Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers

CHAPTER 4 “Forget about Being Irish” Family, Transgression, and Identity in the Fiction of Elizabeth Cullinan

CHAPTER 4 “Forget about Being Irish” Family, Transgression, and Identity in the Fiction of Elizabeth Cullinan KATHLEEN MCINERNEY Louise Gallagher, a young woman having lunch with her married lover, fusses over her omelet—it is meatless Friday—in a Manhattan restaurant. Speaking of the menu, Louise says, “Fish will always mean Catholic to me, and . . . Catholic meant Irish and Irish meant lower class.” Her lover admonishes , “Forget about being Irish,” but she cannot (Cullinan, “An Accident ,” in Yellow Roses 83). The oeuvre of novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Cullinan offers an acutely detailed portrait of the domestic life and identity of Irish Americans in the latter half of the twentieth century; it explores the challenge of defining the self within and against cultural categories, principally within the context of Catholicism and the emotional weight of family life. Limning the tensions between the inherited preoccupations of an immigrant family and the desires of a young female narrator as she seeks her own way, Cullinan describes the multivalent legacy of the diaspora for Irish 97 Ebest 04 10/1/07 1:14 PM Page 97 98 | Kathleen McInerney Americans. In particular, Cullinan represents the tensions of identity as they are experienced by the “dutiful daughters” of Irish America. Of Irish American women writers Maureen Howard has written: “These women of the Irish Diaspora were all fated to be dutiful daughters . . . the duty that many of these writers take on is to discover what is wayward in their souls, where transgression in thought or deed may lead to a finer, sometimes more generous understanding of a limiting world or to self-discovery” (xi). In House of Gold and many of her short stories, Cullinan creates narratives of constriction and containment: the voices of generations of daughters , bound by familial duty and a discourse of Catholic doctrine, are heard as they struggle to identify and escape this architecture of containment that is their inheritance. In the tradition of other diaspora fiction by women— for example, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Memoirs of a Woman Warrior, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,”—women’s struggle for identity is often mediated and inscribed by a maternal legacy of constriction, cultural conservatism, and pathological protectiveness. While many of the narratives reveal a pattern of resistance to the mother and eventual reconciliation and healing, Cullinan ’s fiction suggests the impossibility of reconciling the primary motherdaughter relationship and the psychic necessity of inventing an identity not contaminated by a maternal tyranny born of immigrant anxiety. Elizabeth Cullinan’s publications to date include the novels House of Gold (1969) and A Change of Scene (1982); two collections of short stories, In the Time of Adam (1971) and Yellow Roses (1977); and numerous short stories appearing in the New Yorker and the Irish Literary Supplement. Cullinan ’s stories have also been published in a variety of anthologies, including Cabbages and Bones: An Anthology of Irish American Women’s Fiction (1997), Best Irish Short Stories, Number 3 (1978), Best American Short Stories (1978), and Cutting the Night in Two: Short Stories by Irish Women Writers (2001). Maureen Murphy notes that Cullinan’s fiction has been associated with that of Chekhov, Joyce, J.F. Powers, Maeve Brennan, and Edwin O’Connor (139, 143). Murphy also argues that Cullinan established her own particular narrative voice through the persona and perspective of her young female characters (14). Describing Cullinan’s attention to craft, Joyce Carol Oates commented in a 1971 review of House of Gold that Cullinan’s writing is distinguished by its “precision, gravity and grace—the small happenings of a day, the arc of a life, the demands of temperament, background and necessity” (6). Ebest 04 10/1/07 1:14 PM Page 98 Born in 1933 to Cornelius and Irene (O’Connell) Cullinan in New York City, Elizabeth Cullinan grew up in the Bronx. She graduated from Marymount College in 1954. Following graduation, she was hired to be William Maxwell’s secretary at the New Yorker and worked there from 1955 to 1959. Cullinan lived in Ireland during 1960 and 1963. After returning home, Cullinan worked as a freelance writer and published House of Gold. In 1977 she was invited to teach at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and then in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts– Amherst in the following year. In 1979 Cullinan was...