Resonances of Joyce in Alice Mcdermott's at Weddings

A CONDITION OF PERMANENT MOURNING: RESONANCES OF JOYCE IN ALICE MCDERMOTT’S AT WEDDINGS AND WAKES AND CHARMING BILLY CLAIRE CRABTREE-SINNETT University of Detroit Mercy Abstract: Alice McDermott’s novels of the Irish American immigrant experience in New York, Of Wakes and Weddings and Charming Billy, demonstrate Joyce’s influence in terms of point of view, other fictional strategies, and treatments of time and loss. Focusing on characters marked by Joyceian “paralysis,” McDermott explores lives thwarted by a complex of religious constraints and cultural assumptions similar to those at work in Joyce’s Dublin. Keywords: Catholicism; Irish; Immigrants; Irish-American; Alice McDermott 1. Introduction While Ireland continues to produce superb writers, their cousins across the Atlantic have only recently established a crop of excellent writers beyond Eugene O’Neill and F. Scott Fitzgerald, neither of whom was known as primarily Irish- American. National Book Award winning novelist Alice McDermott shares the field of writers who address Irish-American life and identity, like Mary Gordon, Maureen Howard, and Thomas Kennedy. McDermott explicitly pays tribute to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner in some aspects of her work, and this essay will touch on some of those influences and parallels. The most significant resonances in McDermott’s novels, however, especially in At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy, which focus on immigrant families in the Mid-Twentieth Century, are not with McDermott’s American literary forebears, but with James Joyce. 2. Literary influences McDermott’s work resonates with stories in Dubliners in terms of point of view, often that of a child or participant observer, as in Joyce’s much-anthologized story, “Araby.” Further echoes are heard in the themes of death, alcoholism, thwarted desires, and an atmosphere of unexpressed emotion. Critics have identified Joyceian echoes in characters’ concerns with death, as well as their frequent inability to act for their own fulfillment (Hagan 2002:48-9; Reilly 2005:558). They especially note the thematic and tonal qualities in McDermott’s novels, as reflecting the concerns of Joyce’s long short story “The Dead.” This essay asserts that other Joyce stories, too, especially “Eveline,” “Clay,” and “A Little Cloud,” resonate with McDermott’s Irish American fiction. Finally, in her narrative structures and artful use of time, which are arguably more Modernist than Post-Modernist, her work resembles Joyce’s novels Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, as well as those of other High Modernists like Faulkner and Woolf. Both McDermott novels under discussion are epistemological enterprises which circle around, and gradually unveil, the tragic events at their center. McDermott has said that writers can hardly avoid the influences of Joyce and Faulkner, yet her own treatment of time is quite distinctive. She describes her experiments with time in her novels as “echoing” as well as “circular” (Reilly 2005:577). Apart from Joyce’s stylistic and technical influence, McDermott’s novels reflect the cultural assumptions at work on both sides of the Atlantic during Joyce’s life and into the 1950s. Some qualities in Irish and immigrant life, and Roman Catholicism as practiced in both Ireland and the United States, fostered a culture out of which Irish American writers created their works. Eugene O’Neill, for example, writes of addiction and family losses and secrets, yet, as the author himself is reported to have told his son Eugene, “The critics have missed the most important thing about me and my work—the fact that I am Irish” (Bowen 1959: vi). Fitzgerald’s characters, too, reflect a kind of American striving, not toward the Western frontier, but toward the East and the glamour associated with New York and Long Island. McDermott acknowledges that Fitzgerald is an influence; she named a character in another novel Daisy as a sort of whimsical tribute to him (Reilly 2005:568). Alcoholism permeates the work—and lives—of Joyce, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and O’Neill, and McDermott explores alcoholism head-on in her characterization of Billy Lynch, an exemplum of tragic Irish drunkenness. Yet in Billy, she transcends cultural stereotype and particularizes Billy’s complex psyche. The sense in McDermott’s novels of characters living with severe constraints reflects the twin pressures of Catholic teachings promoting acceptance of God’s will, and the genuine lack of broad opportunities for immigrants. Emotional martyrdom can create bitterness, but resignation and piety are more common responses among McDermott’s New Yorkers. Social and economic conditions in Ireland under an essentially colonial rule by England have clearly affected characters, whether consciously or not. Momma, for example, the widowed matriarch in At Weddings and Wakes, was not sufficiently lettered when she arrived from Ireland in the early 20th century to read the newspaper. Veronica, a tippler and recluse, was disfigured by a mistake in a treatment by the Red Cross for her complexion, a situation in which Momma sat helpless. These conditions of stasis and limitation and the attitudes they promote bring to mind the well- identified theme of paralysis in Joyce’s work. 3. Joyceian echoes The term “paralysis” appears on the first page of the opening story of Dubliners, “The Sisters.” Critics have taken the term to incarnate the entire intention of Joyce’s project in the stories. Unmarried, widowed, or dissatisfied characters are common denizens of Joyce’s Dublin. The fates of Little Chandler in “A Little Cloud,” Maria in “Clay,” the boy in “Araby” and the girl in “Eveline,” especially, and their failure to resist their circumstances are echoed in McDermott’s Brooklyn matriarchy, with its three unmarried daughters, and in the long-suffering Maeve who becomes Billy’s wife. Perhaps Billy himself, who martyrs himself in tribute to his dead love Eva and becomes a severe alcoholic, is the quintessential extension of some of Joyce’s pub- or church-goers in Dublin. If McDermott’s work seems technically clearly rooted in the work of Modernists like Joyce and Faulkner and Fitzgerald, so too is it thematically rooted in the issues of the individual locked into or resisting cultural, economic, or familial constraints. In the Irish Catholic transmutation of this theme, the colonizing authority that demands obedience is not England, but the Church. McDermott’s highly original use of the collective or alternating point of view of three young children yields flexibly to a more omniscient third-person narrator in At Weddings and Wakes. The point of view of Margaret, Bobby, and Maryanne Daily, grandchildren who try to decipher the atmosphere of permanent mourning which haunts their grandmother’s household in Brooklyn, echoes Joyce’s “Araby” and the very young Stephen Dedalus. In Charming Billy, a young woman cousin reconstructs Billy’s story after returning from Seattle for Billy’s funeral. Her father, Dennis Lynch, reveals to her that his cousin Billy’s life of devotion to a putatively ideal—and putatively dead--Irish girl, Eva, was based on Dennis’ own lie told years earlier to protect Billy from despair at Eva’s perfidy. McDermott’s novels show many characters who are frozen in place, but also some who are drawn both physically and emotionally to leave humble, cramped apartments in Brooklyn or Queens for the modest central Long Island suburbs of the post-World War II era, and most evocatively, to Easthampton, a beautiful village on the ocean, where people of modest means may be able to rent a cottage in proximity to the Atlantic. Echoes of Joyce’s notion of the West of Ireland, as evoked in “The Dead,” appear in the never-fulfilled longing of May in At Weddings and Billy in Charming Billy to revisit the open spaces of Eastern Long Island. Easthampton carries little of the political weight of the West of Ireland for Joyce, but it does suggest ease and freedom which are in short supply in Joyce’s Dublin. And if Gretta’s birth in the West of Ireland evokes for Joyce readers a sense of an essential Irish identity, Easthampton for McDermott suggests natural beauty unpolluted by the oppression and poverty that permeated lives in Ireland. The children’s Aunt May, a shy former nun, conflates the convent on Long Island where she was sent for a “rest cure,” with its “endless garden and the smell of the sea and a trellised wall thick with red roses” (McDermott 1992:133) with her hopes for a home and garden with the mailman Fred. Billy dreamt unrealistically of a honeymoon with Eva near the huge seaside house where she worked briefly as a nursemaid. In contrast, the more realistic Bob Daily, Lucy’s husband and the children’s father in At Weddings, brings his family to a rented cottage each summer to give them the sense of freedom he experienced as a Fresh Air Fund child. Here, Brooklyn and Queens represent enmeshment and confinement, while Easthampton suggests freedom and beauty. McDermott’s novels resonate with the point of view and the concerns and tensions of Dubliners. Yet Joyce’s short stories are straightforwardly chronological, apart from clearly signaled flashbacks, while these novels circle around events of the past, building layers of revelation into the ongoing story. One must look to Joyce’s complex treatments of time in A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses—and to other Modernists like Woolf and Faulkner--to find sources for McDermott’s experimentation with time as non-chronological, circling and “echoing.” At Weddings and Wakes is, in fact, structured a bit like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, with a woman’s death as the somewhat absent central event. Most notably, May’s death is revealed early in the novel when one of the children, Maryanne, tells her teacher that her aunt had died just after her wedding the past summer, when “something burst inside her” (McDermott 1992:58).

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