The Parthian Legacy: Irish Catholicism and Remaking Identity in Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy

Abstract

The Parthian LegacyIrish Catholicism and Remaking Identity in Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy Vera R. Foley (bio) Despite its foundation in a romance plot that pits a highly particularized version of Irish Catholic heritage against a more generically Protestant version of the American Dream, Willa Cather’s 1926 novella My Mortal Enemy does not often figure in scholarly explorations of ethnic heritage in America. Like many of Cather’s works, My Mortal Enemy presents ethnic heritage as enriching and even exalting the experience of white American citizens. In this sense she writes in the same tradition as Randolph S. Bourne, who described in 1916 the power and value of what he calls “trans-nationality” (13)1—the belief that the United States is strengthened when the descendants of white immigrants refuse cultural assimilation in favor of retaining “cultural practices” from their families’ European countries of origin (Waters 115). The story of Myra Driscoll Henshawe—who goes from proud Irish American heiress to aspiring New York society wife to lonely, impoverished Catholic enthusiast during the course of her lifetime—embodies the dangers Cather sees for women who eschew ethnic ties in favor of American homogeneity. Based on her own experience growing up on the Nebraska frontier, Cather associated white ethnic particularity with “the splendid story of the pioneers,” in what she calls a “fluid and flexible” society defined by a patchwork of different cultures and heritages working together to tame the landscape and forge their fortunes (“Nebraska” 238). Throughout her career Cather presents retaining specific ethnic roots as symptomatic of strength and integrity; this is the model that her earlier immigrant heroines Alexandra [End Page 51] Bergson of O Pioneers! (1913) and Ántonia Shimerda of My Ántonia (1918) drew upon to become beloved matriarchs in their families and communities. Myra’s Irish American story is thus doubly valuable because Cather offers little insight elsewhere into her specific perspective on Irish immigrants or Irish Americans in the increasingly diverse early twentieth century, although her interest in Catholicism generally is well documented.2 Myra represents a departure from Cather’s usual brand of rural frontier nostalgia—on two levels. First, Cather gives her Irish American heroine, Myra, a birthplace in the United States rather than Ireland. Second, she situates Myra in a series of urban spaces, from the fictional setting of Parthia, Illinois, to New York City, to an unnamed Pacific coast metropolis. As a result Myra must negotiate different strategies for retaining an Irish heritage that meets her needs as an American woman; her definition of what it means to enact her Irish identity remains in flux, morphing to reflect her particular circumstances. The Second Boat: Family Origins and the “blood tie” of Parthia, Illinois Unlike Cather’s Great Plains heroines, with their lived experiences in places like Sweden and Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), Myra is doubly removed from what sociologists would call her “ancestral place of origin” (Waters 86). She is not just removed generationally from Ireland but also from the large, established Irish American enclaves in the Northeast and, to a growing extent, the Midwest. Myra’s great-uncle John Driscoll, the original Irish immigrant in her family, would have been one of what David Emmons calls the “two-boat Irish”3: arrivals who did not stop their voyage west once they crossed the Atlantic but continued on into the American heartland (1). Like many such arrivals who emigrated during the famine, Driscoll found himself in a landscape far “more urban and industrial than” that of his Irish compatriots who remained in Boston and New York (Emmons 2). This does not mean, however, that the Midwest did not offer Irish and blended Catholic communities into which he could have integrated, had that been his wish. As Regina Donlon notes, “During the second half of the nineteenth century, the number of Catholics in the United States increased from [End Page 52] 663,000 to 3,103,000,” with established parishes and worshipers in St. Louis and Fort Wayne (149). Far from knitting himself into an existing ethnic or religious community, however, “John Driscoll made his fortune employing contract labour in the Missouri swamps,” exploiting the toil of men...