Abstract
This chapter examines Mary McCarthy’s relationship with self-fashioning and its importance to understanding her writing history and the complicated position that she occupies as an Irish-American woman writer. Read together, McCarthy’s memoirs set in motion an elaborate experiment in self-authorship. McCarthy presents something of a conundrum to Irish-American Studies as the broad patterns of her work do not subscribe to Irish-American themes, but actively resist such categories and outrun the limitations of any potentially confining compartmentalization. At times, this resistance takes the form of outright hostility while elsewhere she deploys strategies of evasion. The chapter argues that this should not in any way preclude McCarthy from inclusion in the Irish American canon, rather she can be read as one of its most vibrantly dissenting voices.
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Works Cited
Archival Material
Mary McCarthy Archive, Vassar College
Material Relating to Vassar College.
18.4–18.5—Research for ‘The Vassar Girl' (Holiday, May 1951).
18.6—Correspondence with Vassar College re: ‘The Vassar Girl'.
Folder 316.1—Writing done at Vassar. Inaugural Issue of Con Spirito Vol. 1 No. 1, February 1933.
Folder 316.1—Writing done at Vassar. ‘The Nightingale and the Rose' (dates to the 1930s).
Personal Correspondence
193.16—Farrell, James T., 1967–1979, n.d.
Letter from James T. Farrell to Mary McCarthy, September 26, 1978.
Letter from Mary McCarthy to James T. Farrell, October 12, 1978.
Letter from James T. Farrell to Mary McCarthy, February 4, 1975.
Reviews and Interviews
390.1 1962. ‘Interview—Mary McCarthy'. The Art of Fiction XXVII. The Paris Review, 27, 58–94.
Archives of Irish America, Tamiment Library, New York University
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McWilliams, E. (2021). Unsettling Irish America: Self-Authorship and the Writing of Mary McCarthy. In: Irishness in North American Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1_2
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