We Were the Mulvaneys

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As one Mulvaney child says about his family late in the book, “It’s like things are in code and the key’s been lost.” West, N. (2004). Violated Innocence: Joyce Carol Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys and the Question of Childhood Sexual Abuse. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 50(2), 363-386. One night, when he arrives home late and drunk, Michael is rough with Corinne, and Judd intervenes against his father. The next day, Judd moves out and finds his own apartment. Writing makes Oates melancholy, especially towards the end of a book, when the momentum propels her through 10-hour days. She needs to surround herself with people to relax. So it was that, in spite of disliking most television and finding popular culture "debased", Oates took to Oprah's Book Club in a way some of her younger, more modish literary peers did not. In Oprah's world, readers don't read; they stay up all night sobbing their way through a book and then write to its author in the morning. "I found that very wonderful and very surprising," says Oates, blinking her great marble eyes. "Since I'm a literary person, I look upon books as texts that have been imagined and written. But the general reading public looks upon books as documents of reality, and so the people on Oprah would say, for instance, 'I have a mother just like that.' Or, 'My father was just like that.' Or, 'This happened to me.' They don't seem to perceive - nor do they wish to perceive - that this is a novel. I think if they had, for instance, a class on Shakespeare's Hamlet, they would say, 'Gertrude is just like my mother; Hamlet's like my brother; Ophelia, that's my story.' And they would get a lot of emotion out of that." She falters. There is nothing wrong with reading as therapy, but there is something perhaps painful to an author in seeing readers gobble up their books as an excuse to "basically talk about themselves". Oates's eyelashes lower. "Of course, one doesn't want to dampen that enthusiasm."

The novel is so psychologically intricate – Oates documents all the little things, the minute failures in communication that build up until everything reaches the point of no return. I particularly enjoyed the description of how the family communicates through their pets in a way of avoiding having difficult conversations. The daughter’s only act of rebellion noted was this one time when she broke from this established form of communication and snapped at her mother. It was such a small thing, but it left ripples. As a person with an easy access to her store of anger and rage, I found the mother’s and daughter’s inability to get angry perplexing and frustrating, but possibly, understandable in its context.Corinne, the mother of the family, is such a totally real woman —a mother all of us have known and remember from our childhoods. Is she modeled on any particular woman you have known? On your own mother? The dramatic trajectory of Oates’s career, especially her amazing rise from an economically straitened childhood to her current position as one of the world’s most eminent authors, suggests a feminist, literary version of the mythic pursuit and achievement of the American dream. Yet for all of her success and fame, Oates’s daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast. Not surprisingly, a quotation from that other prolific American writer, Henry James, is affixed to the bulletin board over her desk, and perhaps best expresses her own ultimate view of life and writing: “We work in the dark —we do what we can —we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” The center section of the book is so dark and yet it ends on a note of hope and resolution. Where did this ending come from? Did you consider concluding on a darker note? Despite her success (Oates has published 37 novels, 19 collections of short stories, four novellas, eight volumes of poetry, seven plays and eight academic essays), she has the habit of hitching the disclaimer "it seems like a small thing in the great scale of being" to the end of her statements, although this is possibly a rebuke to the giant egos of the literary world rather than straightforward modesty. The great scale of being is something she is in two minds about. "I veer between a vision of the human race rather like Jonathan Swift's, dark and embittered and satirical, and a kind of idealism that maybe there are just enough wonderful people in the world to make us feel thrilled with the possibilities of the human." This is life, generations following generations. The destructive father is gone, and will be remembered, ironically, with affection. Old wounds are forgotten in the excitement and enthusiasm of the future. To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them. What might have been a tragedy in We Were the Mulvaneys becomes something quite different, yet to my mind this bittersweet ending is inevitable.

Corinne, who after Michael dies eventually gets together with Sable and is happy once again and pulls off the reunion and everyone is there except Michael and that seems to be okay. And we sigh with relief because we so wanted Corrine to be happy, maybe, well at least some of us, more than any other of these six characters because except for Marianne of course it has been Corinne who has suffered the most in this story, surviving in all probability only because of her innate optimism and realism, and because of (or maybe in spite of) the religious ideas that consumed and okay also supported her through all her troubles. Success came early: while attending Syracuse University on scholarship, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. After graduating as valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin, where she met and married Raymond J. Smith after a three-month courtship; in 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, a city whose erupting social tensions suggested to Oates a microcosm of the violent American reality. Her finest early novel, them, along with a steady stream of other novels and short stories, grew out of her Detroit experience. “Detroit, my ‘great’ subject,” she has written, “made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am —for better or worse.” Oates is working on a large canvas here. There are several biblical and mythical allusions; and much of the book has the inexorable feel of a Greek Tragedy. The idea of Darwinian evolution is also a big theme. And the book can also be read, quite convincingly, as one of those Death of the American Dream novels. When institutions fail people, you're left with the family unit. The book mostly concerns the subtle interworkings of a large family, from the oft-repeated anecdotes that capture a family member’s character to its big secrets. Michael Sr. goes to the Mt. Ephraim Country Club one afternoon and notices a group of his former friends sitting together, laughing. Drunk, he pours a glass of beer on the head of a district judge, which leads to his arrest for assault and a newspaper article about the incident. The results are further erosion in Mulvaney Roofing and more attorney bills.If Michael Sr. had behaved differently, the Mulvaney tragedy would not have occurred. In the past, laws concerning rape and sexual assault were not as liberal as they are today in most states. Marianne knew that it would have been futile to press charges under the circumstances. It was just too much for me to believe the dad's unexplained refusal to have anything to do with his daughter after the rape, and the mom's role in casting the daughter out into the world on dad's behalf, as if the rape was their daughter's fault. I didn't get any indication (despite how much Oates seems to go on and on and on) that the parents believed their daughter was not credible or that she was "asking for" the rape, no matter how illogical such a belief would be. On St. Valentine's night, 1976, after Marianne Mulvaney is named one of the "maids-in-waiting" at the prom, she goes to a party where she inadvertently drinks a great deal and is raped by an upperclassman. After the publication of her 24th novel, Joyce Carol Oates was invited to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show. The book, We Were the Mulvaneys, had been chosen as one of Oprah's coveted Book Club titles and a portion of the show was devoted to whooping her achievement. Even by the standards of the format, it was a bizarre encounter - the booming, vivacious pioneer of confessional TV and the small, nervy academic. After the recording, an astonished Oates was mobbed by a gang of ardent Book Club members, one of whom threw her arms about her and said: "If my daughter had read your novel she would not have committed suicide."

Daddy Mulvaney is eaten up by resentment, and certainly that isn't unrealistic, as the reader watches him become a cancer to the world around him, including to his family. Most men cannot deal with problems that they cannot fix. And, a high school daughter cannot be "fixed" from the harm she has suffered from a rape. When Daddy realizes this, he is consumed with rage at the boy who raped her, at the boy's family, at the law, at the members of his country club, at everyone. Primarily, I wanted to write about family life —the mysterious and seemingly autonomous “life” of the family that is made up of individuals yet seems to transcend individuals; the joys, the sorrows, the continuity of jokes and humor; the shared pain; the conflicted yearning for freedom simultaneous with the yearning for domesticity; always, the unspeakable mystery at the heart of the family. I wanted to write about complex lives as they are interwoven with one another, always defining themselves in terms of one another.A lesser writer would have offered up sentimentality, cheesy redemption monologues and copious tears. Oates is after something more complex, more textured, and ultimately more real. After many years, the Mulvaneys meet once again at a family reunion in Corinne's new home, which she shares with a friend. The family has extended to include spouses and children. Finally, the Mulvaneys come full circle and receive closure. Mom cried, cried.I’’ve never seen this construction of a sentence before, the leaving out of the word “and” where it would normally go. Maybe Oates does this all the time, maybe it’s a patented quirk of her writing, I wouldn’t know because I’ve never read anything else by her. (Soon to be corrected I hope.) Of course the subject matter really increased my emotions. The things this family went through and how they dealt with is enough to break your heart just hearing about it, let alone suddenly becoming very involved. All the characters are sympathetic, even Michael Sr., who is pretty easy to hate. Everyone we encounter is flawed and real and that makes you feel for them so much more. Of course the one you feel for the most is Marianne, the true victim in all of this. Yet, somehow she manages to move on with her life and become the strongest of all the Mulvaneys. She's filled with hope and love and the fact she maintains that after her rape and then the odd rejection of her family is truly amazing.