We Were the Mulvaneys

“But this document isn’t a confession. Not at all. I’ve come to think of it as a family album. The kind my mom never kept, absolute truth-telling. The kind no one’s mom keeps. But if you’ve been a child in any family you’ve been keeping such an album in memory and conjecture and yearning, and it’s a life’s work, it may be the great and only work of your life.” 

“Absolute truth-telling” is impossible in any medium, as truth is multifaceted and consists of as many sides as there are participants in each event. However, by using these words, Judd wishes to emphasize his detachment from his version of truth, as that implies bias through love and care, which Judd purports to eschew. By using the words “memory and conjecture and yearning,” he shows us how fragile the concept of his own truth must be as it spins itself from such an emotional core. The image of the “family album” also symbolizes snippets of truth caught in time and without broader context, which contradicts Judd’s insistence on absolute truth. 

“Everything recorded here happened and it’s my task to suggest how, and why; why what might seem to be implausible or inexplicable at a distance—a beloved child’s banishment by a loving father, like something in a Grimm fairy tale—isn’t implausible or inexplicable from within. I will include as many “facts” as I can assemble, and the rest is conjecture, imagined but not invented. Much is based upon memory and conversations with family members about things I had not experienced firsthand nor could possibly know except in the way of the heart.” 

In explaining his modus operandi as the narrator, Judd both excuses himself as biased and claims for himself the role of a pseudo-explorer (much like his brother Patrick)—warning us of the essential unreliability of his “facts.” Oates uses “Judd the narrator” to examine the concept of first-person narration in general, and its inherent dependency on emotions and “conjecture.” 

“If they were aware of me they gave no sign, they had no interest in me but only in the doe, five or six of them, ferocious in the chase, ears laid back and hackles raised. I thought I recognized one or two of our neighbor’s dogs. I shouted after them, sick with horror, but they were already gone. There was the sound of panicked flight and pursuit, growing fainter with distance.” 

This quote is an example of Oates’s “realistic allegory.” Young Judd’s meeting the gentle and unsuspecting doe and witnessing her panicked flight from frenzied neighborhood dogs foreshadows Marianne’s fate and allegorically represents it in advance: a young female, trusting, fairy-tale animal brutally descends into the harsh reality of random predator danger. This image and Marianne’s later identification with the print of The Pilgrim, both place her character in the realm of blurred and fitful reality, at odds with her nature and expectation. This is, crucially, still Judd’s perspective on Marianne, as we only see her mediated through his gaze.

“Corinne Mulvaney, the mother, should have detected. Or suspected. She who boasted she was capable of reading her husband’s and children’s faces with the patience, shrewdness and devotion of a Sanskrit scholar pondering ancient texts.

Yet, somehow, she had not. Not initially. She’d been confused (never would she believe: deceived) by her daughter’s behavior. Marianne’s sweetness, innocence. Sincerity.” 

Frequently, Judd slips into the third-person narration, as if Oates wants us to forget that we are reading one biased character’s account of events, which allows us to lend the scenes more of an aura of unmediated credibility. Thus, Corinne becomes “the mother” and not “our mother,” as would be natural for Judd to say. His mother has found a way to comprehend her failure to notice Marianne’s anguish and hurt, through unconsciously blaming her daughter for deceit. Thus, Marianne’s natural characteristics become perverted into their opposites for the sake of Corinne’s avoidance to accept responsibility. This is one of the first signs that the Mulvaney family is far from perfect. 

“Getting a retarded girl drunk. Doing—you know, things—to her.

Hey: she isn’t retarded. Who says that?

The whole family, the Duncans—the mother’s an alcoholic, she’s got Indian blood. Comes from the Seneca reservation.

That’s not what I heard. I heard they’re—you know, Negro.

Well it’s all the same. That kind of people. At that—what d’you call it—trailer court—

Trailer village.”

The narrator never describes the rape of Della Rae Duncan at the cemetery but offers numerous glimpses into the reasons and consequences. Words like “retarded,” “alcoholic,” “Indian blood,” “Negro,” and “that kind of people,” uttered by the boys involved in the rape and their friends—young, wholesome all-American boys—tells us how they prop themselves up and find excuses for what has happened. They show the causal discrimination, racism, and sexism they have learned within their upstanding white Christian families, whose values exclude everything that does not conform. While this is a searing condemnation in itself, it is also a foreshadowing of what Marianne will experience once her rape expels her from the circle of acceptability. 

“And there was her watch, her beautiful watch, a white-gold battery-run Seiko with tiny blue numerals; a gift from Mom and Dad for Marianne’s sixteenth birthday. She’d taken it off immediately when she’d come home. She hadn’t examined it too closely, knowing, or guessing, that the crystal was cracked.

How many times compulsively she’d run her thumb over the crystal feeling the hairline crack. But she hadn’t actually examined it. And if the minute ticking had ceased, she didn’t want to know.” 

The watch, a gift from her parents, stands as a symbol for Marianne and her innocence, irrevocably lost. She is afraid to examine it because she fears the truth about herself, now that her life has changed forever. (Connected to the previous quote, Marianne’s meeting Della Rae in the school locker room shows that Marianne, before her fall, belongs to the same group of people who refuse to acknowledge the inconvenient existence of Della Rae’s in the world.) The crack in the crystal thus becomes the new existential vacuum that brings Marianne closer to Della Rae and removes her from her cheerleading past. Marianne does not wish to know if the watch has stopped because she does not want to face the idea that swirls in her head, that she is now, through someone else’s brutal agency, banished from her old life. 

“Mike was pacing around, running both hands through his hair. He looked a little like Dad, from the back. He said in a rueful voice, ‘It’s a funny thing, how you always know more than you say. I mean—a person does. What you say is always less than you know.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Just what I said!’” 

Mike’s words in this quote refer not only to the complexity of personal experience and to how hard it is to translate it into meaningful words, but also to the storytelling process. Even though Judd (through Oates’s mediation) attempts to include as many elements and perspectives in his account, the truth of the events will always, by necessity, remain incomplete and biased. Oates is warning us: What Judd says in his story is less than he knows. 

“Stiff beside her in the passenger’s seat, like a stranger in dread of being touched, Marianne seemed scarcely to hear. Her lips were dry and chapped; her skin that was always so smooth and fresh looked shadowed, a sad-tinctured skin. Puffy eyes—she’d been crying. Of course, crying. And her hair, the child’s lovely wavy hair, matted, tangled, needing to be washed—how had she ever left the house that morning, without Corinne noticing? Was Corinne blind?” 

Marianne’s physical change after the rape and especially Corinne’s noticing of the change, reveal both the immenseness of Marianne’s world-shattering experience and her mother’s refusal to recognize the obvious signs because they threaten her whole family’s world. “Dry and chapped” lips, “sad-tinctured skin,” “puffy eyes,” and “matted, tangled” hair, have been a clear and obvious sign, but Corinne has unconsciously ignored it, aware of the threat the truth would pose to the peaceful existence of her family. “The child,” who is no longer a child, is “a stranger” recoiling from her own mother. Marianne’s banishment has already begun, and Marianne has started it herself, knowing, again unconsciously, that she no longer deserves to be a part of the picture-perfect Mulvaney family. 

“As if this litany were the most basic, the most irreducible of knowable facts. As if it were all that might be granted her by way of understanding. As if, wakened from a cruel enchantment, she’d discovered in her hands a wide, ragged, rotted net, a net with enormous tears and holes, yet her sole solace, her sole hope, was to cast this rotted net out again, again, again and draw it in breathless and trembling to discover what truths it might contain. But they were always the same truths. I was drinking. I was to blame. I don’t remember. How can I give testimony against him!” 

Connected to the previous quote, here Marianne has reached a conscious realization of her new position: “Wakened from a cruel enchantment,” she finds herself unable to see beyond her blame and her change that renders her unfit to belong to her family or her previous social circle. The patriarchal, discriminatory ideals of the American middle class are so deeply ingrained within her, that she will be the first to expel herself from her environment. The only truth she can grasp has nothing to do with what has happened to her, but with what she now represents for others. Behind her inability to remember, she hides the realization that, by letting herself be damaged, she has accepted that she must relinquish her position in the world. 

“Dogs you love, who love you, with their savage need nonetheless to dig at, gnaw at, even roll luxuriantly in the carcasses of once-living things.

Why? Marianne had asked.

Because, Mom had said.

Yes but why? Marianne asked.

Because it’s nature, honey, Mom said. And nature isn’t evil.” 

Corinne tells Marianne that brutality of nature is not inherently evil because it is free of malicious intent. This stands in stark juxtaposition to the choices human beings make, especially as it refers to Marianne’s fate in the novel. Humans are not free from hidden motivations, both consciously and unconsciously, like dogs, and their savagery is either premeditated or casually, but intentionally cruel. The inference in this quote lies in the unspoken: While nature “isn’t evil,” human nature is another matter. Marianne’s family rejects her for different reasons, but all of them lie in the inability to accept a “damaged girl” into their midst as her presence would jeopardize their sense of wholesomeness and unity.  

“Corinne knew: Michael was sick not just with it, with what had happened to Marianne, but with what he felt to be the betrayal of their Mt. Ephraim friends. He told her bitterly, one night as they lay in bed, in the dark, unable to sleep, ‘Between Mort Lundt and me, naturally they’re choosing Lundt. Siding with him. Because the bastard’s got money and connections, he’s one of them.’” 

Michael is more troubled with the fact that the Mt. Ephraim society is rejecting him, than with what the family has done to Marianne through his agency. In fact, he views Marianne, despite himself and his better nature, as the root cause of his troubles, which is why he cannot stand to be in her presence. His need to belong stems from the rejection he has experienced from his own family, yet he perpetuates the behavior, obsessed with ambition and the only way he has learned to value himself: through the approbation of his peers.

“‘Not ‘winnable,’ Mr. Mulvaney. You’d only be opening your daughter and your family to public humiliation. If the defendant didn’t cave in and there’s no reason he would in such circumstances, in fact his lawyer would move to dismiss and a judge would probably concur. This is Chautauqua County,’ Birch says, ‘we had a hell of a time getting an indictment against a man in Milford—you read about it, maybe—who beat and kicked his pregnant wife a while back—juries don’t like to ‘interfere’ in domestic cases. In male-female cases. If sex is involved, especially.’” 

This quote is one of the most direct condemnations of the American, male-dominated society in the novel. The casualness with which the lawyer explains to Michael why the “case” is not “winnable” reflects the deeply rooted system that places “male-female cases” into an area no one likes to face, and “juries don’t like to ‘interfere.’” Additional taboo is obviously sex: Even though Marianne’s rape is not a domestic issue but an evident crime, the citizens of good standing would rather negate the crime than deal with its aftermath. (This is what Michael does in the end, even though he seems here to be searching for justice for Marianne. However, he is looking for a legal measure that would absolve him of symbolic guilt before his community.)

“Weeks passed, and months, and though Mom had promised Patrick and me we’d drive down to visit Marianne soon, somehow we never got there. And Dad never spoke of going, in fact he never spoke of Marianne in my hearing, at all.” 

Once having reached the decision to excise Marianne from the world of the Mulvaney family, Michael and Corinne never reconsider their position. Judd’s choice of words, “somehow we never got there,” seems to absolve his parents from responsibility in this matter and shows that Marianne’s three siblings never put much of a fight against their parents’ choice. True to their characters, Michael never even mentions Marianne, and Corinne maintains a hypocritical façade while aware that she has chosen her husband’s side in removing the “transgressing” child from the family. Interestingly, Judd’s narration tends to put more of the blame on Michael and less on Corinne.

“The crowd seemed to part for us. Fascinating: how people who’d known Corinne and Michael Mulvaney for twenty years seemed now not to see them, or, unable to reasonably not see them, smiled vaguely, with a pretense of enthusiasm, then turned away to greet others, shaking hands and embracing others. Most instructive for a thirteen-year-old who’d be a journalist one day, to observe.

Yes we feel sorry for you Mulvaneys but no, no!—don’t come talk to us, don’t spoil this happy occasion for us, please.”

Regardless of the Mulvaneys’ decision to erase Marianne, the society does not forgive or forget them their “social offense” of attracting the wrong kind of attention. What Michael and Corinne have done to Marianne, the Mt. Ephraim community does to them to the extent it can: They avoid them or act as if they do not exist. The implication is that the Mulvaney family has been sullied, and their social circle is afraid of it being contagious by association. Oates here amplifies the hypocritical nature of the Mulvaneys’ decision to show the ruthless hypocrisy of the whole society that has shaped the Mulvaneys and their decision. Judd observes this as if he is not a member of the family because, being the youngest, he has never felt as if he has fully been a part of it. 

“At Cornell, no one knew the name MULVANEY. Twenty thousand students. When Patrick had driven through campus, Corinne beside him in the station wagon loaded with his things, he’d been dazed and euphoric contemplating size, distance, anonymity while Corinne wrung her hands in her lap fretting like any mom But you’ll be lost here, oh Patrick you’ll be lost here, no one will know who you are!” 

Patrick emerges as the member of the family who feels most acutely the wrongness of what the Mulvaneys have done to Marianne. This quote exemplifies his desire to remove himself from the associations of falling from grace that his family name carries in Mt. Ephraim. The ability to lose himself in a place that does not care for him individually, or concerns itself with attaching labels to his name, causes euphoria. This is juxtaposed with Corinne’s fear that carries with it the burden of small-town philosophy: No one will know who Patrick is anymore, as if this will render him nonexistent. In Corinne’s world, being known is part of existing, and Patrick’s new life signals the loss of her son.

“Patrick had read about rape victims, he’d done research in his methodical Pinch-style, in the Cornell psych library. It is common for a rape victim, female or male, to avoid mirrors and direct confrontation with all images of the ‘self.’ As if, where there had been a person, there is now no one.” 

Oates utilizes a “quotation” from a psychiatry textbook to verbalize the truth and reason behind Marianne’s profound self-effacement. The act of seeking solace in science is Patrick’s way. Furthermore, the idea that “there is no one” where once Marianne was is doubly symbolic: Marianne has lost her unconcerned and safe old self after the rape, and her family has erased her existence through eliminating her from their world. 

“His father seemed to him mad: it was pointless to talk to him, still less argue. He’d banished Marianne from the household and from his life so that he could banish her from his thoughts. It was simple as that, and Patrick understood. He understood, but couldn’t forgive. To Corinne he said It’s cruel, it’s ridiculous, I hate him, how can you? and Corinne said angrily, You don’t hate your father, Patrick!—you know that. As for Marianne, she’s happy and she’s adjusted, her faith sustains her just as it sustains me. Don’t interfere!” 

Patrick’s slow-burning verbalization of protest for what his parents have done to his sister culminates in two ways: He realizes it is useless even attempting to talk to his father, and he wishes to hurt his mother by being brutally open and honest with his feelings towards them. However, Corinne cannot remove herself from the psychological position she has carved within the family as the protector of idealized “family values,” and her response is not only untrue and hypocritical but also willfully self-deluded. She has proven herself willing to sacrifice her daughter’s presence for Michael and his idea of acceptability, and she now accepts her favorite son’s wrath without even deliberating other possibilities. This helps show that the family’s downfall is rooted in their inability to shape themselves according to inner psychological and familial needs, having chosen the society’s “norm” as gospel.  

“But as soon as Patrick confided in me, I understood that Patrick was the only Mulvaney capable of executing justice in the way it required execution. Not as a sudden, impulsive act of violence, like wildfire springing up to consume us all, but as a coolly premeditated act from which the perpetrator would walk away unscathed. For nothing less than perfect would satisfy Patrick.” 

Judd expresses understanding of Patrick’s actions that he hardly could have had at the time, which is frequently the case in narratives by older persons recalling their younger selves. In recollection, we tend to layer our adult ideas onto the projected characters of our young selves. Judd does this for Patrick as well, giving him characteristics that he might not have had. The key element in this quote is that Patrick is the only one who decides some kind of action must take place in reparation of what Zach has done to Marianne.  

“Patrick said of Marianne she didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, when she was being exploited. She didn’t know what evil was. She’d cheated herself of knowing because she forgave too soon.

When Patrick uttered the word evil, it made me shiver. I never knew exactly what he meant. What is evil, after all?”

Having once been the closest sibling to Marianne, Patrick has a keen understanding of her character and of her changed behavior. Marianne’s willingness to let herself be used by others stems from before her rape: It is portrayed as part of her gentle and religion-shaped character, and by being the only girl in a deeply patriarchal family. However, for Patrick, the fact that she appears to have forgiven the greatest wrong that was done to her, proves she has no real-life concept of right and wrong (or “evil,” as he terms it). Judd is also the product of his family and its core values: His claim that he does not understand what evil is originates in never having to question the innate validity of the values he has inherited. 

“Though afterward, alone, she was transfixed by a sudden terrible fear. It was The Fear. The Fear that overtook her after people, well-intentioned of course, made too much of her. Especially if they worried aloud about her, and touched her. A wise voice warned If you accept kindness undeserved, even worse will happen to you.”

The worst consequence of Marianne’s fate is that she cannot understand and accept herself seriously as a person of agency and value, and allow others to see her in the same way. Oates exemplifies this symbolically through “The Fear”: the feeling of mounting panic if another person sees worth in her or shows emotional attachment. We can read this as a dysfunctional phobia developed after the rape and her family’s rejection, which essentially makes her a vagrant within her own life, or through the perspective of The Pilgrim, as her quest for absolution and divine mercy. The notion of a “deserved” kindness stems from her family, and the “wise” voice she hears might as well belong to her mother. 

“‘How can you look at your own parents like you don’t know us?’ Corinne had demanded, and Mike Jr. had shifted his muscular shoulders in embarrassment, and looked her in the eye in a way new to him, a way she guessed he’d been trained to do, at the boot camp, as if he was about ready to salute, and said, ‘Mom, I guess I don’t, in some weird way. It’s like things are in code and the key’s been lost.’” 

Mike Jr.’s way of dealing with Marianne’s rape and its aftermath is to leave the family to find a new meaning in the military. Having obtained a new set of rules and conducts, he now feels unable to crack the previously famous and cherished “family code.” Corinne talks to him in this quote (she “demands”), as if he were still her young son, Mike the Mule, and not an adult marine. Mike Jr. still shows signs of the need to obey (he shifts his “muscular” shoulders “in embarrassment,” and is almost ready to salute her). However, his reply leaves little room to doubt that Mike Jr. has “quit” the family; he has lost the key to understanding them and their behavior. This makes it possible for him to start a new, independent life.  

“They say the youngest kid of a family doesn’t remember himself very clearly because he has learned to rely on the memories of others, who are older and thus possess authority. Where his memory conflicts with theirs, it’s discarded as of little worth. What he believes to be his memory is more accurately described as a rag-bin of others’ memories, their overlapping testimonies of things that happened before he was born, mixed in with things that happened after his birth, including him. So it wasn’t a smart-ass remark, I don’t know what I know. It was just the truth.” 

This quote functions as Judd’s admission of unreliability. By positioning Judd as the narrator, Oates establishes him beyond doubt as the last person who would give an unvarnished, objective account of his family’s history. Because this quote comes in the latter part of the novel, we can assume that it is the author’s intention to switch the reader’s understanding and appreciation of most things that have happened so far.

“Marianne, my goodness you’re so grown up!—isn’t she, Judd?—and your hair, oh dear your hair, oh but how pretty you are, Marianne—I know you’re exhausted—I know this is a terrible surprise—Marianne you aren’t married are you?—are you married, honey?—no?—I just, I—wondered—I mean, it’s been so confused—I’m sorry not to have been a better mother but—I don’t know what happened exactly—it was just something that happened, wasn’t it?—no one ever decided—I never decided—I love you honey, thank you for coming—your Dad does want to speak to you, he told us—didn’t he, Judd?—oh what a sad, terrible time for us—we can pray, that’s all we can do, but it’s a sad time, we have to be prepared the nurses have warned us.” 

Oates uses here what amounts to a monologue version of stream-of-consciousness in Corinne’s response to seeing Marianne after a long time, in the hospital awaiting Michael’s imminent death. The monologue reveals a lot about Corinne’s character: She grasps the truth of the great wrong she and her husband have done to their daughter, but she still cannot take responsibility for her actions and counts on Marianne’s character to forgive and forget. Corinne’s manner has always been subtly manipulative, but Oates reveals her here as the master manipulator primarily of herself and of the way she shapes her own reality. The flow of words almost hides the fact that she does not know anything about her daughter’s life, but her almost desperate desire to reject responsibility and maintain an illusion of herself is clear.