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Too Smart Sentimental Ebest 000.FM 10/1/07 1:13 PM Page iii TOO SMART TO BE SENTIMENTAL Contemporary Irish American Women Writers Edited by Sally Barr Ebest and Kathleen McInerney Foreword by Caledonia Kearns University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana © 2008 University of Notre Dame Press Ebest-000.FM 11/13/07 11:46 AM Page iv Copyright © 2008 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Designed by Wendy McMillen Set in 10.2/13.3 Goudy by Four Star Books Printed on 55# Nature’s Recycle Paper in the U.S.A. by Versa Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Too smart to be sentimental : contemporary Irish American women writers / edited by Sally Barr Ebest and Kathleen McInerney ; foreword by Caledonia Kearns. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-268-02773-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-02773-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Irish American authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Irish Americans in literature. 5. Irish Americans—Ethnic identity. I. Ebest, Sally Barr. II. McInerney, Kathleen H. PS153. I78T66 2007 810.9'9287—dc22 2007038704 This book is printed on recycled paper. © 2008 University of Notre Dame Press Ebest 00.Intro 10/1/07 1:10 PM Page 1 Introduction Writing Green Thoughts SALLY BARR EBEST When the first wave of Irish immigrants arrived on our shores 250 years ago, they brought with them the Irish literary tradition. With this, they created Irish American literature—“one of the oldest and largest bod- ies of ethnic writing produced by members and descendants of a single American immigrant group” (Fanning 1). According to Charles Fanning, nineteenth-century Irish American literature reflected immigration pat- terns: the first wave included writers who arrived before the “Great Hun- ger” in the 1840s, the second wave those who fled the Famine years from 1850 to 1875, and the third wave those who described the gradual assimi- lation and acceptance of the Irish during the final years of the nineteenth century (1). With the dawn of the twentieth century, a new generation of Irish American writers emerged. Ron Ebest describes their stories and novels as Private Histories, for they reflect Irish Americans’ cultural and socioeconomic 1 © 2008 University of Notre Dame Press Ebest 00.Intro 10/1/07 1:10 PM Page 2 2 | Sally Barr Ebest milieu by detailing the rituals surrounding their lives from birth through death. As Ebest’s title suggests, many of these works continued what Fan- ning terms the “sentimental conventions of plot and character” (3). With the 1932 publication of James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan: A Boyhood in Chi- cago Streets, however, this approach was shattered (at least for male writers) and the way paved for the realism characterizing subsequent twentieth- century Irish American literature (Fanning 3). Toward the end of the 1990s Irish American literature further shifted its boundaries and perspectives. Thanks to increased transatlantic travel, Irish American writers “now cross oceans and boundaries at will” (Fan- ning 369). The effects are evident in what Fanning calls the “Irish inflec- tions” in the works of Irish American poets and fiction writers. At the same time, immigration to America by the “New Irish” has yielded large numbers of Irish writers who view America through Irish eyes (370). Fan- ning argues that this confluence does not wholly account for Irish Ameri- can writing; nevertheless, it “reinforce[s] the decisive fact that there contin- ues to be an Irish-American experience, a living culture on which writers feel compelled to draw.” Regardless of birth country, these writers convey “ethnicity as liberating doubleness,” a characteristic Fanning has traced to pre-Famine literature (371). The above analyses, along with Daniel Casey and Robert Rhodes’s Irish-American Fiction: Essays in Criticism, represent the first in-depth efforts to analyze the Irish American literary tradition. For this, scholars of Irish American literature owe them a great debt. At the same time, however, these works continue the tradition established by the founders of the literary canon: the majority of their discussions center on the works of Irish American males. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the only scholars to recognize the contributions of contemporary Irish Ameri- can females were Caledonia Kearns and Charles Fanning. Kearns pub- lished Cabbage and Bones and Motherland, the first (and only) anthologies of Irish American women’s writing, whereas Fanning’s The Irish Voice in America was the first comprehensive acknowledgment of women’s role in this tradition. In the first edition of The Irish Voice Fanning noted the emergence of a significant number of Irish American women writers in the 1990s (378). Along with the usual Irish American foremothers—Mary Doyle Curran, Mary McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor,1 Maureen Howard, Elizabeth Culli- nan, and Mary Gordon—Fanning mentions Joan Bagnell, Carol O’Brien © 2008 University of Notre Dame Press Ebest 00.Intro 10/1/07 1:10 PM Page 3 Introduction | 3 Blum, and Caryl Rivers and discusses the works of Elizabeth Savage, Elaine Ford, Susanna Moore, Diana O’Hehir, and Ellen Currie. In the second edition Fanning added Ann T. Jones, Maura Stanton, Joan Mathieu, Mau- reen Waters, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Alice Fulton, Kathleen Ford, Helena Mulkerns, Eileen Fitzgerald, Eileen Myles, Anna Quindlen, Kristina McGrath, and Alice McDermott. While this list features some of the best-known Irish American women writers, it is not exhaustive. Maeve Brennan, Mary McGarry Morris, Jean McGarry, Erin McGraw, and Joyce Carol Oates also deserve notice. The purpose of this collection is to introduce some of these writers, for despite Fanning’s recognition they remain a surprisingly ignored co- hort within the field of Irish studies. For years, Irish studies conferences rarely included papers or panels discussing Irish American women. Until 2001 Kathleen McInerney’s work on Elizabeth Cullinan was a notable ex- ception, unique amidst the exegeses of Irish and Irish American males. At that point, Sally Barr Ebest introduced an array of contemporary Irish American women writers in a paper at the Midwest Regional American Conference on Irish Studies.2 This presentation caught the interest of Mary Ann Ryan, who began researching the roots of Tess Gallagher. How- ever, not until a call for papers was circulated internationally did other scholars emerge. The contributors in this collection hail from across the United States, but they also come from as far away as England and Hong Kong. Clearly, interest in the writing of Irish American women existed; it simply lacked a unifying nexus. Too Smart to Be Sentimental provides that space. In this collection the term Irish American is defined by geography as well as birth. Maeve Brennen, for example, was born in Ireland and then moved to America, whereas the other authors can trace their Irish lineage through their forebears. This ethnic doubleness allows the authors to draw on what Vincent Buckley calls their “source-country”—“a source in the sense that the psyche grows from and in it, and remains profoundly at- tuned to it . provid[ing] an artist with images, history, language, man- ners, myths, ways of perceiving, and ways of communicating”—regardless of residence (qtd. in Fanning 358). William Kennedy provides a gloss on this definition when noting that if Irish Americans “set out to discover themselves, to wonder about why they are what they are, then they’ll run into a psychological inheritance that’s even more than psychological. That may also be genetic, or biopsycho-genetic. But whether from North or © 2008 University of Notre Dame Press Ebest 00.Intro 10/1/07 1:10 PM Page 4 4 | Sally Barr Ebest South, whether Catholic or Protestant, some element of life, of conscious- ness, that is different from being Hispanic, or Oriental, or WASP. These traits endure” (qtd. in Fanning 312). As Irish Americans assimilated to life in the United States, measur- ing these traits became more difficult; nevertheless, these writers’ literary works remain recognizably Irish. Thematically, they can be identified by the presence of “explicit images, places, names, historical events, legends, folklore, patterns and customs both familiar and cultural; and stylistically by virtue of an implicit ‘mode’ . habits of perception, language retained or remembered” (Fanning 359). Many of these traits can be traced to James T. Farrell, whose “regional realis[m] created a solid base of Irish- American fiction” (Fanning 359). Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, writers such as Maureen Howard, Elizabeth Culli- nan, and Erin McGraw continue this tradition as they write about the Catholic Church and explore working-class life (Fanning 377). This summary of Irish American literary characteristics may strike some readers as definitive, while others might question the notion of a static definition. In his introduction to Private Histories: The Writing of Irish Americans, 1900–1935, Ron Ebest addresses this issue. Noting that recent scholars “have regarded ethnic identity as fluid, situational, and subjective; a question of collective identification” (7), he argues that ethnic identity has thus evolved into “self-identification.” Those writers who identify as Irish American choose to do so. This does not mean that their identity is “arbitrary or fictional; not anyone, after all, can be Irish; ancestry, no matter how elastic intermarriage may make the definition, re- mains the crucial element. What it does mean is that to some degree . Irish-American ethnicity is an expression neither of nationality, nor of religion, nor of class, nor of race. It is an expression of desire” (7).
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