Arrived at Last: The Young Women of Elizabeth Cullinan’s Fiction

By the time Elizabeth Cullinan began writing fiction in New York City in the 1960s, Irishness was being resuscitated as a positive sign of ethnic difference, and nowhere more visibly than in the election of John F. Kennedy. And yet, despite the consensus that Irish had by this point been fully accepted in the United States, Cullinan’s characters are never quite fully “arrived” as Americans. They seemingly live in a perpetual liminal space, on the threshold of being American, of being white-collar professionals, of being middle class. They have not quite walked through the door of acceptability, for they are still Other in many ways: Irish, Catholic, working class, women. Over the course of two novels and many short stories, Cullinan pursues what it means to be an Irish American professional woman.¹ In the conclusion of her final novel, A Change of Scene (1982), Cullinan’s character Ann Clark finally solves the dilemma of where she fits in, and no longer has choose between paths of life modeled by her mother and father. She can be herself.

Individual characters, their relationships, and plot lines appear in Cullinan’s short stories and then reappear, with some adjustments, in her two novels, House of Gold (1970) and A Change of Scene. Young, educated, professional women with uptight mothers and fathers who gamble too much, appear repeatedly in Cullinan’s fiction. The most frequently re-occurring protagonist in her short stories—and the lead character of A Change of Scene—is a young woman who works in the publishing industry or in television. Kathleen McInerney calls this young woman Cullinan’s “metacharacter.”² She is most often from New York, although in “A Sunday Like the Others,” from her Time of Adam collection, she is from Boston. She often is living abroad in Ireland or has returned from the country; Cullinan herself lived in Ireland from 1961 to 1963. Most of these young female characters aspire to more challenging professional positions—as editors, for example—and some succeed in attaining those positions over the course of the stories. They are also unmarried women, often with sisters who have chosen the more traditional route of marriage and family. For their mothers, the traditional path that means middle-class respectability is the route that pleases them; Cullinan’s young women have little desire to follow that path.

Cullinan explores and re-explores problematic relationships with both mothers and fathers, as well as with emotionally or legally unavailable lovers. In almost every story with a young woman protagonist, her parents’ marriage is either strained or broken. There is also a larger problem than these intimate relationships lurking behind or within these troubles at the personal level. These characters are ethnic Americans trying to figure out where they fit in to the larger society, frequently finding that they do not: they are considered outsiders, or must straddle two worlds. Cullinan recognizes the double identities of her characters, described in “Maura’s Friends,” from The Time of Adam (1971) as “not one thing nor the other” and as “neither one thing nor the other” in “The Perfect Crime,” from Yellow Roses (1977).³ These phrases capture the identity issues felt by most of her characters. In-betweenness is the dominant trope in Cullinan’s fiction, and it is used for all manner of identities—social class, religion, nationality, and gender among them.

Charles Fanning sees what he calls “ethnic doubleness” as a common thread in the writing of Irish Americans in the late twentieth century, calling out Cullinan’s story “Commuting” as a “defining piece of the . . . concept of liberating doubleness.”⁴ In this story, “Everything that the narrator sees while ‘commuting’ she sees twice, and thus more clearly—as the Irish girl from the Bronx that she was, and the New Yorker that she is now.”⁵ For Fanning, this liberating aspect of ethnic doubleness is clearly a positive. It allows Cullinan’s characters to observe the world from two perspectives. Of Cullinan and other Irish American writers from the same era, Fanning...