 |
              |
 We Were the MulvaneysJoyce Carol Oates (1997) The title itself is telling. We Were the Mulvaneys charts the life of a prominent rural family before and after the rape of their daughter, powerfully evoking all that was but will not be again after the violence has been done to her. Oates's heartbreaking 26th novel, set in rural New York state in 1976, is elegy itself, reminding us of a lost time in literal and metaphorical terms. The Mulvaneys are solid and respected, confident in their love of one another and the security that this love provides. If they are of a type - the family perhaps too perfect to be believed, but too decent to dislike for it - it is a type that is deeply familiar to us. They have been, in the words of the mother, Corinne Mulvaney, "privileged by God", and before sexual violence intrudes on this tableau, that privilege defines their interactions with the world. The book's narrator, Judd, the youngest Mulvaney son, looks up to his older brothers and they - along with their parents - dote on their sister Marianne, a popular cheerleader who is 17 when she is raped by a classmate after a prom. Guilty and shamed by his reaction to his daughter's rape, Mike Sr. can barely stand to look at his own daughter, who leaves home to live with a distant relative. Grieving and inconsolable, he rages at his daughter's rapist, along with that rapist's family, as they predictably and protectively wrap themselves around their son, who is never brought to justice. The community, true to time and small town place, aligns itself with the rapist, instead of the victim. Not surprisingly, the Mulvaney family begins to disintegrate, as Mike loses his business and mother, sons and, most heartbreakingly, Marianne wrestle with life in the wake of sexual violence. More than a decade later, this broken family comes together again, and if it is true that they are no longer "The Mulvaneys" - at least not in the way that their long-ago familial identity implies - they have become more complex and deeply realized individuals who find solace in a simple truth: that this family and its daughter have endured. If the attitudes captured in this book's pages at times seem long ago and far away, we are perhaps not paying close enough attention to the victim-blaming that occurs even today in small towns (and large cities) nationwide. We Were The Mulvaneys is fiction grounded all too deeply in modern-day fact. |