism that produced a new version of Irish America, one that often deliberately set itself apart from previous received scripts and mythmaking. By the 1940s, the romanticism of Byrne and writers like him had been displaced by a new kind of social realism in Irish-American fiction. In Edward McSorley’s Our Own Kind (1947), the emigrant saga foregrounds the heroic endurance of the McDermotts and the family’s impoverishment in their adoptive land. As the title of the novel suggests, Our Own Kind is a different kind of exercise in exceptionalism to that found in the work of Donn Byrne, in its attempt to represent the collective Irish immigrant experience through the story of a single family. In the same period, other Irish-American writers removed themselves from

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any trace of romantic mythmaking about Ireland and attempted instead to engage explicitly with the material realities of modern urban Irish America. James T. Farrell broke ground in Irish-American fiction with his extended explorations of the immigrant condition. His popular Studs Lonigan series, published in the 1930s, is an Irish-American Bildungsroman developed across three novels. His rendering of the struggle of the working classes in Chicago established him as a new kind of Irish-American voice. A further five-volume series (1936–1953) charts the intertwined lives of the O’Neill-O’Flaherty families and explores, in part, the world of Danny O’Neill and his literary ambitions amidst the working poor of early twentieth-century Chicago and launched a definitive Irish-American answer to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ron Ebest notes that the O’Neill-Flaherty saga gave new life to ‘the plight of the working-class Irish-American wife’, a figure he describes as ‘a staple of pre-Depression Irish-American literature’ (2005, p. 29). Novelist and short story writer John O’Hara, who was closely associated with The New Yorker, turns his attention on more than one occasion to the histories of Irish-American women. In O’Hara’s second novel BUtterfield 8 (1935), which offers an unflinching cross section view of New York society, his alter ego Jimmy Malloy identifies his liminal status as an Irish American and the burden of exclusion he bears: First of all, I am a Mick. I wear Brooks clothes and I don’t eat salad with a spoon and I probably could play five-goal polo in two years, but I am a Mick. Still a Mick. […] I’m pretty God damn American, and therefore my brothers and sisters are, and yet we’re not Americans. We’re Micks, we’re non-assimilable, we Micks. […] The people who think I am a Yale man aren’t very observing about people. (2008, pp. 50–51)

O’Hara’s relationship with Joyce is illuminated most vividly in his short stories about women. His story ‘The Assistant’ (1965) gives voice to an Irish-American Molly Bloom in the figure of Maggie Muldoon. She wakes, hungover and disoriented, after an evening spent reflecting on her life. The narrative breaks into an extended monologue in a series of digressions that resemble the Penelope episode of Ulysses in tone and style. Maggie recalls:

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This man I’d been to bed with a hundred times or more, and there he was all wrapped up in an old polo coat that was too big for him. So was his hat. His hat was too big for him, it sort of rested on his ears. And his chin kind of kept moving up and down, even when he wasn’t talking. You know, I was brought up a Catholic and thought I got over all that a long time ago, but standing there talking to Jack Hillyer, this man I used to quiver when he touched me, I suddenly after all these years got a guilty conscience. Sin. I committed sin with this old man. (2013, p. 21)

Like Molly Bloom’s monologue, Maggie Muldoon’s confession gives voice to her interior life and private history. In ‘Agatha’, which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1963, O’Hara offers his own version of working-class Irish women. Mary Moran, an Irish maid, features as a paid companion to her employer Agatha Child. Mary has an ambivalent status in the domestic power relations presented by the story. She carries out the labour that ensures the domestic ease of the wealthy, three-times married divorcee and yet the fact that the tellingly named Agatha Child (the character’s name foregrounds her infantile tendencies) depends upon Mary so completely gives the Irish maid significant leverage over her social superior. In finding a home for the character of the Irish domestic servant at The New Yorker, O’Hara’s ‘Agatha’ resonates with the work of Maeve Brennan—to be discussed in detail in Chapter 3—who went from reading Frank O’Connor and Mary Lavin in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar in the 1940s to following in their footsteps as she established herself as an important contributor to The New Yorker in the 1950s. In 1948, Mary Doyle Curran’s The Parish and the Hill appeared as an unprecedented account of the domestic and working lives of three generations of Irish women immigrants. In the afterword to the novel, Anne Halley posits that: ‘The Parish and the Hill can be read as the fictionalized account of one Irish Catholic immigrant family’s difficult, only partial, assimilation into already established Irish-American and Yankee social systems, from the first generation to the third’ (1986, p. 223). In this interest in changing cultural experiences across generations, Curran anticipated the work of Elizabeth Cullinan and Mary Gordon and most importantly Alice McDermott—who will be discussed in Chapter 4—whose intimate readings of Irish-American family life mark a new beginning in this history.

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And yet the voices of these Irish-American women writers have only recently been given extended critical attention. Twenty-three years after the first edition of Charles Fanning’s comprehensive literary history The Irish Voice in America (1990), Sally Barr Ebest’s authoritative The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Writers (2013) broke new ground in mapping the story of Irish women writers in the United States, from the beginning of the twentieth century through to the influence of second wave feminism in the 1960s, the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s, and new directions in Irish-American women’s writing at the turn of the new millennium. Barr Ebest takes the Banshee as her central motif, in part because of the ability of the figure of the banshee to metamorphose, but also because of the history of imagining Irish women in the United States as unruly and outside the law. Compared to this history of the Irish in the United States up until recently, the story of the Irish in Canada and related literature was one marked by relative invisibility. Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth open their study of Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement with a dismayed expression of concern regarding the fate of the Irish in histories of Canada: ‘They are rarely discussed now, except as people who were around in the past. In Canada, the Irish have disappeared and people can no longer point towards an Irish township or an Irish block. … the Irish have been shunted into the recesses of Canada’s collective memory. In that memory, only one event is vivid – the arrival of the Famine hordes in 1847’ (1990, p. 3). In 1963, three years after his story of the Irish migrant in Canada, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, won the Governor General Award, Belfast-born Brian Moore collaborated with Life Magazine World Library to produce its volume on Canada. The section on migration, ‘The Immigrant Tide’, offers a snapshot of the history of immigration to Canada and successive governments’ policy on the same—and yet it contains only a passing reference to the Irish. Another telling gap in the story of the Irish in Canada is to be found in the most recent edition of the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1997). It contains an expansive entry on Italian-Canadian literature, but what should be its near neighbour on Irish-Canadian literary culture is notable by its absence. Jason King and Kevin James confront these elisions directly: ‘The cultural and literary traditions of the Canadian Irish are less well understood than their economic, political, and social activities over time because most literary scholars, unlike historians, have been complacent in their efforts to recover them’ (2005, p. 14). King

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and James address this scholarly lacuna in the introduction to a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies designed to challenge the same inertia. The more recent interventions of literary critics such as Katrin Urschel have been vital in this. Urschel’s doctoral thesis Surfacing Again: Ethnic Identity in Irish-Canadian Literature (National University of Ireland, Galway 2011) and her published research on Irish-Canadian literary history and Irish migration to Canada have added new perspectives to criticism in the field and broken new ground in thinking about Irishness and the Irish writer in Canada. Houston and Smyth’s foregrounding of the unparalleled place of the Great Famine in writing about the history of the Irish in Canada— something to be examined more expansively on the chapter on Jane Urquhart—calls to mind one of the early appearances of Irish immigrants in Anglo-Canadian literature, in the work of the mid-nineteenthcentury memoirist Susanna Moodie. The Englishwoman Moodie arrived in Canada in 1832, and Roughing It in the Bush (1852) is a record of struggle and adaptation in the new world. The opening scenes feature a revealing encounter with Irish immigrants at Grosse Isle: A crowd of many hundred Irish emigrants had been landed during the present and former day and all this motley crew – men, women, and children, who were not confined by sickness to the sheds (which greatly resembled cattle-pens) – were employed in washing clothes or spreading them out on the rocks and bushes to dry … The confusion of babel was among them. All talkers and no hearers – each shouting and yelling in his or her uncouth dialect, and all accompanying their vociferations with violent and extraordinary gestures, quite incomprehensible to the uninitiated. We were literally stunned by the strife of tongues. (1986, pp. 24–25)

Moodie’s vocabulary borrows directly from nineteenth-century periodicals such as Punch magazine with its emphasis on the unruliness and savagery of the ungovernable Irish; she finds little sympathy for the scenes of suffering, but is struck by horror at a caricature come to life. Irish women are found to be most anathema to Moodie’s English sensibility: ‘I shrank, with feelings almost akin to fear, from the hardfeatured, sunburnt women as they elbowed rudely past me’ (1986, p. 25). Moodie’s preoccupation with the abhorrent nature of the Irish finds its most crystalline form in her account of her visit to see Canada’s own version of ‘Bad Bridget’. In Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (1852),

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she gives a detailed account of her encounter with convicted murderess Grace Marks: Among these raving maniacs I recognized the singular face of Grace Marks – no longer sad and despairing, but lighted up with the fire of insanity, and glowing with a hideous and fiend-like merriment. On perceiving that strangers were observing her, she fled shrieking away like a phantom into one of the side rooms. It appears that even in the wildest bursts of her terrible malady, she is continually haunted by a memory of the past. … It is fearful to look at her, and contemplate her fate in connexion with her crime. (1989, pp. 271–272)

If Moodie’s description of Marks contains echoes of Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre (1847), it has a vivid afterlife in the work of Margaret Atwood. As one of Canada’s most famous literary voices Atwood’s remembering of Grace Marks in Alias Grace (1996) is a significant literary counter to the anxieties of historians such as Houston and Smyth about the disappearance of the Irish in Canadian culture. Atwood’s earlier novel The Robber Bride (1993) paves the way for her version of Grace Marks in that it features a historian who offers a meta-commentary on the most readily available historical images of the Irish in Canada: ‘Tony, who is more interested in these details than Roz is, once showed Roz an old picture – the men standing in metal washtubs, to protect their legs from their own axes. Low comedy for the English middle classes, back home, living off the avails. Stupid bogtrotters! The Irish were always good for a smirk or two, then’ (1994, p. 305). Atwood’s Grace Marks is a reply to this history and Grace’s power as a storyteller engages with a particularly Irish formula—the ‘silence, exile, and cunning’ identified by Joyce as essential artillery for the Irish writer and invoked by Atwood in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (2004, p. 68) as a valuable point of departure for the Canadian writer. In Alias Grace, Atwood sets the scene with care in reminding what’s at stake for the impoverished Irish woman migrant: ‘I did indeed come from the North of Ireland; though I thought it very unjust when they wrote down that both of the accused were from Ireland by their own admission. That made it sound like a crime, and I don’t know that being from Ireland is a crime; although I have often seen it treated as such’ (1997, p. 118, italics in original). But to return to the original scene of colonial Canada—in her survey of Canadian writing in ‘From Assimilation to Diversity: Ethnic Identity in

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Irish-Canadian Literature’, Katrin Urschel describes the changing fate of a newly emergent Irish-Canadian literature in the early to mid-nineteenth century in an essay that moves from the poetry of Thomas D’Arcy Magee to the present day: Tracing the impact of Ireland on Irish-Canadian writers between 1820, when the first bigger waves of Irish settlers arrived, and the early 20th Century, one can witness a slow disappearance of Irish subject matter from Canadian literature. Before the 1850s, Irish-Canadian poets tended to emphasize their emigration experience, as well as feelings of estrangement and homesickness. … In literature from the 1850s one can slowly see a trade-off emerge, where writers could no longer easily reconcile their subject position as both Irish and Canadian but had to declare their loyalties to one of these sides unequivocally. (2010, pp. 178–179)

This crisis of identity diagnosed by Urschel is vividly dramatized in the preface to Nicholas Flood Davin’s 1877 history of the Irish in Canada, which praises Mother Ireland with near-religious fervour while also looking to honour the new land. Heady with patriotic sentiment and deploying familiar tropes that involve both erasing indigenous culture and conflating woman and nation in looking back to the Mother Ireland left behind, he celebrates the new Eden of Canada and is determined to be a counter to the familiar stereotype and put the record straight regarding the contribution of the Irish: Happily, to write the history of Irishmen in Canada is no uninviting task. It is not merely that Ireland can advance her claim to recognition and respect as no inconsiderable contributor to the great work of laying the foundation of this young nation. She has helped to reclaim the land from barrenness; to substitute for the wilderness the garden. In clearing and in counsel, her sons have done their part. … The heroism, the endurance, the versatile genius implied by all this may be found written on the tearful pages of the history of the motherland. … Ireland’s fields are greener, but they are not as variously fruitful as those of Canada; her hills – nothing could surpass their beauty, but they do not contain the mineral treasures which are to be found here; her rivers have unspeakable charm, but their sands are not of gold. (2016, p. 4)

In rhapsodizing about Mother Ireland, he transplants a familiar trope for new purpose, and the excess of emotion is very much at home in the same

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sentimental genre as Donn Byrne. While James Reaney’s plays about Irish migrants in his Donnelly Trilogy (1975–1977) and Jack Hodgins’s novel The Invention of the World (1977) number amongst the most prominent accounts of Irish assimilation and acculturation in Canada, Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel Two Solitudes finds a particularly revealing role for the Irish in the Canadian national drama, and for Irish women in particular. The foreword to the novel laments that ‘No single word exists, within Canada itself, to designate with satisfaction to both races a native of the country’ (1945, p. 1). In exploring this bifurcated identity, the Irish wife of the French-Canadian Tallard appears as an interloper and is a fantasy object and a source of conflict between father and stepson. She is introduced through the eyes of her infatuated stepson: Kathleen shrugged her shoulders and picked up some magazines, putting them down again and making their edges straight. One dropped to the floor and she bent to retrieve it while Marius watched her, his lips opening slightly. God, she was beautiful! … The contrast between Kathleen’s white Irish skin and the intense ebony blackness of her hair was startling. Her lips were generous and her breasts were full, but her hips below this opulence were slender. As she straightened his eyes dropped. It was the way she moved and sometimes the way she looked at him that gave her so much power over his senses. (1945, p. 35)

Kathleen appears as a working-class girl who has learned to leverage the power of her beauty, a Bridget figure who manages to stay inside the law, but is nonetheless a troubling object of desire in the Canadian national allegory that plays out in Two Solitudes . In 1960, Brian Moore brought the story of the Irish in Canada up to date in a comic realist account of The Luck of Ginger Coffey, in which Ginger Coffey appears as a reinvention of Leopold Bloom on the hunt for work in Montreal. One of the most revealing strands of the novel is the suffering of his wife, who emerges as a bereft Molly Bloom, disappointed by both the failures of her husband and the failed promises of her new life in Canada. In spite of his best efforts to pass as a ‘New Canadian’ Coffey’s exasperated verdict on Canada materializes midway through the novel ‘Raw, cold, country with its greedy, pushy people, grabbing what didn’t belong to them, shoving you aside! Land of opportunity, my eye!’ (1987, p. 84). Canada conspires against him and leaves his wife, Vera, increasingly alienated from him, until the final pages where the novel

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stages a reunion of the couple and Vera, like Molly Bloom, has the last word on their relationship. The writers to be examined in the second half of this book all make an important contribution to breaking the silences around Irish-Canadian literary connections. Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Emma Donoghue, albeit from very different perspectives and deploying very different strategies, write the lives of Irish women on Canadian territory on new terms. In an article on a symposium on Irish-Canadian connections held at University College Dublin in 2018, Jane Urquhart addresses one of the primary strands of Irish-Canadian literature and sets it against the lived experience of her ancestors: The first Irish-Canadian literary voice heard on Canadian soil was that of Carlingford-born politician, historian, poet and orator Thomas D’Arcy Magee By the time I began the research connected to my third novel, Away, which partly dealt with how my Quinn ancestors had emigrated to Canada in the mid nineteenth century, even a story as colourful as Magee’s had been largely forgotten. I was delighted by the fact that most archival files concerning Irish settler life had remained unviolated since their deposition over a century before, but I was also disturbed that such a large part of Canada’s history had remained hidden for so long. (‘Irish Characters Often Walk the Pages of Canadian Novels’, The Irish Times, 2018)

The writers examined in the later chapters of this book contribute in different ways to the recovery of those hidden connections. While a definitive survey of the Irish woman writer in Canada has yet to be written, the second half of this book examines major figures as a means of thinking closely about how women writers engage with Irish-Canadian literary and cultural histories. Each of the writers in this volume represents a distinctive strand of writing by and about Irish women in the United States and Canada and offers a way into thinking about the material and cultural conditions that have shaped the story of Irish women in North America. In the last three decades, Irish feminist scholarship has placed pressure on the literary canon and led to a recovery of women writers lost or elided in the making of tradition. The exclusions of the original three volumes of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature in 1991 and the publication of an additional two volumes eleven years later by feminist scholars intent on putting the record straight remain a powerful metaphor for how Irish

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literary studies has had to make up for lost ground in thinking seriously about the marginalization of women writers in accepted histories of Irish literature. The writers to be examined in the following chapters add a new perspective to this process and a reappraisal of the category of Irish woman writer. In Eavan Boland’s ‘Bright-Cut Irish Silver’, the woman writer confronts the injuries of the past and authorial agency appears as gift that is claimed so that the elisions of the past are not forgotten or ignored in the process of writing a yet to be imagined future. The writers discussed here take their place in claiming a woman-centred history of Irish writing, ‘this cold potency which has come, / by time and chance, / into my hands’ (1995, p. 145).

Works Cited Primary Material Atwood, M. (1994) [1993]. The Robber Bride. London: Virago. Atwood, M. (1997) [1996] Alias Grace. London: Virago. Atwood, M. (2004) [1972] Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Boland, E. (1990). ‘Outside History’. The American Poetry Review, 19 (2), 32– 38. Boland, E. (1995). ‘Bright-Cut Irish Silver’. In Eavan Boland: Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet. Byrne, D. (1924). Blind Raftery. New York: The Century Company. Byrne, D. (1929). Ireland—The Rock Whence I Was Hewn. Boston: Little, Brown. Curran Doyle, M. (1986) [1948]. The Parish on the Hill. City University of New York: The Feminist Press. Donoghue, E. (1993). ‘Going Back’. In D. Bolger (Ed.), Ireland in Exile: Irish Writers Abroad (pp. 157–170). New Island: Dublin. Flood Davin, N. (2016) [1877]. The Irishman in Canada. Toronto: Maclear. Gregory, A. (1991) [1897]. ‘Our Irish Theatre’. In J. P. Harrington (Ed.), Modern Irish Drama (pp. 378–379). London: W. W. Norton. Halley, A. (1986). Afterword. The Parish and the Hill (pp. 223–264). City University of New: YorkThe Feminist Press. Hodgins, J. (1994) [1977]. The Invention of the World. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Joyce, J. (1993) [1922]. Ulysses (J. Johnson, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.

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Joyce, J. (2008) [1901]. ‘The Day of the Rabblement’. In K. Barry (Ed.), James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing (pp. 50–52). Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacLennan, H. (1945). Two Solitudes. New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce. McDermott, A. (2003) [1998]. Charming Billy. London: Bloomsbury. McWilliams, E. (2018). ‘Maeve Brennan and James Joyce’. Irish Studies Review, 26 (1), 111–123. Moodie, S. (1986) [1852]. Roughing It in the Bush. London: Virago. Moodie, S. (1989) [1853]. Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Moore, B. (1963). Canada—Life World Library. New York: Time-Life Books. Moore, B. (1987) [1960]. The Luck of Ginger Coffey. London: Paladin. Munro, A. (1982) [1971]. Lives of Girls and Women. London: Penguin. O’Hara, J. (2008) [1935]. BUtterfield 8. London: Vintage. O’Hara, J. (2013) [1965]. ‘The Assistant’. In S. Goldleaf (Ed.), The New York Stories (pp. 15–29). New York: Penguin. O’Hara, J. (2013) [1963]. ‘Agatha’. In S. Goldleaf (Ed.), The New York Stories (pp. 1–14). New York: Penguin. Reaney, J. (2008) [1975–1977]. The Donnellys. Toronto: Dundurn Press. Urquhart, J. (2018). ‘Irish Characters Often Walk the Pages of Canadian Novels’. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/irish-charactersoften-walk-the-pages-of-canadian-novels-1.3507180. Accessed 1/6/2020.

Secondary Material Akenson, D. H. (1996) [1993]. The Irish Diaspora: A Primer. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies. Anderson, B. (1991) [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Barr-Ebest, S. (2013). The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Writers. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Deane, S. (1986) [1983]. ‘Heroic Styles and the Tradition of an Idea’. In Ireland’s Field Day (pp. 45–58). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Delaney, E. (2011). ‘Our Island Story? Towards a Transnational History of Late Modern Ireland’. Irish Historical Studies, 37 (148), 599–621. Ebest, R. (2005). Private Histories: The Writing of Irish Americans, 1900–1935. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Fisher-Fishkin, S. (2005). ‘Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies’. American Quarterly, 57 (1), 17–57. Fitzgerald, P., & Lambkin, B. (2008). Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007 . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Flynn, P. (2011). ‘How Bridget Was Framed: The Irish Domestic in Early American Cinema, 1985–1917’. Cinema Journal, 50 (2), 1–20. Foster, R. (1995) [1993]. ‘Marginal Men and Micks on the Make: The Uses of Irish Exile, c. 1840–1922’. In Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (pp. 281–305). London: Penguin. Garden, A., & Crowley, M. (2015). ‘The Irish Atlantic and Transatlantic Literary Studies’. Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 19 (2), 117–135. Glenney-Boggs, C. (2007). Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation, 1773–1892. London: Routledge. Gough, K. M. (2014). Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic. London: Routledge. Gray, B. (2004). Women and the Irish Diaspora. London: Routledge. Hirsch, E. (1991). ‘The Imaginary Irish Peasant’. PMLA, 106 (5), 1116–1133. Hotten-Somers, D. M. (2003). ‘Relinquishing and Reclaiming Independence: Irish Domestic Servants, American Middle-Class Mistresses, and Assimilation, 1850–1920’. In K. Kenny (Ed.), New Directions in Irish-American History (pp. 227–242). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Houston, C. J., & Smyth, W. J. (1990). Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Letters. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Hyde, D. (2015) [1892]. ‘The Necessity for De-anglicising Ireland’. In D. Kiberd & P. J. Mathews (Eds.), Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891–1922 (pp. 42–46). Dublin: Abbey Theatre Press. Ingman, H., & Ó Gallchoir, C. (2018). Introduction. In H. Ingman & C. Ó Gallchoir (Eds.), A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (pp. 1–17). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kiberd, D., & Mathews, P. J. (2015). Introduction. In D. Kiberd & P. J. Mathews (Eds.), Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891–1922 (pp. 24–29). Dublin: Abbey Theatre Press. King, J., & James, K. (2005). Guest Editors’ Introduction: Irish-Canadian Connections. The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 31 (1), 14–17. Lynch-Brennan, M. (2009). The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840–1930. New York: Syracuse University Press. Mackey, E. (1999). The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. London: Routledge. Manning, S., & Taylor, A. (Eds.). (2007). Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Miller, K. A., Doyle, D. N., & Kelleher, P. (1995). ‘“For Love and Liberty”: Irish Women, Migration, and Domesticity in Ireland and America, 1815–1920’. In P. O’Sullivan (Ed.), Irish Women and Irish Migration (pp. 41–65). London: Leicester University Press.

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Moynihan, S. (2013). ‘Other People’s Diasporas’: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Murphy, M. (2000). ‘Bridget and Biddy: Images of the Irish Servant Girl in Puck Cartoons, 1880–1890’. In C. Fanning (Ed.), New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora (pp. 152–175). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Negra, D. (2006). The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. O’Connor, F. (1963). The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. New York: Harper Colophon. Pease, D. E. (2009). The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rains, Stephanie. (2007). The Irish-American in Popular Culture 1945–2000. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Slettedahl Macpherson, H. (2008). Transatlantic Women’s Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Slettedahl Macpherson, H., & Kaufman, W. (2002). ‘Transatlantic Studies: Conceptual Challenges’. In H. Macpherson & G. Kaufman (Eds.), New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies (pp. xi–xxv). Lanham: University Press of America. Stevens, L. M. (2004). ‘The New Transatlanticism’. American Literary History, 16 (1), 93–102. Sugars, C., & Ty, E. (2014). Introduction. In C. Sugars & E. Ty (Eds.), Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory (pp. 1–19). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sweeney, F. (2006). ‘The Black Atlantic, American Studies and the Politics of the Postcolonial’. Comparative American Studies, 4 (2), 115–133. Urschel, K. (2010). ‘From Assimilation to Diversity: Ethnic Identity in IrishCanadian Literature’. In V. Regan, I. Lemee, & M. Conrick (Eds.), Multiculturalism and Integration: Canadian and Irish Experiences (pp. 177–191). Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Urschel, K. (2011). Surfacing Again: Ethnic Identity in Irish-Canadian Literature. Galway: National University of Ireland. Walter, B. (2001). Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Unsettling Irish America: Self-Authorship and the Writing of Mary McCarthy

In Mary McCarthy’s 1987 memoir How I Grew, she looks back at her high school years and her discovery of an academic reference written by her Latin teacher in support of her application to Vassar in 1930. The reference provides her with a retrospective glimpse of her younger self: ‘Mary McCarthy is a student of quite unusual intelligence. … I have always found her industrious and pleasant to deal with in the class-room. Mary also has considerable dramatic ability, and played the leading part in the senior play this year. … She has a strong will and plenty of ambition, and a magnetic and charming personality’ (1987, pp. 169–170). The letter is an attempt to offer a supportive but realistic impression of McCarthy—the teacher’s acknowledgement that the young woman has a strong will and ambition is made safe by the reassurance that she is also industrious, pleasant to deal with, and charming. In How I Grew, McCarthy is keen to put the record straight by including a detailed account of her sexual exploits in the same high school years, one that determinedly punctures the more pious aspects of the Latin teacher’s characterization. She pauses to reflect with a mixture of astonishment and glee: ‘The kindly upright woman was greatly deceived in me. In her worst nightmares that dear Latinist could not have pictured my frequentations: Rex Watson in the woods, Evans Buckley in the hearse, Kenneth Callahan in that eyrie reached by a cat-walk, to say nothing of Forrie Crosby in the Marmon roadster sophomore year, before I even knew her, when I was fourteen’ (1987, p. 170, italics in original). Here, McCarthy © The Author(s) 2021 E. McWilliams, Irishness in North American Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1_2

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is surprised, but also pleased, by a dramatic ability of her younger self that is of a different kind to that praised by her teacher—that being her ability to perform the role expected of a Vassar Girl in the making while also satisfying her sexual curiosity and following her own desires without censure. This chapter examines McCarthy’s relationship with life writing and self-fashioning and its importance to understanding her writing history and the complicated position that she occupies as an Irish-American woman writer. Read together, McCarthy’s memoirs set in motion an elaborate experiment in self-authorship, an appropriate place to begin in a study concerned with conceptualizations of, and engagements with, Irishness. McCarthy presents something of a conundrum to Irish-American Studies as the broad patterns of her work do not subscribe to IrishAmerican themes but actively resist such categories and outrun the limitations of any potentially confining compartmentalization. At times, this resistance takes the form of outright hostility while elsewhere she deploys strategies of evasion. However, this should not in any way preclude McCarthy from inclusion in the Irish American canon, rather she can be read as one of its most vibrantly dissenting voices. The way McCarthy recalls the failure of her Latin teacher to see beneath the surface is very much in tune with her sustained interest in the gap between self-presentation and the versions of reality that lie beneath such projected veneers and it is one that has implications for both McCarthy’s experiments in writing a woman’s life and a very selfconscious concern with staying one step ahead of any grand narrative of Irish America. In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), she addresses the same attempts to characterize, categorize, and define Irish America in her recollection of a formative act of writing in which she took up the challenge, aged ten, to write the story of the Irish in America: When I was ten, I wrote an essay for a children’s contest on ‘The Irish in America’, which won first the City and then the State prize. Most of my facts I had cribbed from a series on Catholics in American history that was running in Our Sunday Visitor. I worked on the assumption that anybody who was Catholic must be Irish, and then, for good measure, I went over the signers of the Declaration of Independence and added any name that sounded Irish to my ears. (1963, pp. 56–57)

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This expedient production of a story of Irish America, half-plagiarized, half-invented, makes her less than reverent attitude to her ancestors’ history explicitly clear from the start. In their survey of twentieth-century Irish-American writing, Daniel Casey and Robert Rhodes introduce McCarthy as follows: ‘Despite her name and background, Irish-Americans do not figure prominently in McCarthy’s fiction, and when they do, they are not portrayed sympathetically’ (2006, p. 654). They go on to offer an account of the abuse and neglect the orphaned McCarthy and her siblings suffered at the hands of their guardians before concluding: ‘McCarthy, perhaps understandably, shed Catholicism. And, faced with two strains of “Irishness” – the toobrief influence of a recklessly extravagant and romantic father as opposed to the grim and tightfisted Irish Americanism of paternal grandparents – it may be equally understandable that she has chosen not to celebrate her Irish heritage’ (2006, p. 654). In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, McCarthy herself provides clarification regarding her complicated relationship with Irish Catholicism: I am often asked whether I retain anything of my Catholic heritage. This is hard to answer, partly because my Catholic heritage consists of two distinct strains. There was the Catholicism I learned from my mother and from the simple parish priest and nuns in Minneapolis, which was, on the whole, a religion of beauty and goodness, however imperfectly realized. Then there was the Catholicism practised in my Grandmother McCarthy’s parlour and in the home that was made for us down the street – a sour, baleful doctrine in which old hates and rancours had been stewing for generations, with ignorance proudly stirring the pot. (1963, p. 22)

This is one of her clearest articulations of her position, but elsewhere she fiercely glosses various encounters with the same strain of Irish-American Catholicism. She recalls getting chastised at her convent school for precociously mouthing all the parts in a school play and the harsh punishment suffered for drawing attention to herself: ‘I don’t recall the words she used to bring me to my senses, only the derision in her voice – typically Irish, by the way’ (1987, p. 21). While Casey and Rhodes are absolutely correct about the absence of any straightforward celebration of McCarthy’s Irish heritage, I am keen to explore what to me seems to be a more complicated relationship with Irishness in her work.

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Sally Barr Ebest argues that McCarthy’s relationship with Irish America is more complex than the writer’s own protests might suggest: Mary McCarthy laid the groundwork for subsequent Irish American women writers to develop flawed heroines and to upset stereotypical conventions regarding marriage and motherhood – in sum, to enter the man’s world of writing and publishing and succeed on her own terms. In this realm, and despite her denials, McCarthy broke the bounds of Irish American literary conventions by leading her female counterparts into second wave, twentieth-century feminism. (2008, p. 29)

McCarthy’s autobiographies are artful exercises in self-invention that seek to transcend the competing stories of Irishness written into McCarthy’s family history. I am interested not just in how she backs away from the problem of Irishness in her work but also how she rescues herself from its limitations—by very assertively pursuing an idea of herself as a self-made public intellectual. The working through of the question or even problem of Irishness in her work is determined in part by the very striking and sustained interest in self-invention in her writing, which is marked by a refusal to be mired in or owned by identity politics of any kind. Especially compelling is how McCarthy’s complex feminist and socialist politics interact with her determination to remain outside any totalizing narrative of Irish-American identity. Further to this, I suggest that McCarthy’s pursuit of an ideal of intellectual sophistication and self-possession in the face of a sometimes hostile reading public, and the role she embraces as an observer of an American intelligentsia in so many of her novels, is a means of recusing and disassociating herself from the more publicly visible scripts historically available to Irish and Irish-American women. The memoirs revisit and rehearse anew key chapters in her life—Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) centres on the formative years of the title, while How I Grew (1987) extends from those girlhood years through to the post-Vassar years, and the carefully titled, posthumously published Mary McCarthy: Intellectual Memoirs, New York 1936–1938 (1993) announces its concern with McCarthy’s public persona and works as a portrait of McCarthy as the public intellectual. Even this shifting of gears between different chapters of her life and return visits to the same

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events across the autobiographies is telling of an interest in the instability of life writing as a narrative form. Similarly, the semi-autobiographical nature of much of McCarthy’s fiction and its direct engagement with, or refraction of, the concerns that determined her adult life is revealing of an ongoing negotiation with the facts of her lived experience and the processes of fictionalization at the heart of all life writing.

Looking for Irish America in Mary McCarthy’s Life Writing As Rhodes and Casey suggest, references to McCarthy’s Irish heritage and to Irish-American life seem at first limited to her early memoirs, but her work contains a number of glances at and refractions of Irish history and Irish America that usually take the form of an indirect association or a narrative sleight of hand. Alert to the power of dominant histories, McCarthy would have been well versed in the archetypes of Irish-American womanhood and treads warily around the same. McCarthy knew exactly what she was up against in writing back to and seeking to protect herself from such dominant types. Her portrait of Catherine Mulcahy, the long-suffering wife of a scheming Joyce scholar in The Groves of Academe (1953), is particularly telling as Catherine appears as a projection of the archetypal Irish Angel in the House, mother to all and helpless pawn in her husband’s plotting: Catherine Mulcahy, moreover, had a womanly, Irish way with her that put the boys at their ease. She was only thirty-one and light on her feet; she had a low, warm encouraging laugh; she remembered first names and nicknames, parents’ occupations, where one had gone to school, what one thought of it, where one went for the summer; she was the sort of person who was interested in your birthday, and who could tell you what sign you were born under, your birthstone, and the patron saint of the day. (1964, p. 24)

She appears as an angelic figure, who wears her wedding dress and mantilla (1964, pp. 19–22) to chaperone the school dances, and keeps the house while her husband attends to the serious business of academia (1964, p. 24). It is not surprising that the same resistance to the prescriptive ‘womanly, Irish way’ of this epitome of maternal self-sacrifice shows itself most

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forcibly in McCarthy’s memoirs. As Claire Lynch reminds us in Irish Autobiography: Stories of Self in the Narrative of a Nation (2009): In autobiography, the standard association between the name of the author on the cover and the name of the narrator who guides the reader through the text cuts a ghostly figure in Barthes’ formulation. … Whilst these texts remain subject to numerous interpretations, the relevance of the author is unassailable in a way that it is not in the novel. Indeed, publication does not eradicate the author, but rather awards a form of immortality; in autobiography the author is the text. (2009, p. 12)

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a thorough excavation of family and cultural history, one that from the beginning demonstrates a wariness of roots, origins, and received histories. McCarthy offers a dramatic version of family history that extends from the family’s arrival in North America from Ireland during the Famine year, to their various exploits as pirates off the Nova Scotian coast, and concludes: ‘By the time I knew them, the McCarthys had become respectable. Nevertheless there was a wild strain in the family. The men were extraordinarily good-looking, dark and black-browed as pirates, with very fair skin and queer lit-up graygreen eyes, fringed by the McCarthy eyelashes, long, black, and thick’ (1963, p. 13). There is a telling tension between the members of the McCarthy family as she ‘knew them’ and the risk that she too might have the ‘McCarthy eyelashes’ and the same ‘queer lit-up gray-green eyes’ that reveals a desire to excommunicate herself from such family inheritances all the better to study and understand them. The same anxiety about origins and inheritance is followed up in a reading of the social and ethnic hierarchies that organize the family in a wry account of how: ‘Our family, like many Irish Catholic new-rich families, was filled with aristocratic delusions; we children were always being told that we were descended from the kings of Ireland…’ (1963, p. 51). Elsewhere, she keenly interrogates other people’s readings and misreadings of the Irish, recalling of one of her later lovers: ‘It delighted him to say that the Irish were the bribed tools of imperialism – he had found the phrase in Marx. I always wondered what it applied to. Marx could hardly have been thinking of Irish cops – New York’s finest. In the England of his day, there were no Irish bobbies. But whether or not Marx said it, the phrase amused me and has stuck in my mind’ (1993, p. 69). This suspected misattribution is accompanied by other misnomers. She recollects her interest in

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the Irish roots of the name of an editor at The New Republic from her time working at the magazine: ‘I learn from my 1978-79 Who’s Who? (he was still living then) that he was named Robert Emmett Cantwell. A misnomer, typically Northwestern, for Robert Emmet, the Irish patriot? A spelling error by Who’s Who? Or just no connection?’ (1993, pp. 7–8). There remains, then, a deliberate ambivalence and uncertainty about what the Irish mean to Americans and yet that is not to say that she does not take the prejudices that lie in wait on account of her Irish Catholic and indeed Jewish ancestry very seriously. In How I Grew, she recalls how: ‘By senior year I was well aware of having a Jewish grandmother and aware of it – let me be blunt – as something to hide. … To Ginny’s admirers, just out of Yale, it was a rich joke that a girl named Mary McCarthy should be drinking cocktails with them at the country club: Irish were mill workers at the Chase and the Scovill and American brass plants. There was a dirty song – “Mary Anne McCarthy went out to dig some clams” – though I never understood what was dirty in it…’ (1987, pp. 217–218). At such moments, she fixes her gaze on the very real if different kinds of prejudice against different branches of her family tree. This, too, informs the repeated rehearsal of autobiographical plots in so much of McCarthy’s work and the overriding concern with self-authorship in her writing—it serves as a means of resisting being read or fixed according to any such prejudiced thinking and so she goes to audacious lengths to avoid being limited to any one narrative of Mary McCarthy. In ‘Irish American Modernism’, Joe Cleary argues that in the early decades of the twentieth century laying claim to an Irish-American identity carried a risk for the aspiring writer: ‘To do so was to adopt a history that smacked of a benighted peasant or working-class past, or of the sanctimony of middle-class respectability, none of these high cultural heritages’ (2014, p. 178). Christopher Dowd also reads Irish-American identity in this period as marked by alienation, going so far as to suggest that: ‘Since the Famine immigration, Irishness had changed from an identity implying a shared history to an identity connoting only vague, sometimes superficial, cultural similarities. As a result, many modern Irish Americans felt disconnected from the culture of their ancestors, but they also felt disconnected from American culture’ (2011, p. 113). McCarthy is fully conscious of these feelings of alienation in recollecting the moment of realization of what it meant to be Irish American in the eyes of her Vassar College friends. Novelist Dawn Powell reveals the complications

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of her antipathy towards McCarthy in a colourful characterization of her work that, for all her apparent reservations, displays a fervent concern for McCarthy’s writing progress. On January 6, 1956, she gave vent to her feelings in particularly revealing language: ‘She has her two manners – her lace-curtain Irish, almost unbelievably genteel lady scholar torn between desire to be Blue Stocking without losing her Ladyship; and then her shanty Irish where she relaxes, whamming away at her characters like a Queen of the Roller Derby, groin-kicking, shin-knifing, belly-butting, flailing away with skates and all arms at her characters and jumping on them with a hoarse whoop of glee when they are felled’ (1995, p. 354). She retreats to the familiar insults of ‘lace curtain’ and ‘shanty Irish’ and her name calling, however satirical the intention, furnishes further evidence for Cleary’s claims regarding the problem faced by the Irish-American writer in this period. The complicated dissection of the most imposing and rigid grand narrative that shaped McCarthy’s formative years is to be found in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which is famous for the fierceness with which she confronts Catholic hypocrisy while at the same time mining Catholic tradition for its literary and cultural content. The memoir is perhaps best known for its unflinching account of the suffering of McCarthy and her orphaned siblings at the hands of their malicious and negligent guardians. She throws a number of grenades at any suggestion of nostalgia in the title of the book and is fearless in excoriating the cosier images of Irish progress in America. But if Memories reads, at times, like an attempt to shuck off the burden of being Irish American what of those vividly rendered memories of an Irish-American Catholic girlhood in her other work? There are times when the problem of Irishness is revisited very directly as in The Groves of Academe in which the Irish-American Joyce scholar, Mulcahy, appears as a hapless prototype Lucky Jim, but is significantly more deluded and self-aggrandizing. There are also a number of nods and glances at the Irish literary canon. In How I Grew, McCarthy writes at length about her delight in The Count of Monte Christo, which Stephen Dedalus claims as one of his formative reading experiences in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. However, the temperature drops again in her characterization of Bill Troy, the academic who inspired her Irish-American nemesis Henry Mulcahy in The Groves of Academe. She describes him as ‘an arrogant Irish puritan of the type I imagined Joyce to be; I could picture him leaning on an ashplant’ (1993, p. 76). She loses patience with Troy (and,

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in the same moment, Joyce along with him) for his scholarly posturing in what is part of a pattern by which, according to Catherine Keyser Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (2010), McCarthy ‘mocks the strenuously defended yet easily undermined position of masculinity coded as intellectualism. She uses smartness, in other words, to unsettle the authority that the very phrase “New York Intellectual” imported to her circle’ (2010, p. 141). Even her fullest tribute to Joyce takes the form of a backhanded compliment: In our Beekman Place apartment, besides PR, I was trying to read Ulysses. … Every year I started Ulysses, but I could not get beyond the first chapter – ‘stately, plump Buck Mulligan’ – page 47, I think it was. The one day, long after, in a different apartment, with a different man (which?), I found myself on page 48 and never looked back. This happened with many of us: Ulysses gradually – but with an effect of suddenness – became accessible. It was because in the interim we had been reading diluted Joyce in writers like Faulkner and so had got used to his ways, at a second remove. (1993, p. 25)

There is a deliberate casualness in the notion that coming to terms with Ulysses was a mere matter of getting used to Joyce’s ways as her relationship with Joyce is interwoven with the men in her life. In the playful appeal to the reader for information as to who exactly she might have been living with when she final made it to page 48 of Ulysses , Joyce is cast as a different kind of casual encounter. McCarthy’s playful mode in her treatment of Joyce is echoed in Intellectual Memoirs in a scene in which she encounters Dorothy Parker. Her keen-eyed social commentary on the American middle classes makes her a rightful descendent of Parker’s satirical wit and yet she is less than impressed. She recalls catching a glimpse of Parker at the walkout of patrons of the Algonquin in support of striking waiters: ‘It was the only time I saw Dorothy Parker close up, and I was disappointed by her dumpy appearance. Today television talk shows would have prepared me’ (1993, p. 17). Parker, like Joyce, is promptly cut down to size as would seem to be McCarthy’s modus operandi when it comes to negotiating with influential precursors. Her recollection of Ulysses in her account of reading Joyce at Beekman Place and the suggestion that she gets to the heart of Joyce via what she sees as his American apostle, Faulkner, is also significant. Elsewhere

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in her work Joyce appears again but briefly. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1962, he makes a fleeting appearance, but moments later is pushed aside when the conversation moves on to Henry James (a writer with his own Irish-American connections), who is given more detailed attention in her study Ideas and the Novel (1980). If James is the archetypal American in Europe, she questions the continuing relevance of the Jamesian algorithm for thinking about transatlantic relations. When asked about the history of the American writer in Europe, she replies: ‘No, I no longer see that Jamesian distinction. I mean, I see it in James, and I could see it even in 1946, but I don’t see it any more’ (1962, p. 61). She continues, in the same interview: ‘I don’t feel anymore this antithesis of Young America, Old Europe. I think that’s really gone. For better or worse, I’m not sure. Maybe for worse’ (1962, p. 61). The experience of an American’s travels in Europe is explored in her 1965 novel Birds of America. Her later work as an art historian would lead to her own sojourn in Italy, a rehearsal of that familiar transatlantic fantasy, and later still she lived for a while with her fourth husband in Poland. During that time she visited Scotland, but there is, given her often fraught relationship with her Irish origins, little sign in her accounts of that time of any explicit concern with tracing the McCarthy line back to Ireland. In a letter to McCarthy, her friend James T. Farrell writes warmly about a trip to Dublin and McCarthy’s own plans to travel there (Letter to Mary McCarthy, September 26, 1978). He goes on to recommend a number of Irish writers to her, including Dennis Johnston, Jennifer Johnston, and Seamus Heaney, but, in spite of his best efforts to enthuse her, McCarthy is somewhat desultory in her reply (Letter to James T. Farrell October 12, 1978). If McCarthy was, at best, mildly indifferent towards her Irish contemporaries, she was nothing short of severe in taking her fellow Irish Americans to task. In a review of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh in 1946, she sighs: ‘To audiences accustomed to the oily virtuosity of George Kaufman, George Abbott, Lillian Hellman, Odets, Saroyan … the return of a playwright who – to be frank – cannot write is a solemn and sentimental occasion’ (qtd in Brightman 1992, p. 292). Her dressing down of one of her most celebrated Irish-American compatriots serves as little more than an opportunity to level new insults at longstanding enemies.

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Self-Authorship and Strategies of Evasion in the Memoirs of Mary McCarthy If a good deal of McCarthy’s fiction and criticism takes sidelong glances from a safe distance at Ireland and Irish America, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood places her at its very centre. However, here too, she insists at all times on destabilizing the progress of her own narrative lest the promises of the title of the book place her too readily in line with tradition. In addition to the book’s explicitly critical readings of the world that made her, McCarthy’s memoir is, of course, also celebrated for its narrative acrobatics that from the outset ambush the reader with uncertainties. Her address ‘To the Reader’ at the beginning of the memoir includes, the acknowledgement of gaps in memory, a reminder that some names have been changed, and a confession that she really rather wishes she were writing fiction—it is a prologue that is famously keen to hold a mirror up to the narrative processes of the autobiography. She also addresses those correspondents who have written to protest against the book based on their reading of extracts published in advance of its appearance in different magazines and to vilify her for the long shadow her work threatens to cast over Irish-American life. In considering the reception of early published fragments of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, she muses: ‘Some readers, finding them in a magazine, have taken them for stories. … The professional writer is looked on perhaps as a “story-teller”, like a child who has fallen into that habit and is mechanically chidden by his parents even when he protests that this time he is telling the truth’ (1963, p. 9, italics in original). The accusations levelled against her by members of the Irish-American community drive her to stage a defence and make a number of clarifications: ‘In the case of my near relations, I have given real names, and, wherever possible, I have done this with neighbours, servants, and friends of the family, for, to me, this record lays a claim to being historical – that is, much of it can be checked. If there is more fiction in it than I know, I should like to be set right; in some instances, which I shall call attention to later, my memory has already been corrected’ (1963, p. 10). These ‘corrections’ as McCarthy calls them take the form of selfreflexive narrative acrobatics and continue through the book with its Tristram Shandyesque marginalia that offer corrections and clarifications and postscripts and codas that pause to correct and amend. It is a display of narrative pyrotechnics that has left its mark on American prose.

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McCarthy is given special attention in Dave Eggers’s 2000 autobiographical fiction A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the preface of which riffs on for almost 40 pages and includes—‘Rules and Suggestions for the Enjoyment of this Book’ and an ‘Incomplete Guide to Symbols and Metaphors’. Eggers pauses to confess that the title of his book could have been Memories of a Catholic Boyhood, and the postscript of the book, ‘Mistakes We Knew We Were Making’, gives full release to his predecessor’s ghost. If Eggers takes a moment to genuflect to the techniques and devices deployed in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, McCarthy herself is also happy to acknowledge the influences that give shape to her own memoir. She frames the cruelty of her guardians in terms set by the Victorian novel: ‘We were beaten all the time, as a matter of course, with the hairbrush across the bare legs for ordinary occasions, and with the razor strop across the bare bottom for special occasions, like the prize-winning. It was as though these ignorant people, at sea with four frightened children, had taken a Dickens novel – Oliver Twist, perhaps, or Nicholas Nickleby – for a navigation chart’ (1963, p. 57). George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) offers a model of selfrealization that is of special interest to McCarthy as a woman holding her own in male-dominated intellectual histories. She writes in Ideas and the Novel: ‘Mr Casaubon is no Pascal; his “Key to All Mythologies”, to which Dorothea plans to devote her young energies, is a figment of his fussy, elderly brain, an “idea” he once had for a multi-volume work which is simply gathering dust in his head. In a sense, this, like Emma, is an education novel: Dorothea has finally grown up when she learns to stop asking her husband about the progress he is making on his master work’ (1980, p. 109). McCarthy repeatedly deploys the form of address ‘To the Reader’ familiar in Eliot and other nineteenth-century novelists in asides, appeals, and exhortations designed to keep the reader onside. In one of the more improbable salutations to her Victorian foremother, she revisits the loss of her virginity: ‘Of the actual penetration, I remember nothing; it was as if I had been given chloroform. … What I am sure of is a single dreadful, dazed moment having to do with the condom. No, Reader, it did not break. The act is over; he has slid under the steering-wheel and is standing by his side of the car and holding up a transparent little pouch resembling isinglass…’ (1987, pp. 77–78, italics in original). The interpolation of this Victorian interjection serves the purpose of flagging up the progress of the text as artefact and draws heightened attention to her authorial interventions and McCarthy’s assertion of agency in owning

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her own story. McCarthy’s candid and playful acknowledgement of the processes of fictionalization at work in writing a woman’s life as well as its liberating potential is very much at home with the critical interests of key thinkers in the study of women and autobiography. In Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century, Sidonie Smith asks a series of vital questions regarding autobiography: at the scene of writing, each woman struggles with inherited autobiographical narratives constitutive of the official histories of the subject. When does she take up the sanctities of official narratives and when set them aside? … What are the pressure points she puts on traditional autobiography as it presses her into a specific kind of autobiographical subject? Where exactly does she find the narrative elasticities and subversive possibilities of the genre? What narrative counterpractices does she import into the text? (1993, p. 23)

The emphasis here on ‘narrative elasticities’ is especially relevant to McCarthy’s creation of a palimpsest in the telling of the story of her life, particularly when it comes to the ‘sanctities of official narratives’ and the social and moral codes they import. If there is a sustained refusal of anything that might look like stability in the progress of her narrative and a keen awareness of her own power to project versions of herself it is because it serves as a useful, self-protecting strategy of evasion that keeps her at a safe distance from limiting archetypes of Irish-American womanhood. It is difficult not to read this process of evasion as linked to the popular image of McCarthy as a professional contrarian. Her changing ideas about socialism and her relationship with feminism and Catholicism are marked by contradictions she seemingly embraces. Sally Barr Ebest suggests ‘Although McCarthy rejected the Catholic Church, she was unable to shake its tenets – a tendency characteristic of most Irish American women writers of this period. … Despite her anti-feminist statements, her characters represent conflicting tensions as they are pulled between the desire for sexual and intellectual freedom and their internalized Catholic sense of guilt’ (2013, p. 73). In contrast to Barr Ebest’s careful weighing up of these complexities, the other image of McCarthy as a kind of ‘Contrary Mary’ is one too often deployed as a diminishing tactic.

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Mary McCarthy and the Making of a New York Intellectual If McCarthy’s life writing is marked by turning away from received scripts of who she might be in the world, it is also characterized by an enthusiastic embracing of the freedom and authority conferred upon the intellectual. The idea of the intellectual looms large from the beginning of How I Grew. The early chapters of the book are dedicated to McCarthy’s high school and college years and preparation for her apotheosis into New York intellectual circles: ‘I was born as a mind during 1925, my bodily birth having taken place in 1912’ (1987, p. 1). Throughout How I Grew, McCarthy appears as a Caliban figure and books represent empowerment and a final break from the cruelty of her guardians: ‘When I was rescued by my Protestant grandfather from the evil spell of the house on Blaisdell Avenue, one of the immediate effects was the opening up of libraries to me’ (1987, p. 23). From this point, she offers a full account of her education courtesy of her uncle’s bookshelves and gaining access to the public library offers an extension of this new freedom and is a defining moment in the fashioning of her young adult identity: ‘I remember the feeling of power conferred on me by the small, ruled piece of cardboard still empty except for my name typed at the top and my signature below’ (1987, p. 30). Her high school years are remembered for her growing awareness of and interest in the abstract figure of the ‘intellectual’ and the freedom and liberty to pursue a life unfettered by the limits of convention: It was in public high school that I became conscious for the first time of a type of person that we would now call an intellectual. In those days the word for such people collectively was ‘intelligentsia,’ borrowed from the Russian and scarcely used any more, as though the Bolshevik Revolution, in eliminating the social grouping, had consigned the term to ‘the ashcan of history’ – a favorite receptacle. ‘Intelligentsia’ had included bohemians – artists and musicians, people like Pasternak’s parents – as well as narodniki, nihilists, teachers, doctors, sometimes combining several of these vocations in one person as in Turgenev’s Bazarov. It was the enlightened class in society. The characters typically found in Chekhov – army officers, country doctors, small landowners fond of musing on large ideas, students – all belong to the intelligentsia, whatever their occupation or lack of it. (1987, pp. 31–32, italics in original)

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The emphasis on ‘enlightenment’ and the promise of ‘musing on large ideas’ is a direct contradiction of McCarthy’s experience as a prisoner of her aunt and uncle’s mean and narrow vision and her rule-bound existence under their watch. Her involvement in school and college publications and even her later work for periodicals such as The Nation, The New Republic, and her key role in the relaunch of Partisan Review in the 1930s, might all be traced back to this formative experience of identifying the life of the intellectual as a liberal safe harbour from the impoverishment of her early years. She recalls a moment of recognition as a young woman: Today journalists are not considered intellectuals. But in 1925, in the West, high-school and college newspapers seemed secure stepping-stones to literary and intellectual fame. … Jack London, Frank Norris, Dreiser, Mencken, Ben Hecht, Burton Rascoe had blazed the trail to the city room or afield in the correspondent’s tent – in Seattle we did not know yet of ‘Bunny’ Wilson and Hemingway, who had been making their start in the same way. (1987, p. 35)

Two of those named would play a key role in McCarthy’s own life as a New York intellectual as she sent her early work to Mencken and was encouraged by his response and would later marry the eminent American critic Edmund ‘Bunny’ Wilson, although she remains coy about both associations in recounting her fascination with the very world within which she would later occupy a distinctive and formidable position. During her University years at the beginning of 1930s, McCarthy was a beneficiary of the carefully regulated educational style of Vassar College, an initiation into the sorority so vividly dramatized in The Group: A good deal of education consists of un-learning – the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve. This was emphatically true of a Vassar education: where other colleges aimed at development, bringing out what was already there like a seed waiting to sprout, Vassar remade a girl. Vassar was transformational. No girl, it was felt, could be the same after Kitchel’s English or Sandison’s Shakespeare, to say nothing of Lockwood’s Press. (1987, p. 203, italics in original)

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She casts her teachers and a select number of her fellow students as members of an intelligentsia in their own right and her Vassar experience was clearly her first opportunity to test her own ambitions amongst an intellectual elite. McCarthy was co-editor of the college magazine, Con Spirito, which was founded in 1933. The manifesto of the inaugural issue on file in the McCarthy Papers at Vassar College is a rallying call for innovative writing and promises to cultivate a new and vital intellectual culture at the University (Mary McCarthy Papers, 316.1). McCarthy’s editorial work at Vassar provided an important formative model—it was a foundation for who she would become and a focus for early anti-establishment resistance. Her 1951 essay on ‘The Vassar Girl’ for Holiday was uncompromising in its candid and sceptical view of the cultivation of the idea of the Vassar Girl as ‘a model of the American woman’ (1984, p. 148). McCarthy’s piece on ‘The Vassar Girl’, generated a good deal of editorial correspondence between McCarthy and Vassar College and rather more anxious exchanges between officials at the University (Mary McCarthy Papers, 18.6). If McCarthy went out of her way to scrutinize the myth of the Vassar Girl of the 1930s, she offers an even more vivid expose of the academic as intellectual and fraud in her 1953 novel The Groves of Academe. Henry Mulcahy, a scholar of Joyce, is introduced as follows: As a prophet of modern literature in a series of halfway-good colleges, he had gladly accepted an identification with the sacred untouchables of the modern martyrology – with Joyce, the obscure language teacher in Trieste; with tubercular Kafka in Prague, browbeaten by an authoritarian father; with the sickly, tisane-drenched Proust; with Marx, even, and his carbuncles; with Socrates and the hemlock. He carried an ash-plant stick in imitation of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus; subscribed to Science and Society, the Communist scholarly publication; and proclaimed the Irish, his ancestors, to be the ten lost tribes of Israel. (1964, p. 9, italics in original)

It is not surprising that the fact of his Irishness should be complicit in his disingenuous posturing. His exploitation of myths of Irishness stands in polar opposition to McCarthy’s own suspicion towards and active deflation of such fictions. Mulcahy turns the threatened termination of his appointment into a political conspiracy by setting himself up as the victim of a communist witch hunt. He further secures the sympathy and outrage

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of his students and colleagues by inventing a serious illness for his wife, and McCarthy is unrelenting in her disdain for his pretentiousness and lack of integrity. The real-life pyrotechnics that characterized McCarthy’s legal battle with Lillian Helman whom she sued for defamation, and her suffering at the hands of other critics, most notably Normal Mailer but also Alfred Kazin, who published a series of character assassinations in print, risk overshadowing the enormity and range of McCarthy’s achievements, as she became one of the mystical creatures she had speculated about in her youth—an intellectual. This record of achievement encompasses publications such as Hanoi (1968) and Vietnam (1968) that offer an account of her time in Vietnam and see her work through her own thinking about the Vietnam War, her political thesis on Watergate, as well as political fictions such as Cannibals and Missionaries (1979) set in modern Iran. Further to this, there is the art critic McCarthy who offers an appreciation of Italian art in The Stones of Florence (1956), in addition to her critical study of the novel in Ideas and the Novel (1980), and numerous interventionist critical articles on literature, art, and culture, not to mention the epistolary history of the public intellectual in the making in her extended correspondence with Hannah Arendt. McCarthy’s concern with the public visibility of the intellectual is a palpable and recurring preoccupation in her fiction, as well as in her life. Amongst the character types encountered by Mary Sargant, a version of the young McCarthy, in her first work of fiction, The Company She Keeps (1942), including the ‘Genial Host’ and the ‘Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit’, appears a satirical ‘Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man’: The year he came down from Yale (where he could have been Bones but wouldn’t), he was worried about Foster and Ford and the Bonus Marchers and the Scottsboro Boys. He had also just taken a big gulp of Das Kapital and was going around telling people about how he felt afterwards. … Al remarked to his wife that maybe it would be a good idea (didn’t she think?) to lay in a stock of durable consumers’ goods – in case, oh, in case of inflation, or revolution, or anything like that. … This was the phenomenon known as the dissemination of ideas. (2011, p. 128)

Her second novel, The Oasis (1949), amplifies her satirical reading of the New York Intellectual, set as it is in a utopian colony it draws heavily on

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the circles that McCarthy moved in while A Charmed Life (1955) is set in a community of artists and writers. Her own intellectual achievements were those of the polymath. McCarthy’s biographer Carol Brightman compiles a list of McCarthy’s professions. She begins by noting that in the 1930s: An intellectual young woman had to be careful to remain alert to her status as interloper, particularly if she didn’t care to be mistaken for one of the boys, or appear masculine, which Mary emphatically was not. Even more dangerous was to seem to have it all, when one was in reality only at the beginning of a polymorphous career as a femme fatale, a critic of theatre and literature, as well as of society, a satirist and novelist, an art historian, a war correspondent, and a memoirist of the first rank. (1992, p. 148)

This was to be a dilemma not easily resolved—Elaine Showalter in ‘Laughing Medusa: Feminist Intellectuals at the Millennium’ writes: The female intellectual is far from dying, but she is camouflaged by her gender. Indeed, the category of the intellectual has been almost as invisible to feminists as to male theorists. The women’s movement tends to be embarrassed and defensive about its intellectuals, whether because of the activist values and anti-elitist pressures of feminist thought or because discussions of intellectuals have been so sterile, dispassionate and disembodied. (2000, p. 132)

She goes on to identify categories by which the woman intellectual has historically been imagined: Cassandra, The Feminist Medusa, and The Dark Lady. She concludes: ‘The idea of the Dark Lady as the only girl in the gang, fighting off competition from her rivals, is now being preserved by Camille Paglia, who has compared her “hot eye” to Mary McCarthy’s cold one, and gone after Sontag in a “one-sided feud”’ (2000, p. 137). Showalter’s characterization of McCarthy as a lone woman amongst male intellectuals is dramatized in the table of contents of the political magazine Partisan Review. A leading figure in the relaunch of Partisan Review in 1937, McCarthy took her place alongside James T. Farrell, Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, and Pablo Picasso in the first issue. She would go on to survive a claustrophobic marriage to the same Edmund Wilson, one of the most eminent American critics in the period. Accounts of their marriage and her own dramatization of her relationship with Wilson, which appears in often thin disguise in her fiction,

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show the woman writer coming to consciousness under the watch of a formidable and dangerous Pygmalion. Hugh Wilford in The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (1995) paints a vivid picture of how central McCarthy was to New York intellectual life in the 1940s and 1950s, a welcome corrective to a sometimes unhelpful fascination with the granted colourful and fascinating details of her private life, her complicated marriages, and forays into public warfare with other notable thinkers and critics of the day. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams’s Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Postwar Intellectual (2004) is the only full-length study of McCarthy in context and offers an ambitious and illuminating exposure of the politically engaged McCarthy. It opens with a precise account of her changing political affiliations from the 1930s to the 1960s: Mary McCarthy is not in but of the world of New York intellectuals, a group of scholars and critics associated with the anti-Stalinist journal, Partisan Review, in the 1930s and 40s. As a Catholic woman from the Northwest, she remains on the periphery of the largely Jewish, maledominated New York intellectual scene. This marginalized identity shapes McCarthy’s satiric vision and makes her a consummate critic of liberalism from within. Neither a Marxist nor a proponent of literary modernism, McCarthy scrutinizes the movement among intellectuals from Marxism in the thirties toward revisionist liberalism and liberal anti-Communism in the fifties. From her tendency toward anarcho-pacifism in the forties to her stand with the non-Communist left in the fifties and her outspoken opposition to the Vietnam war in the sixties, McCarthy stands apart from many of her contemporaries. … Through the art of satire, McCarthy questions certain liberal assumptions and redefines the role of the intellectual and the place of the woman intellectual in postwar American culture. (2004, p. 1)

Hugh Wilford notes that the New York Intellectuals were themselves a marginalized group: ‘Most of the intellectuals were the children of Jewish Eastern European immigrants, reared in the ghetto districts of New York City’s neighbourhoods during the 1910s and 1920s. Hence they had enormous social obstacles to surmount merely to gain admission to, let along achieve status in, American society’ (1995, p. 1). McCarthy was, then, with Fuchs Abrams’s and Wilford’s contextualizing histories in mind, an interloper in an already marginalized group. The multifaceted nature of McCarthy’s writing life and the sometimes seemingly self-contradictory nature of her progress is worth examining

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closely. The Mary McCarthy who went to war with Simone De Beauvoir also published The Group (1954), the novel that anticipates and even outruns what would become the literature of the women’s moment. In a letter to McCarthy, one dispatch in what was clearly an ongoing and extended correspondence, James T. Farrell cuts to the heart of the matter in lamenting the popularity of Erica Jong and insisting on the far greater significance of McCarthy’s own work (Letter from James T. Farrell to Mary McCarthy, February 4, 1975). McCarthy’s insistence on reading volatility or contrariness (a crime charged against her by so many of her critics) as a positive weapon in life’s artillery can be traced back to a formative moment in her childhood, one that she pauses to celebrate in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which includes a scene in which an 11-year-old McCarthy is indicted by a teacher for being ‘Just like Lord Byron, brilliant but unsound’ (1963, p. 83). She recalls: ‘I had never felt so flattered in my life. … Madame Barclay’s pronouncement, which I kept repeating to myself under my breath, had for us girls a kind of final and majestic certainty’ (1963, p. 83). What emerges from McCarthy’s supremely self-conscious experiments in life writing and self-fashioning as an intellectual might be characterized as contributing to the reclamation of a missing history of sophistication in the story of Irish women in America—read together her memoirs represent a very determined pursuit of the story of her own intellectual coming of age, one that is rehearsed over and over in her fiction and life writing. A file of writing fragments in the Mary McCarthy archive that date to the Vassar years includes ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (c. 1930), a pastiche of Oscar Wilde’s story of the same name. Wilde is name checked in How I Grew (1987, p. 57) with the same hauteur that she reserves for some of her other most eminent predecessors. These Wildean ur-texts seem significant for a writer whose public persona was of such interest and so often a cause for consternation at every point in her writing career. Ultimately, the politics of McCarthy’s life writing remains a politics of resistance. Her first work of fiction was published in 1942 the same year the New York City Irish Echo reported on the particular success of the annual Irish Feis held at Fordham University’s Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx. In a newspaper report in the Archives of Irish America at New York University, an enthusiastic journalist writes with the kind of ebullience that chimes with the sentimental timbre of Donn Byrne:

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Despite the threatening weather, the 1942 Feis sponsored by the United Irish Counties Association was brought to a successful conclusion on the beautiful campus of Fordham University last Sunday. For the most part everything panned out as per the blue print, save for the speech-making, which was about one hour too long. Truly was it an Irish day in New York, and fitting too that so many sons and daughters of the Gael should tread the sod of Fordham campus where so many of Ireland’s illustrious sons and daughters have trod since the University was first opened a little over a century ago. (1942, New York City Irish Echo)

There is a telling footnote, one that appears rather late in the account: ‘While handing out bouquets, let us not forget the mothers of the children whose contribution to the success of the Feis was great indeed’ (p. 48). It is safe to assume that Mary McCarthy, herself a mother since 1938, did not attend the Fordham Feis in 1942. 1942 was also the year in which she published The Company She Keeps , a template for the coming of age of the publicly visible intellectual woman. It is the original version of the narrative that would become a dominant preoccupation in her writing life, and so on that June day she was otherwise engaged inventing a new and heretofore untold story in the annals of Irish America.

Works Cited Archival Material Mary McCarthy Archive, Vassar College Material Relating to Vassar College. 18.4–18.5—Research for ‘The Vassar Girl’ (Holiday, May 1951). 18.6—Correspondence with Vassar College re: ‘The Vassar Girl’. Folder 316.1—Writing done at Vassar. Inaugural Issue of Con Spirito Vol. 1 No. 1, February 1933. Folder 316.1—Writing done at Vassar. ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (dates to the 1930s). Personal Correspondence 193.16—Farrell, James T., 1967–1979, n.d. Letter from James T. Farrell to Mary McCarthy, September 26, 1978. Letter from Mary McCarthy to James T. Farrell, October 12, 1978. Letter from James T. Farrell to Mary McCarthy, February 4, 1975.

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Reviews and Interviews 390.1 1962. ‘Interview—Mary McCarthy’. The Art of Fiction XXVII. The Paris Review, 27, 58–94. Archives of Irish America, Tamiment Library, New York University ‘Fordham University Campus Feis Draws Record Gathering’. June 20, 1942, New York City Irish Echo, Box 3, Folder 19.

Primary Material Eggers, D. (2000). A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. London: Picador. McCarthy, M. (1963 [1957]). Memories of Catholic Girlhood. Harmondsworth: Penguin. McCarthy, M. (1964 [1953]). The Groves of Academe. London: Panther. McCarthy, M. (1980). Ideas and the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. McCarthy, M. (1983 [1955]). A Charmed Life. New York: Harvest. McCarthy, M. (1984 [1951]). ‘The Vassar Girl’. In M. Rainbolt & J. Fleetwood (Eds.), On the Contrary: Essays by Men and Women (pp. 144–155). Albany: State University of New York Press. McCarthy, M. (1987). How I Grew. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. McCarthy, M. (1993). Mary McCarthy: Intellectual Memoirs, New York—1936– 1938. New York: Harvest. McCarthy, M. (2011 [1942]). The Company She Keeps. London: Virago. Powell, D. (1995). The Diaries of Powell 1931–1965 (T. Page, Ed.). Vermont: Steerforth Press.

Secondary Material Barr Ebest, S. (2008). ‘Mary McCarthy: Too Smart to Be Sentimental’. In S. Barr Ebest & K. McInerney (Eds.), Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers (pp. 27–51). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Barr Ebest, S. (2013). The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Writers. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Brightman, C. (1992). Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and her World. New York: Harcourt Brace. Casey, D. J., & Rhodes, Robert E. (2006). ‘The Tradition of Irish-American Writers: The Twentieth Century’. In M. R. Casey & J. J. Lee (Eds.), Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (pp. 649–662). New York: New York University Press.

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Cleary, J. (2014). ‘Irish American Modernisms’. In J. Cleary (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (pp. 174–192). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dowd, C. (2011). The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature. London: Routledge. Fuchs Abrams, S. (2004). Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Postwar Intellectual. New York: Peter Lang. Keyser, C. (2011 [2010]). Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lynch, C. (2009). Irish Autobiography: Stories of Self in the Narrative of a Nation. Oxford: Peter Lang. Showalter, E. (2000). ‘Laughing Medusa: Feminist Intellectuals at the Millennium’. Women: A Cultural Review, 1 (2), 131–138. Smith, S. (1993). Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wilford, H. (1995). The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Irish-American Immigrant Histories and Readings of Exile in the Writing of Maeve Brennan

In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941–1942), a play that holds a prized place in the canon of Irish-American literature, the personal dramas of the Tyrone family are played out alongside another less visible history, that of their Irish immigrant servants who move quietly in and out of view. For a dramatic work that is central to the literary and cultural history of Irish America, Long Day’s Journey into Night is not always kind to the more recent Irish immigrant to America, particularly in its repeated reference to ‘Shanty Mick’ and ‘Bridget’, figures rooted in a familiar history of caricaturing the Irish. As discussed in Chapter 1, the place of the Irish ‘Bridget’—the servant girl who at one point in American history was a near-ubiquitous presence in the homes of the American middle and upper-middle classes—has received careful attention in recent studies of Irish-American history and culture. Indeed, the role fashioned for this figure in representations of the Irish servant reveals a great deal about the domestic culture that she inhabited, as well as the prevailing attitudes towards the Irish woman immigrant in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter is interested in how Maeve Brennan—one of Irish America’s most important and recently recovered literary voices—takes up Bridget’s cause in ways that expose the cultural conditions and prejudices that led to the caricaturing of the Irish domestic servant, and empowers the beleaguered figure of Bridget by making her a source of subversive and disruptive power in the middle-class American home. In a series of linked short stories © The Author(s) 2021 E. McWilliams, Irishness in North American Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1_3

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published in The New Yorker in the 1950s, Brennan offers an alternative story of Bridget. Central to Brennan’s satirical exposure of the hypocrisy of bourgeois America is a refashioning of the figure of Bridget in ways that enact an implosion of the original stereotype and the prejudices that gave rise to it; Brennan’s Irish domestic servant holds just enough signifiers in common with the caricature of Bridget disseminated by American popular culture to identify her with this most troubling stereotype. In addition to examining how Brennan enters into a vigorous contest with this image of Irish femininity, the second half of this chapter will address another vital project in Maeve Brennan’s writing history. As well as showing a sustained concern for real migrant histories and the lived experience of Irish women migrants, Brennan engages with the more abstract but equally powerful paradigm of exile in Irish literature in her short stories and, most strikingly, in her ‘Long-Winded Lady’ essays for The New Yorker. As explored in the introduction to this book, exile carries significant ballast in writing by and about the Irish; Brennan’s work evidences a self-reflexive engagement with such a cultural inheritance— as well as signs of an interest in fashioning it anew. Her work speaks in revealing ways to her own distinctive position as both a woman writer and a self-consciously transatlantic one.

Irish Domestic Servants and Middle-Class America in Maeve Brennan’s Writing Angela Bourke’s biography of Maeve Brennan, Homesick at The New Yorker (2004), has been all-important in drawing a new level of attention to Brennan’s life and work, and Bourke is keenly interested in the significance of the Irish domestic servant in Brennan’s writing, going so far at one point to suggest of the stories in The Rose Garden that: Had she been describing African-American domestics; had she herself come to The New Yorker from Antigua, say, as Jamaica Kincaid did some years later, rather than from Ireland, readers might have had a different understanding of the relationships she portrayed between the homeowners of Herbert’s Retreat and their maids. As it is, most critics seem to have read these stories as shallow and inconsequential, with the maids as merely comic characters. (2004, p. 182)

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Here, Bourke identifies something crucial to the politics of Brennan’s writing. Although, as I will examine later, Brennan, in her writing and in her life, came to represent a uniquely Irish model of sophistication in New York in the early decades of the twentieth century, her work demonstrates a sustained and sensitive awareness of divisions of class in American society and beyond. Abigail Palko’s ‘Out of Home in the Kitchen: Maeve Brennan’s Herbert’s Retreat Stories’ offers a comprehensive account of the publication history of the stories and of how the stories are framed by Brennan’s close association with the literary and editorial culture of The New Yorker. She argues that Brennan’s ‘intimate knowledge of the maids’ Irish culture’ (2007, p. 76) is the thing that allows her to write so powerfully of their lived experience and suggests that ‘The increasingly successful redistribution of power to the maids in the stories not only indicates their appropriation of American values, but also simultaneously projects Brennan’s own assimilation and registers her discomfort with American values’ (2007, p. 77). Given the concern with the lives of Irish maids in her work, Brennan must have been especially interested in an editorial published by Harper’s Bazaar in 1944—she was a copywriter at the magazine at the time—and a four-page article entitled ‘The Domestic Problem’ cannot have passed her by. The article raises questions about the need for domestic servants and characterizes the same as a pre-war bourgeois indulgence. The article is determined to lift the lid on the experience of domestic servants and of particular interest to Brennan must have been a short piece by the lively and outspoken Irish woman, Mae Morrissy, archly entitled ‘Your Obedient Servant – A Servant of the Old School Looks Forward to a New Day for Domestics’. Mae Morrissy delivers a striking indictment of the servant system and delivers a number of hair-raising tales about the mistreatment of servants, including the story of a woman of the house whose sole concern when her butler dropped dead was that his body not be allowed to lie too long in the pantry where he had collapsed (1944, p. 90). The remainder of the article is an account of the middle-class employer that reveals them to be both infant and tyrant—foolish and solipsistic at best or malicious and cruel at worst. She goes on to offer an eviscerating account of the view from the kitchen that would be at very much at home in one of Brennan’s servant stories:

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Did you say ‘share’? What’s ‘shared’ in even a lovely home when you see it only from the kitchen? To be sure you can take a magazine from the table and go to your room with it. But can you entertain your friends there? … Ellen, a little old biddy I know who came from Ireland to seek her fortune here in the land of plenty years ago, says the only comfortable chair she’s sat on in sixteen years was at the movies or on the train. (1944, p. 90)

Morrissy’s polemic gathers pace and turns into a Marxist critique that ends with a rallying cry for servants to unionize so that they might demand better terms and conditions for work. She expresses particular anger at the erasure of the personal life of the servant and the disrespect shown towards servant labour (1944, p. 91). Perhaps most interesting in terms of the different forms of revenge executed by Brennan’s servants is Morrissy’s account of how domestic workers fight back: Many times I’ve seen a cook sprinkle washing soda instead of baking soda in a pot of boiling vegetables to give them the crisp green look. I’ve seen cooks cut off a few slices of breast of fowl and throw the rest of it in the garbage can. … I have heard of a girl who, employed in one family for ten years, in their absence got married and after a wedding party in the dining room with the best linen and silver, put on her mistress’ negligee and used the master bedroom for a bridal chamber. (1944, p. 91)

‘The Domestic Problem’ places the figure of the Irish servant between the covers of Harper’s Bazaar and is a reminder of what Palko diagnoses as the ‘discomfort’ Brennan must have felt at having her compatriot presented as an object of curiosity for the magazine’s readership— although the conviction and zeal of Mae Morrissy’s manifesto against the mistreatment of servants is both stirring and impressive. The same unease is at the heart of Brennan’s two-pronged assault in defence of the long-suffering Irish servant; she deploys some of the characteristics of the Bridget stereotype against those who would exert control over her and makes her a dangerous and subversive presence capable of wreaking havoc in the American domestic sphere. Bridget, so long a spectacle for the amusement of others, proves capable of making a spectacle of her employers. If Bronwen Walter characterizes the position of the Irish woman emigrant in relation to Britain and America as that of the ‘outsider inside’ (2001, p. 64) in Brennan’s stories, the immigrant domestic servant is an invading Trojan horse who is accepted inside the fortress of

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Herbert’s Retreat, but turns out to be a powerfully unsettling and even potentially threatening presence. Far from simply serving up trivial vignettes from the suburbs, Brennan’s imagining of the Irish Bridget responds to an all-too-real history in the reception of working-class Irish women in American popular culture. Brennan keeps this firmly in sight in her characterization of the mistress of the house at Herbert’s Retreat. If, in New York, as Walter argues, ‘the Irish reached “class-structure parity” with “WASP” hegemony by the early twentieth century’ (2001, p. 56), Brennan was still very alert to the earlier trials of Bridget when she came to write stories such as ‘The View from the Kitchen’, ‘The Anachronism’, ‘The Divine Fireplace’, ‘The Servants’ Dance’, and ‘The Bride’. Of these, the first four stories exploit the comic value of Bridget, in ways that turn the tables of power, but ‘The Bride’ stands apart as being almost Joycean in its serious exploration of the paralysis suffered by the Irish woman servant. Like Eveline, petrified on the Dublin quays in Joyce’s eponymous story, or Little Chandler’s terrible recognition of his own powerlessness in ‘A Little Cloud’, the main character of ‘The Bride’, who is about to leave her employers to marry her German fiancé, undergoes similar agonies. But in this, too, Brennan deals in historical and material realities. Miller, Doyle, and Kelleher, in a discussion of domestic service and the unmarried Irish woman, foreground the economic structures that bound the Irish woman servant, making the choice between her life in the middle-class American home and marriage in the world outside of it an impossible one: Given the intimate connections among property, security and female selfidentity in rural Irish and Victorian American cultures alike, perhaps it would not be surprising if, over time, steady employment and capital accumulation became ends in themselves for many Irish women abroad, especially for domestic servants who feared those achievements – as well as the genteel standards imbibed in their employers’ households – might be forfeited, at least temporarily, through marriage to working-class Irish Americans. (1995, p. 58)

Brennan’s ‘The Bride’ (1953) opens with Margaret Casey alone, in a house shut down for the summer: ‘The phone was shut off, the refrigerator was disconnected, the windows all were locked, and all the beds,

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except hers, stripped for the summer’ (2001, p. 153). This is fitting given that, according to Hasia R. Diner, the Irish woman servant was usually imagined firmly within the confines of her employer’s home and rarely figured as having any function or autonomy outside of it (1983, pp. xii–xiv). The house is an empty, inhospitable place and we encounter Margaret as she is effectively being evicted from her marginal space ‘on the top floor’ (2001, p. 153). Having committed to marry a man she can only bring herself to ‘like’, she finds herself utterly trapped and alone. The story takes care to contextualize Margaret Casey’s quandary in relation to the previously mentioned difficulties of navigating class boundaries for the domestic servant long exposed to middle-class norms, but not guaranteed the means to secure them for herself in a life independent of her employers. The story emphasizes the seriousness of Margaret’s dilemma, by presenting aspirational fantasy as the only consolation available to her: But when she went in, when they were having breakfast, and gave her notice, the sight of Mrs. Smith’s stricken face was too much for her, and to ease her guilt she blurted out that she was going to marry Carl, and settle down, and stop working, and have a home of her own. Mr. and Mrs. Smith were astonished and delighted at her good fortune, and their pleasure made her so generous that she embroidered the case a little, describing the house (not yet built) that Carl hoped to buy, and telling about his plan to go into business with his brother someday, not right away. (2001, p. 154)

That the Irish woman servant’s employers should be the all-American Mr and Mrs. Smith is no surprise, but what is revealing is that Margaret feels obliged to offer a reassuring picture to her middle-class employers of her life outside their walls, one that promises an upward move on the social scale. In reality, the only possible escape available to her is through desperate wish-fulfilment: ‘If only God had given Margaret the strength to wait a while longer, something might have turned up. She might have won the Sweep, or some old lady might have turned up who wanted a companion to travel to Ireland with her, or somebody – her uncle, maybe – might have died and left her a legacy’ (2001, p. 156). Her imminent marriage threatens to be the final separation from home, as symbolized in the fact that ‘she had nothing old and familiar from Ireland to bring with her into her new home’ (2001, p. 157). Margaret’s life in the present is defined by memories of past disappointments: the favouritism shown to her sister—she had to leave and take up domestic

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service in America to enable her sister’s marriage—and her childish dream of getting a ride in a charabanc, long promised by her parents, but never delivered. She harbours a revenge fantasy of winning out over her sister by ‘saving up enough to go back and start a little business, enough to support her mother and herself, or to go back with a comfortable nest egg and find some good man to marry’ (2001, p. 155). It is this scene, in which she is suspended between two equally undesirable futures, that leads to a moment of crisis that would be at home in Joyce’s Dubliners . When he calls to the empty house, Margaret’s fiancé arrives ‘by the back door’ (2001, p. 157), through the servants’ entrance, in a reminder of the fixity of the social hierarchy that conspires against them: ‘He threw his head back and stretched his arms wide, clowning in his unaccustomed happiness, but she was not touched by his emotion. She stared down at him in astonishment and fear. … She wanted to scream at him that he was beneath her, and that she despised him, and that she was not bound to him yet and never would be bound to him’ (2001, p. 158), but instead she retreats into powerlessness. The kind of ‘astonishment and fear’ conjured up by Brennan in this moment is imported directly from the emotional vocabulary of Dubliners (1914); it recalls Eveline, ‘passive, like a helpless animal’ (1992, p. 35), too petrified to act, in Joyce’s eponymous story, or Little Chandler in ‘A Little Cloud’, who is stricken at the realization that the bonds of fatherhood and family make him ‘a prisoner for life’ (1992, p. 80). If, in ‘The Bride’, Margaret Casey harbours fantasies of revenge on crimes against her, a number of other stories featuring domestic servants hinge on revenge plots where the tables of power are reversed. It is worth briefly revisiting the popular and inherited versions of Bridget and the contexts in which she appeared, as the same is important to understanding the dynamics of Brennan’s satire.

Avenging ‘Bridget’: Servant Insurrections in Maeve Brennan’s Short Stories Set in 1912, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night presents Bridget in uncompromised form. Mrs. Tyrone complains that ‘Bridget is so lazy. And so sly. She begins telling me about her relatives so I can’t get a word in edgeways and scold her’ (1991, p. 13), while her counterpart Cathleen is a variation on the theme: ‘She is a buxom Irish peasant, in her early twenties, with a red-cheeked comely face, black hair and blue

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eyes – amiable, ignorant, clumsy, and possessed by a dense, well-meaning stupidity’ (1991, p. 27). The only defence made of their failure to assimilate and adapt to American cultural norms is revealing: ‘It’s unreasonable to ask Bridget or Cathleen to act as if this was a home. They know it isn’t as well as we know it. It never has been and it never will be’ (1991, p. 41). In The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction (2000), Charles Fanning describes the play as crucial to ‘the breaking of the stage Irish mold’ (2000, p. 4). And yet the fact that a successful, if privately tortured, Irish-American family should cast the more recent Irish immigrant servant as an outsider in this way, and resort to the crudest stereotype of ‘Bridget’ and ‘Mick’, is telling of what the Irish domestic servant was up against in seeking to find a foothold in American society; Brennan’s writing takes some of its cues from the same. In Brennan’s ‘The View from the Kitchen’ (1953), we are introduced to the enclosed, self-contained community of Herbert’s Retreat: a snug community of forty or so houses that cluster together on the east bank of the Hudson thirty miles above New York City. Some of the houses are small and some are middle-sized. No two are alike, and because they are separated by trees, hedges, wooden fences, or untidy vestiges of ancient woods, and because of the vagaries of the terrain, they all seem to be on different levels. Some of the houses certainly reach much higher into the air than others, because a few roofs can be glimpsed from the highway, and in wintertime, when the trees are bare, an occasional stretch of wall is disclosed to passing motorists, but otherwise the community is secluded. (2001, p. 3)

In the opening pages, Brennan takes pains to sketch the one-upmanship and petty rivalry of the inhabitants of the compound, for whom the ‘view of the river’ is the most absolute statement of status: ‘in every house the residents have contrived and plotted and schemed and paid to bring the river as intimately as possible into their lives’ (2001, p. 3). This conceit is carried throughout the stories in The Rose Garden as almost all of the stories set in Herbert’s Retreat circle at some point over the residents’ obsession with their view of the Hudson. It also reappears in ‘The Anachronism’ (1954), where a defining daily ritual of one of the characters is to sit in the window of the New York gentleman’s club that refused to admit his grandfather, and look out onto the street below. Brennan deploys the rhetoric of Herbert’s Retreat against its inhabitants in a brilliant exposure of the snobbery that rules the community: ‘The life there

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is casual and informal, but gracious. A good deal of quiet entertaining is done. All the residents know each other very well or fairly well. There are no strangers. Living there is rather like living in a club’ (2001, p. 5). But Bridget proves to be the exception to the rule in spite of the closed-off, defensive architecture of the community; she is a stranger and an intrusive, anxious-making presence at that. One of the domestic servants, who has a recurring role in the stories, ‘Bridie’, is described in exaggerated corpulent terms: ‘Bridie who liked heat, had planted her broad self on a chair beside the stove’ (2001, p. 5). More generally, the women servants in the stories in The Rose Garden prove adept at ‘planting themselves’ in ways that unsettle the domestic environs and social world of their employers. ‘The View from the Kitchen’ is interested in an altogether different ‘view’ to that which defines the social standing of Herbert’s Retreat dwellers, but one that exerts equal power in Brennan’s narrative. In ‘The Servants’ Dance’ (1954), the same watchful gaze is used to effect as the maid keeps her employers in her sights: ‘the beady Irish eyes of Bridie followed their movements with malevolent attention’ (1954, p. 115). The ‘view from the kitchen’ is the turning of Bridie’s gaze on her employers as they are framed, trapped even, unknowingly offering themselves up for her scrutiny and analysis: Them and their view. You’d think it was a diamond necklace, the way they carry on about their view. Mrs. Giegler is just the same. The minute a person walks into the house, it’s me view this and me view that, and come and look at me view, and dragging them over to the window and out on to the porch in every sort of weather. Damp, that’s all I have to say about it. Damp. (2001, p. 10, italics in original)

The pseudo-elegant speech of Herbert’s Retreat is here invaded by Bridie’s Hiberno-English intonations, as it is in a moment in ‘The Servants’ Dance’ in which Bridie takes powerful satisfaction in mimicking the orders of the woman of the house: Bridie (Charles liked to refer to her as ‘that splendid Irishwoman of Leona’s’) clumped in with the tray. The glare of pure hatred that was her characteristic expression descended in full force on Charles’s silky gray head, but he was indifferent and she was silent, respectfully handing him his orange juice, pouring his coffee and his hot milk (Sye-mull-tane-eusssly, Bridie, she said to herself, the coffee and the milk sye-mull-tane-eusssly), and departing. (2001, p. 112)

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In ‘The View from the Kitchen’, Bridie relays the lengths that Leona Harkey goes to secure her view of the river and establish herself as a high-ranking member of Herbert’s Retreat while all the while turning her penetrating, voyeuristic gaze on the woman of the house. Judging, stealthy Bridie is especially keen to indulge in grotesque details of Leona’s first husband’s death: ‘He was all over the windshield when they found him, and the front seat, and bits of him on the hood – blood, hair, everything. Ugh. I often wonder did they get both his eyes to bury him’ (2001, p. 7). This cheerful account of his death is just one revealing moment in the servants’ narrative of the woman of the house’s sexual and romantic history, one that lingers in particular over her emotional faithlessness. Again Bridie borrows from Herbert Retreat’s vocabulary of mutual admiration: He’s her admirer. He admires her, and she admires him. They admire each other. Oh, they talk a lot about their admiring, but you should have seen the way he hotfooted it out of the picture when Mr Finch was killed. She was all up and ready to marry him, of course. She thought sure she was going to be Mrs. God. But Mr. God was no match for her. (2001, p. 8, italics in original)

Brennan often confers knowing italics on the Irish woman servant, not that further evidence is needed that Bridget has the full measure of her employers as she provides an itemized list of their personal failures and weaknesses. The most telling of these and the one that most explicitly inverts the associations too often imposed on Bridget emerges in response to Bridget’s visceral disgust at Leona’s new husband’s job: ‘A credit manager. Oh my God, the lowest of the low. A credit manager. And to think I’m going to have to put his dinner in front of him. Oh, the dirty thing’ (2001, p. 12). That he is referred to as a ‘dirty thing’ contains a nice inversion of meaning as the same slur was part of the vocabulary that saw Bridget as slovenly and unclean. The ambitious capitalist is, then, assigned the very slur that once afflicted the Irish domestic servant. ‘The Anachronism’ expands Brennan’s class politics beyond her avenging of the Irish Bridget by crossing national boundaries and antipathies to recruit the English maid to her cause. Mrs Conroy, her embarrassing Irish mother, is an obstreperous, unwanted presence. The story pays particular attention to Liza’s efforts to contain her mother, to keep her out of sight, much as she builds a bookshelf with sliding panels

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to keep her mother’s bookkeeping ledgers out of sight: ‘The old lady’s only treasured possession was a set of nineteen shabby account books, records painstakingly kept by her dead husband, who had run a small stationery shop in Brooklyn’ (2001, p. 18). Liza’s mother is an unfortunate reminder of her lower-middle-class Irish origins and spoils her perfect home. Liza Frye has fastidious eating habits, loathes the word ‘appetite’, is controlled and controlling and ‘a rigid housekeeper’. More than this, in a move typical of Brennan’s playfulness, the opening of the story suggests that the rigidity maintained in household management is matched in the conjugal relations between Mr. Frye and Mrs. Frye: At night they slept in matching white silk pajamas. Their bed, wide and low, was as big as small field. Actually it wasn’t a double bed at all but twin beds locked together by the legs and made up with separate sets of sheets. The sheets, like the pajamas, were fresh every night. One of Liza’s favorite words was ‘immaculate’. (2001, p. 16)

She recruits an entirely different model of the domestic servant to the Irish Bridget to help manage her mother in the form of the archetypal English servant and is inspired to do so, tellingly, by an article written by one of the residents for the Herbert’s Retreat circular, The Flyaway. It is impossible not to read the gossip of the self-published magazine as a scathing reference to the magazine culture that previously led the caricaturing of servants, including Irish domestic servants. But the truest answer to the problem of Bridget comes in the form of Betty Trim, the maid imported from London to shore up Liza’s standing in the community and to be a foil for what she imagines as the grotesqueries of her ageing Irish mother. Rather than offering a guarantee of fastidiousness, ‘High-buttoned boots, black lisle stockings, long black dress – apalca, I suppose – apron like an English nanny’s’ (2001, p. 26), Betty Trim brings something altogether different into the house. Liza sets her sights on Betty Trim, to prove a point and to guarantee her place in the domestic pecking order of Herbert’s Retreat, and the English maid is shown to be both shrewd and exacting in negotiating the terms of her employment: ‘She needn’t lift a finger unless she wants to, except to serve tea’ (2001, p. 28). Unexpectedly, Betty Trim joins forces with her mother in a manner that catches Liza by surprise. Her mother is, to Liza, an ailing, troublesome creature, who embodies the characteristics associated with Bridget: gauche, uncomprehending, and illiterate of

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the values and aspirations of Herbert’s Retreat. The story shares a feature with a number of the others that see the Bridget character disturb the silence of the domestic space with raucous laughter. In ‘The View from the Kitchen’, ‘emboldened, Agnes thumbed her nose at the window, and immediately collapsed on the table in a heap of shuddering, feeble giggles, with her hands covering her face. After a second, she moved one finger aside and peered up to see how Bridie was taking this demonstration. Bridie winked at her’ (2001, p. 15), while in ‘The Anachronism’, perhaps most strikingly of all, laughter is a subversive, invasive presence: ‘In the living room, sitting in sepulchral silence, Tom and Liza were first startled, then appalled, by the sudden screeches that came at them from the kitchen – screeches of laughter that was rude and unrestrained, and that renewed itself even as it struck and shattered against the walls of the kitchen’ (2001, p. 38). The echoing animal laughter that invades the domestic space and ‘shatters’ against the walls of the house is an echo of other threats posed by the subversive power of Bridget in these stories. Brennan’s interest in hierarchies of power finds a different expression in drafts of an unpublished article entitled ‘Pledges at the Whitehouse’, on file in The New Yorker Records at the New York Public Library, in which she responds to a proposed confidentiality pledge to be signed by White House employees (‘Pledges at the Whitehouse’, p. 1). In this intervention in the American class system, her sympathies lie very clearly with Mrs. Kennedy’s private secretaries and domestic staff at the White House. Brennan’s charged response is all the more significant because the presidential family in question was, of course, the most iconic of Irish-American families, but it is also important because it is, in part, a reflection on her own father’s diplomatic role in Washington in the 1930s and 1940s. It reveals, on Brennan’s part, a striking consciousness and articulation of class difference that is presented as all-important in the debate about women’s rights, but shows a particular concern for how the proposed honour pledge will bear on servants and the women ‘downstairs’. In Homesick at The New Yorker, Bourke notes some of the similarities between Herbert’s Retreat and Snedens Landing, the gated community that Brennan lived in with her husband, St. Clair McKelway. She makes a passing reference to the fact that Betty Friedan, who was a neighbour at Snedens Landing, had started her research for The Feminine Mystique while she lived there (2004, p. 195). Brennan’s feminism, and her defence of a degraded underclass, kicks Friedan’s anxiety over

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the ‘problem that has no name’ into touch while, at the same time, offering some insight into how characters such as Leona continue to chase an always out-of-reach bourgeois domestic perfection. Although fully aware of her privileged status as the daughter of a Washington diplomat, Bourke argues that Brennan was not completely immune to a certain kind of objectifying interest in her Irishness: ‘Wealthy American society would have been equally exotic to Irish Catholic women of all classes, and even someone as privileged as Maeve did not escape an element of stereotyping, as listeners exclaimed at her accent or her turn of phrase’ (2004, p. 183). Brennan’s short stories and her influence as an Irish woman writer at The New Yorker demonstrate a sustained and multifaceted engagement with the real history and lived experience of Irish women in America. As a complement to the same concern with writing back to received assumptions of different kinds, the next section will examine how elsewhere in her writing Brennan shows a keen alertness to, and renegotiates anew, the inherited paradigm of the Irish writer in exile.

Maeve Brennan ’s ‘Long-Winded Lady’ in Exile In ‘Faraway Places Near Here’, a republished sketch in The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker, Brennan’s alter ego pauses to contemplate the power of memory: ‘When the summer weather in New York begins to reach its height, I am subject to powerful gusts of memory from other summers and other rooms in the different places in the city where I used to live’ (1997, p. 112). In this instance, the diagnosis of ‘homesickness’ is inflected with particular meaning for the Irish writer far from home. Brennan’s focus on exile finds two different modes of expression. As discussed, on the one hand, the writing displays a politically aware concern with the history of the Irish migrant. Although maintaining a clear sympathy for the suffering endured by Irish women migrants at various points in history, Brennan also demonstrates a nuanced interest in the productive capabilities of rootlessness and separation from home, thus renegotiating the terms of the more established and publicly visible image of the modern artist, and particularly the Irish artist, as an exile. Andrew Gurr, for example, insists ‘Deracination, exile and alienation in varying forms are the conditions of existence for the modern writer the world over. The basic response to such conditions is a search for identity, the

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quest for a home, through self-discovery or self-realisation’ (1981, p. 14); not surprisingly, Gurr makes a special case study of Joyce as the archetypal example of such ‘creative exile’ (1981, p. 7). In the Irish context, a preoccupation with exile is especially pervasive: Seamus Deane describes it as a ‘fetish’ (1986, p. 58) of the Irish literary tradition, whereas R. F. Foster characterizes it as a ‘reflex action’ (1993, p. 288). Elizabeth Cullingford revisits the meanings of emigration and exile in relation to contemporary Irish fiction and begins with an appraisal of the more familiar narrative of the Irish in exile: From the Flight of the Earls to the Great Famine and on to the economic depressions of the 1950s and 1980s, emigration was represented as, and often was, involuntary exile: a heartbreaking saga of families destroyed, children lost, and a country drained of its most precious resource – its people. The public staging of the ‘American wake’, a gathering on the eve of an emigrant’s departure that replicated the rites of a funeral, including poteen, dancing, and keening, reinforced the idea of leaving Ireland as death-in-life. (2014, p. 60)

Examining the case of the Irish in the United States, R. F. Foster challenges the high-profile image of the Irish migrant as a beleaguered exile: ‘It is tempting to ask – certainly in terms of Irish American experience – a more robust question: if the emigrant Irish were so trapped in a state of permanent yearning nostalgia, why did they do so well? Is there a case for seeing the emigrant laments as a kind of therapy, and the extremely low numbers of those who returned as representing a deliberate option, not evidence of imprisonment abroad?’ (1993, p. 288). In his account of new developments in the analysis of the history of Irish migration, Kevin Kenny intervenes helpfully in ongoing conversations about Irish ‘exile’ by emphasizing the need to incorporate questions of gender and class (2003, p. 3). As an Irish woman writer in mid-twentieth-century New York, Brennan speaks to such abstract complexities in especially revealing ways; her careful reconstruction of the cityscape of New York and her emergence as a New York writer, a reputation secured by a career-long association with The New Yorker magazine, become the means by which she evades the traditional focus on the Irish burden of exile. Her Joycean commitment to writing the city also establishes a self-protective distance between the Irish woman writer and the national ‘fetish’ of exile. The

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oeuvre includes stories of both Dublin and New York, but whereas her stories collected in The Springs of Affection are interested largely in domestic interiors and the intimacies of family life in a suburban Dublin household, an equally significant strand of the writing is deeply concerned with mapping the city of New York. Here, New York comes to rival Dublin as the crucible of Brennan’s imagination. In the short story ‘The Joker’ (1952), Brennan critiques the myth of the male Irish artist as exile; in the story, an Irish poet exploits the Joycean model of exile, transforming it into a self-serving truism to compensate for his own failure as a writer. As a transatlantic author, one for whom New York matters as much as Dublin, Brennan refuses to be bound to any potentially totalizing narrative of home and her work evinces an acceptance and even a celebration of her nomadic state; her essays for The New Yorker convey a relationship with the notion of rootlessness, a condition that appears to have a serious and positive value for her. As will be explored in the following sections, Brennan accepts the role of ‘traveler in residence’ (1997, p. 2) as an inevitability of New York living, but also embraces that identity as a means of escaping the more familiar archetype of the Irish writer in exile, mesmerized and burdened by the idea of Ireland as home. The sections of Bourke’s Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker devoted to the writer’s adult life keenly explore how Brennan positions herself in relation to the idea of home. Bourke establishes key critical paradigms for thinking about Brennan’s writing, on more than one occasion returning to the revealing tension in the writer’s relationship with her homeland. At one point, Bourke notes that for Brennan, ‘Home is a refuge, hastily improvised, a place where one can settle down unchallenged, yet be free to leave at will’ (2004, p. 217). With this version of ‘home’ in mind, I am especially interested in examining Brennan’s writing in relation to a recurring interest in nomadism in her work—and exploring how her preoccupation with rootlessness is reflected in a concern with capturing urban life and with tracing the ever-changing cartography of New York. I suggest, moreover, that the promise of nomadism offers her a means of evading the male-dominated trope of exile in the Irish context. Rootlessness in Brennan’s work functions at the level of the immediate and personal as well as the abstract and national; her full imaginative immersion in the cityscape of New York becomes a means of resisting the potentially restrictive influence of Ireland as homeland.

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For Brennan, as for so many writers after Joyce, the challenge of writing the city is both overshadowed and nourished by her renowned predecessor’s spectacular account of life in Dublin—the ‘Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis’, as it appears in Ulysses (1993, p. 112). Brennan takes up this challenge, but does so by a commitment to mapping the city of New York, thereby keeping Joyce’s modernist achievement and, by association, the male-centred tradition of Irish exile at arm’s length. Moreover, the pseudonym of ‘The Long-Winded Lady’, under which Brennan wrote her ‘Talk of the Town’ essays for The New Yorker— most appearing in the 1950s and 1960s—is deliberately misleading. Far from long-winded, the essays deliver precisely drawn scenes of New York as she goes about her business, rarely straying from midtown and the streets around Times Square or from Greenwich Village, another favourite haunt. In her recent study Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, Lauren Elkin addresses an urgent need to rewrite the male-centred history of the flâneur in case studies of the life and work of figures such as Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Martha Gellhorn: The portraits I paint here attest that the flâneuse is not merely a female flâneur, but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own. She voyages out and goes where she’s not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which words like home and belonging are used against women. She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk. (2016, pp. 22–23)

Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady embodies the possibilities of the flâneuse as characterized by Elkin. To some extent, the intimate mapping of the city that is to be found in these essays is a direct consequence of their being commissioned as ‘Talk of the Town’ sketches that issued a special appeal to the city’s readers by offering a sharing of common experience. In his account of the magazine and its culture, Ben Yagoda characterizes editor Harold Ross’s vision of The New Yorker as ‘somehow transcending the individuals who contributed to it’ (2000, p. 43). Yagoda sees the ‘Talk of the Town’ essay as one of the magazine’s features that reveal a commitment to a collective New York identity:

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The institutional voice of Notes and Comment and The Talk of the Town expressed itself in the first-person plural: as we. The logic to this convention lay in the conceit that the section was written by ‘The New Yorkers,’ who ‘signed it’ at the end. That tag line was dropped in 1934, but we stayed around until 1992, when Tina Brown arrived as editor. (2000, p. 43)

Yagoda describes how ‘The Talk of the Town evolved over the years from a collection of arch paragraphs to a series of short journalistic articles that consisted of, took pleasure in, and frequently wrought humour presenting many facts about a person, place, thing, or phenomenon’ (2000, p. 50)— an account that captures the special role of this feature in the magazine’s history and speaks to the concerns and commitments of Brennan’s LongWinded Lady. The following items appear in a folder of ideas compiled by New Yorker editor Harold Ross for possible ‘Talk of the Town’ features pitched between 1943 and 1951—the years preceding and encompassing the period of Brennan’s arrival at the magazine in the late 1940s: a piece on the listing of the addresses of hotels with duplicate names in the New York City telephone directory; an inquiry about the longest subway ride possible to take in the city; and an article about what happens to items returned to the Lost and Found office at Radio City Music Hall (‘“Talk of the Town” Outlines, Ideas and Assignments 1943-1951’). Brennan’s essays are similarly concerned with capturing New York through careful attention to precise and quirky detail. Despite the teasing appropriation of ‘long-windedness’, implied by her pseudonym, Brennan’s own account of her work is more revealing: ‘Now when I read through this book I seem to be looking at snapshots. It is as though the long-winded lady were showing snapshots taken during a long, slow journey through the most cumbersome, most reckless, most ambitious, most confused, most comical, the saddest and coldest and most human of cities’ (1997, p. 1). We see a clear affinity here between Brennan’s description of the LongWinded Lady’s project and Phillip Lopate’s account of the central appeal of New York as a literary landscape. Lopate emphasizes ‘Its man-made quality: the gigantic built environment and the relative unimportance of nature’; ‘Its offer of anonymity to the many’; ‘Its fabled loneliness and alienation’ (1998, pp. xviii–xix). He also stresses the city’s natural affinity with ‘the impressionistic urban sketch’ often written by that recognizable New York native with a special vocation: ‘The Argus-eyed commentator

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satisfied readers’ voyeuristic desires to peek around every neglected corner of their city, while taking advantage of the opportunity to sneak in some fairly lyrical passages’ (1998, p. xix). The ‘anonymity’ Lopate implies here is of special value to Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady, who relies upon her ability to move about unobserved in her project of imaginatively constructing the city. Significantly, ‘They Were Both about Forty’, the first piece in Brennan’s collected essays, reveals a recurring dynamic in her figuring of character and place. The title of the essay conflates the guessed-at age of the characters and the fact that their walk is taking them in the direction of Fortieth Street. Such a mirroring of character and place is all the more appropriate since the Long-Winded Lady frequently attributes personality to streets, buildings, and local amenities. As she offers a running real-time commentary, the reader is ferried around the city with her and even given a full set of directions. At one point in ‘The Name of Minnie Smith’ (1963), she explains: ‘I rode down to the street floor in Schrafft’s majestic elevator, and I walked out onto Fifth Avenue and up Fifth to Forty-ninth and along Forty-ninth to the hotel where I live, which is very close to Seventh Avenue’ (1997, p. 205). The specific bit of geographical information—that the hotel is very close to Seventh Avenue—appears to create an intimacy, even suggesting that the reader, too, is a ‘traveler in residence’. Other useful hints for the visitor appear, such as a note that justifies the Long-Winded Lady’s choice of hotel for coffee in ‘The Solitude of Their Expression’ (1969): ‘The reason I had to make that choice between the Algonquin and the Biltmore is that Schrafft’s is closed on Sundays’ (1997, p. 9). Some of these details are inevitably borrowed from Brennan’s own day-to-day occupation of New York. A 1974 interview with Time magazine reveals Brennan similarly preoccupied with such minutiae: She lives alone in a midtown hotel on West 44th Street – ‘just opposite the Algonquin’ and only a few steps away from The New Yorker – and she has a canny survivor’s eye for a bargain. ‘The coffee at Bickford’s is only 16c,’ she will say, ‘but they rob you at Childs.’ She broods on the differences between Woolworth’s and Lamston’s. (1974, p. 71)

In The New Yorker sketches, the same care is evident when she offers a full directory of restaurants, some of which were indeed popular venues at the moment in which Brennan was writing. Street names are especially

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important, as are those of hotels and restaurants—including the Biltmore, the Grosvenor Hotel, the Hotel Earle, the café Le Steak de Paris, the Forty-ninth Street Schrafft’s, and the Adano restaurant. Le Steak de Paris, one of the Long-Winded Lady’s favourite eating places, is given a good deal of air time. Significantly, it is described modestly in the 1964 edition of Hart’s Guide to New York City as a café with a capacity for no more than 60 that ‘offers good cooking at a very moderate price’ (1964, p. 1061)—whereas the Algonquin Hotel, despite being the home of New York literary celebrity, appears regularly as a landmark in Brennan’s essays, but is afforded no special status. Another of Brennan’s primary concerns, one that is further attuned to Joyce’s famous project of writing the city, albeit in a deliberately different context, focuses on capturing and conveying the sensory and emotional character of places and streets—a process of personification that is again presented as a kind of public service for citizens of and visitors to New York. For example, in her essay ‘Sixth Avenue Shows Its True Self’ (1961), her judgement is particularly harsh: …anyone walking alone through that ugliness can see without any trouble that Sixth is not a human thoroughfare at all but only a propped-up imitation of a thoroughfare, and that its purpose is not to provide safe or pleasant or beautiful passage for the people of the city but to propitiate, even if it is only for a little while, whatever the force is that feeds on the expectation of chaos. (1997, pp. 123–124)

In ‘The New Girls on West Forty-ninth Street’ (1967), West Forty-ninth Street is cast in similarly morose terms, even though it is one of the routes most often frequented by the Long-Winded Lady and the home of Le Steak de Paris: ‘With all the hesitation, and all the slowness, there was no revelry. There never is, on West Forty-ninth Street. It is a tentative, transient, noisy street, very ill at ease and, to a stranger’s eye, shifty, as though gaiety were unknown or strictly forbidden’ (1997, p. 161). In her mapping of the city, Brennan carefully removes herself from any familiar perception of the Irish exile languishing in what Foster describes as ‘imprisonment abroad’ (1993, p. 288). Although the short stories collected in The Springs of Affection look back across the Atlantic and hold up a mirror to the vicissitudes of Dublin family life, Brennan’s essays claim New York as the city that looms largest in her literary imagination. The painstaking attention to urban detail in the Long-Winded Lady’s

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journey through the streets of the city represents a response and challenge to the encyclopaedic plotting of the city of Dublin in Joyce’s writing.

Mapping the Metropolis and the Last Days of New York City Brennan’s relationship with New York becomes most vital in her response to attacks on the city’s streetscape; in ‘They Were Both about Forty’ (1968), the skyscraper is introduced as a kind of looming architectural enemy: She was showing him her neighbourhood – Sixth Avenue in the Forties, where furnished rooms and cheap hotels are still to be found, in spite of the enormous amount of demolition that has taken place around there this year to make way for the new skyscrapers. … The night view up Sixth Avenue is eerie now that the blocks on the west side of the avenue are half broken down and half gone. It is as though the area had been attacked and then left in pieces… (1997, pp. 4–6)

In the same spirit, she observes houses on Forty-eighth Street that break up the run of high-rise buildings as having the character of a ‘small, stubborn survivor’ (1997, p. 11). In ‘I Wish for a Little Street Music’, the Astor Hotel is mourned for having been ‘executed’ (1997, p. 67), and by 1967, just three years after its modest appearance in Hart’s Guide, she grieves at hearing of the demolition of one of her favourite New York places, Le Steak de Paris: I heard bad news tonight at Le Steak de Paris, where I had dinner. ‘The building is coming down’ – and the little restaurant is to be swept away, just like that, after more than twenty-six years of hardy life. Those words ‘The building is coming down’ occur so often in New York conversation, and they have such finality, and they are so unanswerable, that once they have been said there is nothing more to say. There is no appealing the decisions of the ogre called Office Space that stalks the city and will not be appeased. (1997, pp. 157–158)

‘Office Space’, which here and elsewhere appears in sinister capitals, is Brennan’s natural urban enemy. The threatened demolition of Fortyeighth Street, a thoroughfare close to the Long-Winded Lady’s heart, is a cause for special concern: ‘But next New Year’s Eve there won’t

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be a Forty-eighth Street. A number of houses are already down, and on weekdays the street is filled with that choking white wreckers’ dust. Fortyeighth Street is going, going. Office Space must be served, but somebody should write a Lament for Forty-eighth Street – a cheerful lament because Forty-eight has always been a cheerful street’ (1997, p. 138). And indeed, collectively, the essays mourn the lost streetscapes most dear to the LongWinded Lady. In ‘West Eighth Street Has Changed and Changed and Changed Again’ which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1966, we learn how ‘the Whitney huddled more and more into herself, like a poor old woman pulling her shawl around her shoulders in wintertime. “I may not be what I used to be” the Whitney seemed to be saying, “but I don’t want to go just yet”’ (1997, p. 193). The essays written in the 1950s and early to mid-1960s are most anxious about the threatened destruction of New York, appearing, significantly, immediately prior to and after the publication of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. Jacobs begins her manifesto on urban planning with an indictment of contemporary planning policy: Look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. … Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. … Commercial centers that are lackluster imitations of standardized suburban chain-store shopping. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities. (1992, p. 4)

Jacobs became a key figure in the fight against plans for the building of a Lower Manhattan Expressway, a project that would have involved, amongst other invasions, building through Washington Square Park in the early 1960s. Part of the Long-Winded Lady’s brief involves protest against such a ‘sacking’ of New York. In a feature suggestively entitled ‘The Last Days of New York City’, (1955) Brennan writes: ‘I heard lately – it is only a rumor, I suppose – that there is talk of cutting an underpass through Washington Square. I suppose that means that part of the square, anyway, will be dug up. It will hardly look the same after that’ (1997, p. 216).

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The Long-Winded Lady’s battle for the preservation of small streets of her city against the threat of ‘Office Space’ is best comprehended within a history of political protest. Throughout her chronicling of New York, she emphasizes the city as constructed out of portable, temporary parts—as though New York is a kind of toy town, made up of precarious, moveable structures. An uncanny dimension is added to the same vision in ‘The Farmhouse That Moved Down Town’ (1967), where the movement of a two-hundred-year-old building takes the reader on a walking tour as the house is suspended in the air and travels slowly along the Village streets. At such moments, New York seems more like a shantytown than an urban metropolis. But Brennan’s sense of its apparent collapsibility in no way diminishes the city, becoming rather a means of foregrounding its vulnerability and of sympathizing with the precarious lives of its citizens. The Long-Winded Lady’s methods of tracking the changing face of her urban landscape resemble Jacobs’s emphasis on attending to and carefully observing the ordinary and quotidian life of the city—in order to understand how such landscapes function. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities , Jacobs writes, So in this book we shall start, if only in a small way, adventuring into the real world, ourselves. The way to get at what goes on in the seemingly mysterious and perverse behaviour of cities is, I think, to look closely, and with as little previous expectation as is possible, at the most ordinary scenes and events, and attempt to see what they mean and whether any threads of principle emerge among them. (1992, p. 13)

Placing Brennan’s writing in conversation with that of Jane Jacobs and with debates about urban renewal and the use of urban spaces in the 1950s, Ann Peters notes the role of women activists in the period. This attention to an emerging female political voice in the mid-twentieth century gives Brennan’s writing about urban destruction and the threat of homelessness added significance. Peters observes how Brennan’s essays, criticized as demure and two-dimensional, were in fact addressing some of the most significant issues affecting urban life at midcentury: the rupture of neighbourhoods in the era of Moses and Jacobs, the plight of New Yorkers losing their homes to the bulldozers, and the demise of the residential hotel. (2005, pp. 69–70)

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Brennan’s fearful sense of the collapsibility of the city becomes especially acute in a description of how she loses her apartment in ‘The Last Days of New York City’ (1955): ‘I had white walls in the little Ninth Street apartment that was torn out from under me last year by the wreckers’ (1997, p. 218). She wonders what her flat might look like turned inside out by demolition and worries whether it would make a ‘creditable corpse’ (1997, p. 219). The Long-Winded Lady is suspicious not only of ‘Office Space’, but of monuments of all kinds—those notable landmarks that dwarf the quotidian places and the people who live and work in the city. If the casting of New York as a kind of moveable toy town suggests both authorial ownership and authorial responsibility, then Brennan’s Street Directory takes on a particular significance as it documents unwelcome changes to the streetscape—the demolition of buildings to make room for new office building or, worse still, for monuments: ‘But more and more the architecture of this city has nothing to do with our daily lives’ (1997, p. 143). In ‘The Ailanthus, Our Back-Yard Tree’ (1968), she lingers over a description of the streets razed to make way for the Rockefeller Center, expressing a sense of mourning, an urgent need to memorialize the lost streets before they are forgotten, and a striking hostility to what appears as the invasion of colossal and unwelcome monuments: ‘Architecturally, very little that was notable has been lost in the destruction of the Broadway area. What has been lost is another strip of the common ground we share with each other and with our city – the common ground that is all that separates us from the Machine’ (1997, pp. 145–146). In a judgement that is in keeping with her recurring suspicions about the city’s architectural monuments, one of midtown’s most celebrated icons becomes a kind of Ozymandian folly. In ‘The Solitude of Their Expression’ (1969), the Empire State Building is also described in the harshest of terms: ‘To the east I can see the Empire State Building for most of its ugly length. The Empire State is at least fifteen long blocks from here. It seems to be very close, but then, no matter where you stand, the Empire State always seems to have that effect of trying to be on nudging terms with every other building in the city’ (1997, p. 12). In ‘A Visitor from California’ (1969), a woman is irritated by a newcomer’s questions about the Flatiron building. At his request, she identifies it dismissively. The exchange can be read as another moment in which a New York monument is cut down to size: ‘“A flat iron,” she said. Then she said “Flat-i-r-o-n…” “It’s very odd” he said politely’ (1997, p. 253, italics in original).

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In Brennan’s New York, as in Joyce’s Dublin, the small streets matter as much—if not more—than the great. Just as 7 Eccles Street becomes the most important location in Dublin for Joyce, the places that Brennan made home on uncelebrated midtown streets and in Greenwich Village fuel her imagination—rather than the iconic monuments that loom large in the city’s skyline. Brennan’s defence of New York is both a reaction to the threat faced by the city from ‘Office Space’ and other hostile urban forces, and a reminder of how essential New York becomes in flying by the nets of exile; this American metropolis provides her with creative escape, distancing her work from a central Irish theme. Rootlessness is both an unavoidable fact of life for the Long-Winded Lady as she risks being moved from place to place by the ‘the ogre called Office Space’ (1997, p. 158), and a condition that accrues creative value—enabling her to avoid being implicated in what Deane diagnoses as a ‘fetish’ of Irish literary culture. Although New York is the urban landscape that dominates in Brennan’s essays, she takes occasional oblique glances at the Dublin she left behind through details and allusions that alone can seem incidental, but in accumulation create a clear line to home. In ‘From the Hotel Earle’ (1960), we see the Long-Winded Lady buying a copy of Benedict Kiely’s Poor Scholar (1997, p. 39)—a moment related to a previously mentioned one when she very self-consciously references Elizabeth Bowen, another author from home (1997, p. 167). However, one of the most direct links back to her Dublin origins conjures up unease. In a feature for The New Yorker entitled ‘Lessons and Lessons and Then More Lessons’ (1962), she recalls her convent school education and instinctively hides a martini glass when a group of nuns enter the restaurant where she sits—an unconscious impulse that foregrounds the relative sophistication of her present life. But the moment that most clearly reveals the relationship of Brennan’s New York to the Dublin of her past appears in a sketch called ‘A Blessing’ published in 1981: Yesterday afternoon, as I walked along Forty-second Street directly across from Bryant Park, I saw a three-cornered shadow on the pavement in the angle where two walls meet. I didn’t step on the shadow, but I stood a minute in the thin winter sunlight and looked at it. I recognized it at once. It was exactly the same shadow that used to fall on the cement part of our garden in Dublin, more than fifty-five years ago. (1997, p. 267)

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This Proustian moment of recollection—taking her back not only to Forty-second Street and Bryant Park, the home of the New York Public Library where Brennan worked in her early years in the city, but also to her Dublin childhood—represents the imaginative coalescence of her two worlds; such a conjoining of past and present lives appears especially significant for a transatlantic writer. In the commitment to the local and distinctive sense of place so crucial to her writing about New York, she embraces a complex model of the writer as exile that avoids being limited by any one identity—Irish or Irish American, Dubliner or New Yorker. As a woman writer who came of age in the shadow of the formidable influences and controversies surrounding place associated with W. B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce, she asserts a positive value in the choice of not belonging. As she looks with a careful observing eye at a New York that transforms itself before her, Brennan separates herself from the burden of tradition and secures her position as the outsider looking in. Whereas the image of the Irish woman migrant as a beleaguered outsider remains powerfully resonant in the stories about domestic servants, her Long-Winded Lady essays suggest her own status of outsider and offer a source of new creative possibilities for the Irish woman writer. Even as Brennan remains sensitive to the inheritances of her generation, particularly in relation to writing the city, she emerges as homesick for many places, and resisting any ready categorization or totalizing narrative of the Irish or Irish-American writer. In doing so, she reshapes the theme of the Irish writer in exile—as her own unique aesthetic demands.

Works Cited Archival Material The New Yorker Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations Brennan, M. ‘Pledges at the White House’. Maeve Brennan Folder, Box 1447. Ross, H. ‘Talk of the Town’ Outlines, Ideas and Assignments 1943–1951. Editorial Business Series, Box 969. Periodicals Collection—The New York Public Library Morrissy, M. (1944, January). ‘Your Obedient Servant: A Servant of the Old School Looks Forward to a New Day for Domestics’. Harper’s Bazaar, No. 2785, 56–57 & 90–91.

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Berg Collection—The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations Rogan, H. ‘Moments of Recognition: Review of Christmas Eve—13 Stories’. Time Magazine. July 1, 1974. 62. Brennan Folder, Howard Moss Coll.

Primary Material Brennan, M. (1997 [1955]). ‘The Last Days of New York City’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 215–220). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1960]). ‘From the Hotel Earle’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 37–43). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1961]). ‘Sixth Avenue Shows Its True Self’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 123–126). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1962]). ‘Faraway Places Near Here’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 112–117). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1962]). ‘Lessons and Lessons and Then More Lessons’. In The Long Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 220–224). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1963]). ‘The Name of Minnie Smith’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 204–206). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1963]). ‘The Traveler’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 117–123). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1966]). ‘West Eighth Street Has Changed and Changed and Changed Again’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 192–197). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1967]). ‘Howard’s Apartment’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 206–211). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1967]). ‘The Farmhouse That Moved Downtown’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 43–48). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1967]). ‘The New Girls on West Forty-Ninth Street’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 157–164). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1967]). ‘The View Chez Paul’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 164–170). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1968]). ‘I Wish for a Little Street Music’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 67–70). Berkeley: Counterpoint.

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Brennan, M. (1997 [1968]). ‘The Ailanthus, Our Back-Yard Tree’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 139–146). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1968]). ‘They Were Both about Forty’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 4–7). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1969]). Author’s Note. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 1–3). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1969]). ‘A Visitor from California’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 247–255). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1969]). ‘The Solitude of Their Expression’. In The LongWinded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 9–14). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1976]). ‘A Daydream’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 264–265). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1997 [1981]).‘ A Blessing’. In The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (pp. 266–268). Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (1998). The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin. Berkeley: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (2001 [1952]). ‘The Joker’. In The Rose Garden (pp. 52–69). Washington: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (2001 [1953]). ‘The Bride’. In The Rose Garden (pp. 153–158). New York: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (2001 [1953]). ‘The View from the Kitchen’. In The Rose Garden (pp. 3–15). New York: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (2001 [1954]). ‘The Anachronism’. In The Rose Garden (pp. 16– 38). New York: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (2001 [1954]). ‘The Servants’ Dance’. In The Rose Garden (pp. 111–149). New York: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (2001 [1956]). ‘The Divine Fireplace’. In The Rose Garden (pp. 94–110). New York: Counterpoint. Brennan, M. (2002). The Visitor. London: Atlantic. Joyce, J. (1992 [1914]). ‘A Little Cloud’. In T. Brown (Ed.), Dubliners (pp. 65– 81). London: Penguin Books. Joyce, J. (1992 [1914]). ‘Eveline’. In T. Brown (Ed.), Dubliners (pp. 29–34). London: Penguin Books. Joyce, J. (1992 [1916]). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. ed. Deane, S. London: Penguin Books. Joyce, J. (1993 [1922]). Ulysses. ed. Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Neill, E. (1991 [1956]). Long Day’s Journey into Night. London: Nick Hern.

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Secondary Material Bourke, A. (2004). Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker. Cambridge, MA: Counterpoint. Cullingford, E. (2014). ‘American Dreams: Emigration or Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction’. Eire-Ireland, 49 (3–4), 60–94. Deane, S. (1986 [1983]). ‘Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea’. In Ireland’s Field Day (pp. 45–58). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Diner, H. R. (1983). Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Elkin, L. (2016). Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. London: Chatto & Windus. Fanning, C. (2000). The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Foster, R. F. (1993 [1992]). ‘Marginal Men and Micks on the Make: The Uses of Irish Exile, c.1840–1922’. In Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (pp. 281–305). London: Penguin Books. Friedan, B. (1991 [1963]). The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Gurr, A. (1981). Writers in Exile: The Creative Use of Home in Modern Literature. Brighton: Harvester. Hart, H. (1964). Hart’s Guide to New York City. New York: Hart. Jacobs, J. (1992 [1961]). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage. Kenny, K. (2003). ‘New Directions in Irish-American History’. In K. Kenny (Ed.), New Directions in Irish American History (pp. 1–10). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Lopate, P. (1998). Writing New York: A Literary Anthology. New York: Library of America. Miller, K. (1988 [1985]). Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, K. A., Doyle, D. N., & Kelleher, P. (1995). ‘“For Love and Liberty”: Irish Women, Migration, and Domesticity in Ireland and America, 1815–1920’. In P. O’Sullivan (Ed.), Irish Women and Irish Migration (pp. 41–65). London: Leicester University Press. Palko, A. (2007). ‘Out of Home in the Kitchen: Maeve Brennan’s Herbert Retreat Stories’. New Hibernia Review, 11 (4), 73–91. Peters, A. (2005). ‘A Traveler in Residence: Maeve Brennan and the Last Days of New York’. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 33 (3–4), 66–89. Walter, B. (2001). Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge. Yagoda, B. (2000). About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. New York: DaCapo.

CHAPTER 4

‘A Genetic Trait’: Alice McDermott’s Irish America

The readings of Mary McCarthy and Maeve Brennan explored selfauthorship and acts of literary resistance and these writers’ productive if sometimes anxious relationship with Irish America and the literary culture of the United States. This chapter examines how Alice McDermott’s work traces the changing fortunes of Irish-American communities in the twentieth century, and the lives of Irish-American women in particular, while also testing the boundaries of tradition. McDermott, whose first novel A Bigamist’s Daughter was published in 1982, stands out as the most critically successful and celebrated contemporary writer to dedicate her work to life in Irish-American enclaves and offer sensitive and probing portrayals of the intergenerational tensions that characterize the Irish-American family. Her work demonstrates a sustained and polyvalent relationship with Irish, American, and English literary precursors, and the rich intertextuality of her novels refuses to be contained by any one national literature. McDermott’s writing about Irish America came to prominence in the 1990s, the decade during which, as noted by Piaras Mac Éinrí and Tina O’Toole, ‘Debates on “diaspora” reached their peak… both in terms of the international academic theorization of the term itself and of the prominence given to it, in the Irish case, by Presidents Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese’ (2012, p. 8). McDermott’s work builds upon the same landscape as an earlier IrishAmerican writer—Elizabeth Cullinan. If Maeve Brennan was well versed in the material realities of the Irish women immigrant, Elizabeth Cullinan, © The Author(s) 2021 E. McWilliams, Irishness in North American Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1_4

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who also made frequent appearances in The New Yorker, displays a different level of engagement with Irish-American themes. Her stories are near relatives of the ‘New Yorker story’, and in an attempt to place her in a line of inheritance, Kirkus Review went so far as to describe Cullinan’s work as ‘rough-cut Maeve Brennan’ (1969). Cullinan’s stories of Irish America invoke an imaginative landscape all their own, while retaining the introspective understatement associated with The New Yorker short story. Her novel House of Gold (1969) is an exploration of the intergenerational tensions of the Devlin family and echoes some of the primary concerns of her short stories, collected in The Time of Adam (1971) and Yellow Roses (1977). Cullinan’s work anticipates the key concerns of McDermott’s in the way modern American values clash with Irish-American Catholicism in sometimes dramatic, sometimes subtle, ways in her fiction. For example, Cullinan’s 1965 short story ‘The Old Priest’ is Nora Barrett’s story of the annual visit of Father Stone to the family home and of her embarrassment when her parents embark on a heated discussion about changes in the Catholic Church while the near deaf priest remains unmoved. Nora’s only intervention is to mention to the priest that she read an article about the vernacular Mass in Vogue, a confession she instantly regrets as the mention of the fashion magazine forces the different parts of her life into uncomfortable contact. It is exactly such points of contact between the traditional and the modern that are of special interest to McDermott, and the next section will explore how her work engages with the changing culture of Irish America through social mobility, assimilation, and attendant privileges that set the generation born in the 1950s apart from their parents.

Irish-American Futures in Alice McDermott’s Fiction In a reading of At Weddings and Wakes (1992) and Charming Billy (1997), Patricia Coughlan argues that: ‘McDermott skillfully combines symbolist and realistic storytelling, subtle management of viewpoint, and deft use of flashback and flash-forward to show the psyches of second- and third-generation Irish Americans born up to the early 1950s as a ground of struggle’ (2012, p. 123). This chapter is especially concerned with the chasm in experience that sometimes charges characters in McDermott’s fiction with the task of reading and interpreting the lived experience

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of their predecessors. In introducing McDermott’s work in Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Writers, Sally Barr Ebest begins with the reminder that ‘Like other baby boomer Irish Americans, Alice McDermott, born in suburban Long Island (an Irish American enclave) in 1953, was raised in a family bent on assimilation. Nonetheless, McDermott attended parochial schools and religious icons dotted the house; she even slept with a rosary beneath her pillow until she was a teen’ (2013, p. 40). The same image of McDermott as a writer who came of age on the cusp of change is important for considering how in her novels, the passing of the experience of one generation and the rise of the next involves leaving the world of the enclave behind and occupying a more comfortable position in the American mainstream. The Irish communities imagined in McDermott’s work take in Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Long Island, but are bound by an interest in the material conditions that have framed the lives of Irish Americans from the beginning of the twentieth century to the contemporary moment. Drawing on Diane Negra’s readings of the cultural uses of Irishness and the work of Noel Ignatieve, whose How the Irish Became White (1995) explores the relationship between whiteness and Irishness in the United States, Sinéad Moynihan offers an extended analysis of IrishAmerican identity and the exposure of the privileges of whiteness in McDermott’s work in ‘“None of us will always be here”: Whiteness, Loss, and Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes ’. Her analysis of McDermott is most interested in how her novels, and At Weddings and Wakes in particular, dramatize the social changes that reshaped Irish-American identity in the post-war period and reads McDermott’s representation of the suburbs in relation to the ‘white flight’ of the mid-1960s (2010, p. 46). Moynihan concludes that: McDermott deftly interweaves the motifs of whiteness, victimhood, and death through the prism of housing patterns, reproduction, cultural rituals and Christianity in order to suggest the extent to which these Irish diasporic women are unsettled by their confrontation with the ultimately unstable nature of their own whiteness. Far from romanticizing the ethnic identity of her Irish-American characters, McDermott demonstrates the degree to which their whiteness implicates them in structures of white power even if, as Eric Lott puts it, ‘that privileged category [historically] oppressed the Irish themselves’. (2010, p. 52, italics in original)

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In McDermott’s work, the transformation of Irish America in the years after the Second World War is explicitly tied to new educational opportunities that defined that same period. The same is also implicated in the corrosion of understanding between the earlier generations and characters, who like McDermott herself were born in the 1950s—the unfolding of this history is attended to with care in McDermott’s writing, without resort to any easy sentiment or nostalgia for the past. The narrator of Charming Billy (1997) is a chronicler of the Irish America of her father and Uncle Billy, the charming man of the title, and the narrative includes a number of signposts to the changing values and expectations of Irish America. In its ongoing inquiry into the fashioning of Irish-American identity, McDermott’s account of the generation who lived through, and fought in, the Second World War places emphasis on the reliability and respectability afforded by tradition in shoring up a sense of personal and familial security. The narrator recalls her father’s working life and the mantra ‘stick with the company’ that became a slogan for a generation: ‘“Any one of the utilities would be a safe bet,” they told him, turning him away. “But you can’t do better than Edison, Dennis. There’s security, if you stick with them. Stick with the company and you’ll be fine”’ (2003b, p. 108). The same mantra is underwritten by his father’s romantic vision of New York on his deathbed: ‘The greatest city in the world will always need electricity’ (2003b, p. 108). McDermott’s work acknowledges the striking juxtaposition between the lives of working-class Irish-American men and the heroic grand narratives associated with the history of the Second World War. In At Weddings and Wakes (1992), the groom in the wedding of the title is cast as in a familiar role in the mise en scene of McDermott’s novels: ‘As had the army in the years before, the post office swept Fred the mailman from the rooms he shared with his mother and gave him a part in the general history of his generation’ (2003a, p. 125). Her work is punctuated with reminders of the aftershocks of the war. It surfaces with particular poignancy in the melancholy and emotional aloofness of John Keane in After This (2006), for whom the regimented routines of the army persist long after he has returned to civilian life. The darker legacies of the war are conjured up in At Weddings and Wakes in Lucy Dailey’s repeated unhappy complaint about her husband: ‘He’s not the man I married’ (2003a, p. 25). The explanation provided is a familiar one in this strand of McDermott’s work: ‘It had all to do with the war, of course. He was a young soldier when they’d married, and when he

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returned from overseas he was someone else. Who he was or what he’d been was never clear to the children, nor could they ever, even as adults, get a good sense of what it was that had changed him’ (2003a, p. 44). In direct and deliberate contrast to the struggle of the earlier generation, the education and opportunities afforded McDermott’s own generation are detailed with attentive specificity. The names of institutions such as Fordham, Holy Cross, and Notre Dame all carry particular weight in McDermott’s work as bastions of Irish-American identity that often sought to serve a religious and community function as well as an educational one in keeping the traditions of Irish America alive. In Charming Billy, set as it is in New York, Fordham University has a particular weight of associations and makes a number of appearances just pages apart in a reminder of how the new generation is set apart by the privileges of their college education. The function that educational success serves in the social mobility of Irish Americans is revealed in the way institutions and professions become the prime markers of identity. ‘Fordham Law’ appears twice in the opening pages of Charming Billy—a reminder of the role of Catholic universities in promoting Irish-American class mobility. In reply to a query after the family, Billy calls the roll of family achievement: ‘Billy launched into a familiar litany: his sister Rosie’s kids (Holy Cross and Katherine Gibbs, Queensborough Community and the telephone company) and Kate’s kids (Regis Fordham Notre Dame Marymount Chase Manhattan) and his mother at eighty, who still liked her nightcap’ (2003b, p. 64). Linda Dowling Almeida offers a full account of the enabling legacies of these new educational opportunities: ‘Just as life was improving for the Irish in Ireland, the Irish community continued to move up the social and economic ladder in America and out of the urban neighborhoods that had been their home for over one hundred years. By the 1970s Irish-American Catholics were among the best educated and best paid white ethnics in the country’ (2006, p. 556). The conflict that changed the course of their father’s life is too remote and impossible to imagine even for the four Keane children in After This whose father is still living with its traumatic aftershocks: ‘When John and Mary Keane said “during the war,” their children imagined the world gone black and white, imagined a hand passing like a dark cloud over the earth, blotting out the sun for what might only have been the duration of a single night, or the length of a storm’ (2008, p. 53). The importance of literary intertexts to McDermott’s versions of Irish America will be examined later in this chapter, but literature, and Irish

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poetry in particular, has a mediating function as the chasm between generations becomes more marked. It was a matter of some pride to my father, to Billy’s friends and family in general, that he had carried a volume of Yeats with him all through the war. Not that my father, or most of his family, read the poems themselves; more that Billy’s interest absolved them from any interest of their own. When my generation of cousins began to come back from college with copies of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and Sylvia Plath, our parents could sniff, ‘Oh, poetry, sure. Billy Lynch loves that Irish poet, Yeats (or Yeets)’ – with a proud nonchalance that seemed to hint that the poet was a friend of a friend. (2003b, p. 69)

In the age of Ginsberg, Plath, and Ferlinghetti, and the emergence of a new American counterculture in the 1960s, W. B. Yeats, in this moment, casts a protective shield over the generation that sacrificed their lives in the Second World War and, in a different way, to the expectations of ‘the company’. The intimacy suggested in relation to Billy’s closeness to Yeats is also a symptom of the older generation pulling rank against the seemingly more modern, progressive lives of their ever more American children as time and history mean they are closer to the age of Yeats and to Ireland as a place of origin than their culturally and intellectually precocious offspring. The cost of the widening chasm between generations shows itself as alienation in McDermott’s Child of My Heart (2002), a novel about a young girl who is both babysitter and muse to the Long Island families who employ her. Her parents’ hopes for her mean: ‘The best assurance they would have that I had indeed moved into a better stratum of society would be my scorn for the lesser one to which they belonged’ (2004, p. 33). It is exactly this social contract that makes her vulnerable to the father of one of her charges who insists on casting her as: ‘A Thomas Hardy-reading, Shakespeare-quoting, drink-pouring wood nymph’ (2004, p. 135). The losses as well as the gains involved in the social mobility that saw the Irish relocate to the suburbs in the middle of the century are especially keenly felt in Lucy Dailey’s melancholy journeys from Long Island to see her family of origin in Brooklyn in At Weddings and Wakes. We learn that ‘The children understood this much about her discontent, if nothing more. She didn’t know its source or its rationale … She was feeling unhappy, she was feeling her life passing by. She hated seeing her

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children grow up. She hated being exiled from the place she had grown up in’ (2003a, p. 20). The meaning of ‘exile’ at this moment is a knowing deployment of a trope that is, as discussed in Chapter 1, all-important to the conceptualization of the Irish Diaspora, but is played out here within the territory of New York City and its suburbs. Linda Dowling Almeida sheds light on the full connotations of exile in this context in her appraisal of how Irish America changed in the post-war period: The challenge for the Irish in the second half of the twentieth century was coming to terms with their social and economic success and the migration out of tight-knit urban communities to the anonymity and dispersion of the suburbs. Immigration and parish life in the city had long nurtured Irish Catholic identity. With money, education, and home ownership outside the neighborhood, the Irish had to work harder to be Irish. (2006, p. 548)

The relationship of Irish-American women to the changing fabric of IrishAmerican society and culture comprises a dominant strand of McDermott’s fiction, particularly in relation to how in the later decades of the twentieth century, the lives of Irish-American women were transformed by the social shifts identified by Dowling Almeida.

Alice McDermott and the Lives of Irish-American Women In her exploration of the relationship between the post-war generation and the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, McDermott’s work often gravitates towards the experiences of Irish-American women. In this, their relationship with second wave feminism and the politics of emancipation associated with the women’s movement, 1960s youth culture, and the collision of the same with the traditional values of Irish America are especially important. The voices of women also take centre stage in the narrative structure of McDermott’s novels. As noted by Beatrice Jacobson: The novels of Alice McDermott share common themes and concerns developed with a richness of language and narrative skill located, usually, in a female persona who serves as both character and narrator. This figure, whose ironic, witty, intuitive, and ultimately wise voice guides the reader through events and reflections, is typically a woman of Irish American

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heritage and Catholic upbringing. … This voice from the margin resonates both with the contexts of Irish American literature and, more generally, the circumstances of women writers. (2008, p. 116)

McDermott’s narrators are charged with literary detective work—they appear as interpreters and recorders of family history, both the stories of the generation that came before them and the lives of previous generations that stretch back to the early decades of the twentieth century. The experience of Irish-American women in the post-war period is given special attention in After This and At Weddings and Wakes . The ambitions of the women’s movement and attendant literature— the work of second wave feminist American writers such Erica Jong, Marilyn French, and Marge Piercy—have little to say to McDermott’s best-known characters although they formed the backdrop to McDermott’s own coming of age. ‘I’m not having the kind of life I wanted’ (2003a, p. 26) says Lucy Dailey in At Weddings and Wakes , giving voice to the dissatisfaction of a generation. One of the most comprehensive renderings of the place of women in Irish America in the period after the Second World War appears in After This. The novel exposes the limited options available to women as gender roles ossified in the post-war years and explores the demands of tradition in the Irish-American family. Mary Keane works as a typist and serves a housekeeper to her father and brother. If, as discussed in the previous chapter, Maeve Brennan found herself in close quarters with Betty Friedan during her time at Snedens Landing, Friedan exerts a different kind of influence in McDermott’s work. The early chapters of the novel trace Mary’s dutiful regard for the expectations of family, religion, and society, and the Irish-American version of ‘The Problem that has No Name’ (1992, p. 13) diagnosed by Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963). The novel takes care to probe at the limited options available to women, even those as intelligent and intuitive as McDermott’s Mary Keane, as she waits patiently for the future to reveal itself. Mary, who appears at the beginning of the novel as a typist by day and domestic caretaker for her brother and father when the office closes, has an encounter with a stranger (the man she would later marry) that sets the expectations of Catholic propriety into conflict with her own desires. The scene calls attention to ‘Her mother’s gold ring, inset with a silver Miraculous Medal, on her right hand’ (2008, p. 7) before embarking on a carefully drawn account of Mary’s response: ‘She turned back to her

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sandwich. And here, of all things, was desire again. (She could have put the palm of her hand to the front of his white shirt.) … And here she was at thirty, just out of a church (a candle lit every lunch hour, still, although the war was over), and yearning now with every inch of herself to put her hand to the worn buckle at a stranger’s waist, a palm to his smooth body’ (2008, pp. 8–9). Thomas J. Shelley notes that the post-war period saw a revival of Catholic piety and the same—as shown through the rituals of prayer and daughterly obeisance—frames accounts of Mary Keane’s formative experiences: ‘In the aftermath of World War II, Catholicism flourished in America as part of the general religious revival experienced by the whole country. In many of the big cities of the Northeast and the Midwest, parish-pump Catholicism still exhibited the insular self-confidence of the 1920s and 1930s’ (2006, p. 598). And yet Mary Keane also rebels against such ‘parish-pump Catholicism’ in acting on her own sexual desire as an assertion of personal agency. She holds onto a memory of an early sexual encounter, initiated by her (2008, p. 9), and sets herself firmly against seemingly unavoidable outcomes for women, particularly Irish-American women, for whom marriage and family were not an option: ‘She did not, with equal longing, wish to be part of the whispering spinster chorus at the edge of other, more interesting lives. … It was as much as she had prayed for an hour ago in church, now that the war was over and she no longer prayed for the boys. She had prayed for if not a better life than this daily, lonely one, a better way to be content with it’ (2008, p. 14). After This pays particular attention to Mary’s imagination and sensitivity and her unrealized potential—it is Mary who appreciates the craft of the piano player upstairs as she settles into married life, a mirroring of other, unknown possibilities and opportunities that may have been hers had she been born in another time and place. Mary Keane’s children have access to exactly such opportunities, not bound by duty and the conformism that shaped their mother’s early life, but encouraged by the possibilities that come with an education and with the new liberal politics of the 1960s. In an extended scene in the novel, her daughter Annie goes on a transatlantic adventure as an exchange student to England, a chapter that is played out with studied care and with the knowledge that such an adventure is one that her mother could have only dreamed of. Catholic lives receive their most vivid treatment in The Ninth Hour (2017), which is set partly in a convent, but the memories of a Catholic

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girlhood and education comprise an important strand that runs through all of McDermott’s work. In After This , Annie, whose first contact with European culture comes about when she queues with her mother as a child to see Michelangelo’s Pieta at the 1964 American World Fair, emerges as one of McDermott’s avid readers. She compiles her own personal canon through her convent high school curriculum that takes in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Annie’s commitments as a reader call to mind her mother’s sensitivity and emotional intelligence, although, unlike her mother, she is given the opportunity to develop her talent. As a college student on an exchange visit to an English university, Annie’s skills as a reader find new purpose as she finds herself reaching for comfort in a history of transatlantic writers amongst the intellectual posturing of her peers and tutors. The scene treads familiar ground in retracing the steps of a history of transatlantic writers, although the experience proves to be a hollow one for Annie. Invited with another American student to the home of her English professor, Annie’s sharp-eyed recording of events lays bare the pretension and condescension of her hosts: ‘Professor Wallace stepped forward to take the cat from his arms. Annie noticed that there were cat hairs, too, along the hem of her sweeping black skirt. And that she wore soft leather booties and bright purple tights beneath it. Like a character from D.H. Lawrence. Or Virginia Woolf herself’ (2008, p. 225). The conversation is an exercise in intellectual affectation as Annie’s fellow American student plays up to her hosts by citing Fitzgerald and Hemingway and faking a love of Spenser in hope of winning favour with her tutor. The scene contains an innate suspicion of expressions of literary allegiances—indeed presents the same as fraught with risk, something that will be explicated more closely in relation to McDermott’s work in the final section of this chapter—but it also finds use for Edith Wharton and Henry James, in its illumination of celebrated American transatlantic writers. In spite of her better instincts, Annie finds herself participating in the charade, seduced by the self-assurance and confidence of her teacher and her husband and craving their approval: ‘When he turned to her and said, “And who’s your man?” She said, “Edith Wharton,” without thinking and without an inkling of truth in it, her only impulse being that she should name a woman, since the life she wanted – their life – was all unattainable and she must begin to prepare herself to be a woman

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alone’ (2008, p. 228). When quizzed about her choice, she finds herself at a loss and Wharton lacking: ‘The truth was that she had read very little of Edith Wharton. Had thought, until a few minutes ago, that Edith Wharton was a spinster, homely and professional (she recalled a mannish jaw, a heavy pile of dark hair), with no exquisite husband waiting for her at home. It was the sole reason she had said her name. She had a vague memory of Ethan Frome, of laughing at it. Suicidal sled rides. Sex and death. She couldn’t recall finishing The Age of Innocence’ (2008, p. 230). The conversation moves on to Henry James and is brought to an end when Annie’s fellow exchange student has too much to drink and becomes ill. She leaves with a clear impression of herself through the eyes of Prof Wallace and her urbane husband: ‘She would not, she knew, recalling Professor Wallace’s wry smile, be the first American student to seek to remake herself in her year abroad’ (2008, p. 249). The self-conscious acting out of roles—the English professor styling herself as Woolf—and the American student in search of new experiences in the home of Spenser, is one that Annie, for all of her youthful inexperience, is capable of interpreting. What the scene does not immediately announce is that as an Irish-American woman she is an outsider and an aloof observer of this rehearsal of Anglo-American exchange. The scene carefully plants Edmund Spenser as the Elizabethan literary hero of the English professor, in full knowledge that Spenser conjures up altogether different associations for the Irish—Spenser’s 1596 A View on the Present State of Ireland is a notorious ur-text for familiar stereotypes of the Irish as backward, unruly, and incapable of self-government. Annie is made to feel her own naivety and gaucheness in this drama, but her ability to interpret the dynamic at work in the gathering makes her the most capable reader in the room. For the Irish-American woman writer, the figure of Edith Wharton offers little consolation in the historical drama of transatlantic exchange and, as will be explored later in this chapter, McDermott seeks out and tests other possibilities when it comes to matters of literary affiliation and affinity. If After This focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, then Someone (2013) is a fractured Bildungsroman that embraces temporal jumps and breaks and attempts to span the century. Mary Keane in After This finds consolation in small acts of rebellion and in the appreciation of art where she finds it, but Marie in Someone is a rebellious and self-determining character who refuses to obey the scripts of the 1920s close-knit Brooklyn community she is born into. The early chapters

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present her as in constant conflict with the expectations of her Irish-born parents. One such encounter between tradition and the determined modernity of the young Marie plays out over the making of soda bread. In spite of her mother’s best efforts, Marie cannot be made to follow the recipe. Irish traditions conspire in the circumscription of her life and the recipe card becomes a text to be unravelled and refused in defence of her right to an autonomous life outside of her mother’s kitchen: ‘I looked down at the little card. The ink my mother had used was brown. Her handwriting was lovely and neat, the capital S and the capital B at the top of the card were striking – perfectly shaped, perfectly proportioned. My mother had learned from Irish nuns’ (2014, p. 55, italics in original). She describes her rebellion to her friends in the following terms: ‘“Once you learn to do it, you’ll be expected to do it,” and was amazed at the way my own words clarified for me what had been, until then, only a vague impulse to refuse. They looked at me over their knees, this gaggle of girls: a lifetime of hours in the kitchen bearing down on us all’ (2014, p. 60). Her protest and refusal to follow her mother’s script take its boldest form in her deliberate sabotage of the soda bread: ‘I returned with fifteen minutes on the clock still to spare. I opened the oven door and used the towel to take out the heavy bread. It was, I knew, paler than it should have been, but I turned off the oven anyway, simply to dispatch the task’ (2014, p. 60). The traditions of the homeland appear in this instance as a burden, but Ireland also offers an artillery for survival as in her insult of choice, the Irish word for fool—amadán—which throughout the novel appears as a trademark in her fearlessness in taking on the world. The novel jumps through time to her experiences of love, marriage, work, the traumas of childbirth, and, in its later chapters, the unknowability of her own adult children. Beatrice Jacobson suggests of McDermott’s relationship with the experience of previous generations of Irish Americans that: ‘In the course of her storytelling, she often seeks to make sense of that world by revisiting the past and, in several books, by revisiting the Irish American culture out of which she emerged. This theme of return suggests the positioning of McDermott’s narrators as women on the margin between past and present, and between home (Irish American and Catholic) and the larger world (secular and materialistic)’ (2008, p. 116). It is this recovery and retrieval of the voices of Irish-American women that continues a process

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of giving them a right of reply that is so powerfully rendered in the short stories of Maeve Brennan. The complex multiplicity of the experiences of women in McDermott’s work is its own riposte to the history in American print culture of reducing the experience of Irish women to caricature. In McDermott’s rendering of the lives of ordinary Irish-American women, she saves a guest role for Jackie Kennedy who makes occasional cameo appearances that serve as a reminder of the social progress of Irish America in the later decades of the twentieth century, but also present the Kennedys as distant and remote icons of achievement with little to say to the lives and struggles of McDermott’s Irish Americans. In At Weddings and Wakes , when Lucy Dailey and her three children make the journey to Brooklyn, the reality effects of the apartment of her family of origin are detailed with care, and the apartment serves as a museum to family history. In the insular, stultifying space of their mother’s childhood home, the children roam amongst family effects. Aunt Agnes’s magazines receive particular scrutiny and one issue of Life magazine is especially important in the domestic mausoleum. The magazine ‘featured on its cover a formal portrait of President Kennedy edged in black and inside (the younger girl found the place immediately) a full-page photograph of Mrs Kennedy in her black veil, a dark madonna that the younger girl studied carefully on the worn Oriental rug’ (2003a, p. 22). The conflation of the grieving widow with the Virgin Mary is a reminder of the primacy of both of these female icons to Irish Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Jackie Kennedy is also invoked in determining the fate of Theresa in Child of My Heart , whose looks are characterized as follows: ‘A young Elizabeth Taylor was the immediate word. (Later, among the East End crowd, it was the young Jackie Kennedy.) Blue eyes and dark hair and full lips and pale skin. A somewhat startling change from the red-haired or red-faced relatives who leaned over my crib…’ (2004, p. 13). The likeness to Taylor and Kennedy carries its own burden as fifteen-year-old Theresa becomes an object of interest to the middle-aged men who employ her and is cast as muse by a jaded American artist. In At Weddings and Wakes , a small child falls asleep with her face on a Life magazine cover dedicated to John F. Kennedy in a reminder of the inescapability of the Kennedys and in a gesture at how little they really mean to the material lives of the Dailey family—in this moment, the magazine cover serves merely as a convenient pillow for an exhausted child.

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‘Second Edition’: Alice McDermott’s Transatlantic Forebears In American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–55 (2013), Tara Stubbs investigates the American writer’s relationship with Irish literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The book is especially interested in how their questioning of the same sometimes took the form of ambivalence towards the place and its culture: F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, came to resent the lure that his maternal Irish background held for him – and to attempt to shake off the Celtic and Catholic overtones of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920); while John Steinbeck, who lovingly recreated his Northern Irish grandfather in his 1952 novel East of Eden, feared visiting Ireland in case it failed to live up to the promise of the stories told to him in his youth. Other writers came to Ireland late in life in search of solace; Wallace Stevens, for example, sought comfort in the spiritual, natural Ireland that was presented to him in letters from his zealous Irish correspondent Thomas McGreevy, despite the fact that he realized that his view of Ireland was probably an illusion. (2013a, p. ix)

Connection and alienation, hope and disillusionment, have already shown themselves to be powerful preoccupations in the work of Mary McCarthy and Maeve Brennan, and to have a different kind of purchase in the IrishAmerican communities that emerge from McDermott’s work. The same tension is central to McDermott’s relationship with important precursors and literary ur-texts. Her work is richly allusive and broad ranging in the reach of its intertextuality and refuses to be bound to any single tradition or to venerate canonical precursors. McDermott is cheerful and open in acknowledging the range of influences that coexist in her work and in a discussion of Fitzgerald concludes: I’ve read one or two writers who claim they have never been influenced by anyone – some claim they have never even read much of anyone else – and I think to a degree they are full of shit. So Gatsby, sure: I think the American, not the Irish American, idea of striving and longing and getting to something better found its way into Charming Billy. But I would be dishonest if I claimed that Fitzgerald influenced me more than Faulkner

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or Nabokov or García that Fitzgerald influenced me more than Faulkner or Nabokov or García Márquez or Woolf or others. (2005, pp. 568–569)

As previously mentioned, celebrated Americans in Europe—Wharton, James, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald—are given a walk on part in the transatlantic mini-drama of a student exchange programme in After This , but this next section is most interested in tracing Irish literary histories in her work and in the intermingling and cross-fertilization of allusions to Irish writers and English novelists. The same reveals McDermott’s own resistance to being confined to any literary enclave—a refusal to be pigeonholed at home with the sceptical politics of Mary McCarthy and, at the same time, her work absorbs and reframes a range of literary urtexts in ways that unsettle the more familiar trajectory of American-Irish relations. One of the ways in which McDermott avoids any romanticized mythologies of Irish America is by drawing attention to the processes of fictionalization at work in the making of Irish exceptionalism. Her work draws deliberate attention to the staging of family gatherings and foregrounds performance and voice in how her narrators set the scene in chronicling family histories and recording stories of previous generations for the annals. The setting of Billy Lynch’s funeral in the Bronx is an assemblage of props and proceeds by stage directions: The others parked up along the drive, first along one side, then the other, the members of the funeral party walking in their fourth procession of the day (the first had been out of the church, the second and third in and out of the graveyard), down the wet and rutted path to the little restaurant that, lacking only draught Guinness and a peat fire, might have been a pub in rural Ireland. Or, lacking dialogue by John Millington Synge, the set of a rural Irish play. (2003, pp. 3–4)

Synge, one of the most celebrated Irish Revivalists, was for American writers of an earlier generation such as James T. Farrell, a vitally important influence—Farrell celebrated the writers of the Revival in a 1953 essay ‘Observations on the First Period of the Irish Resistance’: ‘Synge, Yeats, Lady Gregory and their contemporaries helped bring a note of reality into Irish writing. Their characters have a dignity and a naturalness of their own. Their language bespeaks this dignity. They are real, not false’ (1982, p. 44).

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In McDermott’s work, Synge and Yeats are invoked for a different purpose. In interview, McDermott comments on the character of Billy Lynch’s ‘maudlin romanticism’ (2005, p. 567) and comes to the rueful conclusion: ‘He should never have been allowed to read Yeats’ (2005, p. 567). Indeed, in the course of Billy’s doomed love affair with the Irish nursemaid, Eva, he courts her with a rendition of ‘Down By The Salley Gardens’ (2003, p. 92). For all of his passion for the poet, Yeats conspires against him and leaves him open to heartbreak and exploitation. The power of Revivalist mythmaking is unravelled alongside of other more subtle encounters with Irish culture and history, and McDermott’s work contains a delicately coded suspicion of clichéd emblems and symbols. In a scene in which the narrator’s father discovers Billy’s love interest has absconded with the money he sent her and has no intention of returning to the United States, one familiar emblem is put under the microscope: In the front seat of Mr. Holtzman’s car, on Seventieth Street, just off Park Avenue, my father watched Mary, Eva’s sister, worry a small handkerchief, Irish linen (naturally), embroidered in one corner with three small shamrocks. Emblematic, sure, now, looking back, but in truth the children, her charges, had sewn it for her. She had shown them how to make the stitches. They had made one for their mother and their aunt. And one for her. (2003, p. 30)

Although the character carries an emblem that signifies her Irishness, it is revealed to be anything but ‘natural’ as far from being a symbol of national pride it is produced as fleeting entertainment for her charges. It becomes associated in the narrator’s father’s mind with Eva’s faithlessness and his unfortunate role as messenger dispatched to carry the news of her deception. Other myths of Irish authenticity are invoked only to be undercut in Charming Billy such as in Billy Lynch’s return home to Ireland to take the Catholic Pledge (2003b, p. 18) in the hope it will rescue him from alcoholism—a move that invests in an idea of a curative return to the homeland. Not only does Ireland fail to produce the cure, what Billy never realizes is that his valourized idea of Ireland is complicit in the treacherous trick that makes a victim of him. Such acts of fraud also show themselves in the use and abuse of language and in the narrator’s diagnosis of disingenuousness: ‘“She’s dead to me.” This was the Irish hyperbole, of course. This was the Irish penchant for pursuing

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any mention of death, any metaphor, any threat, the way a seal goes after a tossed mackerel’ (2003b, p. 31). This warning against excessively dramatic metaphors appears as caution for all writers, all the more valuable a warning, for a writer working out of a tradition that in the early twentieth century was dominated by such hyperbole as that to be found in the work of Donn Byrne. McDermott refuses to conspire in any such excess of emotion, and her work is most interested in contesting powerful myths of Irishness, whether generated by Irish history or the literary canon. There are times when the most powerful narratives of Irish history are cut down to size and rendered meaningless in relation to the ordinary struggles of McDermott’s Irish Americans. In Child of My Heart , for example, a traumatized family give their stillborn baby boy the name of Robert Emmet (2004, p. 29). The myths of Emmet’s patriotic heroism are emptied of their meaning as the grand narrative of ‘Romantic Ireland’, as Yeats would have it, is set in sharp contrast to the suffering of ordinary lives. In a lighter vein, a misheard reference to Parnell leads to moment of outrage at the wedding in At Weddings and Wakes: ‘“He was a better man than J.F.K.,” which drew a shouted objection from the rest of them. “Oh there’s no parallel,” a woman said angrily, and yet another cried, “Sweet Jesus, don’t mention Parnell”’ (2003a, p. 201). This moment of mishearing pulls the rug out from under the indignation that fuels the drunken argument, as the younger generation look on, bored and indifferent. A further case of mistaken identity in At Weddings and Wake reveals a different kind of suspicion of ideas of authenticity as one of the characters recalls the war years: A kitchen in England before the invasion where he’d sat with a woman in a thin robe and found himself wondering if given the choice his mother would disown him for what he’d just done or for the fact that he’d done it with an English girl – although the second and last time they met she told him her mother was actually Irish, a sign, he thought, regardless of what he’d already confessed to the chaplain, of God’s own absolution. (2003a, p. 127)

But for all of this concern with mishearing, misinterpretations, and mistaken identity, the novel acknowledges the impossibility of fully escaping genealogy and contains a number of knowing nods to the same. The narrator of Charming Billy confessed: ‘I went to the kitchen to stand there for a minute looking for something to do. I put the kettle on – a

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genetic trait’ (2003b, p. 42). The ‘genetic trait’ finds its most determined limits in the rueful taxonomy of the Irish produced by the narrator of Charming Billy: Of the (let’s face it) half dozen or so basic versions of the Irish physiognomy, they had two of them: Billy thin-faced with black hair and pale blue eyes behind his rimless glasses; Dennis with broad cheeks, eternally flushed, and dark eyes and fair hair… One every inch the poet or the scholar, the other a perfect young cop or barman. The aesthete priest and the jolly chaplain. (2003b, p. 73)

For women in McDermott’s work, the power of the ‘genetic trace’ carries particular hazards. At Weddings and Wakes pauses to linger over the facial features of a small child: No beauty here, what with the freckles on the moon face and those small green eyes, but it was she they smiled at, those who smiled, she who drew them to smile up at the mother (the door sliding shut behind her, cutting off the noise), whose face brought to mind not only the map of Ireland but the name of two or three other women they knew who looked just or something like her. (2003a, p. 10)

That the young girl’s face calls to mind a map echoes the poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s reading of the dangers of the confusion of woman and nation: ‘I as an Irish woman carry a map of Ireland on my back’ (2005, p. 57) and the far-reaching inescapability of the Mother Ireland trope. McDermott finds an antidote for the same impulse by reaching beyond the Irish literary tradition as a means of destabilizing any attempt to frame her work in essentialist terms. McDermott’s literary allusions draw together a wide-ranging congregation that refuses to be limited to any one national tradition. In their introduction to Modern Irish-American Fiction: A Reader (1989), Daniel J. Casey and Robert E. Rhodes present the relationship of the Irish-American writer to the Irish literary tradition as a waiting game: ‘Irish-American fiction has yet to produce a James Joyce or a Samuel Beckett, to name only two of modern literature’s great innovators’ (1989, p. 16). They go on to list the achievements of Irish-American writing before noting with some approval: ‘A number of Irish-American writers in recent years have shown an Irish penchant and talent for the nonrealistic thinking and language that, much like Beckett and Joyce, borders on

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and sometimes crosses over into the surreal in both content and shifting stream of consciousness’ (1989, p. 16). The celebration of this ‘Irish penchant and talent’ for avant-garde narrative techniques positions the Irish-American writer in relationship to a formidable canon that is very much at home with Harold Bloom’s model of influence in The Anxiety of Influence (1973): ‘Battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads’ (1997, p. 11). In ‘The Idea of Influence in American Literature’, an introduction to a special issue of Comparative Literature, Tara Stubbs draws on the work of Paul Giles, Wai Chee Dimock, and other scholars of American transnationalism in raising the question: ‘But what happens when one moves away from the apparent “anxiety” that accompanies literary inheritance, and considers instead the many ways in which influence might liberate an American writer or offer new avenues of exploration?’ (2013b, p. 87). McDermott makes for a revealing case study of the same as the critical assumptions at the heart of Harold Bloom’s diagnosis of the ‘anxiety of influence’ are incompatible with how formidable precursors are invoked in her work—rather she proceeds by absorbing and recasting canonical plots in her novels and enthusiastically experimenting with pastiche. To return to the idea of being ‘second edition’ raised at the very beginning of the book—for Billy Lynch in Charming Billy—it comes with a weight of nostalgia. He sees a young girl in the street in Ireland and is moved by how closely she resembles a family member and declares her to be like a ‘second edition’ (2003b, p. 9), but in the larger framework of the novel Irish-born characters occupy the protected role of the ‘Irish girls’, reinstating the more predictable idea that to be Irish American is to occupy the place of the ‘second edition’. For the Irish-American writer, this encompasses a number of possible meanings—the edition may be secondary to the originating ur-text, but it also opens the door to revision, adaptation, and rewriting as well as amplifying or distilling strands of the original narrative. The ‘second edition’ also has the potential to become the more authoritative narrative or to enter into a playful conversation with its predecessor. One of the ways in which McDermott’s work outruns the claims of the ‘genetic trait’ and revels in being ‘second edition’ in terms of Irish literary influence and inheritance is, then, by the very eclecticism of the sources that she places alongside and in dialogue with Irish inheritances of different kinds. As acknowledged by McDermott herself, the range of literary influences absorbed in her work is significant and moves back and forth across

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the Atlantic, and as discussed in the previous section, her work contains clear nods towards the history of the transatlantic writer in the tradition of Wharton and James. English novelists also have a significant place in the process of borrowing and adaptation that marks her work and are present in ways that deliberately upset any assumptions about the IrishAmerican writer and their literary allegiance to Irish literary culture and Irish origins. The Brontës, Dickens, and Hardy are of special significance, and the intertextual boldness that characterizes McDermott’s relationship with these writers merits close consideration. The stakes are high in terms of both canonicity and the history of connections between the Irish writer and the English literary tradition. Patricia Coughlan’s reading of the uncanny in Charming Billy and At Weddings and Wakes calls attention to the importance of Emily Brontë to McDermott’s work. Coughlan suggests that: With its gendered inflections, McDermott’s ethnic uncanny offers significant resistance to the domination of Irish-American cultural narrative by stereotypes both feminine and masculine: the revered matriarch, the loveable drunk. I have been observing how, in the uncanny episodes and transactions of both novels, McDermott discloses emotional truths that at once point to realizable futures and, stemming from half-submerged, subordinate understandings, offer the hope of psychological transformation to those trapped in sclerotic old emotional and cultural patterns… (2012, p. 144)

It might be added that the staging of the novel, complete with three spinster aunts, Veronica, May, and Agnes, and an alcoholic uncle, represents a mirroring of a popular image of the Brontë parsonage. In this version, John plays the role of the dissipated Branwell, the hard-drinking, profligate prodigal son—and so the novel offers up a canonical English plot recast in Irish America. No doubt McDermott’s relationship with the Brontës is mediated in part by discussions of the Brontë family’s Irish origins as explored by Terry Eagleton in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. His account of Branwell Brontë’s configuration in terms of the Brontë family’s Irish roots is especially vivid: Branwell lived, in short, a flamboyant stage-Irish existence, so obediently conforming to the English stereotype of the feckless Mick. When his Tory father Patrick took the Haworth hustings, Branwell, enraged at hearing

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him howled down by the crowd intervened loyally on his behalf. The local populace demonstrated their displeasure by burning Branwell in effigy, a potato in one hand and a herring in the other. The Brontës may have effaced their Irish origin, but the good people of Haworth evidently kept it well in mind. (1995, pp. 1–2)

The melancholy and ennui that fill the Brooklyn apartment in At Weddings and Wakes is, of course, also tied to material changes in the social fabric of Irish America. Dowling Almeida notes that changing immigration patterns meant that by the 1970s one in three Irish-born Americans was over the age of seventy (2006, p. 555). And so the framing references by which the family stasis can be read are rooted in social reality as well as rehearsing a familiar impression of the Brontë sisters at home. In Child of My Heart , Theresa is cast as Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, as she finds herself on the receiving end of the designs of her socially superior employers and is, at times, fashioned as an object of their projected desires. Her relationship with the artist who figures her as his muse is especially telling in this regard and is mediated in part through her interests as a reader. Her demure protest ‘I like Jane Eyre, too’ (2004, p. 70) sets Hardy’s victimized heroine into play with the relative emancipation of Brontë’s Jane the Heiress in a refusal to be bound by other people’s readings of her. Jane Eyre comes to her rescue as she negotiates her own position in relation to the power and motivations of other characters in the novel. While the lives of women in nineteenth-century fiction might seem of special concern to McDermott, a writer who is so interested in women, agency, and self-creation, one of her most extended engagements with an august predecessor appears in the form of her reading and adaptation of Charles Dickens. This plays out in local scenes such as the wedding in At Weddings and Wakes —the account of Aunt May’s courtship and wedding to Fred the mailman veers towards the Wemmick-Skiffins romance and union in Great Expectations. But Someone is the novel that contains an entanglement of plots, characters, and settings that engage directly with Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations. Dickens’s London cityscapes give way to life in New York Irish tenements. As the title of Someone suggests, the most significant reflection of Dickens is to be found in McDermott’s sustained and picaresque experiment with writing the subject—a literary commitment that goes beyond any national affiliation and traces back to Dickens’s preoccupation with writing a life.

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David Copperfield is especially concerned with the art of writing and reading a life and opens with the challenge, ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show’ (1966, p. 49), before issuing a reminder of the constructed nature of the narrative about to unfold: ‘To begin my life with the beginning of my life…’ (1966, p. 49). Someone is similarly concerned with the potential hazards of writing a life and refuses to follow the plot. McDermott’s Marie is given to interjections of the kind that are very much at home with Dickens. She pauses to explain at one point: ‘I had read far enough into David Copperfield by then to know a hard-luck childhood could portend a hard-luck life’ (2014, p. 156). Someone also contains an extended homage to Dickens. In a deliberate confusion of Dickensian plots, in a self-contained set piece in the novel, Marie turns her back on the typing pool and other suitable forms of employment for young women and goes to work for Fagin the Undertaker. Oliver Twist turns into Great Expectations when she meets his mother, a version Miss Havisham, albeit one who keeps a tidy house, but nevertheless decorates it with leftover funeral flowers and remains confined to the upstairs parlour where she holds court to visitors: ‘The third floor apartment was all Irish lace: lace curtains, lace tablecloths, lace doilies on the backs and arms of every chair, lace at the throat of the old lady’s dresses, and a lace handkerchief in her pale hands’ (2014, p. 119). McDermott’s playful genuflections take on additional charge at Marie’s wedding reception: ‘At our reception, Mr Fagin and Mr Heep had stood before me, arm in arm, laughing and pointing at each other, shouting about what they called “the irony of it,” that they both had names out of Charles Dickens’ (2014, p. 173). Here, McDermott’s characters do the work for her, excited as they are to find themselves in another novel. Such scenes also contain within them a tacit acknowledgement of transatlantic literary history and anxious questions about cultural superiority. Charles Dickens offers a compelling case study of the English novelist in America in the mid-nineteenth century and this encounter serves as a backdrop for McDermott’s reorientation of Dickens, given the significance of his American Notes (1842), which offers a vivid account of his travels in the United States. In Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (1990), Christopher Mulvey suggests that if Charles Dickens proceeded with the observational powers of the novelist at work in American Notes, he himself was received as a kind of fictional character:

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In some respects Charles Dickens on tour was not unlike one of his own creations – a character to be enjoyed by his public much as it enjoyed Mr Pickwick. In turn Dickens was himself a creation of this public who celebrated him, feted him, made him famous by counting him famous. … The American public expected in 1842 to be courted in a way that the British public had not yet learned. (1990, p. 117)

The cultural superiority of the English writer in the United States asserts itself on more than one occasion in his accounts of American political institutions, cultural life, and the cities that he visits on his tour. Even though he writes at length about the pleasing aspect of the city of Boston, he imagines its suburbs as follows: The white wooden houses (so white that it makes one wink to look at them), with their green jalousie blinds, are so sprinkled and dropped about in all directions, without seeming to have any root at all in the ground; and the small churches and chapels are so prim, and bright, and highly varnished; that I almost believed the whole affair could be taken up piecemeal like a child’s toy, and crammed into a little box. (2000, pp. 34–35)

This vivid scene is very much the product of the novelist’s imagination, but it also risks imagining one of the finest cities of the United States as a toy town, an idea that is revealing of the anxieties and cultural hierarchies that dominated the relationship between English and American literature. It is also difficult not to think of this description in contrast to the city of London, which in the pages of Dickens’s novels has a magnitude and permanence that makes the toy town of Boston all the more precarious. McDermott absorbs this history in her own recasting of some of Dickens’s most famous characters, but Dickens ultimately emerges as a source of nourishment for McDermott’s literary practice rather than representing any burden of anxiety. McDermott’s relationship with literary precursors on both sides of the Atlantic is something she acknowledges, but when it comes to the power of the canon she is pragmatic and unreserved in how she positions her work in relation to the same: If you’re Irish American you are often advised to study Joyce and use him as a model. But someone like Joyce can be such an overwhelming influence that, if you are going to find your own voice and subject matter, you just have to say – and I think he would smile at my phraseology – ‘Fuck Joyce’.

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I admire James Joyce enormously, but I had no intention of doing my own version of The Dead or of using it as a model. (2005, p. 568)

McDermott’s refusal be limited by pious observation of the law of the canon—while in the same moment expressing her appreciation for Joyce—is a contradiction that would have been appreciated by McCarthy and Brennan before her and is marked by a shared determination to remain one step ahead of the demands and expectations of tradition.

Works Cited Primary Material Cullinan, E. (1969). House of Gold. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cullinan, E. (1971). ‘The Old Priest’ in The Time of Adam (pp. 80–99). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cullinan, E. (1977). Yellow Roses. New York: The Viking Press. Dickens, C. (1966 [1849–1850]). David Copperfield. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dickens, C. (2000 [1842]). American Notes for General Circulation (P. Ingham, Ed.). London: Penguin. Dickens, C. (2003 [1861]). Great Expectations. Harmondsworth: Penguin. McDermott, A. (2003a [1992]). At Weddings and Wakes. London: Bloomsbury. McDermott, A. (2003b [1997]). Charming Billy. London: Bloomsbury. McDermott, A. (2004 [2002]). Child of My Heart. London: Bloomsbury. McDermott, A. (2008 [2006]). After This. London: Bloomsbury. McDermott, A. (2014 [2013]). Someone. London: Bloomsbury. McDermott, A. (2018 [2017]). The Ninth Hour. London: Bloomsbury.

Secondary Material Barr Ebest, S. (2013). The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Writers. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Bloom, H. (1997 [1973]). The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: University Press. Casey, D. J., & Rhodes, R. E. (1989). ‘The Next Parish: An Introduction’. In D. J. Casey & R. E. Rhodes (Eds.), Modern Irish-American Fiction: A Reader (pp. 1–21). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Coughlan, P. (2012). ‘Paper Ghosts: Reading the Uncanny in Alice McDermott’. In P. Mac Éinrí & T. O’Toole (Eds.), Eire-Ireland—Special Issue, New Approaches to Irish Migration, 47 (1&2), 123–146.

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Eagleton, T. (1995). Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso. Farrell, J. T. (1982 [1953]). ‘Observations on the First Period of the Irish Resistance’. In D. Flynn (Ed.), James T. Farrell: On Irish Themes (pp. 40–44). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Friedan, B. (1992 [1963]). The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin. Jacobson, B. (2008). ‘Alice McDermott’s Narrators’. In S. Barr Ebest & K. McInerney (Eds.), Too Smart To Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers (pp. 116–135). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Kirkus Review, Review of House of Gold by Elizabeth Cullinan. (1969). https:// www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/elizabeth-cullinan/house-of-gold/. Accessed 1 June 2020. Mac Éinrí, P., & O’Toole, T. (2012). Editors’ Introduction: New Approaches to Irish Migration. In P. Mac Éinrí & T. O’Toole (Eds.), Eire-Ireland—Special Issue, New Approaches to Irish Migration, 47 (1&2), 5–18. Moynihan, S. (2010). ‘“None of us will always be here”: Whiteness, Loss, and Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes ’. Contemporary Women’s Writing, 4 (1), 40–54. Mulvey, C. (1990). Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ní Dhomhnaill, N. (2005). ‘The Woman Poet in the Irish Tradition’. In O. Frawley (Ed.), Ní Dhomhnaill: Selected Essays (pp. 239–265). Dublin: New Island. Reilly, C. (2005). An Interview with Alice McDermott. Contemporary Literature, 46(4), 557–578. Shelley, T. J. (2006). ‘Twentieth-Century American Catholicism and Irish Americans’. In M. R. Casey & J. J. Lee (Eds.), Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (pp. 574–608). New York: New York University Press. Stubbs, T. (2013a). American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–55—The Politics of Enchantment. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stubbs, T. (2013b). ‘Introduction: The Idea of Influence in American Literature’. Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, 9 (2), 87–90.

CHAPTER 5

The Lonely Voice: Alice Munro and Ireland

If the recovery of the history of the Irish-American woman writer has come about through a process of testing the canon and rethinking the range of what Charles Fanning called ‘the Irish voice in America’ (1990), the fortunes of Irish-Canadian literary connections have been somewhat differently conceived. Smyth and Houston’s dismay at the ‘disappearance’ of the Irish from official histories of Canada (1990, p. 3) is also to be found in critical studies of Irish-Canadian writers. Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Emma Donoghue present three revealing case studies of transatlantic encounters in contemporary Canadian fiction, albeit through three very different modus operandi. The early work of Alice Munro is shot through with nods at the Irish literary tradition during a period of revival and renewal for Canadian literature in the 1970s, Jane Urquhart’s historical novels stage a number of dramatic encounters with a distant and more recent Irish history, and do so with a view to breaking the silence observed by Smyth and Houston, while Emma Donoghue, as an Irish-born writer with Canadian citizenship, embraces the indeterminacy of being at home in two places, and makes a study of the hazards and liberating potential of the same in her novels and short stories. In the large body of critical work on Alice Munro, her Scottish ancestry is referenced with far greater frequency than her connections to Ireland. Her ancestors on her mother’s side were from County Wicklow, but the reading of Irishness in her work is relatively underdeveloped. Munro’s biographer Robert Thacker is the only critic to investigate these links © The Author(s) 2021 E. McWilliams, Irishness in North American Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1_5

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in his extended analysis of Munro’s stories. In ‘A “Booming Tender Sadness”: Alice Munro’s Irish’, he notes that her stories about IrishCanadian connections, such as ‘A Better Place Than Home’, which started out as a screenplay for the CBC called ‘1847: The Irish’, are allimportant to the advancement of her craft as a short story writer. Thacker concludes: ‘1847: The Irish’ and ‘A Better Place Than Home’, coming as they did at a critical place in Munro’s career, played a part in the transformation of Munro’s art as she returned to Ontario, and to Huron County, after over twenty years in British Columbia. Though not focused on her own Irish ancestors, Munro’s research into the mid-nineteenth-century Irish exodus from Ireland helped to contextualise the images she was happening upon in the 1970s and that she subsequently fashioned into stories. (2016, p. 226)

This chapter is concerned with how Munro’s earliest work engages with Ireland through a similarly indirect route and via the legacy of a formidable Irish forebear—James Joyce—as well as being interested in her expressions of sympathy for near contemporary Irish writers such as Edna O’Brien and Frank O’Connor. It investigates these links as a means of revisiting the importance of Irish influences and allegiances and as a route to examining how Munro’s reading of Irish writers holds up its own nicely polished looking glass to the writer at work in her groundbreaking 1971 short story cycle Lives of Girls and Women.

Irish and Canadian Literary Revivals In drawing Ireland into conversation with Munro’s Canada, it is helpful to turn to a scene in Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971). One of the earliest acts of writing in the short story cycle features Del Jordan, teaching Uncle Benny how to write. She begins by painstakingly printing his name and address: ‘Mr. Benjamin Thomas Poole, The Flats Road, Jubilee, Wawanash County, Ontario, Canada, North America, The Western Hemisphere, The World, The Solar System, The Universe’ (11). This is a carefully positioned rewriting of the young Stephen Dedalus’s attempt to locate his place in the world in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), where Stephen writes his full address, extended to include ‘The Universe’, in the flyleaf of his geography book. Munro’s invocation of Joyce has considerable implications for reading Lives of Girls

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and Women as a portrait of the woman artist and for understanding the Canadian literary community out of which she emerged in the 1970s. Derek Attridge writes in the introduction to Joycean Legacies: The place occupied by Joyce’s fiction in the later twentieth century and after is unique: any English-language writer with aspirations to write a novel that will have a chance of joining the canon of major literary works has to take account of Ulysses, and this means having to acknowledge that if the new work does not appear to be influenced by Joyce, it will be taken to have avoided Joyce. (2015, p. vii, italics in original)

For a writer like Munro, faithful to the short story as she is, the germinal importance of Joyce’s Dubliners for the short story writer in the twentieth-century and the indeterminate, episodic structure of Portrait, which speaks to both the short story cycle and the novel in terms of form, are of special interest when it comes to the reach of influence described by Attridge. The figure of Joyce also casts a light on the work of other Canadian writers in this period. Mavis Gallant’s frustration at the parochial reception of her work at home in Canada is most fervently expressed in the introduction to her 1981 collection, Home Truths. She looks back at her writing life with dismay at the limitations of the dominant view of what Canadian art and literature should aim to be and the risk of being seen as ‘un-Canadian’, which Gallant describes as ‘an accusation to which the expatriate writer is particularly susceptible, and will go to some lengths to avoid’ (1981, p xi). She continues: ‘It surely signifies more than lightheadedness about English that “expatriate” is regularly spelled in Canadian newspapers “expatriot”’ (1981, p. xii). The desire to fly by the nets of any nationalist sentiment while being interested in the possibilities of what Gallant calls Canadian ‘national consciousness’ (1981, p. xv) is one that is very much at home in both the work of Joyce and Munro. In finding a home for her work in small-town Canada, Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women is representative of the changing literary landscape of Canada in the 1970s. This period of Canadian cultural and literary revival was due in no small part to the groundbreaking vision of Munro and her contemporaries. It is for this reason that Irish writers emerge as key influences in Munro’s narrative of growing up Canadian, inspired as she is by the challenge to find expression for the uncreated conscience of Southern Ontario. Stephen Dedalus’s formula for self-determination as it appears inside the cover of his geography book makes another

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dramatic appearance on the Canadian literary scene in 1972, just a year after Munro’s reworking of it in Lives of Girls and Women. Munro’s contemporary, Margaret Atwood, returns to Stephen Dedalus’s act of self-identification in her analysis of Canadian literature in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972). Munro, Atwood, and others sought to answer the question ‘Where is Here?’ A question first formulated by Canadian critic Northrop Frye in 1965. For this generation, up until the late 1960s, in literary terms, Canadian literature was still, to borrow Irish writer George Moore’s phrase, an ‘untilled field’— Moore’s The Untilled Field (1903) had a formative influence on Joyce and writers of his generation. Munro, like so many of her compatriots, was committed to imagining a new kind of Canadian literature that was not afraid to root itself in Canada. Writing in 1971, the same year in which Lives of Girls and Women was first published, Margaret Laurence issued a manifesto on behalf of Canadian writers in an essay entitled ‘Where the World Began’. She reaches for a Yeatsian rather than Joycean vocabulary: ‘We have only just begun to value ourselves, our land, our abilities. We have only just begun to recognize our legends and to give shape to our myths’ (1976b, p. 217). It is clear to see why Irish literature might have held such appeal for Munro and other writers of her generation—its promise to invent a new kind of Irish literature in English speak to the commitments of Canadian writers in the 1960s and 1970s. Joyce, as Kiberd and Mathews note in The Handbook of the Irish Revival, might be celebrated as a literary internationalist but was, in his own way, a writer fully engaged in the Revival and it formed an undeniably important backdrop to his work: ‘In more recent decades, the tendency has been to dismiss and demonise the Revival as a source of many Irish ills… Some critics, indeed, have been determined to remove one of the most innovative and progressive writers, James Joyce, from the Revival context that informs all of his work, on the basis that the movement could only ever produce insular, nativist art’ (2015, p. 27). If, too often, the Irish Literary Revival is characterized as the project of men, the promises of cultural regeneration in Canada in the 1970s were especially important for women writers such as Munro, Atwood, and Margaret Laurence. Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) and Laurence’s The Diviners (1974) make for valuable companion texts about self-realization and the woman writer in Canada in the second half of the twentieth century.

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This chapter is most concerned with the fate of the Canadian woman artist as she resists, but ultimately remains fruitfully connected to the complexities of home in small-town Canada, in what looks likes a reanimation of the cycle of departure and return that is so important to Irish literary modernism. Stephen Dedalus’s formula for self-determination makes another dramatic appearance on the Canadian literary scene just a year after Munro’s repurposing of it in Lives of Girls and Women. Margaret Atwood draws attention to Stephen Dedalus’s act of selfidentification in her analysis of Canadian literature in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), a work of criticism that, as previously discussed, very self-consciously sets out to educate the reader about the history and value of Canadian literature. In outlining what she sees to be the missing elements in Canadian literary criticism, Atwood makes explicit reference to Joyce’s Portrait and stresses the need to discover a national theme in Canadian literature: ‘Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood School, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe.’ That’s a fairly inclusive list of everything it is possible for a human being to write about and therefore to read about. It begins with the personal, continues through the social or cultural or national and ends with ‘The Universe,’ the universal… The tendency in Canada, at least in high school or university teaching, has been to emphasize the personal and universal but to skip the national or cultural. This is like trying to teach human anatomy by looking only at the head and the feet. That’s one reason for reading Canadian literature then; it gives you a more complete idea of how any literature is made: it’s made by people living in a particular space at a particular time, and you can recognize that more easily if the space and the time are your own. (2004, p. 22)

Atwood’s definition of a national literature as made ‘by people living in a particular space at a particular time’ echoes Leopold Bloom’s poignant conclusion in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses that ‘a nation is the same people living in the same place’ (1993, p. 317). The Canadian delineation of a national literature in this period finds sympathy with one of Joyce’s most famous pronouncements on the constitution of a nation. Atwood goes on to identify survival as the most appropriate symbol for Canadian culture—a symbol that all former colonies might indeed identify with— and stresses the need for an awakening to Canadian difference and to an appreciation of Canadian literature on its own terms.

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In Lives of Girls and Women, Munro (drawing on Joyce’s formula for self-definition) already addresses the elisions in Canadian literature that are later identified by Atwood. Lives of Girls and Women explores female coming of age in a distinctive regional and social landscape, making an essential contribution to the process by which Canadian writers forged an independent Canadian national and literary identity and, more specifically, an independent Canadian literary community. It is easy to see why A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Joyce as a figurehead of a new chapter in the history of Irish writing in English, would have held such appeal for Munro and other writers of her generation. For Margaret Atwood, as a young writer concerned with escaping past and present colonial influences, and wishing to forge a sovereign Canadian literary tradition in English, Joyce provides a powerful role model. In her extended analysis of images of the artist and author in literature in Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing , Atwood looks back to the 1970s and draws attention to how ‘James Joyce’s well-known triplebarrelled slogan, “silence, exile, and cunning,” had a distinct resonance for aspiring Canadian writers’ (2002, p. 68) at that time in Canadian cultural history. For Munro, as for her Canadian contemporary Margaret Laurence, writing ‘has to be set firmly in some soil, some place, some outer and inner territory which might be described in anthropological terms as “cultural background”’ (1970, p. 18). Munro presents a classic example of this in her treatment of Jubilee in Lives of Girls and Women as the collection savours and gives full expression to the local events of life in rural Wawanash County. This emphasis on place is one of the key points of contact between Joyce and Munro. Joyce’s work, most notably Ulysses , clearly speaks to Munro as a writer encountering the same challenges as those made famous by Joyce. Some of the stories of his commitment to recreating a sense of place to equal the scale of his modernist achievement include his declared ambition to capture Dublin in all of its encyclopaedic detail, so that if the city were ever destroyed it could be rebuilt from the text of Ulysses; his careful adherence to the Dublin of Thom’s Street Directory of 1904; and the image of the author labouring over the chapter known as ‘Wandering Rocks’, calculating as accurately as possible the time needed for his characters to get from one destination to another. Such commitment is reflected and rearticulated in Del’s Uncle Craig’s work in progress; his ‘History of Wawanash County’ with

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its attention to very specific local detail reads like a descriptive version of Thom’s Street Directory: On the opposite corner, Mr Alex Hedley built and opened a General Store but died within two months of the opening of a stroke and the operation was continued by his sons Edward and Thomas. There was also a blacksmith shop in operation further along the Fifth Concession, O’Donnell being the name of the people that had it. This corner was known either as Headley’s Corners or Church Corners. There is nothing in that location at the present time but the building of the store, which a family rents and lives in. (1982, p. 61, italics in original)

In his biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann recounts how when asked in later life if he would ever go back to Ireland, Joyce’s reply was a telling, ‘Have I ever left it?’ (1982, p. 292), giving rise to yet another tale for the Joycean annals, one that encapsulates the gloriously contradictory nature of his complicated relationship with Ireland. By the end of Lives of Girls and Women, Del Jordan, in a similar vein, has no desire to relinquish the Jubilee of her imagination in her development as a writer and so she arrives at a very Joycean conclusion about her relationship with, and role in, the community of the town. Munro’s engagement with Joyce also presents itself obliquely in her treatment of the Canadian city. Lives of Girls and Women is set very determinedly in the semi-rural landscape of Ontario, but a key episode in the first story in the collection centres on Uncle Benny’s trip to Toronto in search of his runaway wife. Uncle Benny finds himself lost and confused, going around in circles, unable to navigate the maze of the city. Reflecting mournfully on his misadventures in the city, Uncle Benny explains: ‘I went to a gas station and I asked them and they said they didn’t have no maps. They had maps but only of the province’ (1982, p. 24). That Uncle Benny should fail to procure a map of the city of Toronto and finds himself frightened and disoriented is an indication of Munro’s commitment to the rural landscape of Southern Ontario so vividly mapped out in her work. More than this, Uncle Benny’s experience in labyrinthine Toronto is a reflection of how Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom navigate the streets of Dublin in Portrait and Ulysses, sometimes losing their bearings on the city and, indeed, on reality. For all of the emphasis on flight and evasion in the trajectory of progress found in Munro and Joyce, they share a deep commitment to putting the places they come from at the centre of their work and imagination.

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‘The Same People Living in the Same Place’: Portraits of the Artist in James Joyce and Alice Munro Munro’s artist in formation, Del Jordan, undergoes similar trials by ordeal as Stephen Dedalus in Portrait —religious fervour, unrequited passion, sexual awakening—before emerging at the end of the novel ready to write the narrative of her own life and, as importantly, to write the story of the community of Jubilee. This is played out most dramatically in Del’s relationship with her Uncle Craig, who is also a writer and a self-styled local historian. Joyce once claimed that his capacious ability to recall the minutiae of situations and places, evident from a young age, was on account of the fact that he had a ‘grocer’s assistant’s mind’ (1982, p. 28). The same diagnosis can be made of Uncle Craig as he attempts to write a thousandpage history of Wawanash County and trace his family tree back to Ireland in 1670. Uncle Craig is a source of unwanted information as far as the young Del is concerned: ‘The other kind of information he gave me had to do with the political history of Wawanash County, allegiances of families, how people were related, what had happened in elections’ (1982, p. 30). In spite of Del’s initial rejection of his exhaustive history of the county, she gradually comes to appreciate his project, which, as it turns out, is not entirely removed from that of Joyce’s encyclopaedic tribute to Dublin in the scale of its ambitions. Del comes to value the ‘grocer’s assistant’s mind’ in Uncle Craig’s literary enterprise as she comes into her own as a writer, and she ultimately succeeds in integrating it into her developing creative life on her own terms. Thus, Lives of Girls and Women relies on a similar pattern to that found in Joyce’s work, in its chronicle of a character’s rejection of, but ultimate return to, the ordinary and familiar as a true source of inspiration for the burgeoning artist and its investment in, to borrow Declan Kiberd’s description of Ulysses, ‘the collective utterance of a community’ (1996, p. 329). Much as is the case in Portrait, from the outset of Lives of Girls and Women, Del’s relationship with the adults who fashion her view of the world is challenged and tested. Whether in showing Uncle Benny how to write—although Uncle Benny, as the opening pages tell us, is only her Uncle because that is how the community imagines him: ‘He was not our uncle, or anybody’s’ (1982, p. 1)—fending off the sarcastic sneers of her aunts, or negotiating the emotional minefield of the school

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dramatic society, Del is thoroughly embroiled in the communal workings of Jubilee. The appearance of Del’s aunts as self-styled arbiters of taste and opinion has a special function in the collection. In a moment where they recall the arrival of a Catholic into the family, a whole history of prejudice is acknowledged. One of Uncle Craig’s history projects addresses the same directly in an account of family genealogy that traces back to Ireland in 1670: ‘Nobody in our family had done anything remarkable. They had married other Irish Protestants and had large families. … He did not ask for anybody in the family to have done anything more interesting, or scandalous, than to marry a Roman Catholic (the woman’s religion noted in red ink below her name)’ (1982, p. 31). As she becomes more aware of the social topography of the town, Del Jordan forges, in spite of her mother’s disapproval, her own alliance with the squalor of the Flat’s Road community, protesting when, in a bid for respectability, her mother insists that they move to town. Her mother, despite her charitable intentions, is selective in her sympathy for the inhabitants of Jubilee: ‘She could not bear sexual looseness, dirty language, haphazard lives, contented ignorance; and so she had to exclude the Flat’s Road people from the really oppressed and deprived people, the real poor whom she still loved’ (1982, p. 8). Marjorie Garson’s article ‘Alice Munro and Charlotte Brontë’ (2000) examines Munro’s literary relationship with her Victorian predecessor and outlines how Munro’s writing productively interacts with Brontë’s work. One of the most evocative intertextual references in Lives of Girls and Women centres on Del’s teenage epiphany inspired by her reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë . Even though Del remains one remove from Jane Eyre—Gaskell’s biography is the named text rather than Brontë’s novel—Garson’s explication of the impact of the novel draws out the range and power of Brontë’s informing influence. The Joycean subtext is, in contrast, frequently implicit rather than explicit in Munro’s first short story sequence. In contrast, her next collection Who Do You Think You Are? (1978) (later published as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose) contains a number of very direct appeals to Ulysses. Thus, a matrix of Joycean connections—some explicit and some oblique—can be observed that casts a retrospective, illuminating light on Munro’s first portrait of the artist in Lives of Girls and Women. ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ is a question equally troubling for Canadian writers in the 1970s as for the Irish in the early decades of

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the twentieth century. The main character in the collection, Rose, who shares much in common with Del, surrounds herself with ‘Great Books’, including the work of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Joyce. In the third episode of the collection, Rose describes how she likes to play with the titles of literary works: ‘She made rubble out of the titles. Ode came out Odd and Ulysses had a long shh in it, as if the hero was drunk’ (1979, p. 45). Rose’s irreverent jumbling of Ulysses is indicative of Munro’s relationship with the male-centred portrait of the artist ideal with which Joyce is synonymous. Thus, in a familiar enough pattern, Munro’s portrait takes inspiration from but also resist elements of Joyce’s work. This is echoed in the way that Rose’s first marriage is negatively influenced by her husband’s misplaced literary affiliations: ‘You don’t know how I love you. There’s a book I have called The White Goddess. Every time I look at the title it reminds me of you.’ She wriggled away from him. She bent down and got a handful of snow from the drift by the steps and clapped it on his head. ‘My White God’. (1979, pp. 81–82)

The earnestness of her husband’s endorsement of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess spells doom for their marriage. Munro’s work shows, at times, a similar irreverence as her protagonist towards Joyce and yet she ultimately finds common ground between the communities out of which they write. This is exhibited very clearly in an exchange with a friend where Rose’s describes the colloquial language of her hometown of Hanratty: ‘In the town I come from,’ Rose said, exaggerating, ‘everybody says yez. What’ll yez have? How’re yez doing.’ ‘Yez?’ ‘Youse. It’s the plural of you.’ ‘Oh. Like Brooklyn. And James Joyce.’ (1978, p. 104)

That Rose’s origins should in this way be identified with those of James Joyce and that her voice reverberates with the sounds of Joyce’s HibernoEnglish has resonance for the community of Hanratty evoked in The Beggar Maid but strikes an even greater chord with Del Jordan and the town of Jubilee in Lives of Girls and Women. While Stephen Dedalus in Portrait and Ulysses refuses to serve the demands of the voices of nationalism that clamour for his attention, Ireland nevertheless remains the crucible of Stephen’s, as well as Joyce’s,

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imagination. A similar dynamic emerges in Lives of Girls and Women, in Del’s relationship with her Uncle Craig’s exhaustive history of Wawanash County, which moves from being a mildly embarrassing eccentricity to being acknowledged as a ‘Great Book’ in its own right. Del’s relationship with her Uncle Craig’s History of Wawanash County comes to play a particularly important role in the assertion of her own literary ambitions. The history is a detailed chronicle of ordinary, daily events and occurrences. Nevertheless, Uncle Craig’s project is regarded with theatrical significance by her aunts as ‘man’s work’. It quickly becomes apparent that the public and political events of the county are of no interest to Craig’s local history: These were not what mattered; it was daily life that mattered. Uncle Craig’s files and drawers were full of newspaper clippings, letters, containing descriptions of the weather, an account of a runaway horse, lists of those present at funerals, a great accumulation of the most ordinary facts, which it was his business to get in order. Everything had to go into his history, to make it the whole history of Wawanash County. He could not leave anything out. That was why, when he died, he had only got as far as the year 1909. (1982, pp. 31–32)

In many ways, true to the Victorian intertexts identified by Garson, Uncle Craig is as tied up in an interminable project as his nineteenth-century parallels in the form of Mr Casaubon and his ‘Key to All Mythologies’ in Middlemarch and the impossible case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House. In keeping with the form and function of these examples, Uncle Craig’s death is followed by a careful negotiation over inheritance. Unlike Dorothea in Middlemarch, Del is, at first at least, indifferent to and careless with her Uncle’s literary legacy. On the death of her uncle, Del’s aunts solemnly present the incomplete history in a fireproof and padlocked tin to Del, in the hope that she will complete it at some point in the future. When Del receives her literary inheritance in the form of Uncle Craig’s history of the county, she is faced with a particular challenge. Her Irish aunts are frank in outlining her mission and their expectations of her and in making clear that she has been given the privilege by default: ‘Because we hope – we hope someday that you’ll be able to finish it.’ ‘We used to think about giving it to Owen, because he’s the boy –’ ‘But you’re the one has the knack for writing compositions.’

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It would be a hard job, they said, and it was asking a lot of me, but they thought I would find it easier if I took the manuscript home with me now and kept it, reading it over from time to time, to get the feel of Uncle Craig’s writing. (1982, p. 61)

In a coda to this event, Del casually removes the manuscript and notes from the padlocked tin in which it was solemnly presented to her, and takes a ‘few poems and bits of a novel’ that she keeps stashed between the pages of Wuthering Heights and places them in the tin (1982, p. 62). Craig’s manuscript is abandoned in the cellar and is destroyed in a spring flood. Del, up to this point, like Stephen Dedalus in Portrait, has only written ‘a few poems’ but nonetheless has made an important strike towards determining her own way of organizing reality in her writing. Most significantly, Del’s development as a writer is determined by Jubilee to the extent that the town becomes the inevitable subject of her writing. In the epilogue to the collection, Del plans her first novel, a gothic adventure in which Jubilee will serve as a convenient backdrop, until she realizes that the community of Jubilee itself will be key to her writing life. Looking back on her anxiety to escape Jubilee, Del reflects ‘It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee. Voracious and misguided as Uncle Craig out at Jenkin’s Bend, writing his history, I would want to write things down’ (1982, p. 249). In her new-found voraciousness for Jubilee, Uncle Craig’s manuscript seems more like a Joycean project in the scale of its attention to detail than an irrelevant litany of events of minor interest, but by this time the manuscript has been destroyed and so, as well as desiring to, Del is, in part, obliged to write a replacement history. Del finally finds a new outlet for her agile memory as she develops ‘a feel for Uncle Craig’s writing’ in most unexpected ways. The idea that Munro’s collection takes a Joycean template and traces upon it a Canadian, woman-centred pattern is further supported in the way the ending of Lives of Girls and Women marks another point of contact with Stephen Dedalus’s experience in Portrait. At the end of Portrait, Stephen Dedalus makes a declaration of his artistic ambition, but Joyce is already ahead of himself if Portrait can be considered a milestone in, if not the ultimate achievement of, this ambitious enterprise. Similarly, at the end of Lives of Girls and Women, Del is finally in a position to write the narrative that the reader is nearing completion.

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Reflecting on developments in Canadian literature in the 1970s, Linda Hutcheon concludes: ‘It is clear that many thematic lacunae in our literary experience are now being filled, thanks to the work of novelists such as Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood and many others: we are finally learning what it feels like for example, to be female and growing up in repressive small-town Canada’ (1986, p. 226). Lives of Girls and Women presents, then, an alternative history of female coming of age in rural Ontario: a new endeavour in Canadian literature that marks a break in the literary history of Canada in a reflection of the way that Joyce’s work announced a new and unprecedented change in the direction of Irish literature. The voice of Munro’s protagonist in Lives of Girls and Women has distinctively Joycean inflections. Notwithstanding the fact that Del Jordan often finds herself poised between the desire to fly by the nets of home and family and capture its every minute detail, as is the case in Joyce’s work, the collection ends with a longing to reconnect productively with the fabric of home. But this is not where Munro’s relationship with Irish writing ends as there is evidence to suggest a different kind of transatlantic empathy between Munro and her near contemporaries—her writing contains signs of engagement with the voices of Irish writers who came to prominence at the beginning of the 1960s and evidence of their importance to her emergence as a new voice in Canadian fiction a decade later.

Alice Munro’s Irish Compatriots If the importance of Joyce most readily announces itself in Munro’s early work, the expression of affinity with other writers across the Atlantic is more subtle, but nonetheless important—the demotic voices of Munro’s post-war Ontario are not so far removed from the lives played out in the rural Ireland of near contemporaries acknowledged to be of special interest to Munro. Munro recollects a stay in Carrigadrohid in County Cork when she was struggling with revisions to ‘The Love of a Good Woman’: ‘Much of what I saw was familiar to me, not very different from the rural landscape I grew up in, and live in now, in southwestern Ontario. Change the beech trees to maples, the stone walls to wire fences, and there you have it’ (2003, p. 29). Her time in Ireland involved a trip to her mother’s

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ancestral home and a moment of crisis: ‘On our way back we swung eastward to see Wicklow where my mother’s people came from. We went to look at the Meeting of the Waters, in the Vale of Avoca, which Thomas Moore wrote about, and that was the spot where I was struck by the idea that I must not only give up that story but give up writing fiction’ (2003, p. 30). She goes on to describe how the story had become overcome with Irish influences and on return to Canada needed to be reset in terms of its geographical compass: You could hardly miss it. The changes I had made, working in Ireland, had all to do with something I would have to call tone. Something unmistakable but hard to define. And yet I know now where that had come from. It had come from Irish short stories, from William Trevor and Edna O’Brien and Frank O’Connor, and Mary Lavin, all of whom I had read for decades, long before I went to Ireland, and whom I was not reading during that particular time in their country. I was not reading them, but I was seeing through them, through their eyes and their words. … But what if the cows in my story were actually the cows in Edna O’Brien’s rainy fields in County Clare? That is the sort of thing that can happen. And now I had to fetch everything back. (2003, p. 30)

Having successfully managed to ‘fetch everything back’ to Canadian territory, Munro adds a final note that ‘The Love of a Good Woman’ became the title story in her Giller Prize winning 1998 collection of the same name. Munro’s encounter with Edna O’Brien, in this case both anxious and productive, is especially revealing. O’Brien’s The Country Girls , published a decade before the appearance of Lives of Girls and Women, has an especially significant relationship with Munro’s early autobiographical fiction. The appearance of O’Brien’s novel in 1960 was a transformative moment for Irish women’s writing and The Country Girls is looked upon as a lodestone for subsequent generations. Its account of the life and trials by ordeal of Caithleen Brady shares a great deal in common with Munro’s Del Jordan and her fashioning of the Irish woman artist has a number of traits that set the scene for Munro. Like Del Jordan, Caithleen Brady finds herself on the receiving end of the literary ambitions of others, most memorably in the form of the flattery of an acquaintance who writes for the local newspaper: ‘I sighed. Jack’s infatuation with the English language bored me. He went on: “‘My thoughts on white ships and the King of Spain’s daughter’ – except that my thoughts are much nearer

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home.” He smiled happily to himself. He was composing a paragraph for his column in the local paper: “Walking in the crystal-clear morning with a juvenile lady friend, exchanging snatches of Goldsmith and Colum, the thought flashed through my mind that I was moving amid…”’ (1988, pp. 13–14). Ten years before Del Jordan wrestles with the unwanted inheritance of her Uncle Craig’s exhaustive history, Caithleen Brady is subjected to inflated prose of a similar kind. Furthermore, Emily Brontë’s work appears as a possible source text to plagiarize in her letter writing to Mr. Gentleman: ‘I had some idea that I would write him a beautiful letter, a magnificent letter, most of which I’d copy out of Wuthering Heights’ (1988, p. 62). As previously mentioned, when Del Jordan begins to write her way out of the shadow of male influence, she keeps her poetry in progress tucked safely between the pages of Wuthering Heights . As is the case with Munro, O’Brien’s most important nods and echoes in The Country Girls , as Derek Attridge characterizes them in Joycean Legacies, are reserved for Joyce. In interview, O’Brien recalls her first encounter with Joyce: Oh yes, I thank James Joyce. I fold my hands and say, ‘God bless you James Joyce,’ every day. I was working in a chemist shop in the Cabra Road here in Dublin and obsessed about writing. I came across a little book called Introducing James Joyce, by T. S. Eliot. … I learnt from it about the dazzlement, audacity, and fluidity of language. (2000, p. 216)

He is given rather more down to earth treatment in The Country Girls when Kate’s friend and nemesis, Baba, chastises her for her enthusiasm: ‘Will you for Chrissake, stop asking fellas if they’ve read James Joyce’s Dubliners ? They’re not interested. They’re out for a night. Eat and drink all you can and leave James Joyce to blow his own trumpet.’ ‘He’s dead.’ ‘Well, for God’s sake, then, what are you worrying about?’ (1988, p. 150)

Munro’s reanimation of Joycean themes of family, religion, home, creative agency, and the burden of tradition are already written anew in O’Brien’s work. Given the controversies that surrounded O’Brien and the stories of book burnings in outraged response to candour about the emotional, intellectual, and sexual desires of young Irish women in Ireland at mid-century, the book could not have fallen under the radar for

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a writer like Munro, who ten years later would produce her own account of the lives of girls and women. For O’Brien, the associations with Joyce would come at a cost as readings of her work occasionally cast her as the voice of Joyce’s lifelong companion Nora Barnacle—thus reducing both O’Brien and Barnacle to by products of male genius—or deliberately misrepresented her work as salacious with O’Brien in the role of a ‘bargain basement Molly Bloom’ (2012, p. xi). T. S. Eliot’s famous pronouncement in his 1923 essay ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, ‘I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape’ (1975, p. 175), has a special value for Munro. Geographical distance and the sleight of hand with which she absorbs Joycean themes into her work means she can inhabit the richness of Joyce’s legacy without fear of being entangled in clumsy or diminishing literary assumptions about her place within a national literary tradition. If the friendship of Naomi and Del in Lives of Girls and Women drives the narrative forward, it does so much in the same way as the complicated relationship of Caithleen and Baba in The Country Girls progresses— together the young women encounter powerful institutions: religion, education, and the social expectations that circumscribed the options for women in Ireland and Canada in the mid-twentieth century. For Caithleen Brady and Del Jordan as artists in the making, home has a particularly powerful emotional and psychological hold. Much like Del’s declaration of allegiance to Jubilee, Caithleen Brady escapes to the relative freedoms of Dublin only to find herself dreaming of home in the West of Ireland: ‘At the far edge of the lake there was a belt of poplar trees, shutting out the world. The world I wanted to escape into. And now that I had come into the world, that scene of bogs and those country faces were uppermost in my thoughts’ (1998, p. 137). This would, of course, set the tone for O’Brien’s own lifelong relationship with Ireland—although she has lived most of her life outside of it, Ireland has remained at the centre of her literary imagination throughout her writing life. This Joycean indeterminacy that is already so vivid in The Country Girls is shared by Munro’s Canadian woman writer in Lives of Girls and Women, who tests and borrows from a celebrated English and Irish literary tradition, while turning to the small towns of Southern Ontario in her contribution to a new and vivid chapter of Canadian women’s writing.

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If Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls offers a companion text to Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, the autobiographical writing of Frank O’Connor and, in particular, his 1961 memoir An Only Child, appears as a quietly supportive presence in Munro’s early work—especially when it comes to wrestling with form, with the establishment a sense of voice and place, and the crafting of autobiographical narratives. What O’Connor shares with Munro is a fidelity to the short story and a career long association with The New Yorker, but it is in O’Connor’s autobiographical writing that a trace history of Munro’s portrait of the artist can be found. At the end of O’Connor’s story ‘The Bridal Night’ (1939), the scene closes with a description of how ‘Darkness had fallen over the Atlantic, blank gray to its farthest reaches’ (1982, p. 25). In O’Connor’s short stories the Atlantic usually leads to emigration, escape, or banishment to America or, alternatively, to an examination of the fraught diplomatic negotiations necessitated by return. And while the American short story may seem within easier reach in thinking about O’Connor’s influence, his work also has an importance and vitality for Canadian literary culture, one that Munro has been quick to acknowledge. O’Connor’s theory of the short story—its turning away from the hero and attention to the ‘submerged population’—speaks very powerfully to Munro’s Southern Ontario. In The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1963), O’Connor suggests that: In discussions of the modern novel, we have come to talk of it as the novel without a hero. In fact, the short story has never had a hero. What it has instead is a submerged population group – a bad phrase which I have had to use for a want of a better. That submerged population changes its character from writer to writer, from generation to generation. It may be Gogol’s officials, Turgenev’s serfs, Maupassant’s prostitutes, Chekov’s doctors and teachers, Sherwood Anderson’s provincials, always dreaming of escape. (1963, pp. 17–18)

The cry heard up along Cork streets in O’Connor’s 1961 memoir An Only Child: An Autobiography: ‘Tommy, come into your tea, toast, and two eggs!’ (1965, p. 115) would be very much at home on the Flats Rd and the story of the world O’Connor emerged from is compatible with the ‘submerged population’ of Munro’s Jubilee. The tireless battle for respectability, to stay one step ahead of encroaching poverty, is an urgent concern in both texts and the figure of the mother as educator, as

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guardian in the journey to a better life, is as vital to Munro’s Jubilee as it is to O’Connor’s Cork. In An Only Child, O’Connor appears as the self-invented, working-class scholar while Munro undergoes her own negotiation with creative agency and class politics via Del Jordan’s encounters with different literary modes. In Lives of Girls and Women, we see a young woman writer negotiate the limits of the rural outpost of Jubilee, both engaging with and seeking to transcend the limits of home and community. Lives of Girls and Women is full of the demotic voices of Wawanash County and offers a clear guide to the values as well as the limited possibilities of the place. This is the marginalized landscape that her work often returns to; it is, to borrow Margaret Laurence’s phrase, Munro’s ‘place to stand on’ (1970). In an essay written in 1961, O’Connor describes being pushed to address the matter of place in his own work and appears troubled by a recurring theme in readers’ responses. He notes: Ever since I came to this country I have been haunted by that question, ‘Why don’t you write about America?’ It has always made me feel awkward, like a failure to repay hospitality, or worse a deliberate flouting of it. It was as though I didn’t think America worth writing about, when indeed it was modesty more than anything else. (1994, p. 318)

At The New Yorker he sometimes found himself pushed the other way by editor Harold Ross. Ross’s fastidiousness regarding accuracy extended to the matter of place. In About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made, Ben Yagoda calls attention to a memo sent by Ross to his editorial foot soldiers, written in insistent capital letters: ‘A SPECIAL EFFORT SHOULD BE MADE TO AVOID MISTAKES IN THE NEW YORKER’ (2000, p. 204). Yagoda continues: This was true enough. But it did not account for the terror Ross seemed to feel that an error should slip in, or that any statement in the magazine might be at all ambiguous, misleading, or unclear. … So was Ross’s unshakeable belief in the need for what he referred to as ‘pegging’ – as early as possible, preferable in the first paragraph, of a story’s setting. Ross’s query sheet on a 1949 Frank O’Connor short story called ‘The Idealist’ begins began, ‘This pretty darned good story. Must be pegged,

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of course…. Could put in Irish-sounding name here, and then say at 1(a) something along the line us lads in Ireland or us Irish lads ’. (2000, p. 204)

This anxious relationship with place would resolve itself under the editorship of William Maxwell. In the 1950s, by which time O’Connor was lecturing at American Universities and William Maxwell was fiction editor of The New Yorker, a radically different relationship with writer and editor emerged; this is documented in the published correspondence of O’Connor and Maxwell in The Happiness of Getting It Down Right: Letters of Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell 1945–1966. In his correspondence to O’Connor, Maxwell occasionally reminds O’Connor of the need to place his stories for his American readers, but he does so without intruding upon the author’s work. Munro was not spared the same kind of interventions. As late as 1980 she received an editorial instruction in relation to her short story ‘Wood’ that recommended she explicitly name the province in which the story is set as a means of guaranteeing that American readers would see that the story is about Canada (Letter from Charles McGrath to Alice Munro, May 21, 1980). As another writer who remained faithful to home soil while being at home at The New Yorker, Alice Munro had to similarly negotiate with the framing of rural Ontario for an uninitiated readership. There are a number of other striking affinities between O’Connor and Munro in their treatment of sources of influences and significant acts of reading in the life of the writer in the making. O’Connor’s An Only Child, in this regard, finds direct points of contact with Munro’s account of the making of the young Canadian writer in Lives of Girls and Women. One of the key ways O’Connor’s portrait of the formative years of the writer in An Only Child finds affiliation with Munro is a shared concern with self-improvement, with the progress of the young autodidact. Both the young O’Connor as he emerges from An Only Child and Munro’s Del Jordan in Lives of Girls and Women are largely self-educated and have to undergo various trials by ordeal in their negotiations with culture and literary tradition. O’Connor offers an extended account of the self-made polymath as An Only Child presents a litany of seemingly haphazard encounters with literary history and attempts at adaptation. He recalls, at one point, the loss of his job at the Great Southern and Western Railway as a spur in his self-education:

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On the Saturday night I was sacked I read my first paper. It was in Irish, and the paper was Goethe. For me, my whole adolescence is summed up in that extraordinary evening – so much that even yet I cannot laugh at it in comfort. … In truly anthropomorphic spirit I re-created Goethe in my own image and likeness, as a patriotic young man who wished to revive the German language, which I considered to have been gravely threatened by the use of French. I drew an analogy between the French culture that dominated eighteenth-century Germany and the English culture by which we in Ireland were dominated. (1965, pp. 179–180)

He goes on to emphasize the role of transcription and memorization in absorbing literary influences: ‘It was characteristic of my topsy-turvy self-education that I knew by heart thousands of lines in German and Irish, but had never heard of Browning, or indeed of any other English poet but Shakespeare, whom I didn’t think much of. But my trouble with poetry was that of most auto-didacts. I could not afford books, so I copied and memorized like mad’ (1965, p. 194). In Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, in Del Jordan’s account of coming of age as a female artist, her ‘practice writing’ for Uncle Benny’s benefit appears as a similar kind of exercise in copying and transcription. Her ‘round, trembly, and uncertain’ handwriting reveals that she is engaged in a similarly fraught and anxious process as O’Connor’s experiment with different literary modes and scripts. In the course of the book she, too, works through different textual possibilities, as different writing modes come to her aid or are found lacking. For a while she becomes preoccupied with the Brontës and devours Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë . As she turns away from the limited options available to her—that of undervalued secretary or wife and mother—and hazards declaring herself a writer, she decides ‘Better Charlotte Brontë’ (1982, p. 191). In contrast to such moments of consolation, in the epilogue to the collection, Del plots out her first novel, a gothic adventure in which Jubilee will serve as a convenient backdrop, until she rejects the melodrama as it dawns that the granular detail of the lives of Jubilee itself will be the key to her writing life. The role that mothers play in this kind of negotiation with literary sources in both O’Connnor’s An Only Child and Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women shares important ground. Anne Fogarty argues compellingly that Irish women’s writing shows signs at times of a version of matrophobia (2002), a manifestation of fear and alienation at being trapped in the same historical circumstances that

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limited and circumscribed the lives of Irish women for so long. But in striking contrast to this, the relationship with the mother figure that emerges from O’Connor’s memoir shares a redemptive quality with the interventions of the mother figure in Munro’s autobiographical fiction, albeit in more amplified forms. The frontispiece of the original Macmillan edition of An Only Child features a striking, full-page photograph of O’Connor’s mother, Minnie, just months before she died. She is not looking directly at the camera and her presence in the main body of the autobiography is similarly discreet, but profoundly important. O’Connor’s mother’s relationship with books is presented as a significant influence from the off: ‘She had been trained as a bookbinder, and was neat and skilful at this, as she was at almost anything she tackled, but she was always getting into trouble for reading the books she should have been binding’ (1965, p. 51). A few pages later we learn: Mother must have been a dreamy, sensitive child, because she had spells of somnambulism, and once she was found walking up and down a convent corridor in her nightdress, reciting Wolsey’s speech from Henry VIII – ‘Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness!’ O’Connor emphasises that his mother has a novelist’s eye for detail – ‘Mrs Stewart, as mother described her, had a lot in common with Trollope’s Mrs Proudie’. (1965, p. 53)

She is responsible for introducing him to Moore’s Melodies (1965, p. 125) and is characterized throughout as a thoroughly judicious reader of character. In Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, Del Jordan’s early exposure to books is also mediated through her mother and she is ambitious for her daughter in ways redolent of O’Connor’s account of his own mother’s influence. Her mother at one time peddles encyclopedias door to door and Del serves as sale assistant by repeating lists of facts learned by rote. Del’s developing relationship with literature comes under special scrutiny at a ‘Great Books’ discussion group run by the local doctor and his wife and attended by Del’s mother. Del is at every turn influenced by the models put forward by her mother for reading and writing and her mother’s critical position on the canon of western literature takes a comic turn when relations with the other members of the reading group become strained:

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Her admiration persisted through Antigone, dampened a bit in Hamlet, grew dimmer and dimmer through The Republic and Das Kapital. Nobody could have any opinions, it appeared, but the Combers; the Combers knew more, they had seen Greece, they had attended lectures by H.G. Wells, they were always right. Mrs. Comber and my mother had a disagreement and Mrs. Comber brought up the fact that my mother had not gone to university and only to a – my mother imitated her accent – backvoods high school. (1982, pp. 72–73, italics in original)

Del’s mother is at first impressed with the group, a beacon of light in what she sees as the cultural desert of Jubilee, but as relations with the sententious doctor and his wife sour, she is moved to defend herself by invoking the most mundane of domestic processes: ‘“What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet?” asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee’ (1982, p. 73). This echoes O’Connor’s account of his mother’s re-routing of literary ambition to the ordinary and domestic on a visit to the Alps in her later years. They pause to take in what could be a scene from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, something that O’Connor with his interests in German Romanticism would have been particularly moved by. He recalls: ‘Once I took her on a funicular to the top of some Alp, and as we sat on the terrace of restaurant far above the glittering lake, I enthused about the view. “There should be great drying up here,” she said thoughtfully, her mind reverting to the problem of laundry’ (1965, p. 84). His mother appears in other moments as a capable and sure-minded literary critic in her own right: Another time I bought her a novel by Peader O’Donnell, whom she loved, but she had read only a few pages when I saw her getting fretful. ‘What is it now?’ I growled. ‘Ah, didn’t you notice?’ she asked reproachfully, looking at me over her glasses. ‘Nearly every sentence begins with “I”’. From remarks like these one had to deduce what she meant, but often no deductions were necessary. (1982, pp. 83–84)

Del Jordan’s mother exerts a similar influence in her love of the literary. She writes missives to the local newspaper under a pseudonym from Tennyson, ‘Princess Ida’, though her literary letters are excruciating to the young Del:

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They were full of long decorative descriptions of the countryside from which she had fled (This morning a marvellous silver frost enraptures the eye on every twig and telephone wire and makes the world a veritable fairyland–) and even contained references to Owen and me (my daughter, soon-tobe-no-longer-a-child, forgets her new-found dignity to frolic in the snow) that made the roots of my teeth ache with shame. (1982, p. 80, italics in original)

Most significantly, Del’s development as a writer is determined by Jubilee to the extent that the town, in a rehearsal of her mother’s relationship with home, becomes the inevitable subject of her writing. Even though Del rejects much of her mother’s literary style, she recognizes her mother’s ambition in herself: ‘I myself was not so different from my mother, but concealed it, knowing what dangers there were’ (1982, p. 80). It is the very same process that ensures the character achieves a new level of empathy with the place she was previously convinced she wanted to leave behind: ‘People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum’ (1982, p. 249). Ten years after the publication of An Only Child, Munro’s investigation of the mysticism of the ordinary, the newly realized appreciation of her mother’s life, and working through of the dilemmas of the formative years of the writer, all speak powerfully to the promises of O’Connor’s portrait of the artist as an autodidact.

Works Cited Archival Material The New Yorker Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Letter from Charles McGrath to Alice Munro, May 21, 1980, Munro Folder.

Primary Material Gallant, M. (1982 [1981]). Introduction. In Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (pp. xi–xxii). Toronto: Macmillan. Joyce, J. (1992 [1991]). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. S. Deane. London: Penguin. Joyce, J. (1998 [1922]). Ulysses, ed. J. Johnston. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.

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Laurence, M. (1976a [1970]). ‘A Place to Stand On’. In Heart of a Stranger (pp. 13–18). Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Laurence, M. (1976b [1971]). ‘Where the World Began’. In Heart of a Stranger (pp. 213–229). Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Munro, A. (1982 [1971]). Lives of Girls and Women. London: Penguin. Munro, A. (2003). ‘Good Woman in Ireland’. Brick: A Literary Journal, 72, 26–30. Munro, A. (2004 [1978]). The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose. London: Vintage. Ní Anluain, C. (2000). Interview with Edna O’Brien. In C. Ní Anluain (Ed.), Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy (pp. 207– 222). Dublin: Lilliput Press. O’Brien, E. (1988). The Country Girls Trilogy. London: Penguin. O’Brien, E. (2012). Country Girl. London: Faber. O’Connor, F. (1963). The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. New York: Harper Colophon. O’Connor, F. (1965 [1961]). An Only Child. London: Macmillan. O’Connor, F. (1982 [1939]). ‘The Bridal Night’. In Frank O’Connor: Collected Stories (pp. 19–25). New York: Vintage. O’Connor, F. (1994 [1961]). ‘Why Don’t You Write About America?’ In M. Steinman (Ed.), A Frank O’Connor Reader (pp. 318–321). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Steinman, M. (Ed.). (1996). The Happiness of Getting It Down Right: Letters of Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell 1945–1966. New York: Knopf.

Secondary Material Atwood, M. (2002). Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Atwood, M. (2004 [1972]). Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Attridge, D. (2015). ‘Irish Writing After Joyce’. In M. C. Carpentier (Ed.), Joycean Legacies (pp. vii–xx). Palgrave Macmillan. Eliot, T. S. (1975 [1923]). ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’. In F. Kermode (Ed.), Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (pp. 175–178). London: Faber. Ellmann, R. (1982 [1959]). James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fanning, C. (1990). The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Fogarty, A. (2002). ‘“The Horror of the Unlived Life”: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction’. In A. Giorgio (Ed.), Writing Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the Mother in Western European Narratives by Women (pp. 85–118). New York: Berghahn.

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Garson, M. (2000). Alice Munro and Charlotte Brontë. University of Toronto Quarterly, 69(4), 783–825. Hutcheon, L. (1986). ‘“Shape shifters”: Canadian Women Novelists and the Challenge to Tradition’. In S. Neuman & S. Kamboureli (Eds.), A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing (pp. 219–227). Edmonton, AB: NeWest. Kiberd, D. (1996). Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Vintage. Thacker, R. (2016). Reading Alice Munro, 1973–2013. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Yagoda, B. (2000). About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. New York: Da Capo.

CHAPTER 6

Irish-Canadian Connections: Jane Urquhart’s Historical Fictions

Jane Urquhart’s fiction is the most celebrated record of the story of the Irish in Canada. Although her writing about the Irish comprises just one aspect of Urquhart’s historical fiction—other notable works such as The Whirlpool (1986), The Underpainter (1997), and The Stone Carvers (2001) are set in Canada and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Irish-Canadian strands of her writing come closest to home in terms of Urquhart’s literary engagements with her own family history. Her 1993 novel Away, about Irish emigration during the Great Famine of the 1840s, is, in part, a vivid excavation of her ancestors’ emigration to Canada, while The Night Stages , published in 2015, is set in County Kerry, where Urquhart has had a second home for two decades, and brings to light a neglected chapter in Ireland’s sporting and cultural history: the all-Ireland bicycle race, An Rás Tailteann of 1954. In an article on Irish-Canadian literary connections for The Irish Times, Urquhart writes: In spite of our lack of formal education on the subject, Canadian families of Irish descent never forgot Ireland, and because they did not forget, Ireland became an imagined sacred homeland for us, and – in some ways – set the tone for the future. Since the great Irish migration of the 19th century, immigrants from dozens of different backgrounds have repeated the experience of the Irish and have come to Canada. It seems fair to say that in Canada everyone has two homelands in their imagination; the one where they settled, and the abandoned, mourned homeland that they © The Author(s) 2021 E. McWilliams, Irishness in North American Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1_6

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were forced to leave behind. (‘Irish Characters Often Walk the Pages of Canadian Novels’, 2018)

In interview and in the ancillary material of her novels, Urquhart is keen to foreground her sources, whether from historical archives or academic scholarship. She recounts the discovery of her Quinn ancestors, who emigrated to Canada in the mid-nineteenth century, in terms that echo the concerns of Houston and Smyth regarding how the Irish have been neglected (1990, p. 3) in the official national narrative: ‘I was delighted by the fact that most archival files concerning Irish settler life had remained unviolated since their deposition over a century before, but I was also disturbed that such a large part of Canada’s history had remained hidden for so long’ (‘Irish Characters Often Walk the Pages of Canadian Novels’, 2018). In The Night Stages , one of the main characters pauses to reflect on Irish history: ‘Something we Irish were always attempting to do, Niall thought. We are always trying to bring people home’ (2016b, p. 279). The same statement could be an expression of Urquhart’s own commitment to recovering the past and to bringing elided histories into view. It chimes with Anne Enright’s account of new directions in Irish writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a review of Nuala O’Faolain’s history of the Irish-American outlaw Chicago May, Enright announces with confidence: ‘We are bringing them all back home: it is not just recent emigrants who are returning to Ireland, but the dead, the lost, the longago disappeared — their ghosts are being repatriated one by one. This is a necessary task. So deep was the shame of emigration that, for many generations, we never dared to ask what really happened to them, once they were gone’ (Enright 2006). Urquhart’s writing about Irish migration to Canada during the years of the Great Famine in Away breaks particularly significant ground in its attempt to repatriate the ‘long-ago disappeared’. Furthermore, the novel was first published in 1993 just as Irish Diaspora studies was beginning to gain ground and just three years after the inauguration of President Mary Robinson, who made a renewed commitment to ‘cherishing the Irish diaspora’. In a speech of the same name in 1995, Robinson declared: ‘The men and woman of our diaspora represent not simply a series of departures and losses. They remain, even while absent, a precious reflection of our own growth and change, a precious reminder of the many strands of identity which compose our story’ (Robinson 1995). Urquhart’s Away was also published at the beginning of the decade

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during which Ireland would move from being a country historically associated with emigration to one of net immigration and it remained to be seen how Ireland would treat new migrant communities drawn to the country by the economic opportunities afforded by the Celtic Tiger years of the 1990s and 2000s. As will be explored in more detail in the next section, the novel appeared at a moment when what Diane Negra describes as ready made ‘associations between Irishness and innocence’ (2006, p. 363) remained dominant in conversations about Ireland and migration. If Urquhart’s writing about Irish emigration to Canada during the years of the Great Famine drew heavily on the national archives, The Night Stages has its own sources, meticulously recorded in the appendix of the novel. The real-life figures of Canadian artist Kenneth Lochhead, poet and folklorist Michael Kirby, and meteorologist Brendan McWilliams all have roles in the cast of novel. The year in which the novel is set was a pivotal one in the story of the Irish Diaspora. 1954 was the year of the first An Tóstal, a festival of homecoming to welcome the Diaspora. As noted by Fitzgerald and Lambkin, it was also one of the worst years of the decade for Irish emigration (2008, pp. 243–244). 1954 was an important year for diasporic relations for other reasons as it saw the publication of John A. O’Brien’s The Vanishing Irish for a home audience—an anxious meditation on declining population rates and the losses of mass emigration. In the introduction, O’Brien proceeds with caution: The Irish are an old race and, some have said, a proud race. Indeed, they have reason to be. And we think no one is prouder of the folks on the ‘auld sod’ than her children of the Diaspora – her far-flung army of exiles in distant lands. We want them to understand that we would not knowingly hurt their pride or wound their sensitivities. If we err here and there, as well we may, in seeking to bandage Erin’s wounds, it is due to a defect in our technique or to our clumsy fingers but not to a defect of our hearts or a lack of love. (1954, p. 10)

In interview, when asked about why it took so long to set a novel in Ireland when she has had a home there for over twenty years, Urquhart is circumspect in her reply: ‘She offers a wry smile. “I’ve noticed that the Irish are pretty good at writing about themselves. I don’t think they need me to come and do it for them”’ (Wallace 2015). Furthermore,

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when pressed about the politics of the bicycle race and its controversial status as a border-crossing event as recorded in Tom Daly’s history, she demurs: ‘Yes, I tipped my hat to that. It was terribly tempting to go down that route, but I said “Jane, that’s not your story”’ (Wallace 2015). Her ambivalence here is not much tied to matters of plot, but rather reveals an anxiety about appropriation. The caution with which the Irish-Canadian writer proceeds around the ‘story’ is understandable, given that for so long the Irish writer has been defined in terms of what Enda Delaney characterizes as an ‘island story’ (2011, p. 599) and the country’s long history of engaging with the Diaspora on exclusively home terms. The author byline of The Night Stages makes the terms of Urquhart’s engagement clear: ‘She lives in Ontario, Canada, and occasionally in Ireland’. Such need for clarity as to the author’s relationship with the country reveals an understandable apprehension, given the cultural dominance of the ‘island story’ in Irish historical and cultural discourses and its associated suspicion of the encroachment of other perspectives, other narratives. For Urquhart, historical fiction opens up particularly fruitful avenues for exploring this tension between the diasporic writer and the story of Ireland and historical fiction offers particularly fertile ground for examining and testing the national narrative from a new critical perspective. Jerome De Groot offers an expansive account of the dexterity of the genre: Historical writing can take place within numerous fictional locales: romance, detective, thriller, counterfactual, horror, literary, gothic, postmodern, epic, fantasy, mystery, western, children’s books. Indeed, the intergeneric hybridity and flexibility of historical fiction have long been one of its defining characteristics. A historical novel might consider the articulation of nationhood via the past, highlight the subjectivism of narratives of History, underline the importance of the realist mode of writing to notions of authenticity, question writing itself, and attack historiographical convention. The form manages to hold within itself conservatism, dissidence, complication and simplicity; it attracts multiple, complex, dynamic audiences; it is a particular and complex genre hiding in plain sight on the shelves of a bookshop. (2009, p. 2)

Of these, matters of nationhood and belonging, the subjectivism of History, and the capacity of the historical novel to accommodate inherent contradictions are especially relevant to Urquhart’s work and this

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chapter is particularly interested in the meta-narrative that emerges from Urquhart’s self-reflexive meditations on maps and mapping, the potential of historical and literary texts to mislead, the risks and hazards of writing back to history, and the role of the writer and artist in producing narratives of the nation. The challenge of writing the Great Famine merits special attention here, given the importance of Away to Urquhart’s back catalogue of writing about Irish-Canadian history, while The Night Stages , as well as holding a mirror up to transatlantic connections, rewrites the national tale in knowing and adventurous ways.

‘Where Is Here?’---Reading Canada and Ireland in the Fiction of Jane Urquhart The question ‘Where is Here?’ addressed in the previous chapter remained and important one for the Canadian writer into the 1990s—Margaret Atwood emphasizes how the mapping of Canada has historically troubled Canadian literature: But in Canada, as Frye suggests, the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ is at least partly the same as the answer to another question: ‘Where is here?’ ‘Who am I?’ is a question appropriate in countries where the environment, the ‘here,’ is already well-defined, so well-defined in fact that it may threaten to overwhelm the individual. … ‘Where is here?’ is a different kind of question. It is what a man asks when he finds himself in unknown territory, and it implies several other questions. (2004, p. 17)

Urquhart’s writing about Irish-Canadian histories has an especially charged relationship with this dominant meta-narrative. The careful delineation of journeys in Away and The Night Stages and the self-reflexive invocation of atlases, geological surveys, and ordinance surveys, along with the casting of one of the main characters in The Night Stages as a meteorologist who reads the weather of the Atlantic facing south-west coast, all point towards a sustained interest in engaging with histories of place. In ‘Chronotopic Memory in Contemporary Irish-Canadian Literature’, Katrin Urschel explores the importance of imagining Ireland as a place for the contemporary writer: ‘Memory of Ireland amongst immigrants and their descendants is first and foremost an imaginative recollection of the place, as the place represents the main link that is broken. Languages or accents, beliefs or stories can be taken elsewhere;

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places are fixed. … Direct experience of Ireland as a physical space has become not only possible but important, shaping a person’s emotional attachment to the idea of homeland and reinforcing a sense of ethnic origin’ (2012, pp. 36–37). Atlases, in particular, offer a powerful metaphor for the novelist who looks back and forth across the Atlantic. The mapping of Atlantic crossings from the Famine ship of Away to the transatlantic flights of The Night Stages is fundamental to the plots of Urquhart’s work. Benedict Anderson’s reading of the map along with the census and museum as a crucial vehicle for meaning in the making of the cultural artefact of the nation speaks vividly to Urquhart’s novels. In Imagined Communities, Anderson writes of the language of ‘nation-building’: Few things bring this grammar into more visible relief than three institutions of power which, although invented before the mid nineteenth century, changed their form and function as the colonized zones entered the age of mechanical reproduction. These three institutions were the census, the map, and the museum: together, they profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion – the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry. (1991, pp. 163–164)

In Away, the idea of Canada first takes shape when it crystallizes in Mary’s imagination via the study of maps. When it is revealed that the landlords plan to send cottiers to ‘British North America’ to escape the food shortages, the word ‘Canada’ is spoken like a mantra: ‘As the talk increased, the word “Canada” was spoken hundreds of times a day – on the roads, in the fields, near the doors of dismal cabins, at firesides – and pictures of the country, itself, began to be assembled by those who claimed to know something of the terrain or those who had once spoken to someone who had received a letter from across the sea’ (1997, p. 114). Later, Mary takes the atlas down to the sea and studies the map of Canada as a way of making the imminent departure of her and her family more real: She placed the geography book on a large boulder and herself beside it. In the early morning the incised continents stood out in exaggerated relief and it seemed to Mary as if her own approaching journey had given them more weight and substance. The cracks on the spine, where she had repeatedly bent the book open, were even more visible; etched reminders of her paths through the words of the book. (1997, p. 126)

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In the novel, the idea of being ‘Away’ has two meanings that interweave and coalesce—Mary is taken captive by supernatural forces at the beginning of the novel and this mystical, folkloric narrative moves alongside of the devastating material realities of Famine emigration. Later in the novel, years after they have settled in Upper Canada, after Mary has disappeared and her husband is dead, their son Liam takes the question ‘Where is Here?’ to its most literal extreme. After his father’s death, he searches the schoolhouse for a map and locates the family farm on the Canadian shield. In an instant, his struggle to cultivate crops is explained as he finally identifies his position in the Canadian Geological Survey: ‘Opening the book to the first map of Upper Canada, he located the position of Belleville on the edge of Lake Ontario, then moving his finger due north past Moira Lake he found the approximate location of his farm, noting that the shading of the map had changed from a dot to a slanted line pattern’ (1997, p. 208). His helpless struggle for survival after the death of his father, a hedge school teacher, is captured in the uselessness of his father’s knowledge to his dilemma in the present: ‘Neither the English poets nor the Greeks had anything at all to say about farming the Canadian backwoods’ (1997, p. 205). If maps and geological surveys offer one manifestation of the national narrative, then official histories of the new world are also foregrounded and tested after the family settle into their new life in Canada. Brian, the hedge school master turned teacher, is forced to educate his pupils in the sanctioned history of the British empire. He challenges this official history via the school syllabus by departing from Egerton Ryerson’s ‘prospectus for Upper Canadian schools’ and, instead, teaching the children Irish (1997, p. 201). After his death—his son discovers his father’s secret: ‘Next to the map was a list of Gaelic nouns written in his father’s hand, and beside them their English equivalents written in the hand of a child: “famine”, “sorrow”, “homeland”, “harp”, “sea”, “warrior”, “poet”, and the word “castle,” interrupted after the first syllable – the chalk that wrote it resting on the ledge beneath the board’ (1997, pp. 206–207). Later the novel goes a step further in revealing the potentially incendiary relationship between acts of writing and political power as Mary and Brian’s daughter, Eileen, is drawn to politics and inspired by the political zealotry of the magazine, The Irish Canadian (1997, p. 284). When it comes to disrupting the official narratives of the Canadian settler experience, the novel engages with literary precursors in its representation of the Canadian wilderness. From the wilderness memoirs of

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Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill to the Group of Seven art collective and their afterlives, the settler perspective has been a determining shaping influence in Canadian literature and culture. In her 1977 study Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision, Carol Shields works hard to offer a balanced assessment of Moodie’s pioneer narratives: Her most frequently employed style is an uneasy rotation of Old World florid romantic and New World how-to-survive handbook prose of the sort her sister Catharine Parr Traill used so successfully in her Canadian Settlers Guide (1855). Mrs Moodie alternates one style with the other, writing a lyrical aside to moonlight in one paragraph, then plunging immediately into a technical discussion of logging in the next. (1997, pp. 2–3)

Marta Dvoˇrák describes the aesthetic of the new settler writer as follows: Illustrative of early nineteenth-century travel-writing and immigrant writing are the hybrid texts in this picaresque, then baroque manner – published primarily for an English readership that considered the bush exotic – by Susanna Strickland Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, two sisters belonging to the English gentry who emigrated to Canada in order to avoid dwindling economic and social circumstances. While that other frontier society – the newly emancipated United States – was beginning to produce a distinctive future-oriented literature rejecting the old order, upper-middle class Canadian settlers like the Moodies were set on preserving their imported values based on family, education, property, and propriety. (2004, p. 156)

As discussed in Chapter 1, Moodie’s attitude towards the Irish in Roughing it in the Bush is revealing of just such ‘imported values’. In addressing her home readership, her description of the Irish ‘accompanying their vociferations with violent and extraordinary gestures, quite incomprehensible to the uninitiated’ (1986, pp. 24–25) is drenched in the anti-Irish prejudice that circulated so freely in the nineteenth century. In Away, Urquhart provides a counter perspective on of the Irish in Upper Canada in answer to Moodie’s version of Irish immigrants. The wilderness is disorienting and alienating to the traumatised arrivals: ‘What with illness, quarantine, and then waiting out the winter freeze in Quebec, it had taken the family a year to reach this spot. Now they were terrified of the paradise they had imagined. To the boy in particular, the flowers and grass had become huge and terrifying, he and his parents had been

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reduced in size, and the sky had been blocked, forever, from the world’ (1997, pp. 139–140). A shift takes place soon afterwards and as the family begin to acclimatize, the most poetic language of the novel is reserved for the forest: ‘Liam began to move less tentatively each morning into a world of unchartable visual richness – the shimmering planet of the forest. Leaf and leaf and shadow, shadow and sunlight scattered there, and over there, by the wind’ (1997, p. 146). What Dvoˇrák characterizes as the ‘exotic bush’ of the nineteenthcentury literary imagination is dismantled with care by Eva Mackey in The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada in her analysis of the dominance of a ‘settler point of view’ (1999, p. 49) in the codification of Canadian national identity. Jonathan Bordo takes up the same inquiry in his examination of the foundations of Canadian art. In ‘Jack Pine – Wilderness Sublime or the Erasure of the Original Presence from the Landscape’, Bordo examines how so much of modern Canadian art edits out the history of the indigenous population: ‘Inaugurated by the Group of Seven, modern art in Canada is intimately and inseparably linked, unlike other early modernist visual art traditions, with landscape painting and a particular, if not special, view of the land as wilderness’ (1992–1993, p. 108). For both Mackey and Bordo, this ‘special view’, the privileging of the settler point of view, enacts a denial of First Nations experience. Urquhart’s novel contains an acknowledgement of the legacies of colonial violence against indigenous people and the continued violation of the landscape by the descendants of settlers, the Irish included: ‘When she spoke of the curse of the mines, could Old Eileen have foreseen the annihilation of the geography of Loughbreeze Beach? Hers had been a life during which forests were torn apart in an attempt to reproduce the pastoral landscape of the British Isles’ (1992–1993, p. 135). In a recent interview, Urquhart points towards the history of colonial violence against First Nations people, ‘in mourning as well for a lost home: the land and life they knew before settler contact changed that land and that life forever’ (‘Irish Characters Often Walk the Pages of Canadian Novels’, 2018). Even with that respectful acknowledgement of the devastating effects of colonial violence in mind, Cynthia Sugars argues that Away does not go nearly far enough to avoid projecting another settler fantasy onto the Canadian wilderness at the expense of indigenous culture. She suggests that the novel contains ‘an insufficiently critical postcolonialism’ (2003, p. 6) and finds the ready importation of

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Celtic mythology to Canada’s settler past problematic. Marlene Goldman takes this analysis a step further in suggesting the novel’s dramatization of apparent parallels between Celtic and indigenous Canadian mythology risks serving to ‘legitimize the Irish people’s right to possess the land – essentially to effect their indigenization’ (2010, p. 134). In the last ten years, the cultural production of contemporary ideas of Irishness on home territory and abroad has come under scrutiny. In ‘Other People’s Diasporas ’: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture (2013), Sinéad Moynihan raises a series of vital questions about Irishness and race in Ireland and the United States that find resonance with the inquiries of critics such as Mackey, Bordo, and Sugars into Canadian settler identity. Moynihan asks: Does identifying as a postcolonial Irish subject insulate that subject from charges of racism? Does that subject’s claim to postcolonial status trump his or her whiteness? How effective are such analogies in generating meaningful understanding by Celtic Tiger Irish subjects of the struggles faced by contemporary asylum seekers and refugees? Is the potential of such analogies, if they hold any potential, undermined by the fact that parallels drawn between Irishness and blackness also serve to bolster a sense of enduring Irish victimhood – and, by extension, white innocence – in the contemporary moment? In other words, are such analogies too deeply implicated in structures of white power to be effective in generating cross-racial solidarity? (2013, pp. 38–39)

These important interventions regarding the commodification of Irishness offer new ways of framing the novel. Published in the early 1990s, Away bears the markers of its historical moment and relies heavily on assumptions about postcolonial Ireland that have been significantly re-evaluated in the last thirty years. In Away, the cement quarry that degrades the landscape of Loughbreeze lake is one of a number of imaginative bridges to Urquhart’s other determinedly Irish novel, The Night Stages, the protagonist of which is the daughter of a concrete merchant. The Night Stages looks the other way in its interest in mapping place, but stages a triangulation of connections between Ireland, the United States, and Canada. The epigraph to The Night Stages is a quotation from Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941–1942)—the invocation of O’Neill seems a tacit acknowledgement that in the history of the Irish Diaspora, the IrishAmerican story is, by some measure, the dominant one and the United

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States remains what Breda Gray calls ‘the emblematic locus of the diaspora and the classic Irish migrant narrative of crossing the Atlantic and following the “American Dream”’ (2004, p. 10). Urquhart’s The Sanctuary Line (2010) is, in part, the story of the prosperous Irish-American Butlers, but in telling the story of the Irish in Canada and of the Canadian writer in Ireland, Away and The Night Stages offer a significant corrective. The events of The Night Stages move between the Iveragh Peninsula of Co. Kerry and Newfoundland, and the novel’s transatlantic perspective is an important framing device. After Tamara Edgeworth leaves Ireland for New York, she stops off at Gander, Newfoundland, opening the door to the story of Canadian artist Kenneth Lochhead and his mural in the terminal waiting room. In the course of the journey the coastlines of Ireland and Canada are set in sharp contrast: What she sees below is not quite arctic, is a mirror image instead of the sea cliffs that were visible after the takeoff from Shannon, except there are far too many trees now to mistake this country for Ireland. The cliffs appear to be wilder, though the surface breaks around them in the same familiar way. As the plane lowers more purposefully, making its final approach into Gander, Newfoundland, the pine forest approaches. Sea, rock, then acres and acres of forest. Like all transatlantic flights, the aircraft would refuel in this bleak, obscure place. (2016b, p. 11)

While the novel opens with Tamara on her way to build a new life in New York, it ends with her turning back at the Newfoundland stop off and returning to Shannon. In The Night Stages , the project of excavating history focuses on Ireland, but as will be explored in the next section, the novel contains a number of clear intertextual gestures and signals that place Urquhart as a writer of the Diaspora in a charged conversation with what Enda Delaney calls the ‘island story’, and proceeds with a more discursive and self-reflexive approach towards received histories than is apparent in Away. The novel is as interested in maps and mapping as is the case with Urquhart’s earlier work and the geography of The Night Stages moves between the transatlantic and international and the local: ‘Sometimes he would recite the ancient names of the peninsula’s townlands and mountains… Raheen, Coomavoher, Cloonaughlin, Killeen Leacht, Ballaghmeana, Gloragh. Beautiful places, as she had come to know, though

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diminished by the previous century’s famine and then by ongoing, unstoppable emigration’ (2016b, pp. 12–13, italics in original). If The Night Stages contains a special interest in mapping the boundaries of national identity, the Canadian artist—and, by association, the Canadian writer—is implicated in significant ways in making the ‘imagined community’ that emerges from the novel. In this, Urquhart travels familiar territory in her study of mid-century artist Kenneth Lochhead’s search for a form. Lochhead wrestles with the dilemma of the artist articulated by Hugh MacLennan’s aspiring writer in Two Solitudes : Must he write out of his own background, even if that background were Canada? Canada was imitative in everything. Yes, but perhaps only on the surface. What about underneath? … The background would have to be created from scratch if his story was to become intelligible. He could afford to take nothing for granted. He would have to build the stage and props for his play, and then write the play itself. (1945, p. 329)

This lament is echoed by E. K. Brown in the same period in his plaintive question ‘Is a Canadian Critic Possible?’: ‘What is really lacking is not Canadian criticism in any sense of the term but an audience for it. As I have said before in this place – and expect to say again – Canadians do not care what other Canadians think’ (1951, p. 314). In The Night Stages , Lochhead offers an extended meditation on the Canadian artist’s struggle with being ‘second edition’, to borrow Alice McDermott’s phrase. ‘We all want to believe that we are originals’ (2016b, p. 204), his mentor insists, at one point, but Lochhead’s own development as an artist, as Urquhart imagines it, involves moving through the demands and expectations of established British, European, and American artistic traditions. Lochhead, a Canadian artist from a small prairie town in Saskatchewan, is commissioned to paint the mural in the lounge where passengers disembark while transatlantic flights refuel. He acknowledges the lure of a familiar landscape for the Canadian artist: He, whose most intense periods of growth had unfolded in the vicinity of hills, rivers, and trees, then later on the streets of cities, was often out of step with the apparently limitless horizons and exaggerated weather of the prairie. But he was moved by the openness around him as well, particularly at night in winter when starlight alone would occasionally provide sufficient ambient light for him to walk by. … These long, collective announcements from distant animals astonished and delighted him: he could feel

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the seductive pull of that wildness, and then the resistance, the refusal in him. (2016b, pp. 50–51)

In an invocation of the Group of Seven mythologies, he appears at one moment as a lone artist in the wilderness: He bought a simple stone house and built a frame studio in which landscapes remained representational but figures and animals were abstract in nature. During the winter he taught at a college in the prairie city ten miles away, and in the summer he and a handful of other artists held summer classes in a recently abandoned TB sanatorium situated in a river valley one hundred miles from any kind of urban settlement. (2016b, p. 84)

Urquhart’s version of Lochhead suffers the patronizing American art critic who misleads him into thinking he would be willing to exhibit his work if he could give up on the representational mode in favour of abstraction: ‘The critic told Kenneth that the purity and quiet of the situation was soothing to him after the noise, the commotion really, of the art scene in New York. … Absolutely nothing has ever happened here, he added, which is what makes it so appealing. Nothing has been built, he said. Then he made a quick, insistent rectangle with his hands’ (2016b, p. 86, italics in original). Lochhead undergoes adventures in Europe and the United States on projects such as following the rivers in Germany that Turner journeyed along in the 1830s and working with a coterie of New York artists. His art finally finds an audience in the airport mural and the work of the artist is brought down to earth by a commercial commission that turns out to be the most meaningful and public exhibition of his vision. Outside of and beyond the demands and expectations of any national tradition Lochhead finds his moment of true artistic expression in an artistic allegory for flight, all the more appropriate given the novel’s concern with origins, routes, and destinations.

The Trauma of Irish History in Jane Urquhart’s Away Urquhart’s Away is, first and foremost, a novel about memory and specifically about the legacies of trauma associated with the Irish Famine. In the foreword to The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark Fitzgerald, Frawley begins by foregrounding the 1990s as an especially important

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decade for writing and reading about the Famine: ‘During the period of the sesquicentenary commemorations of the Great Famine in the 1990s, the myth of silence was shown to be precisely that: and the time since those anniversaries has been marked by nothing if not the utter refutation of the idea that Irish culture remains without trace of the Famine’ (2018, p. xvii). The role of literature in this reservoir of cultural responses to the 1840s is taken up in Recollecting Hunger: Cultural Memories of the Great Irish and British Fiction, an anthology of writing about the Famine in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in which Marguérite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack, and Lindsay Janssen note that ‘Literature appears to have a significant function in trauma processing. As Cathy Caruth claims, “[s]peech helps integrating the experience of trauma”, and, as James Wertsch argues, unresolved trauma resists integration into narrative’ (2012, pp. 7–8). Recent readings of Irish fiction have also begun to examine the aftershocks of the Famine in contemporary literature—such as Sinéad Moynihan’s analysis of Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002) in ‘Other People’s Diasporas’: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture (2013). In Away, storyteller Esther O’Malley Robertson continues to process the trauma of her family history through recounting the past. Esther’s home is located with care early on in the novel: ‘The old house on Loughbreeze Beach is like a compass situated on the southern boundary of the province called Ontario, on the extreme edge of a country called Canada’ (1997, p. 5). Esther is three generations away from the experiences of Mary O’Malley, but is curator of a family history passed down through the female line—the stories and myths of Mary in the 1840s are handed down to Esther as a child. Aged 82 she looks back and tells the story again to herself: Esther knows exactly what she is doing as she lies awake in the night. She is recomposing, reaffirming a lengthy, told story, recalling it; calling it back. … Esther lying still in her sleigh-bed feels like an Irish poet from a medieval, bardic school. … Esther has neither rocks nor plaids with her in this bed but shares with the old ones a focused desire. Nothing should escape. Line after line must be circulated by memory among the folds of the brain. (1993, p. 133)

This retelling of the story of the Famine is one of the ways the novel comes to terms with the difficulty of finding words that are adequate

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to events. The novel also places particular emphasis on the meaning of objects as signifiers of loss and dispossession and objects take on a charged value in the descriptions of the cottiers as they prepare to leave their hunger-stricken home. Maureen Reddy suggests that objects serve a particular function in Irish America after the Famine: In the Irish case, the Famine is the great trauma from which kitsch insulates memory. Souvenirs come into their own as an industry in the generation immediately following the Famine, that generation of Irish-American visitors (however slight in numbers), for example, who would return to Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to scoop up bog-wood sculptures, leprechaun figures, and picture postcards, to buy into a version of Ireland entirely mediated through shamrocks and shillelaghs. (2012, p. 81)

Individual objects in Away take on a different inflection, something examined more fully in Urquhart’s A Number of Things: Stories of Canada Told Through Fifty Objects (2016a), which explicates how historical meaning and memory can be gleaned from taken-for-granted objects. She reflects on the process: ‘As I was to discover, the history of an object itself – the how and why it was fashioned; whether it is organic, or mercantile, or spiritual in nature, or a combination of the three – opens up like a fan to reveal a much, much larger picture’ (2016a, p. xii). Away is particularly concerned with the personal and intimate stories attached to ordinary and everyday objects and their ability to contain a whole history of loss and suffering. There is little room for the more sceptical relationship with Irish exile examined in the early chapters of this book, as the novel makes a careful study of suffering, loss, and the search for a sense of belonging. With regard to how the novel approaches the Famine, there are occasional moments of direct exposition—a brief history of the Famine is offered at one point in the text (1997, p. 218)—but the more abstract and dramatic rendering of loss is played out through damage and injury to personal belongings. Objects are cracked, broken, rusted, lost and forsaken, both in fearful anticipation of the Famine and the aftermath of its devastation. The listing of ordinary things is one of the means by which the novel conjures up the attachment to everyday domestic items as a symbol of home:

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For days after the reading of the list, each man, woman, and child who had heard it was away in contemplation of possessions that had been loved and lost. One remembered a chair with a carved pattern on its back, another a brooch given to her by the butcher’s son who had later jilted her. … Fiddles, flutes, and pocket-watches sang and ticked in the minds of the people and well-made harnesses and trusted turf spades squeaked and crunched. (1997, p. 118)

Mary and Brian’s realization that they are about to leave everything they know crystallizes in the domestic objects they leave behind and the damage to the same is a conduit for the dread and loss that marks their departure (1997, pp. 123–124). In this, the local landlord at Puffin Court is not spared: ‘Fear and loss came to sit beside him at his table until he covered his ears to free himself from the wailing that seemed to be pouring out of all the familiar objects in his room’ (1997, p. 130). If this represents an abstraction of the trauma of Famine death and migration, the novel also pauses to look it in the face, including the deliberately calm but dreadful announcement: ‘A year later Quinn and many of his parishioners were dead, their silver teapots left to tarnish in the far corners of their sad, dismantled cabins’ (1997, p. 129). Kerby Miller summarises that historical reality behind Urquhart’s fictionalization: In ‘black ‘47’ the vessels carrying Irish emigrants to Canada ‘literally reeked with pestilence’: at least 20,000 died en route to British North America or shortly after arrival, and of those bound for the States between 8,000 and 9,000 perished. Thousands died in the ‘fever sheds’ on Grosse Isle, near Quebec; others escaped cursory medical inspections and spread disease and death up the St. Lawrence River; some 6,000 more expired in Montreal; and farther west, at Lachine, the dying Irish crawled through the streets, vainly begging shelter from the frightened inhabitants. (1997, p. 316)

The novel shows an acute awareness of the suffering behind the historical facts—in its account of the Atlantic crossing it stares down the visceral devastating reality of the coffin ship and what lies beyond: He had forgotten the dark belly of the ship where no air stirred and, as the weeks passed, the groans of his neighbours, the unbearable, unspeakable odours, his own father calling for water, and the limp bodies of children

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he had come to know being hoisted through the hatch on ropes, over and over, until the boy believed this to be the method by which one ascended to heaven. … And after ten weeks crouched on the end of his parents’ berth on the New World, and six weeks confined to a bed with five other children at the quarantine station at Grosse Ille (some lying dead beside him for half a day), he had forgotten how to recall images, engage in conversation, and how to walk. (1997, p. 137)

When Eileen recounts the family’s story to Esther so she may carry it into the future she reminds her: ‘“You are only three generations away from all this,” Esther remembers her grandmother saying. “You are only two generations away from me. Don’t think it couldn’t happen to you, too. Pay attention”’ (1997, p. 15). There are moments when the novel’s concern with memory and remembering shifts gears and it turns into an exercise in writing back to the dominant pioneer narratives of the mid-nineteenth century. The novel includes a number of subtle invocations of Susanna Moodie, in particular, that are best understood in relation to a broader pattern by which Canadian women writers write back to Moodie with intent. Susanna Moodie and her sister Catharine Parr Traill exert a particularly powerful presence in the work of Canadian women writers, whether in the extended dialogue with Parr Traill found in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974), the dramatization of Moodie in Atwood’s poem cycle The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Carol Shields’s Swann (1987), which features a fictional version of Moodie, or Shields’s Small Ceremonies (1976), a novel about an imagined Moodie biographer. Faye Hammill notes that contemporary Canadian writers ‘have produced a diverse range of images of Susanna Moodie, which perhaps suggests that the perceivable contradictions and the elusiveness of her character are an important source of her enduring appeal’ (2003, p. 168). For the Irish-Canadian writer, Moodie poses a particular challenge, but she appears in Urquhart’s Away as a refraction of the original, a minor character with a walk on part—the voice of authority, who weaponizes the imported English values associated with Moodie in her assessment of the plight of Mary’s family. In one scene that takes place after the disappearance of Mary in the Canadian woods, her husband and children are visited by a matron appointed by the local authorities. The matron’s reading of the situation

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circles back over the view of the Irish presented by Moodie in Roughing It in the Bush: With the coming of winter a sad calm fell over the little family, interrupted only once when a well-meaning matron from Madoc arrived in a rattling sleigh with the intention of adopting the baby girl. Liam, sensing the purpose of her visit, crouched by the cradle, growling, and when the woman drew near he lunged and bit her ankle. She departed, then, in great wrath and declared to her friends at church meetings that, like most Irish and all Papists, the boy was mad and dangerous and his father dim-witted and unable to speak. (1997, pp. 164–165)

A similar dynamic plays out in the novel’s foregrounding of ‘Colonel Tarbutt’s Guide for Settlers in Upper Canada’ (1997, p. 117), which sets in motion an encounter with an English pioneer myth that is especially disorienting and alienating for the Irish cottiers on the eve of departure. The scene deploys objects with pointed purpose in unravelling the dominant Anglo-Canadian history as Colonel Tarbutt’s ‘Suggested Accoutrements for a Gentleman’s Pleasant Pilgrimage’ leave the Irish cottiers baffled and bereft: ‘These included ancestral armour, andirons, artillery, barometers, bath chairs, blazers for boating, bugles, caddies for tea, candelabra…’ (1997, p. 117). The accoutrements of the deluded English upper classes and their expectations of an Anglo-Canadian garrison are cast in careful contrast to the abject poverty of the Irish. In this, the novel writes against Colonel Tarbutt’s pioneer fable, in foregrounding a narrative of hopelessness and dispossession, a reading of the Irish migrant very much at home with Robin Cohen’s categorization of the global Irish as a ‘Victim Diaspora’ (1997, p. 18).

Adapting the National Tale: Jane Urquhart’s The Night Stages If Away looks back to Irish migration in the nineteenth century, The Night Stages remains alert to the subsequent history of emigration and the renewed exodus of the 1950s. The observation of a priest on a school outing serves as a reminder of the vanishing Irish of the decade: ‘Among the fields there were three or four abandoned houses with the thatch on them ruined and sagging and the glass in their windows gone altogether. “Off to America, I suppose,” the priest said, though no one had asked

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him. “Couldn’t make a go of it”’ (2016b, p. 44). The mysterious bicycles that the young Kieran discovers abandoned in the novel are revealed to be the property of young people leaving the Iveragh Peninsula for the boat train to England and the local tailor’s account of emigration contains echoes of the losses of Famine emigration and comes as a shock: ‘Then he turned back to his visitors. “This time we are living in, this time of scarcity, has broken the farming people of Kerry,” he said with sudden vehemence. “It has pauperized them, and scattered them.” A silence slipped in through the door and inhabited the indoor space. Then it slipped out again’ (2016b, p. 114). In the later stages of the novel, Kieran himself ends up lost and destitute in New York and his brother goes in search of him in the Bowery in 1958. The account of transatlantic migration in the present contains echoes of the larger history of Irish emigration. A family of Irish immigrants in the airport lounge at Gander are described as ‘collapsed into various attitudes of sleep, lying against one another like a heap of puppies’ (2016b, p. 177). In this novel, Urquhart is most interested in the movement between England and Ireland and specifically in the arrival of Tamara Edgeworth, the English woman, in County Kerry. The name of the character alone is a clear clue to how Urquhart stages a rehearsal of the Irish national tale; she does so by invoking familiar narrative strands of the genre and repurposing them, but extending the geographical coordinates to include not just Ireland and England, but also the United States and Canada. If in Away she takes on a number of Canadian national ur-texts in relation to settler history, in The Night Stages she executes a knowing rewriting of the national tale in the staging of the romance between Tamara Edgeworth and Niall Riordan. In The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (2002), Ina Ferris summarises the genre as follows: Named by Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan) in her pioneering The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806) but shaped as well by the better known Maria Edgeworth in Ennui (1809) and The Absentee (1812), the national tale was an explicit response to the civic and English genre of the Irish tour. As such it not only placed itself directly inside properly public discourse but did so at a critical angle, at once complementing and targeting the travel-text and its civic assumptions. (2002, p. 11)

The Wild Irish Girl (1806) is an ur-text for the story of the Englishman in Ireland who comes to a better understanding of the place and its people

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through the love of an Irish woman. Thomas Tracy writes of the novel: ‘Lady Morgan created a powerful heroine who embodied Irish nationhood and who, through her union with the English hero, represented a re-imagined distribution of power between Britain and Ireland, as well as between men and women’ (2009, p. 1). The effect of Lady Morgan’s Glorvina on the English traveller is immediate: ‘She was seated on the nurse’s little stool. Her elbow resting on her knee, her cheek reclined upon her hand; for once the wish of Romeo appeared no hyperbola’ (1999, pp. 60–61), but later responses to the origin of species would go out of their way to play with this formula. By the beginning of the twentieth century, George Bernard Shaw was ready to offer his own take on this romance mythology in his 1904 play John Bull’s Other Island, a play commissioned by Yeats for the national theatre, but one that delivered more than expected in terms of its deliberately flamboyant stage directions and its complete scepticism towards any easy national sentiment. In John Bull’s Other Island, Shaw’s Englishman goes on his first adventure to Ireland—a place he imagines to be both wild and uncivilized—and meets a young woman by a Round Tower. In keeping with Shaw’s satirical schema—the play sets out to thoroughly unsettle conventional models of the Irish and the English and their relationship with each other—he falls instantly in love. The Englishman Broadbent is described as ‘suddenly betraying a condition of extreme sentimentality’ as he rhapsodizes about Ireland, the beauty of the landscape, and the irresistible beauty of Nora Reilly’s voice: ‘I can hardly trust myself to say how much I like it. The magic of this Irish scene, and – I really don’t want to be personal, Miss Reilly; but the charm of your Irish voice —’ (1991, p. 151). Nora Reilly interjects with a riposte to the wild Irish girl in all her incarnations and swiftly cuts his romantic musings down to size: ‘Oh, get along with you, Mr Broadbent! You’re breaking your heart about me already, I daresay, after seeing me for two minutes in the dark’ (1991, p. 151). The national tale as it resurfaces and is refashioned in Urquhart’s novel is a story of two romances that reverse the conventional gender algorithm of the genre. Tamara Edgeworth’s relationships with the English-born Teddy O’Brien, with whom she leave England for County Kerry, and later with Niall Riordan, her married lover on the Iveragh Peninsula redraw some of the most important coordinates of the national tale in ways that unsettle the earlier templates. Tamara’s myopia towards the Irish is emphasized in the early stages of the novel: ‘Irish. Until that moment she

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had never even thought about the Irish. She recalled, however, that they had opted for neutrality during the war. When she asked what the Irish were doing in London, he had looked at her, surprised’ (2016b, p. 129). She moves from a state of ignorance to complete immersion in life on the Iveragh Peninsula, but her relationship with Ireland is at every turn mediated through her romantic relationships with Irish men. The homecoming of the English-born Irishman Teddy O’Brien is a return fantasy as he describes it as the experience of ‘a long-lost member of the tribe coming home’ (2016b, p. 133). Teddy O’Brien resonates with the original ‘quiet man’ man of Maurice Walsh’s short story of the same name collected in Green Rushes (1935) and reinvented in John Ford’s 1952 film. Sinéad Moynihan’s Ireland, Migration, and Return Migration: The ‘Returned Yank’ in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to the Present (2019) offers a full account of this history of the returnee in the Irish-American context. Urquhart changes the terms and conditions of the dominant Irish-American returnee narrative by modifying the geographical coordinates, but Teddy O’Brien retains a good deal in common with Walsh’s Paddy Bawn Enright, who returns to Co Kerry ‘a quiet man, not given much to talking about himself and the things he had done’ (1974, p. 133) and settles with Tamara into their new life on the Iveragh Peninsula. For Urquhart, the novel represents a different kind of homecoming as she takes possession of the national tale and repurposes it. Urquhart’s version not only upturns the established gender equation, but also reconstitutes the geographical reach by adding a transatlantic dimension to the more familiar Anglo-Irish encounter. In The Night Stages, the Irish-Canadian writer lays claim to tradition, but also writes back to a fellow hyphenated identity, that of Anglo-Irish writers such as Lady Morgan and Maria Edgeworth. Tamara Edgeworth’s early experience of escape to the Iveragh Peninsula with Teddy O’Brien conjures up a richly embroidered Yeatsian utopia: There are mountains, he told her, and quite a number of good fishing rivers and streams. He loved to fish and would bring fresh salmon and trout for their suppers. It rains a good deal, but then there is the green everywhere. The cottage came with two fields, one on each side. We could keep a cow, he said. His grandmother had left him a small amount of money as well, though God knows where she had got it, he said. She had inclined towards gentility, so the cottage would be nicely fitted. (2016b, p. 131)

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The Night Stages turns the national tale inside out by recasting the Irish woman and visiting Englishman, to reverse the gender formula, and by making Tamara’s Englishness an object of interest and strangeness to Irish eyes. After Teddy’s death she begins an affair with Niall Riordan and finds herself regaling him with tales of English life: ‘Her memories of her English childhood fascinated him, he having limited first-hand knowledge of that country beyond a series of weather patterns. What did she remember of butlers, he, a P. G. Wodehouse fan, wanted to know, or of Hardy country, or Constable’s cloud studies which he had heard about from McWilliams?’ (2016b p. 30). Tamara becomes aware that she is being made to perform a role to secure his attention and, at first, he is happy to reciprocate: ‘He would offer accounts of Gaelic football victories, and all the training that took place in every imaginable kind of weather. He had been a sort of local hero, he admitted’ (2016b, p. 32). The breakdown of their relationship is another fracturing of the original version of the national tale and essentialist assumptions about national identity are implicated in the impasse they reach: ‘He was too Irish to leave his marriage. He was too Irish to remain faithful in his marriage’ (2016b, p. 251). Niall seeks to repatriate her and when she proves unwilling he banishes her: ‘What was an English toff like her doing there anyway? He would smile then, laugh, but behind this apparent playfulness she could feel something else, something that wanted her gone from there. Without a multi-generational history she could never actually be part of the surroundings’ (2016b, p. 326). The novel deploys the language of eviction and dispossession as his attempts to make her leave grow more ardent: ‘Niall was trying to displace her. It was as if he had eviction on his mind. Had there been thatch rather than slate on her roof he would set it on fire. He would bring the battering ram and smash down her walls, force her out into the open, for all the convenience of an uncomplicated life’ (2016b, p. 332). Tamara refuses and to leave, eventually does so on her own term, but ultimately decides to return home to County Kerry, in a reanimation of the familiar narrative of Irish exile and return that stretches back through the twentieth century to George Moore’s germinal short story ‘Homesickness’ (1903). If the romantic plot of The Night Stages leads directly back to Sydney Owenson, then the naming of Tamara Edgeworth points to another novelist deeply interested in questions of origin, nationhood, and the power of the same to shape the sensibility of the individual subject. A

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key plot in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809) centres on the confusion of mothers and the discovery that the absentee English landlord on a visit to his estate in Irish is in fact the son of his Irish nursemaid. Their first encounter hints at the revelation to come: ‘The strong affections of this poor woman touched me more than anything I had ever yet felt in my life; she seemed to be the only person upon earth who really cared for me; and in spite of her vulgarity, and my prejudice against the tone in which she spoke, she excited in my mind emotions of tenderness and gratitude’ (1992, p. 157). Urquhart integrates a different version of this mistaken identity and maternal love in The Night Stages as the local maidservant takes the place of Kieran’s mother after her suicide and has a similarly transformative effect on the young man. In doing so the novel travels via the Brontë’s— whose Irish connections have already been addressed—as Niall Riordan describes Annie Gerry as ‘“A sort of Irish Nelly Dean,” he said then, adding that Wuthering Heights was one of McWilliams’ favourite books because of the weather in it. She was their maid, came in from the country daily to help look after them when Kieran was small. Her name was due to the way country people of the parish occasionally identified a woman’ (2016b, p. 31). Annie Gerry adopts Kieran after his mother’s suicide, speaks Irish to him, and teaches him Irish songs and poetry. The nurse introduces him to a Yeatsian world where the young Kieran, a version of Yeats’s stolen child, runs wild amidst nature under the care of his adopted mother. Some of the images that describe Kieran’s new life at one with nature borrow heavily from Yeats. A scene in which he goes to work rebuilding a beehive might have been taken straight from ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’: ‘He had found a collapsed beehive hut a couple of miles from the farm and, with his new masonry skills, was trying to build it up again and finding it more difficult than his work on the wall…’ (2016b, p. 97). Yeats is, unsurprisingly, given special billing on the syllabus of the school he attends under Gerry Annie’s care (2016b, p. 152). Later in the novel, Kieran appears as an Irish navvy with a Romantic imagination: ‘Years later, working with a pick axe to destroy some hedgerows in England so that a motorway could proceed a mile farther through farms and fields, he would remember the roads of southwest Kerry and wonder if they were still as alive as they had been, still filled with such abundance and disarray’ (2016b, p. 244). His education in Gerry Annie’s care is one that roots him more firmly in local Irish culture and she, like the nurse

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of the national tale, is the conduit for his more complete and determined immersion in the Irish language and Irish folklore. In Away and The Night Stages , Urquhart renegotiates the Canadian writer’s relationship with Ireland and the Irish literary canon by exploring central chapters of Irish-Canadian history and by offering her own version of the national tale. As an Irish-Canadian writer she expands the geographical frame of reference of the histories she attends to, turning the ‘island’ story of Irish history and literary culture into a transatlantic one.

Works Cited Primary material Edgeworth, M. (1992 [1800, 1809]). Castle Rackrent and Ennui. London: Penguin. MacLennan, H. (1945). Two Solitudes. New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce. Moodie, S. (1986 [1852]). Roughing It in the Bush. London: Virago. Owenson, S. (1999 [1806]). The Wild Irish Girl. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Shaw, G. B. (1991 [1904]). John Bull’s Other Island. In J. P. Harrington (Ed.), Modern Irish Drama (pp. 119–203). London: Norton. Urquhart, J. (1997 [1993]). Away. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Urquhart, J. (2016a). A Number of Things: Stories of Canada Told Through Fifty Objects. Toronto: Harper Collins. Urquhart, J. (2016b [2015]). The Night Stages. London: Oneworld. Walsh, M. (1974 [1935]). ‘The Quiet Man’. In Green Rushes (pp. 133–159). London: Pan Books.

Secondary material Anderson, B. (1991 [1983]). Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Atwood, M. (2004 [1972]). Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Bordo, J. (1992–1993). ‘Jack Pine—Wilderness Sublime or the Erasure of the Aboriginal Presence from the Landscape’. Journal of Canadian Studies, 27 (4), 98–128. Brown, E. K. (1977 [1951]). ‘Is a Canadian Critic Possible?’ In D. Staines (Ed.), Responses and Evaluations: Essays on Canada (pp. 313–314). Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

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Cohen, R. (2008 [1997]). Global Diasporas: An Introduction (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Corporaal, M., Cusack, C., & Janssen, L. (Eds.). (2012). Recollecting Hunger: Cultural Memories of the Great Famine in Irish and British Fiction, 1847– 1920. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Corporaal, C., Frawley, O., & Mark-FitzGerald, E. (Eds.). (2018). The Great Irish Hunger: Visual and Material Culture. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. De Groot, J. (2009). The Historical Novel. London: Routledge. Delaney, E. (2011). ‘Our Island Story? Towards a Transnational History of Late Modern Ireland’. Irish Historical Studies, 37(148), 599–621. Dvoˇrák, M. (2004). ‘Fiction’. In E. Kröller (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (pp. 155–176). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enright, A. (2006). Review of The Story of Chicago May by Nuala O’Faolain’ in The Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-story-of-chicago-mayby-nuala-ofaolain-2m9vg7p256j. Accessed 1 June 2020. Ferris, I. (2002). The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, P., & Lambkin, B. (2008). Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007 . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goldman, M. (2010). ‘Talking Crow: Jane Urquhart’s Away’. In H. DazironVentura & M. Dvoˇrák (Eds.), Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre (pp. 129–144). Brussels: Peter Lang. Gray, B. (2004). Women and the Irish Diaspora. London: Routledge. Hammill, F. (2003). Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada 1760– 2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Houston, C. J., & Smyth, W. J. (1990). Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Letters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mackey, E. (1999). The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. London: Routledge. Miller, K. A. (1988 [1985]). Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moynihan, S. (2013). ‘Other People’s Diasporas’: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Moynihan, S. (2019). Ireland, Migration, and Return Migration: The ‘Returned Yank’ in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to the Present. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Negra, D. (2006). The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. O’Brien, J. A. (Ed.). (1954). The Vanishing Irish: The Enigma of the Modern World. London: W. H. Allen.

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Reddy, M. (2012). ‘Race and Irish Cultural Memory’. In O. Frawley (Ed.), Memory Ireland: Diaspora and Memory Practices (pp. 61–74). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Robinson, M. (1995). ‘Cherishing the Irish Diaspora’, An Address to the Houses of the Oireachtas. https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/199502-02/2/. Accessed 1 June 2020. Shields, C. (1997 [1977]). Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision. Ottawa: Borealis Press. Sugars, C. (2003). ‘Haunted by (a Lack of) Postcolonial Ghosts: Settler Nationalism in Jane Urquhart’s Away’. Essays on Canadian Writing, 79, 1–32. Tracy, T. (2009). Irishness and Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century British Writing. Farnham: Ashgate. Urquhart, J. (2018). ‘Irish Characters Walk the Pages of Canadian Novels’. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/irish-charactersoften-walk-the-pages-of-canadian-novels-1.3507180. Accessed 1 June 2020. Urschel, K. (2012). ‘Chronotopic Memory in Contemporary Irish-Canadian Literature’. In O. Frawley (Ed.), Memory Ireland: Diaspora and Memory Practices (pp. 36–48). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Wallace, A. (2015). ‘A Canadian Novel About Kerry’s “Mythic” Rás Tailteann in the 1950s: Interview with Jane Urquhart’. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/a-canadian-novel-aboutkerry-s-mythic-rás-tailteann-in-the-1950s-1.2272338. Accessed 1 June 2020.

CHAPTER 7

Transatlantic Encounters in the Writing of Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue’s emergence as an important voice in contemporary Irish women’s writing coincided with a sea change in thinking about the place of the woman writer in the Irish literary canon. Her first novel Stir Fry was published in 1994 and her most recent, Akin, appeared in 2019. The time in between has been marked by a process of recovery and renewal in Irish literary criticism as previously neglected women writers received new attention and contemporary women writers carved out a new space for writing about the lives of Irish women. As a writer who has lived most of her adult life outside of Ireland and holds both Irish and Canadian citizenship, it comes as no surprise that Donoghue’s fiction is not afraid to travel when it comes to matters of genre, historical period, and setting. Her early work is set in Ireland—both Stir Fry (1994) and Hood (1995) play out in Dublin—but her 2007 novel Landing is her most emphatically transatlantic novel: a lesbian love story that holds up a nicely polished looking glass to both Irish and Canadian narratives of nationhood. This chapter is most interested in reading Landing as a novel that lifts the veil on privileged literary, cultural, and historical discourses of Ireland and Canada and does so by wry nods and gestures towards familiar archetypes. It is, at heart, the story of a Canadian-Irish romance, but one that unfolds via familiar Irish and Canadian national discourses. In a novel rich with epigraphs about travel and journeying, the penultimate chapter contains lines from Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush and so it takes its time in getting around to acknowledging the work of Moodie © The Author(s) 2021 E. McWilliams, Irishness in North American Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1_7

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and other nineteenth-century Canadian settler writers as a source text. But this clue is deftly plotted on Donoghue’s part as both a writer of historical fiction and a scholar of literary history. In terms of its broader Canadian resonances, Landing can be placed in the tradition of Brian Moore’s The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), as a novel about the dismay of the new arrival—the small Ontario town in which Jude lives conjures up a mixture of dread and dismay in the worldly and well-travelled Síle, who struggles to contemplate a new life there. There is a further suggestiveness in how Ontario functions as a setting in the book, as it appears to be firmly located in the world of small-town Canada so central to the work of Alice Munro—Jude Turner in Landing appears as a latter-day Del Jordan, albeit one whose attachment to home is far less complicated and for whom Munro’s ‘deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum’ (1982, p. 249) are more enticing than anything that the world beyond the town might have to offer. When the novel turns its attention to Ireland it does so with a similar alertness to how well trodden the city of Dublin is by Irish writers and copes with the same by turning it into a ‘movie set’ (2007, p. 109), an assemblage of Celtic Tiger veneers that are acknowledged and satirized by the Irish cast of the novel. There is no reverent appeal here to the familiar landscapes of the Irish literary tradition that Donoghue would have grown up with and been immersed in as a student at University College Dublin. Her Dublin is marked by the intimate and personal and, in the words of Baba in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls , leaves James Joyce to ‘blow his own trumpet’. Landing is a novel that puts up a resistance to the demands of both national literatures while self-consciously playing with currencies of Irishness and Canadianness at pivotal moments. In Landing some of the most important scenes and exchanges are played out in between spaces—mid-flight over the Atlantic, in airports, in cyberspace— and the novel investigates multiple meanings of the ‘ideas of crossing and connection’ (2007, p. 4) identified by Manning and Taylor as central to transatlantic literary studies. A number of stories in Donoghue’s Touchy Subjects (2006) also address these questions of belonging, dislocation, separation and return, preoccupations in Donoghue’s work since the very beginning of her writing career, but Donoghue’s 2012 collection Astray represents a significant chapter in this regard, concerned as it is with historical archives and the role of the historical novelist in bringing the lived experience of migrants, travellers, and outlaws to life. Astray is a compilation of snapshots

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that captures historical narratives at deliberately arbitrary moments and expands upon a historical footnote to amplify the untold story of a voice from the margins. The collection is a gathering of the voices of women who have been left ‘outside history’ to return to Eavan Boland’s phrase and so makes for a natural end point for this study, largely concerned as it has been with neglected possibilities for thinking about Irish, American, and Canadian women writers as part of a transatlantic matrix. In Astray, Donoghue lifts these characters out of different historical grand narratives of migration, exploration, and adventure and imagines their history with the meticulous care of the archivist at work. The appendices that trace the origin of each story and the explicatory afterword to the collection reveal the work of the author in progress, although these ancillary texts remain part of the constructed narrative of the collection as a whole. The tracing of the sources of these stories is carried out in good faith, but the stories themselves are less concerned with origins and destinations than with pivotal moments in the lives of the often minor historical figures cast in major roles in the collection. In this, Donoghue pushes beyond the official history in capturing moments of empathy with figures who might otherwise be confined to a passing gloss. Astray, like Donoghue’s earlier collection of fairy and folktale adaptations Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997), speaks to the tradition of feminist ‘diving into the wreck’, celebrated in Adrienne Rich’s poem of the same name, which remains a touchstone in conversations about feminist practices of recovery and revision.

Relocations: Emma Donoghue’s Literary Nomadism Donoghue left Ireland to study in Cambridge in 1990 at the end of a decade notorious for its policing of Irish women’s lives—something that showed itself most virulently in the abortion debates of that decade. In interview, she reflects on the same period in talking about her adoptive home of Canada: ‘I did feel much freer in England. I find my new home, Canada, a more diverse and just society than any other I’ve known, so I’m glad to have washed up here’ (2019, website). The work of Irish feminist critics of the last forty years has brought about a revolution in the study of Irish literature that has made Ireland a more hospitable place for the woman writer. The early foundations of a critical tradition that turned its full attention to Irish women’s writing were laid by Ann Owens Weekes’s germinal history, Irish Women’s

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Writing: An Uncharted Tradition (1990), and Christine St Peter’s Changing Ireland: Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (2000), while more recent volumes such as Caitriona Moloney and Helen Thompson’s Irish Women Writers Speak Out: Voices from the Field (2003), Heather Ingman’s Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women (2007), Geradine Meaney’s Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation (2010) and Claire Bracken’s Irish Feminist Futures (2016) have continued to keep pace with the prolific output of Irish women writers, their engagement with literary and critical histories, and advances into new previously unimagined futures. The publication of the Field Day volumes dedicated to Irish women’s writing in 2002 contains its own fable about the struggle for Irish women’s writing to gain the recognition it deserves. In their introduction to Opening the Field: Irish Women, Texts, and Contexts Patricia Boyle Haberstroh and Christine St. Peter describe the controversy that greeted the publication of the three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991, and its failure to include the work of women writers. They read the subsequent publication of two volumes of Irish Women’s Writing a decade later as a transformative moment: ‘From this point on, definitions of the Irish literary tradition would change’ (2007, p. 1). They go on to emphasize how the genesis of the Field Day anthology and responses to the same generated a whole series of new conversations about the inclusions and exclusions of the Irish literary canon and the limits of any narrowly defined definition of Irish literature or any overly prescribed model of critical practice. Gerardine Meaney’s essay ‘Engendering the Postmodern Canon? The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing , Volumes IV & V: Women’s Writing and Traditions’ in the same collection offers a full analysis of the editorial processes that produced these volumes while also reflecting on the hostile environment in which Irish feminist critics were working at the beginning of the 1980s, the decade in which Donoghue came of age: The 1980s was also a time of extraordinary social and political turmoil in Ireland, with the successive abortion referenda putting the issue of changing sexual and gender roles at the centre of political life in the South. Anyone politically opposed to the resurgence of the Catholic right at the time was forced to think about the reserves of cultural hysteria centering on women’s bodies in general and motherhood in particular which it was able to mobilize. (2007, p. 18)

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In a survey of Irish feminist history, Siobhán Kilfeather explicates some of the central events that were exploited in the circumscription of Irish women’s identity, bodily autonomy, and sexual agency during the same period: In the 1980s and 1990s public debates over issues to do with privacy, reproductive rights and alternative sexualities were centred on a series of scandals in which print and broadcast media personalised the issues through sensationalised exemplary cases: the death in childbirth of 15-year-old Ann Lovett and her baby in 1984, the trial of Joanne Hayes for the murder of the Kerry babies in 1984; the decision of rape survivor Lavinia Kerwick to renounce anonymity and speak on a radio programme in 1990… (2005, p. 111)

The Cambridge History of Irish Women’s Literature, published in 2018, almost two decades after the appearance of volumes IV and V of The Field Day Anthology, includes its own appeal from editors Heather Ingman and Clíona Ó Gallchoir for an evermore inclusive conceptualization of the Irish woman writer: The policy of ‘generous inclusion’ adopted by the editors of the Cambridge History of Irish Literature in relation to the term ‘Irish writer’ has also been adhered to here, so that in these pages you will find writers who were born in Ireland and those who lived for significant periods of time in Ireland, including women who are part of the increasing immigrant population in Ireland today. The definition used in this volume is in fact even more broadly inclusive, in that it incorporates writers who form part of diaspora communities in Britain and America. (2018, p. 5)

This alternative approach to thinking about Irish women’s writing is also a key driver of this book as all of the writers examined are at home in this more generous taxonomy of Irish women’s writing. Emma Donoghue’s position is especially concomitant with this revised and expanded definition of the Irish woman writer having grown up in Dublin, but spent most of her adult life in England and Canada. Donoghue’s oeuvre is also comfortable with ambitious relocations in terms of place and historical period. For example, her novel Slammerkin (2000) is set in eighteenth-century London and Wales while the celebrated Room (2010) is deliberately abstract in terms of time and place. Landing and Astray stand apart as texts in which she most

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vividly embraces the possibilities of transatlantic travel and transnationalism as a theme. In ‘“If love’s a country”: Transnationalism and the Celtic Tiger in Emma Donoghue’s Landing ’, Moira Casey makes the point that ‘Donoghue’s finely honed humor targeting the idiosyncrasies of modern transnational life does indeed keep the novel’s mood light, but the themes are deeply resonant with Irish literature and culture’ (2011, p. 66) and it is exactly this balancing act that the next section is interested in exploring. Casey charts the changing meaning of home in Donoghue’s work, from her early story, ‘Going Back’, about being Irish in London to her returnee drama in the title story of Touchy Subjects and beyond. Donoghue emerges as a writer who maintains what Casey calls a ‘balancing act’ when it comes to the significance of transnational routes and national, regional, and local roots in her writing, something that complements her predilection for moving across different genres and flying by the nets of any all-encompassing description of her work. She is pragmatic when it comes to the reception of her fiction and how her work tends to be framed: ‘I’m not going to object to “lesbian writer” if I don’t object to “Irish writer” or “woman writer”, since these are all equally descriptive of me and where I’m from’ (2019). In writing about gender, sexuality, and race in Ireland, Donoghue remains engaged in the Irish story while also moving freely outside of it when her work demands. In her landmark article, ‘Cé Leis Tú? Queering Irish Migrant Literature’, Tina O’Toole offers a critical account of what is at stake for the Irish lesbian writer: ‘To grow up in Ireland, even in recent times, was to be inscribed within familialist discourses founded on the centrality of the family of origin. Irish LGBTs circumvented this fixed heteronormative and patriarchal structure by constructing lateral networks of their own: alternative families, or what might be described as queer kin’ (2013, p. 132). O’Toole goes on to trace the emergence of queer kinship from the late nineteenth century to the novels of Kate O’Brien and the work of more recent writers such as Mary Dorcey. Of the account of Síle O’Shaughnessy’s life in Dublin in Landing she writes: Cognate homophobia also alienates her. Beneath the surface of brash Celtic Tiger culture, the narrator observes, lurks the very real possibility of being gay-bashed or cauterized by the centuries-old code of Irish silence. … As such, Donoghue, now a Canadian immigrant residing in Ontario herself, sends back her own social remittances, making this intervention or impetus for change in Irish culture. (2013, p. 139)

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These ‘social remittances’ identified by O’Toole are also implicated in questions about race, identity, and the privileges of whiteness that are pressing to both Irish and Canadian culture and are examined with care in Donoghue’s Landing . Steve Garner summarizes the social changes that took place in the making of ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland in Whiteness: An Introduction, published in the same year as Donoghue’s novel: ‘The transition from a country of net emigration to one of net immigration (since 1996) has had a serious impact on Irish identity (Lentin 2001; Garner 2003). … The response to these changes has meant the identification of new ethnicities, a rise in racism, and debate on the relationship of this new phase of Irish history to the past’ (2007, p. 131). In an extended analysis of how Landing engages with and contributes to new discourses of race, migration, and belonging during the Celtic Tiger years, Sinéad Moynihan notes that ‘It is interesting to consider the possibilities that Canada represents as a model for Irish multiculturalism, for several critics find the US multicultural model extremely deficient’ (2013, p. 203). The naming of ‘Ireland, Ontario’ suggests that Donoghue is aware of the ways in which Canada may seem to offer an alternative model of the newly emergent, multicultural Ireland, although Canadian multiculturalism has its own critics. Sabine Sielke examines how Canadian policy-making on multiculturalism has been seduced by its own rhetoric and has, at times, struggled to resist the temptation to exploit a utopian view of multiculturalism to ‘champion the Canadian mosaic and to affirm national unity’ (2014, p. 60). In summing up Indian Irish Síle’s relationship with migrant histories in the novel, Moynihan concludes: Here, it is not only the memory of Irish emigration that is evoked by Donoghue in relation to contemporary immigration, but also the imperfect memory of the experiences of Síle’s, and her older sister Orla’s, mother as an Indian immigrant to Ireland in the 1970s. On the one hand, Donoghue suggests that such memory has the potential to generate a radical, politically active form of empathy for more recent arrivals to Ireland. … On the other hand, the influx of immigrants to Ireland has virtually no impact on Síle, except insofar as she is ‘not the only brown face anymore,’ and ‘compared to the women in chadors [she] hardly look [s] foreign at all’ (35). Immigration to Ireland affects her only to the extent that she is less racially ‘other’ than she had previously been. (2013, pp. 203–204, italics in original)

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As her writing career has unfolded Donoghue has, then, remained attuned to the Ireland she left behind and makes a repeated return to the fashioning of Irishness on home territory. While the importance of Donoghue’s work to representations of sexuality and race has been examined in detail in recent work in Irish literary studies, this chapter is interested in how her work plays with some of the ‘routes’ and ‘roots’ that are key coordinates in transatlantic literary studies and how it refuses to obey the demands of either. The next sections of this chapter are most interested in how she takes up familiar literary landscapes, both Irish and Canadian, and redraws them in ways that test literary origins and afterlives. She proceeds with a scholarly, albeit wry, relationship with tradition, often taking care to meticulously acknowledge her sources through epigraphs and an explicatory afterword, but using them as point of departure for playfully unravelling the meaning of such findings.

From ‘Hibernian Metropolis’ to Canadian ‘Bush Garden’: Unravelling the Nation in Emma Donoghue’s Landing On her author website, Donoghue includes ‘Are you Irish?’ as one of the Frequently Asked Questions that tend to come her way: ‘I would say I’m an Irishwoman and an Irish writer, having spent those formative first twenty years of life in Dublin. … I hold joint Irish and Canadian citizenship and am happy to be known as a Canadian writer too’ (2019). Donoghue recalls being asked at a reading about why she moved to Canada in 1988 and the interviewer’s assumption about her motivations: ‘I once answered this question at a reading in Ontario by saying “Love”, but the questioner then asked confidently, “Love of Canada?” – so I had to spell it out and say “No, love of a Canadian!”’ (2019). Emma Donoghue’s Landing is, first and foremost, a love story about an Irish and a Canadian woman that is keenly interested in testing ideas of departure and arrival, origins and destinations. Donoghue sets the two in suspension—the novel challenges any essentialist, totalizing narrative of self and nation while acknowledging the lure and seductions of the same. Landing is a novel about falling in love, but the romance of Síle O’Shaughnessy and Jude Turner is wittily interwoven with a discursive

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investigation of Irish and Canadian national narratives and the Atlantic is the blank canvas onto which this love story is imprinted. At the beginning of the novel, Jude receives notice that her mother has fallen ill while visiting family in England and makes the journey to bring her home. Her fear of flying means that for Jude: ‘The Atlantic stretched out in her mind, a wide gray horror’ (2007, p. 3). The reference to the ‘wide gray horror’ has two possible functions here. It acknowledges Atlantic histories of colonial violence and trauma, but also has a satirical function in representing Jude as an apprehensive pioneer figure. As will be explored later, the wry rendering of Jude as a twenty-first-century version of Susanna Moodie is mediated through her luddite attitudes to technology and her work as curator of a museum in the small Ontario town she grew up in, which is dedicated to the history of migration and settlement in nineteenth-century Canada. Jude’s preference for staying in one place is clearly established from the start: ‘The summer her friends from high school had been touring Europe, Jude had been up north planting trees to pay for her first motor-bike. Surely it was her business if she preferred to stay on the ground?’ (2007, p. 4). The novel works through the different facets by which national identity is constructed and maintained and calls into view Anthony Smith’s taxonomy of the nation in National Identity: These concepts – autonomy, identity, national genius, authenticity, unity and fraternity – form an interrelated language or discourse that has its expressive ceremonials and symbols. These symbols and ceremonies are so much part of the world we live in that we take them, for the most part, for granted. They include the obvious attributes of nations – flags, anthems, parades, coinage, capital cities, oaths, folk costumes, museums of folklore, war memorials, ceremonies of remembrance for the national dead, passports, frontiers – as well as more hidden aspects, such as national recreations, the countryside, popular heroes and heroines, fairy tales, forms of etiquette, styles of architecture, arts and crafts, modes of town planning, legal procedures, educational practices and military codes – all these distinctive customs, mores, styles and ways of acting and feeling that are shared by the members of a community of historical culture. (1991, p. 77)

The same vocabulary is woven into the text of the romance from the start and is exploited in some of the more satirical moments in the novel. In searching for a simile for her feelings at the beginning of their affair, Jude announces: ‘“It’s like being Belgium.” “Belgium?” repeated Síle,

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shrilly. “Wasn’t Belgium always getting overrun by invading armies?”’ (2007, p. 121). From the beginning, the novel is keen to acknowledge the ‘nation as narration’ as Edward Said would say, and to exploit the same idea in irreverent ways: ‘I’m off to England, she told herself, trying to rouse some enthusiasm, but all she could think of were those royal guards on the postcards, with bearskin straps cutting into their chins’ (2007, p. 6, italics in original). Jude’s English-born mother is a mirror image of the unhappy traveller, a disgruntled Susanna Moodie in reverse as she laments: ‘The plumbing’s atrocious as ever. There’s no such thing as a pound note anymore, only a coin, can you believe it?’ (2007, p. 31). Naming the town Ireland, Ontario, is especially pointed as the collision and occasional confusion of places is one of the things that empties the idea of ‘Ireland’ of any essentialist meaning, as well as recognizing Donoghue’s dual identity as a writer who is both Irish and Canadian. The novel is especially interested in investigating how the literatures of both places replicate fantasies of place, from the celebrated Hibernian Metropolis brought to life by Joyce to the mythologies of the wilderness central to Canadian literature. At first the characters imagine each other as ‘the Canadian’ and ‘the Irish woman’ and their fledgling romance depends on the vocabulary of the nation. In an early flirtation, Síle tells Jude the story of Oisin and Tir-na-nOg and is interrupted with wry amendments. On the subject of Oisin’s fall to earth, her response is swift: ‘“Ah,” said Jude, nodding, “the magical pull of the native soil.” The girl was quick; Síle grinned at her’ (2007, p. 21). The same flirtatious riffing infiltrates their exchanges from the start and is a key determinant in their email and letter exchanges: ‘I wonder how long this will take to get to you by mule, elk, or whatever the Mounties are using these days? I’m trying to picture your little hamlet of Ireland, Ontario, and I realize the images in my head are all out of Northern Exposure, which is actually Alaska, isn’t it ?’ (2007, p. 61, italics in original). And yet, in contrast to this scepticism about national origins the first love token that Jude sends Síle is a feather from a Canada goose (2007, p. 65). In his essay ‘Irish Literature and Irish History’, Declan Kiberd suggests that ‘All nations are, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, an invented or imagined community, and the Irish have shown more relish for that fiction than most’ (1992, p. 280). The commodification of Irish culture has received ample attention, most particularly in the work of Diane

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Negra whose edited volume The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture (2006) brings together key thinkers on this question. In Donoghue’s hands, fictions of Canada are also expertly peeled back and revealed. The novel turns its gaze with special care on Canadian history via Jude Turner’s job as curator of a one-room museum housed in an 1862 schoolhouse. Jude takes personal responsibility for the history of the town of Ireland via the museum’s exhibitions and her endeavours to honour the same are shot through with an earnestness and sincerity that is a source of bafflement and amusement to Síle. The novel shares in this amusement in presenting Jude as a reincarnation of the nineteenth-century settler. Suspicious of technology in all its forms, Jude hates flying, prefers to pay her way in cash rather than carrying cards, and refuses to own a microwave or mobile phone. Meanwhile tech-savvy Síle is in the process of developing repetitive strain injury from texting. Her feelings for Jude are first revealed when she handwrites her a letter that crosses with Jude’s first email—each mode of correspondence meeting the other on their preferred terms. In contrast to Síle’s conception of herself as an unfettered cosmopolitan, Jude is actively engaged in the reproduction of a dominant narrative of Canadian identity. In Jude’s preference for solitude and suspicion of the world beyond Ireland, Ontario, the novel crafts a comic take on Northrop Frye’s definition of the ‘garrison mentality’: ‘A garrison is a closely knit and beleaguered society, and its moral and social values are unquestionable. In a perilous enterprise, one does not discuss causes or motives: one is either a fighter or a deserter’ (1971, p. 226). Síle, whose profession as a flight attendant is one of the more literal running puns in the book, stands in direct opposition to Jude’s sense of loyalty to place and history: ‘I happen to be based in Dublin but it could be anywhere really (well, anywhere with a population of more than a million!)’ (2007, p. 62). Jude teases: ‘You’re such a global citizen, you don’t know where or when you are’ (2007, p. 128). In spite of her scepticism, origins are not entirely abandoned by Síle as discussions of family history make up a significant part of her correspondence with Jude. In one dispatch just as she is teasing Jude about her own journeys into history, the story of her mother’s migration from Kerala to Dublin comes into view: I keep picturing you in a gray Victorian bonnet, Jude, it’s unnerving. But the Quaker thing does help explain your purist oddities. I love the way

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you say “We built our Meetinghouse at Coldstream in 1859” as if you were there – time traveler! My Amma was Hindu, but the Church insisted she convert to marry Da (already pretty much lapsed, ironically), and he claims it was “simpler for her to change everything” (country, job, primary language, religion, marital status) all at once. Huh, rather her than me! (2007, p. 68)

In a further knowing turn, Síle plots her move to Canada to be with Jude by setting up a new genealogy business called ‘Origins’ and so origins take on a value for Síle when they promise to be commercially viable and offer a means of reuniting her with Jude. The novel takes particular care to enumerate the seemingly unavoidable stereotypes that surface in this Irish-Canadian encounter. Before Jude realizes that the passenger next to her on the flight to England has, in fact, died she considers how best to ask him to move because ‘Canadian politeness only went so far’ (2007, p. 11). Jude wears the Canadian maple leaf on her jacket, something flagged by Síle on the occasion of their first meeting (2007, p. 16). Later in the novel, on a visit to see Síle in Dublin, she is surprised to find herself ‘playing the self-deprecating merry Canuck for all she was worth’ (2007, p. 176). Jude is piqued by the teasing of Síle’s friends into enumerating Canadian achievements: ‘Mock all you like but our inventions include basketball, insulin, the gas mask, ketchup, and international time zones’ (2007, p. 70). Síle springs to her defence when her sister insists that Canadians are boring and wheels out Joni Mitchell, Mary Pickford, William Shatner as evidence to the contrary (2007, p. 183). She is spirited in her reply when further aspersions are cast upon the national identity of her lover: ‘“Are Canadians not a bit… dull?” … “Are the Irish not all thick and ignorant?” Síle countered’ (2007, p. 106). The same interest in foregrounding and teasing out assumptions about national character extend to place. Síle O’Shaughnessy’s Dublin is not celebrated as the Hibernian Metropolis captured by Joyce, but seems to Jude to be like a ‘movie set’ (2007, p. 169), an accumulation of surfaces that serves as a flimsy backdrop for their love affair. Hyperconsumerist Celtic Tiger Ireland serves up an assemblage of sets and props for their romance. The city is described as ‘overrun by twenty-year-old millionaires’ (2007, p. 182) and roots its new identity in ostentatious architecture, pretentious theatre, and expensive restaurants. The novel includes a particularly pointed reference to ‘overpriced sushi in a Temple

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Bar restaurant made entirely of hard, noisy surfaces’ (2007, p. 139) and muses on the pros and cons of gentrification. Síle’s life offers a close-up view of the intimate details of Celtic Tiger excess. She drives a BMW, owns an Alessi lemon squeezer, employs a cleaner, and has a wardrobe of raw silk dresses, local details that add up to an impression of a rampant consumer culture. For all its apparent progress and prosperity, Celtic Tiger Dublin is predictably enough found to be a hollow place. For those who left and returned there is no idealized homecoming: ‘“When I got kicked out of home and went off backpacking,” Jael remembered, “I used to tell people I’d shaken off Mother Ireland’s bony claws for good. I thought I’d settle in Berlin or Athens, or never settle at all”’ (2007, p. 40). In the novel’s investigation of Celtic Tiger hypocrisy, Síle emerges as an object of predictable interest because she is mixed race. Her response to a request to appear in an article on ‘Ireland since the Celtic Tiger’ sums up how exposed she is to the projections of others: ‘Can’t you just imagine? Veteran crew member Síle O’Shaughnessy, chic at thirty-nine, tosses back the hip-length tresses she owes to her deceased mother’s Keralan heritage’ (2007, p. 34). In mapping Síle O’Shaughnessy’s Dublin, Donoghue has no interest in competing with other writers who put the city at the heart of their work nor does her work give away any anxiety about the Joycean tradition of writing the city. Síle’s father offers a nod to this history in his chastisement of Celtic Tiger complacency. ‘Bring back heated discussions of politics, that’s what I say. D’you remember that splendid fight over Parnell in Portrait of the Artist ?’ (2007, p. 81). The city is drawn according to moments of intimacy—Síle’s first kiss outside TCD, for example (2007, p. 181)—that marked Síle’s formative years rather than by landmarks and monuments. This interest in mapping the city by personal histories calls to mind Anne Enright on writing Dublin. In an essay entitled ‘Writing the City’, Enright offers further insight into the significance of cartography and mapping in her work, in asserting that: I find my way around Dublin by the places where I was in love. It is a private map of bedsits and street corners, an anatomy, a map of the flesh. I remember the things that were said, or the way they were said, at a bus stop in Nassau Street, at the corner of Suffolk Street, on a Canal Bank

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Walk. All these places have been written a hundred times, they have been owned or taken by poets and novelists, but they are mine. (1999, p. 30)

Enright expands on this in laying claim to her own right to map the city of Dublin in spite of walking in the footsteps of formidable precursors: ‘As for my own work, I refuse the maps that other people draw. I do not even try to amend them. I do not want to own, or have, a city that has been owned and had by every man who has lifted a pen in this town’ (1999, p. 30). Jude’s relationship with her home town is at the opposite end of the spectrum to the props and set of Síle’s Dublin—the lure of authenticity is the driving force central to Jude’s sincere and heartfelt attempt to curate the history of Ireland, Ontario. Berating herself for her perfectly understandable distress at the death of a fellow passenger on the airplane, she conjures up the resilience of her ancestors: The immigrants who’d come to settle southwestern Ontario had done a lot of falling through ice, onto hay forks, from topmasts, across train tracks, into fireplaces, down mine shafts or grain threshers. They swallowed buttons, got concussed in sleigh crashes, lost in blizzards, eaten by bears. Other people saw it happen: pointed, screamed, ran to help, ran away, did something. They never just sat there oblivious, reading the in-flight magazine. (2007, p. 29)

Here, Donoghue borrows from the vocabulary of Atwood’s survivalism and knowingly evokes a naïve version of settler nationalism critiqued by critics such as Cynthia Sugars and Eva Mackey. Even though Jude’s ex-husband Rizla Vandeloo is Mohawk-Dutch, Jude remains curiously oblivious to First Nations history, carried away as she is by her earnest enthusiasm for local settler narratives and her attempts to capture an authentic experience of it for visitors to the museum. Jude’s work as a curator of Canadian settler history is where the satirical turn in the novel finds its sharpest expression. Jude launches exhibitions with titles such as ‘Blood on the Ice: A Hundred Years of Local Hockey’ (2007, p. 45) and Fearful Epidemics (2007, p. 74) and compiles a record of ‘Destitute Orphan Immigrants’ who arrived in the town in 1891 as part of her weekly ‘From the Archives’ exhibit (2007, p. 55). She files nineteenth-century newspaper clippings in the museum archive, including

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a piece from the Irish Clarion in 1861, a rallying cry for Irish women to come to Canada to fix the gender imbalance in the Irish immigrant community (2007, p. 194) and a reminder of Donoghue’s own status as an Irish migrant. The novel ends with Síle and Jude relocating to Toronto and the local museum in Ireland, Ontario falls victim of funding cuts. Jude leaves the museum behind in a decision that reroutes the meaning of her life to the present moment and looks forward to a future with Síle in a city that is neutral territory and, in terms of sensibility if not geography, allows them to meet halfway in establishing a life together. The future that lies beyond the end of the novel promises a new chapter in the lives of Irish and Canadian women. At one point, on one of her visits with Jude in Ontario, Síle notices a number of titles on Jude’s book case, including a book about Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, Sisters in the Wilderness, and James Reaney’s The Donnellys Trilogy. Donoghue’s novel is a new departure in this Canadian history, as it is in the history of Irish writing, as her work moves beyond the received literary tradition and critical history that have shaped how women’s lives have been written about in both cultures. Jude’s appetite for reading is informed by her mother’s enthusiasm for English and American writers. Her mother names her after Hardy’s Jude, and Hawthorne, Poe, and Dickens are cited as family favourites. When confronted by Síle about the true nature of her romantic history with Rizla she replies ‘Reader, I married him’ (2007, p. 154) in an invocation of Jane Eyre and one of the most prominent heterosexual romance mythologies in nineteenth-century English fiction. At one point, Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness offers some consolation, but only goes so far for Jude in its representation of desire as she comments on the disappointing coyness of its language (2007, p. 178). These carefully-woven intertextual references add up to a clear statement about how lesbian love stories have been marginalized in Irish and Canadian literary history and in the literary canon more broadly. Landing is a love story that writes back to both a literary history of imagining pioneer women in the Canadian wilderness and an Irish literary tradition that too often elided the work of Irish women writers.

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Conclusion: The Woman Writer at Home and Astray From the homegrown narrative of Landing , Donoghue’s collection Astray expands outwards and takes in other Canadian and American histories of travel, adventure, displacement, and dislocation. In terms of form and technique, it resembles Donoghue’s earlier experiment Kissing the Witch (1997), a collection of rewritings that redraw the coordinates of well-known fairytales. This collection, like Astray, is an exercise in ‘revision’ as defined by Adrienne Rich in her critical manifesto ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1971): Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. … We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us. (1980, p. 35)

In Astray, Donoghue takes up the stories of minor historical figures too often banished to the footnotes of official histories and captures them at a moment of crisis or transformation. These snapshots are often taken mid journey and have a decentring effect. They privilege minor characters and events over grand narratives and emphasize moments of experience in transit rather than the more familiar dramas of departure and return historically prized by Irish literature. In an interview in which she discusses her historical fiction, Donoghue emphasizes the consciously political nature of this as a process: ‘I think the reason I use a specific, real, named protagonist is because my original impulse was very much to represent the ones who had been left out – like the nobodies, women, slaves, people in freak shows, servants – the ones who are not powerful. I felt an obligation. If I was going to write about them at all, I wanted to give them their little moment in the sun. I wanted to name them, even if they were incredibly obscure figures’ (2018, p. 121). Astray is a collage of transatlantic crossings and histories of internal migration in the United States and Canada—stories of rootlessness loosely anchored to the archive. The sense of obligation described by Donoghue is perhaps, in part, explained by her awareness

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of the elisions of Irish history when it comes to the lives of Irish women and the importance of recovering those histories. The collection is a coda to Landing in that the glimpses of history on offer in these short fictions are inspired by the equivalent of the ephemera curated by Jude Turner in her museum—plucked from obscurity and given vivid treatment in Donoghue’s fiction. Many of the characters with walk on parts in Astray are built out of fragments from historical archives or official histories named and recorded by Donoghue. Some are minor figures in the life drama of celebrated historical figures such as Charles Dickens and Abraham Lincoln and others are obscure characters found in glosses to historical texts. ‘Onward’, for example, traces back to 1856 and to a letter from Charles Dickens revealing that he sponsored impoverished siblings to start a new life in Canada. The collection moves back and forth across the border from the United States to Canada and steps across different migrant histories—a reminder from the Irish writer that the story of Irish emigration is not exceptional. A number of the stories are concerned with publicly excoriated outlaw figures, such as ‘The Widow’s Cruse’, which goes back to 1735, and is inspired by an article in the New York Weekly Journal about a woman who fakes her husband’s death so she can abscond with his fortune. Suffering, transgressive, and scandalous travellers and vagrants who pose a threat to the status quo dominate the collection from the account of a ‘scandalous woman’ from the 1870s in ‘The Long Way Home’ to the story of defiant gender crossing in ‘Daddy’s Girl’, which brings the collection up to 1901. Colonial America is given special attention in ‘The Lost Seed’ based on archival material that serves as a point of departure for a story about samesex desire amongst the puritans while ‘The Hunt’ is a narrative of sexual violence that traces back to 1776. ‘Vanitas’ is set in 1839 and features a visit to a plantation in Louisiana and sets the horror and suffering of slavery against a young girl’s death by vanity. While the collection almost goes out of its way to avoid making a special case of the Irish, they do appear in ‘Counting the Days’, a Famine story, which draws on a series of letters dating to 1848–1849 and tells of the evermore anxious wait of family hoping in vain to be reunited in Canada. What all of these stories have in common is how they pull at the threads of history and set about unravelling the dominant narratives that too often exclude or overwrite the experience of the ‘nobodies’ so important to Donoghue’s work. Donoghue is clearly interested in the

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postmodern potential of playing with historical records and using them as a creative springboard, but at the same time insists on the importance of accurately recording the names of those figures in ways that honour their memory and lived experience. Astray is fully aware of its processes of fictionalization—it includes ancillary features more commonly associated with scholarly work such as a gloss at the end of each story to explain its provenance and an exegetic essay mapping out her process and intent. This extra-textual material is, of course, part of the creative design of the collection, but it nonetheless serves as a reminder of the writer’s responsibilities when writing about marginalized lives. This interest in revisiting familiar histories from what Rich would call a ‘new critical perspective’, or of casting ‘old tales in new skins’ as Donoghue prefers, is fundamental to the work of all of the writers discussed in this book. In terms of the broader narrative of the Irish literary tradition, the writers examined in this volume have, in their own way, had to negotiate a position from the margins, writing back to powerful images of Irish women in North America and reclaiming and recovering on their own individual terms the story of Irish women’s migration and of women in the Irish diaspora. This book has been most interested in the creative agency and productive possibilities that come with being ‘second edition’ to, once again, borrow Alice McDermott’s evocative characterization of diasporic relations, and in how the reclamation of the same serves as a positive literary mantra. The writers studied here all put pressure on the idea of a self-contained Irish literary canon as well as rethinking some of the parameters of American and Canadian literary culture. This book began with a detour via Joyce in setting out the possibilities for rethinking the limits of a national literature and the value of a transatlantic perspective for opening up new routes for exploration. To return to the beginning, and in keeping with Joyce’s sensibility, it is fitting that one of the women writers examined here should have the final word. In the Afterword to Astray, Donoghue pauses to confess: ‘All this is my best explanation for why, on and off, for the past decade and a half, I’ve been writing stories about travels to, within, and occasionally from the United States and Canada. … Emigrants, immigrants, adventurers, and runaways – they fascinate me because they loiter on the margins, stripped of the markers of family and nation; they’re out of place, out of their depth’ (2006, p. 263). Donoghue’s explication of the cultural and emotional hazards of crossing oceans and national borders is a reminder of what is at stake

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for all of the writers discussed in this book. They navigate their own relationship with an idea of Ireland and do so in ways that put pressure on some of the most privileged and cherished narratives of Irish, American, and Canadian literary culture. With that in mind, this book has sought to make its own contribution to an emerging conversation about Irishness, the woman writer, and transatlantic exchange, and to think closely about the different means by which the writers examined here trace histories of migration, travel, exile, and acculturation, and contribute new and vital strands to the story of the Irish writer at home and astray.

Works Cited Archival Material University College Dublin Special Collections, The James Joyce Centre Enright, A. (1999). Writing the City. In James Joyce: Bloomsday Magazine. UCD/SC, O’Brien Papers, OB/384.

Primary Texts Donoghue, E. (2008 [2007]). Landing. Orlando: Harcourt. Donoghue, E. (2013 [2012]). Astray. London: Picador. Emma Donoghue, Author Website. https://www.emmadonoghue.com. Accessed 1 June 2020.

Secondary Texts Boyle Haberstroh, P., & St. Peter, C. (2007). Introduction. In P. Boyle Haberstroh & C. St. Peter (Eds.), Opening the Field: Women, Text and Contexts (pp. 1–14). Cork: Cork University Press. Casey, M. (2011). ‘“If Love’s a Country”: Transnationalism and the Celtic Tiger in Emma Donoghue’s Landing ’. New Hibernia Review, 15 (2, Summer), 64–79. Frye, N. (1971). The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Garner, S. (2007). Whiteness: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Ingman, H., & Ó Gallchoir, C. (2018). Introduction. In The Cambridge History of Irish Women’s Literature—Ch1. Kiberd, D. (1992). ‘Irish Literature and Irish History’. In R. F. Foster (Ed.), The Oxford History of Ireland (pp. 230–281). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Lackey, M. (2018). ‘Emma Donoghue: Voicing the Nobodies in the Biographical Novel’. Éire-Ireland, 53 (1–2), 120–133. Manning, S., & Taylor, A. (Eds.). (2007). Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Meaney, G. (2007). ‘Engendering the Postmodern Canon? The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes IV & V: Women’s Writing and Traditions’. In P. Boyle Haberstroh & C. St. Peter (Eds.), Opening the Field: Women, Text and Contexts (pp. 15–30). Cork: Cork University Press. Moynihan, S. (2013). ‘Other People’s Diasporas’: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Munro, A. (1982 [1971]). Lives of Girls and Women. London: Penguin. Negra, D. (2006). The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Kilfeather, S. (2005). ‘Irish Feminism’. In J. Cleary & C. Connolly (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (pp. 96–116). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Toole, T. (2013). ‘Cé Leis Tú? Queering Irish Migrant Literature’. Irish University Review, 43 (1), 131–145. Rich, A. (1980 [1971]). ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’. In On Lies, Secrets and Silences: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (pp. 33–49). London: Virago. Sielke, S. (2014). ‘Multiculturalism in the United States and Canada’. In R. M. Nischik (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature (pp. 49–64). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, A. (1991). National Identity. Nevada: University of Nevada Press.

Index

A Akenson, Donald Harman, 14 American domestic culture, 55 American Studies, 8 Anderson, Benedict, 5, 140 Anglo-American exchange, 93 Atlantic-facing cultures, 5 Atlases, 139, 140 Attridge, Derek, 111, 123 Atwood, Margaret Alias Grace, 23 and the House of Anansi Press, 10 Negotiating with the Dead; A Writer on Writing , 114 Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, 10 Surfacing , 112 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, 10, 23, 112, 113 The Robber Bride, 23

B Barr Ebest, Sally, 15, 21, 34, 43, 85 The Black Atlantic, 7 Bloom, Harold, 101 Boland, Eavan, 2, 27 ‘Outside History’, 2, 163 Bordo, Jonathan, 143, 144 Bourke, Angela, 56, 57, 66, 67, 69 Bracken, Claire, 164 Brennan, Maeve and Harper’s Bazaar, 20, 57, 58 and James Joyce, 79 ‘Long-winded Lady’, 56, 67, 70–72, 75 The Rose Garden, 62 The Springs of Affection, 69, 73 Brontë, Charlotte, 23 Jane Eyre, 23, 103 Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights , 92, 123, 157 Brown, E.K., 146 Byrne, Donn, 17, 18, 25, 50, 99 Blind Raftery, 18

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. McWilliams, Irishness in North American Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1

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Ireland—The Rock Whence I Was Hewn, 17

C Canadian art, 10, 111, 143 Canadian literary renaissance, 9, 11 Canadian Massey Report, 10 Casey, Daniel J., 33, 35, 100 Casey, Moira, 6 Catholicism, 33, 43, 84, 91 Celtic Tiger Ireland, 4, 172 Cleary, Joe, 37, 38 Cohen, Robin, 152 Corporaal, Marguérite, 147, 148 Coughlan, Patricia, 84, 102 Crowley, Muireann, 6–8 Cullinan, Elizabeth, 18, 83, 84 Cullingford, Elizabeth, 68 Cusack, Christopher, 148

D Deane, Seamus, 4, 68, 78 De Groot, Jerome, 138 Delaney, Enda, 6, 7, 138, 145 Diaspora Studies, 5 Dickens, Charles, 42, 102–105, 118, 175, 177 Dimock, Wai Chee, 101 Diner, Hasia, 15, 60 Donoghue, Emma Akin, 161 Astray, 162, 163, 165, 176–178 ‘Going Back’, 4, 166 Landing , 161, 162, 165–168, 175, 176 Dorcey, Mary, 166 Dowd, Christopher, 37 Dowling Almeida, L., 89, 103 Dvoˇrák, Marta, 143

E Ebest, Ron, 18, 19 Edgeworth, Maria, 153, 155, 157 Eggers, Dave, 42 Eliot, George, 42 Eliot, T.S., 123, 124 Elkin, Lauren, 70 Ellmann, Richard, 115 Enright, Anne, 136, 173, 174 Exceptionalism, 9–13, 18, 97 Exile, 3, 4, 7, 56, 67–69, 79, 89, 149, 156, 179 F Fanning, Charles, 21, 62, 109 Farrell, James T., 18, 19, 40, 48, 50, 97 Ferris, Ina, 153 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing , 26, 164 Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley, 3 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 92, 96 Fitzgerald, Patrick, 14, 137 Flaherty, Robert, 13 Flâneur/flâneuse, 70 Flood Davin, Nicholas, 24 Flynn, Peter, 17 Fogarty, Anne, 128 Foster, R.F., 4, 47, 68 Frawley, Oona, 147 Friedan, Betty, 66, 90 The Feminine Mystique, 66, 90 Frye, Northrop, 10, 112, 171 Fuchs Abrams, Sabrina, 49 G Gallant, Mavis, 111 Garden, Alison, 6–8 Garner, Steve, 167 Garson, Marjorie, 117, 119 Gaskell, Elizabeth

INDEX

The Life of Charlotte Brontë , 117, 128 Giles, Paul, 101 Gilroy, Paul, 6 Glenney Boggs, Colleen, 6 Globalization, 6, 12 Goldman, Marlene, 144 Gordon, Mary, 18, 20 Gough, Kathleen M., 7 Gray, Breda, 15, 145 The Group of Seven, 142, 147 Gurr, Andrew, 67, 68 H Hall, Radclyffe, 175 Hammill, Faye, 151 Hardy, Thomas, 102, 103 Hemingway, Ernest, 45, 92, 97 Hiberno-English, 63, 118 Hirsch, Edward, 12 Hodgins, Jack, 25 Homesickness, 67, 156 Hotten-Somers, Diane, 17 Houston, Cecil J., 21–23, 109, 136 Hutcheon, Linda, 121 Hybridity, 138 I Ignatiev, Noel, 85 Ingman, Heather, 2, 165 Intertextuality, 83, 96 Ireland and transatlantic literary studies, 6 Ireland as homeland, 2, 69 The Irish Atlantic, 7 Irish diaspora studies, 136 The Irish Famine, 147 Irish Famine Studies, 8 Irish literary canon, 2, 3, 38, 158, 161, 164, 178 Irish Literary Revival, 9, 12, 112

183

Irish Memory Studies, 8 The Irish woman writer, 5, 26, 68, 79, 165

J Jacobs, Jane The Death and Life of Great American Cities , 75, 76 Jacobson, Beatrice, 89, 94 James, Henry, 40, 92, 93 James, Kevin, 21, 22 Janssen, Lindsay, 148 Joyce, James and influence, 111, 112 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 19, 38, 110, 114 Dubliners , 61, 111 ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, 13 Ulysses , 1, 39, 114

K Kavanagh, Patrick, 13, 79 Kennedy, Jackie, 95 Kennedy, John F., 95 Kenny, Kevin, 68 Keyser, Catherine, 39 Kiberd, Declan, 13, 112, 116, 170 Kilfeather, Siobhán, 165 King, Jason, 21

L Lambkin, Brian, 14, 137 Laurence, Margaret The Diviners , 112, 151 Lawrence, D.H., 92 Literary influence, 14, 101 Lloyd, David, 7 Lopate, Phillip, 71, 72 Lynch-Brennan, Margaret, 15, 17 Lynch, Claire, 36

184

INDEX

M Mac Éinrí, Piaras, 83 Mackey, Eva, 10, 11, 143, 144, 174 and Canadian Settler Identity, 144 MacLennan, Hugh, 14, 25, 146 Two Solitudes , 25, 146 Magazines, 25, 41, 95 Manning, Susan, 3, 5, 8, 162 Mark Fitzgerald, Emily, 147 Marks, Grace, 23 Maxwell, William, 127 McCabe, Patrick, 13 McCann, Colum TransAtlantic, 8 McCarthy, Mary and feminism, 43 and James Joyce, 39 and Life Writing, 35, 44, 50 and Oscar Wilde, 50 and reception of her work, 111 and self-authorship, 32, 37, 41, 83 and socialism, 43 and Vassar College, 46 as public intellectual, 34 as refusenik figure, 3 How I Grew, 31, 34, 38, 44 Mary McCarthy: Intellectual Memoirs, New York 1936–1938, 34 Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, 33, 34, 36, 38, 41, 42, 50 The Company She Keeps , 47, 51 The Groves of Academe, 35, 38 McDermott, Alice After This , 86, 87, 90–92, 97 and adaptation, 101 and Second wave feminism, 89 and the Irish-American family, 20, 83, 90 At Weddings and Wakes , 84–86, 90, 95, 102, 103

Charming Billy, 1, 84, 86, 87, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102 Child of My Heart , 88, 95, 99, 103 Someone, 93, 103, 104 McDonagh, Martin, 13 McGahern, John, 13 McGarrity, Maria, 7 McSorley, Edward, 18 Meaney, Gerardine, 164 Middle class America, 17, 39 Miller, Kerby, 16, 17, 59, 150 Moloney, Caitriona, 164 Moodie, Susanna, 10, 22, 23, 142, 151, 152, 169, 170, 175 and attitudes towards the Irish, 55 Roughing It in the Bush, 22, 142, 152, 161 Moore, Brian, 25 LIFE magazine, 21, 95 The Luck of Ginger Coffey, 21, 25, 162 Moynihan, Sinéad, 7, 85, 144, 148, 155, 167 Mulvey, Christopher, 104 Munro, Alice and County Wicklow, 109 and Edna O’Brien, 11, 110, 122, 125 and Frank O’Connor, 11, 110, 125, 127 and James Joyce, 110, 112, 114 ‘1847; The Irish’, 110 Lives of Girls and Women, 11, 110–118, 120–122, 124–129 Who Do You Think You Are?, 117 Murphy, Maureen, 15 Myth of the ‘stay at home female’, 14

N National identity, 3, 5, 146, 156, 169, 172

INDEX

Nationalism, 6, 118, 174 The national tale, 139, 153–156, 158 Negra, Diane, 12, 85, 137, 171 The New Yorker, 19, 20, 56, 57, 67–70, 72, 75, 78, 84, 125–127 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, 100 Nostalgia, 38, 68, 86, 101 O O’Brien, Edna The Country Girls , 122–125, 162 O’Brien, Flann, 13 O’Brien, John A. The Vanishing Irish, 137 O’Brien, Kate, 166 O’Connor, Frank An Only Child, 125–129, 131 ‘The Bridal Night’, 125 O’Connor, Joseph Star of the Sea, 8, 148 Ó Gallchoir, Clíona, 2, 165 O’Hara, John, 19, 20 O’Neill, Eugene Long Day’s Journey into Night , 55, 61, 144 O’Neill, Peter D., 7 Onkey, Lauren, 7 O’Toole, Tina, 83, 166, 167 Owenson, Sydney, 153, 156 Owens Weekes, Ann, 163 The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, 21 P Palko, Abigail, 57, 58 Parker, Dorothy, 39 Parr Traill, Catharine, 142, 151, 175 Pease, Donald, 8, 13 Peters, Ann, 76 Plath, Sylvia, 88 Powell, Dawn, 37

185

Prejudice towards the Irish, 16 Punch magazine, 22

R Rains, Stephanie, 15 Reaney, James, 25, 175 Reddy, Maureen, 149 Rhodes, Robert E., 33, 35, 100 Rhys, Jean, 70 Rich, Adrienne, 163, 176, 178 Robinson, Mary, 83, 136 Ross, Harold, 70, 71, 126

S Said, Edward, 5, 170 ‘Shanty Irish’, 38 Shaw, George Bernard John Bull’s Other Island, 154 Shelley, Thomas J., 91 Shields, Carol, 142 Small Ceremonies , 151 Swann, 151 Showalter, Elaine, 48 Slettedahl Macpherson, Heidi, 14 Smith, Anthony, 169 Smith, Sidonie, 43 Smyth, William J., 21–23, 109, 136 Spenser, Edmund, 93 Stevens, Laura, 6 St. Peter, Christine, 164 Stubbs, Tara, 96, 101 Sugars, Cynthia, 11, 143, 144, 174 Sweeney, Fionnghuala, 6 Synge, John Millington, 97, 98

T Taylor, Andrew, 3, 5, 8, 162 Thacker, Robert, 109, 110 The transnational turn, 3 Thompson, Helen, 164

186

INDEX

Tóibín, Colm Brooklyn, 8 Tracy, Thomas, 154 Transatlantic Studies, 6–8 Transatlantic Women’s Literature, 14 Transnationalism, 6, 166 Tucker, Amanda, 6 U Urquhart, Jane and historical fiction, 135, 138 and Irish-Canadian Connections, 135 and writing the Great Famine, 139 A Number of Things: Stories of Canada told through Fifty Objects , 149 Away, 26, 135, 136, 139, 140, 142, 145, 147, 149, 151, 158

The Night Stages , 135, 136, 138–140, 145, 146, 152, 158 Urschel, Katrin, 22, 24, 139

W Walsh, Maurice ‘The Quiet Man’, 155 Walter, Bronwen, 9, 15, 16, 58, 59 Wharton, Edith, 92, 93, 97, 102 Whiteness, 85, 167 Wilford, Hugh, 49 Woolf, Virginia, 70, 93, 97

Y Yagoda, Ben, 70, 71, 126 Yeats, W.B., 12, 13, 18, 79, 88, 97–99, 154, 157