Mary Gordon’s Irish-American fiction: clean living?

Beatrice, the protagonist of Mary Gordon’s story City Life, is quite preoccupied with cleaning. Having moved from her pristine and cherished house in upstate Ithaca to New York City, she is dismayed with her family’s new abode. Her “heart sank at the grayness of the grout between the small octagonal bathroom floor tiles, the uneven job of polyurethaning on the living room floor […] the frosted glass on the window near the shower that she couldn’t, whatever she did, make look clean”. So she sets to work, pouring a “lake of bleach on the bathroom floor” and having “left it for six hours, then sopping it up, found she had created a field of dazzling whiteness”. What the story makes tragically clear is how Beatrice’s obsession with cleaning is linked to a dark and personal history of neglect, as she struggles (and ultimately fails) to wash away the traumas of her childhood past.

Cleanliness, or lack thereof, is a recurring motif in Irish-American writer Mary Gordon’s work. In her first novel Final Payments (1978), the main character Isabel recounts her inability to keep her father’s house clean, the “grime” she “could never get out of the furniture”, while in the more recent novel Pearl (2005), protagonist Maria is repeatedly shamed as a child by her family’s housekeeper for being slovenly and “filthy”. Across the work, connections are established between cleanliness and an ascetic purity of the soul, something identifiable in the words of Muriel, a character from Gordon’s second novel The Company of Women (1980) – “She had brushed out with fire all the root connections of her life; she had kept clean for him and God, a sanctuary perfect in its stillness” – and in her third novel Men and Angels (1985), when Laura, a young and troubled evangelical woman does a “spring clean” on her employer’s house in a symbolic attempt to make clean the supposed impurities of the household.

Ideas about purity are at the centre of these representations of cleanliness, with Mary Gordon’s work taking on a philosophical critique of the concept, revealing its diminishing aspects. This is most clearly shown in the narrative of Final Payments, when Isabel adopts a mode of unbearable living based on what she mistakenly identifies as a “pure act of love”: “loving the unlovable”. Gordon’s work consistently engages such questions of moral philosophy: what is a pure act? What is beauty? What is justice? What is forgiveness? What is goodness? Her characters dialogically engage these questions with themselves, and with others around them. And none of this is dry. Gordon writes great dialogue balanced with expertly crafted internal monologues of her characters’ inner lives. One of her most notable achievements is to engage philosophical seriousness in fictions that are fresh and engaging, humming with humanness, brimming with desire.

Mary Gordon’s fiction is intimately concerned with the experience and cultural memory of immigration to the US, especially Irish, but also Jewish, Italian, and Polish to name but a few. She is dazzling on family drama and her characters are acutely aware of the complexity of their family histories, immigration stories, and interweaved cultural heritages. Indeed, an interweaved cultural heritage is something experienced by Gordon herself.

She was born in 1949 in Far Rockaway, New York to parents of Irish, Italian and Jewish ancestry. Her father, David Gordon, converted from Judaism to Catholicism. He died in 1957 when she was seven years old, something which made a lasting mark. Gordon’s first memoir, The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search For Her Father, published in 1996, explores her memory of him and the love of books and writing which he bestowed, as well as uncovering some very painful and traumatic truths, most notably his virulent anti-Semitism. Following his death, Gordon moved with her mother, Anna Gagliano, to Long Island to Gordon’s maternal grandmother and she grew up with her mother’s family. She attended Catholic parochial schools and then went to Barnard College in New York City in 1971 for undergraduate study, followed by Syracuse University for a Masters degree in 1973.

Her writing has received many honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was named the Official New York State Author in 2008. Gordon returned to Barnard College in 1988 where she holds the position of Millicent Macintosh Chair of English. Married to fellow writer Arthur Cash, they have two adult children and spend their time between New York City and Rhode Island.

When looking at the trajectory of Gordon’s prolific writing career, which includes seven novels, four short story and novella collections, three memoirs, and three books of essays and biography, there is a shift from earlier representations of local place to a more recent interest in transnational crossings, something which in many ways reflects the compressions of time and space indicative to the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In the 2005 novel Pearl, Gordon crosses the ocean to Ireland and, in the 2011 The Love of my Youth, to Italy. However, her earlier novels are focused on the northeast region of the US. In her first two novels – Final Payments and The Company of Women – the focus is on Irish Catholic communities in New York City and New York state in the 1960s, exploring the conflicted relationships of young women to an intractable and conservative Church. Looking back to a recent past, they provide incisive insight into the tensions and unrests of Catholic America post Vatican II, folding into them the more general cultural contexts of 1960s culture: the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the Kennedy deaths and student demonstrations.

At the centre of these two novels are daughters that rebel, in different ways, against the patriarchal structures of the Church and Irish-American communities, with each finding a new way of living their faith by the narrative’s end. For all her issues with the Church, Gordon identifies as Catholic and this is a major theme in her work, permeating her writings, from the representations of an Irish-American Catholic family in The Other Side (1989) to the Polish Catholicisms of Pearl. She has also written a number of religious books, which include a biography Joan of Arc (2000) and Reading Jesus: A Writer’s Encounter with the Gospels (2009).

However, as her two first novels demonstrate, Gordon is no dutiful daughter and her work confronts many of Catholicism’s problems, especially with respect to women and their bodies. A signature of the Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion in 1984, the essay Abortion: How do we Really Choose in her collection Good Boys and Dead Girls (1991) also signals her pro-choice position.

Embodiment is a key motif in all her work, a filter of desire and feminist consciousness, as women’s subjectivities are figured in richly kaleidoscopic ways: sexual, maternal, familial, spiritual and artistic. In her third novel, Men and Angels, set primarily in a small college town in Massachusetts, she explores the difficult relationship between Anne, an art historian, and her evangelical babysitter Laura. Anne is working on the catalogue of a woman artist named in the novel as Caroline Watson. It shares with Gordon’s 1998 novel Spending an exploration of the place of the female artist (Virginia Woolf is an enduring influence on Gordon’s work), carefully unpacking the relations between desire, power and – especially in Spending – money.

Gordon’s writing powerfully explores women’s desires so as to interrogate and disrupt a patriarchal religious shaming of the female body. Her project is echoed in the novel Pearl: “Of all the malignities Maria traces to her upbringing, among the most heinous is the habit of thinking herself impure by virtue of femaleness. The female: insufficiently fine. The female: overfleshed”.

In Gordon’s work, practices of cleaning operate as a barometer of the problematics of purity. Messiness – the messiness of life, the messiness of bodies, the messiness of human love – intervenes and disrupts the cold machinations of purity. Maeve Brennan, the accomplished writer being celebrated in this series on Irish-American women writers, engages a similar strategy in her short story The Day We Got Our Own Back from her collection The Springs of Affection. With the narrator Maeve’s family home being aggressively searched by members of the Free State Army – and making quite a mess! – one of the men gets a face full of soot when looking up the chimney. The story thus ends with this subtle mode of resistance and, also, with laughter, as Maeve mother’s cries: “Oh, thanks be to God I forgot to have the chimney cleaned”.

We can extend the connection between Brennan and Gordon on this subject of cleanliness all the more, linking these two writers with the commentaries they make on class and gender politics. Critics Angela Bourke and Ellen McWilliams illuminate the ways in which Brennan’s stories in The Rose Garden perceptively identify the classed position of the Irish woman servant, the cleaner of upper- and middle-class American households. Gordon’s work also takes up this concern of domestic servitude, evident for example in the character of Margaret in Final Payments, Marie in Pearl, the grandmother of Intertextuality to name just a few.

Overall, her work is very attuned to the intricacies of class politics, something which she thoughtfully explores in The Company of Women as Felicitas negotiates upper-middle-class elitism as a student of Columbia University, which stands in sharp contrast to her own working-class upbringing. At one moment in the novel, while attending an anti-war demonstration in Washington DC, Felicitas imagines writer Mary McCarthy as a "daring older sister", establishing a literary feminist lineage in the Irish-American tradition. We can trace a similar genealogy of sisterhood between Mary Gordon and her predecessor Maeve Brennan, with both casting spurious eyes on the classed and ethnic dynamics of clean living.

Claire Bracken is associate professor in the English department at Union College, Schenectady, New York, where she teaches courses on Irish literature and film. She is author of Irish Feminist Futures (Routledge, 2016) and is co-editor of Anne Enright (with Susan Cahill, Irish Academic Press, Spring 2011) and Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts (with Emma Radley, Cork University Press, 2013).
Women Writers and Irish-American Literature is a week-long series to celebrate the centenary of Maeve Brennan's birth on January 6th, 2017, comprising articles on Maeve Brennan, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Cullinan, Mary Gordon and Alice McDermott, co-ordinated by Ellen McWilliams and featuring contributions from Angela Bourke, Claire Bracken, Patricia Coughlan and Sinéad Moynihan