Intertextuality by Mary Gordon

First published: 1995

Type of plot: Autobiographical, family

Time of work: 1959-1960

Locale: Long Island, New York

Principal Characters:

• The narrator, who recalls two incidents she witnessed as a child
• Her grandmother, a stern, practical Irish immigrant
• Her aunt, an unmarried daughter who lives with her mother
• Her mother, a widow forced by circumstances to return with the narrator to live in her mother's house

The Story

The narrator, a middle-aged woman, frames the story with allusions to the lengthy classic novel by Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931, 1981), that are significant in interpreting the story. She begins with a brief history of her grandmother's early life as an Irish immigrant. Although she admired her, she never liked her grandmother, a practical, physically imposing woman with a strong work ethic. The narrator recalls two incidents that ocurred when she was ten years old.

The grandmother came to the United States in the late nineteenth century at the age of nineteen and worked as a domestic servant, saving her earnings to pay the passage to the United States for her own mother and six siblings from Ireland. She married a jeweler and gave birth to nine children. The family has always told entertaining stories about their collective past, but the narrator recognizes these as myths; the unpleasant realities of their lives are never discussed. This is a closed world of women, with the men seldom mentioned. These women believe that they must simply get on with life as if unfortunate events had never occurred. The grandmother is the family caretaker; in addition to raising her own nine children, she takes in three of her poverty-stricken sister's children. The narrator and her mother, destitute and homeless after the death of her father, are also taken in by the grandmother, but as recipients of charity, they are expected to go along with the grandmother's wishes. They have no part in household decisions and can only witness events as bystanders.

In the first incident witnessed by the narrator, her eighty-year-old grandmother takes the only vacation of her life, a month-long trip to Florida to visit relatives. While she is away, her unmarried middle-aged daughter collects money from the family to remodel the house, eliminating the old kitchen, buying new appliances, and getting rid of many of the household objects. This is, on the surface, a practical decision intended to make life easier for the old woman. She has lived in the house for forty years and has decorated it with mementos that have significance for her: pictures of saints, poems, lamps with French paintings, and a Celtic cross. The family gathers to celebrate the grandmother's return. When she is confronted with the surprise, she reacts with shock, bursting into tears and hiding in her bedroom, the only room that has remained untouched. She composes herself and returns to the party, saying nothing at all about the renovation of her house. This event is never discussed in the family.

The second incident occurs a year later when the grandmother announces that she wants to build a summer house as a gift to her granddaughter. She shows them the discarded screens she plans to use for this project. Her unmarried daughter mocks her scornfully, calling the idea crazy. The grandmother abandons the idea and goes to the kitchen to wash her hands. This event, too, is never again mentioned by the family.

The story concludes with the narrator describing a scene from the Proust novel. She imagines that she is drawn into the elegant nineteenth century French dinner party and, in a dreamlike sequence, has just finished her own dinner when she sees her grandmother entering the restaurant in her housedress and practical black shoes. The narrator tries to capture her grandmother's emotions. Does she view these people with contempt, judging them sinful in their indulgence and wastefulness, in contrast to her own righteous life of self-denial? Or, might she be imagined as entering the scene as the beautiful child she once was, to be invited into the summer house where she will be given a pleasurable treat and petted and indulged?

The narrator returns to her insight at the beginning of the story, her sense of loss in failing to understand her grandmother's life.

Bibliography

Bennett, Alma. Mary Gordon. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Gordon, Mary. "Getting from Here to There: A Writer's Reflections on a Religious Past." In Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing, edited by William Zinsser. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

Juhasz, Suzanne. "Mother Writing and the Narrative of Maaternal Subjectivity." In A Desire for Women. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Labrie, Ross. The Catholic Imagination in American Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.

Leonard, John. "Mary Gordon's Father Runs Away from Home." In When the Kissing Had to Stop. New York: New Press, 1999.

Mahon, Eleanor B. "The Displaced Balance: Mary Gordon's Men and Angels." In Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Mahon, John W. "Mary Gordon: The Struggle with Love." In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989.

Sheldon, Barbara H. Daughters and Fathers in Feminist Novels. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.

Smiley, Pamela. "The Unspeakable: Mary Gordon and the Angry Mother's Voices." In Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women's Writing as Transgression, edited by Deirdre Lashgari. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.