Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers

CHAPTER 10The World of Mary Gordon Writing from the “Other Side”

CHAPTER 10 The World of Mary Gordon Writing from the “Other Side” SUSANNA HOENESS-KRUPSAW Among Irish and Irish Americans the “other side” denotes America, the land of plenty on the other side of the Atlantic. It is a place many imbue with dreams and desires, while others associate it with an escape from the persecutions and suffering of their forebears. For those who crossed to the other side, the experience often proved a mixed blessing. Success stories were common, but they occurred at the high cost of cultural assimilation and loss of heritage (Casey and Rhodes 266, 267). Moreover, the immigrant experience positioned the Irish American author—whose native language is English but whose cultural and political affinity rests with those who have historically been oppressed by the English—both inside and outside the mainstream of American life. As Miller and Wagner explain, feelings of alienation among immigrants are not uncommon when emigration from one’s homeland is seen as a kind of exile or banishment (17). Thus, the term the “other side” acquires yet another meaning that meshes well 201 Ebest 10 10/1/07 1:11 PM Page 201 202 | Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw with the “doubleness” that scholars have observed in the works of various contemporary Irish American authors (Fanning 358). The literary world of Mary Gordon illustrates well all of these concepts of otherness. Initially, Mary Gordon’s short stories and novels emphasized the plight of Irish American immigrants and the effect of a Catholic upbringing on immigrant women’s experience of guilt and shame. Her later works embrace what Casey and Rhodes have called “an intellectualized Catholicism ” (272).1 Gordon’s most recent works, however, display the author’s increasing interest in connections between literature and art—influenced, as we shall see, by her Catholic upbringing—and between place and identity . Other recurring themes include father-daughter and priest-parishioner relationships, which are related to the master-servant issues in other Irish American fiction, and troubled mother-daughter relationships, echoing the Irish preoccupation with the matriarch. Obviously, Mary Gordon’s interests vary widely, and critics have tried to categorize her variously as an Irish American, moral, Catholic, and feminist writer. Although she rejects such labels (Bennett, Mary Gordon 1), Gordon’s major themes position her firmly within the Irish American literary tradition. Mary Catherine Gordon, née Davis, was born in Far Rockaway, New York, on December 8, 1949. Her mother, Anna Gagliano, a legal secretary, was the daughter of Italian and Irish immigrants; her father, David Gordon , was a Polish Jew who had converted to Roman Catholicism before his marriage and turned virulently anti-Semitic. A failed writer, he taught his daughter to read when she was only three years old and inspired in her a love of books. After her father’s death of a heart attack in 1957, Gordon grew up at her maternal grandmother’s house in the working-class neighborhood of Valley Stream on Long Island, New York. It is precisely because of her multiethnic background that Gordon considers herself somewhat of a hybrid, an outsider who writes from the “other side.” Gordon was educated at various parochial schools and entered Barnard College on a scholarship. In 1973 she earned a master’s degree in English and creative writing at Syracuse University with a thesis consisting of a collection of poetry. She also began a dissertation on Virginia Woolf. Over the years, Gordon has received many honors: Final Payments, one of the New York Times outstanding books of 1978, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Men and Angels received a Literary Lion of the New Public Library Award in 1985; and Gordon was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. Gordon teaches creative writing at BarEbest 10 10/1/07 1:11 PM Page 202 nard College, where she is the Millicent C. MacIntosh Professor of Writing . Together with her second husband, Arthur Cash, biographer of Laurence Sterne and professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz, she resides in Manhattan. They have one daughter, Anna Gordon Cash (born in 1980), and one son, David Dess Gordon Cash (born in 1983).2 Although Gordon planned to become a poet, her literary breakthrough occurred after she became a fiction writer; the publication of Final Payments in 1978 constituted her first publishing success. This story of a young Irish American woman who needs...