Avenging ‘Bridget’: Irish domestic servants and middle-class America in the short stories of Maeve Brennan

Abstract

This article will examine the representation of Irish women servants in Maeve Brennan's short stories, first published in The New Yorker in the 1950s, and collected in The Rose Garden (2001). The Irish ‘Bridget’, the most publicly visible, if troubling, image of Irish womanhood in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, has received much-needed attention from historians and social scientists in the last decade, and is a central figure in discussions of Irish women and diasporic identity in the American context. Drawing on this body of work, and focusing in detail on key stories from the collection, including ‘The Bride’, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, ‘The Anachronism’, ‘The Divine Fireplace’, and ‘The Servants’ Dance', I argue that Brennan's reimagining of the Irish Bridget can be approached as a form of feminist revisionism, as Brennan's stories enter into a charged dialogue with the history of imagining the Irish woman servant as an undesirable but necessary presence in middle-class American domestic culture. Brennan's self-reflexive reworking of this paradigm is informed by her work as a satirist for The New Yorker, and proves an effective means of writing back to this problematic history, as she takes up recognisable tropes and motifs from earlier representations of Bridget in popular and literary culture, and alters them in knowing and subversive ways.

Keywords:

• Maeve Brennan
• The New Yorker
• Irish America
• Irish women
• domestic servants
• stereotyping
• self-fashioning

Acknowledgements

This research was enabled by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Fellowship (October 2011–June 2012). I would like to thank the Literary Estate of Howard Moss and the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, at the New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations), for kind permission to cite from material in the Howard Moss Papers. I would also like to thank the Manuscripts and Archives Division at the New York Public Library for access to The New Yorker Records.

Notes

 1. See, for example, Murphy, ‘Bridget and Biddy’; Hotten-Somers, ‘Relinquishing and Reclaiming Independence’; Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget; and Flynn, ‘How Bridget was Framed’.

 2. In her landmark study Outsiders Inside Bronwen Walter describes how Irish women and their descendants have come to represent a migrant group ‘whose lives remain largely hidden although their labour has been strongly in demand’ (1).

 3. Bourke, Homesick at The New Yorker, 182.

 4. Letter from Maeve Brennan to Howard Moss (n.d.), item 19.

 5. Miller, Doyle, and Kelleher, ‘“For Love and Liberty”’, 54.

 6. Walter, Outsiders Inside, 2.

 7. Hotten-Somers, ‘Relinquishing and Reclaiming Independence’, 227.

 8. Miller, Doyle, and Kelleher, ‘“For Love and Liberty”’, 55.

 9. Hotten-Somers, ‘Relinquishing and Reclaiming Independence’, 230–1.

10. Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget, 11–13.

11. Walter, Outsiders Inside, 54.

12. Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget, 67

13. Walter, Outsiders Inside, 56.

14. Miller, Doyle, and Kelleher, ‘“For Love and Liberty”’, 58.

15. Brennan, ‘The Bride’, 153.

16. Diner, Erin's Daughters in America, xii–xiv.

17. Brennan, ‘The Bride’, 153.

18. Brennan, ‘The Bride’, 154.

19. Brennan, ‘The Bride’, 156.

20. Brennan, ‘The Bride’, 157.

21. Brennan, ‘The Bride’, 155.

22. Letter from Maeve Brennan to Howard Moss (n.d.), item 8.

23. Brennan, ‘The Bride’, 157.

24. Brennan, ‘The Bride’, 158.

25. Joyce, ‘Eveline’, 34.

26. Joyce, ‘A Little Cloud’, 80.

27. Brennan, ‘The Bride’, 154.

28. Bourke, Homesick at The New Yorker, 182.

29. Walter, Outsiders Inside, 61.

30. Walter, Outsiders Inside, 64.

31. Murphy, ‘Bridget and Biddy’, 152.

32. Diner, Erin's Daughters in America, 86.

33. Diner, Erin's Daughters in America, xii–xiv.

34. Murphy, ‘Bridget and Biddy’, 154.

35. Murphy, ‘Bridget and Biddy’, 170.

36. O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night, 13.

37. O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night, 27.

38. O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night, 41.

39. Fanning, The Irish Voice in America, 4.

40. Brennan, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, 3.

41. Brennan, ‘The View from the Kitchen’

42. Brennan, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, 5.

43. Brennan, ‘The View from the Kitchen’

44. Brennan, ‘The Servants’ Dance', 115.

45. Brennan, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, 10.

46. Brennan, ‘The Servants’ Dance, 112.

47. Brennan, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, 7.

48. Brennan, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, 8.

49. Brennan, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, 12.

50. Brennan, ‘The Divine Fireplace’, 95.

51. Brennan, ‘The Servants' Dance’, 131.

52. Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget, 131.

53. Brennan, ‘The Servants’ Dance', 149.

54. Brennan, ‘The Anachronism’, 18.

55. Brennan, ‘The Anachronism’

56. Brennan, ‘The Anachronism’, 16.

57. Brennan, ‘The Anachronism’, 25.

58. Brennan, ‘The Anachronism’, 26.

59. Brennan, ‘The Anachronism’, 28.

60. Brennan, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, 15.

61. Brennan, ‘The Anachronism’, 38.

62. Brennan, ‘Pledges at the White House’, 1.

63. Brennan, ‘Pledges at the White House’, 2.

64. Brennan, ‘Pledges at the White House’, 3.

65. Bourke, Homesick at The New Yorker, 195.

66. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique.

67. Bourke, 183.

68. Letter from Howard Moss to Maeve Brennan (n.d.), item 5.

69. Brennan, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, 13.

70. Letter from Maeve Brennan to Howard Moss (n.d.), item 3.

71. Letter from Maeve Brennan to Howard Moss (n.d.), item 25.

72. Bourke, Homesick at The New Yorker, 3.

73. Bourke, Homesick at The New Yorker, 139.

74. Hammill, Sophistication, 161.

75. Hammill, Sophistication, 201.

76. Bourke, Homesick at The New Yorker, 165.

77. Joyce, A Portrait, 269.

78. Bourke, Homesick at The New Yorker, 242.

79. Shawn, Postcard to Maeve Brennan, 1967.

80. Cheever, Letter to William Maxwell, 22 October 1959.

81. Hawthorne, ‘A Traveller in Residence’, 31.

82. Bourke, Homesick at The New Yorker, 160.

83. Bissinger, The Luminous Years, 38.

84. Vidal, Introduction, 11.

85. Murphy, ‘Bridget and Biddy’, 152–3.