Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers

CHAPTER 7 “I’m Your Man” Irish American Masculinity in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates

CHAPTER 7 “I’m Your Man” Irish American Masculinity in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates SUSANA ARAÚJO Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, in upstate New York, but her family’s background epitomizes the ethnic diversity of America’s immigrant history. Oates’s maternal grandparents, Stephen and Elizabeth Bush, were born in Hungary and arrived in America in 1902, settling in Buffalo, New York. Her paternal great-great-grandparents, the Oateses, were Irish who arrived in America in the late nineteenth century. Her father’s greatgrandmother (whose maiden surname, Mullaney, resonates with the title of her popular novel We Were the Mulvaneys) emigrated from Ireland to America with her six children after the death of her husband, Dominic Oates (Oates, letter to the author). This genealogy helped fuel Oates’s sociohistorical inquisitiveness, informing the rigorous depiction of the immigrant working classes that marks so many of her works. The representation of Irish experience in Oates’s work is more obviously conveyed in her portrayals of second- or third-generation 157 Ebest 07 10/1/07 1:13 PM Page 157 158 | Susana Araújo Irish male characters. Oates’s depiction of Irish American masculinity can be seen, for instance, in the figure of Michael Senior1 in We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). Michael is a second-generation Irish emigrant who, faced with the rape of his daughter, sinks gradually into alcoholism, contributing ultimately to the exclusion of his daughter from the family. However, it is in an earlier novel, What I Lived For (1994), that Oates’s portrayal of the Irish American experience is more thoroughly conveyed. What I Lived For has, in fact, been described by Oates as the “most Irish of [her] novels” (personal interview)—a claim that begs for our critical attention. In this chapter, therefore, I will examine how Irish history and experience are depicted in this novel and will analyze, in particular, the ways in which the narrative allows for interrogation of a specific type of masculinity. What I Lived For describes the life and times of Jerome Corcoran, a successful real estate developer and broker of Irish descent. Brought up in Irish Hill, Union City, Jerome gradually moves up the social ladder, leaving his working-class neighborhood behind to break into wealthier and more influential social circles. In his forties, Jerome Corcoran, also known as “Corky,” is already seen by friends and commercial partners as a successful businessman with a promising future in local politics. Corky is also a ladies’ man with striking misogynistic tendencies. By accumulating property and women he attempts to achieve a sense of power and control that had been lacking in his childhood and tries to make up for the sense of social displacement that he associates with his family history. The novel opens when Corky is seven years old, with a depiction of the tragic murder of his father, Timothy Corcoran. Timothy had angered his trade union leader by hiring black workers for his construction site. He was later found dead in front of his house on Christmas Eve, 1954. Jerome’s mother is hospitalized for depression and never fully recovers her mental capacities, dying later in the hospital. Corky is brought up by his uncle, Sean Corcoran, but the memory of his parents—particularly that of his father—continues to haunt Corky throughout his life, even after he leaves Irish Hill. The narrative moves forward to 1992 to give a detailed picture of three days in the life of the forty-four-year-old Jerome. Corky manages to fulfil his father’s desire to escape Irish Hill, but this separation only serves to widen the gulf between his “integrated” self-made-man persona and the social eccentricity that he associates with his family roots. Oates satirizes the clichés of Irishness interiorized by Corky—the drinking, blarney, and fighting—as much as she derides the image of America as a buoyant Ebest 07 10/1/07 1:13 PM Page 158 land of opportunity, a myth that Corky recognizes as fictitious but that he is unable to let go. The history of Corky’s family is set alongside America’s own as a powerful if contradictory influence on the definition of his identity and social position. Union City, the fictional town where Corky grew up, is mapped out in rigorous topographical detail. Oates describes the different neighborhoods populated by black, Irish, Hispanic, and “white...