Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers

CHAPTER 5 Alice McDermott’s Narrators

CHAPTER 5 Alice McDermott’s Narrators 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 heritage and Catholic upbringing. Yet McDermott has distanced herself from her ethnic world—or she has been distanced from it. Thus, 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). This voice from the margin resonates both with the contexts of Irish American literature and, more generally, the circumstances of women writers. 116 Ebest 05 10/1/07 1:11 PM Page 116 Marked by a sense of loss, Irish American culture echoes experiences of exile and separation from home and family—from Mother Ireland— resulting in a search for connection and belonging. For the second and third generations of Irish Americans, this loss evolves to reflect other kinds of alienation—a loss of faith or the thinning of family or community ties— that are further complicated by struggles to make one’s way in a culture resistant to Irish Catholics. By the middle of the twentieth century, Irish Americans were experiencing increasing acceptance, epitomized by the election of an Irish American Catholic president. Yet this progress failed to completely resolve feelings of alienation. Further, social and political movements in the 1960s and 1970s encouraged the post–World War II generations of Irish Americans to resist traditional Irish behavior patterns. As one of McDermott’s narrators observes, “Even when I married Matt . . . we headed for Seattle. Lives of our own, we said. Self-sacrifice having been recognized as a delusion by then, not a virtue” (Charming Billy 132). In different but equally important ways, women writers, who are located on the margins of patriarchal society, also have understood themselves as alienated. For Irish American women writers this sense of difference , coupled with ethnic identification, has posed multiple challenges as well as multiple opportunities. Maureen Howard, in her foreword to Caledonia Kearns’s Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish American Women Writers, delineates the challenge that McDermott and others have embraced : “The duty that many of these writers take upon themselves is to discover what is wayward in their women’s souls, where transgression in thought or deed may lead to a finer, at times, more generous understanding of a limiting world or to self-discovery” (xi). This challenge is made more daunting by literary scholarship, which has traditionally reflected ad hominem concerns, a politics described by Sandra M. Gilbert: “Not only have examinations of literary history tended to address themselves “to the man”—that is, to the identity of what was presumed to be the man of letters who created our culture’s monuments of unaging intellect—but many aesthetic analyses and evaluations have consciously or unconsciously appealed to the “personal interests, prejudices, or emotions” of male critics and readers. (ix) Thus, in their attempts to negotiate both the world of literature and their social contexts, Irish American women novelists have had to invent strategies that strive for community on the one hand and that affirm artistic identity on the other. In her remarkable series of novels, Alice McDermott provides ongoing lessons in such work. Her use of a variety of narrative Alice McDermott’s Narrators | 117 Ebest 05 10/1/07 1:11 PM Page 117 techniques, her explorations of the meaning of story and storytelling, and her examination of the connections and the conflicts between life and art provide the grounds for a “generous understanding” of the Irish American world and its women storytellers. McDermott’s upbringing in an Irish American family in Brooklyn and her education in Catholic elementary and secondary schools account for the focus on Irish American life in several of her novels. Yet McDermott de-emphasizes the role of Irish American culture in her family: “My parents were first generations; their parents had all been born in Ireland...