LITERARY CRITICISM: Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers.Edited by Sally Barr Ebest and Kathleen McInerney. University of Notre Dame Press, 254pp, $29.
IN AN ARTICLE in the Weekend section of The Irish Times, dated March 4th, 1995, the writer and journalist Maureen Gaffney reflects upon a tendency among emigrants and exiles to imagine themselves simultaneously in two places while actually fully engaging with neither. Gaffney warns that while more recent departees might laugh at the rigidly idealised notions and standards of the old country entertained by Irish-Americans of several generations' standing, our own understandings of Ireland and what it means to be Irish are also relentlessly ossifying.
We may well refer longingly to as "home" a country in which we would undoubtedly feel like strangers should we actually return. Meanwhile, we may well resist, reject and categorise as alien the values and customs of our new home, resulting in a strange sense of dispossession and isolation and consequent clannish gathering together with others whom we perceive to be our "own kind". The phrase is Isabel Moore's, from Mary Gordon's novel Final Payments, but the sense of "ethnic doubleness" noted by Sally Barr Ebest in the work of Maeve Brennan serves as one of the most potent unifying motifs in this fascinating collection.
Too Smart to Be Sentimentalis a satisfying, poignant book. It is as compelling to read as many a fine novel; it gathers under one roof a disparate yet connected group of writers; it contains a great deal of background scholarship and reference material that is sure to be useful to teachers in the field; and it offers new perspectives on well-known authors while also including others who have not in the past received the recognition they deserve, such as Elizabeth Cullinan and Maeve Brennan.
The essays are stitched together with great care, integrated by means of a cohesive editorial strategy in which all the contributions are framed and informed by several unifying contexts. Caledonia Kearns and Sally Barr Ebest set up the modus operandi in the early pages, Kearns noting that the collection is organised using as a model The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature: Irish Women's Writings and Traditions,"to demonstrate their parallels with their Irish sisters". The essays address women in Irish-American society, religion and ethics, oral traditions, sexuality, and feminism, culture, and critique. Barr Ebest, using Maureen Howard's words to describe the smart unsentimentality of Irish-American women's fiction, places at the core of the collection Charles Fanning's summation of Irish-American literary characteristics in The Irish Voice in America. He identifies the genre as consisting of accounts of past lives, public lives, private lives, and stylised lives, and incorporating, among other themes and subjects, "the dominant mother in her fortress home", and "lives affected by extremes of dissipation, abstinence, profligacy, and piety; lives organized around ideas of religion, family, nationhood for Ireland . . . tableaus of ritual gatherings at deathbeds and christenings, weddings, and wakes". While such a strategy inevitably results in a degree of repetition, it also brings an overarching coherence to the collection. Several essays, notably Kathleen McInerney's on Cullinan, Barr Ebest's on Mary McCarthy, and Beatrice Jacobsen's on Alice McDermott, stand out in their excellence, but the interconnectedness of the chapters is one of the book's strengths.
THE SHARED FOCUS on Fanning privileges both the many similarities shared by the writers under consideration and their significant differences. The writers here featured are by no means a homogenous group. Their ethnic identity is frequently divided; they are not all practising Catholics; and they range from the Irish-born Maeve Brennan to those whose families have lived in the US for generations. Their fictional characters embody these biographical differences. We are invited to contemplate recurring weddings and wakes, holy matriarchs and patriarchal posses, entrapment and self-immolation, stasis and escape, secrets and myths. However, we are also offered thoughtful analysis of the changes that occur within families and individuals over time (for example, assimilation instead of continued adherence to tribal identity), and of the range of possible choices in any given situation.
Sometimes, in order to choose a painful yet ultimately satisfying liberation, as do Gordon's Isabel Moore and Maureen Howard's Mary Agnes Keely, Irish-American women must endure a second emigration/exile, from their church and their tribe, and resolution is not always possible. Cullinan focuses on the implications of remaining within the Catholic Church, and on her characters' struggles to be nobody's "kind" but their own. In both Cullinan and McDermott, Ireland is constructed as the idealised mother country, the seat of the clan. Many of their characters are sustained by such romantic myth-making. However, a belief in this ideal is shown repeatedly to be destructive.
Another fascinating feature of this collection is its emphasis on the role of women as storytellers of their tribe. Beatrice Jacobsen discusses McDermott's narrators in this role, as does John Managhan in his discussion of female narrative authority in Brennan. Lastly, this collection stands out for its illuminating perspectival shifts. For example, Barr Ebest forces a re-examination of Mary McCarthy in an Irish-American context, and suddenly The Groupmakes sense in new ways. Similarly, Susana Araujo reconsiders Joyce Carol Oates's belligerent male characters in the context of Irish-American masculinity. This repositioning of old friends is genuinely exciting. So are the connections made between Irish-American and American literature as a whole, and those suggested between Irish-American and Irish women's writing, and by implication beyond.
The silences interrogated by Eavan Boland in Object Lessonsalso loom large across the Atlantic, and novels such as Anne Enright's The Gatheringfind their precedents and counterparts not just among other Irish writers but also in, for example, Cullinan's House of Gold. Jacobsen discusses the difficulty experienced by children in McDermott's narratives in "negotiating the adult world - bringing order and safety where adults have failed to do so".
Exactly this anguish is mirrored in Clare Boylan's Holy Pictures. You do not need to be an academic to enjoy this book. While it is scholarly, it is also accessible, providing plenty of food for thought.
Rachael Sealy Lynch is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is currently working on a book on class, gender, and identity in the work of Jennifer Johnston