We Were the Mulvaneys

In Chapter 14, Dr. Oakley confirms to Corinne the truth of Marianne’s rape. However, Oates structures the chapter around Michael’s reaction, signaling he is the one member of the family who will have the hardest time dealing with it. Upon learning of the rape, Corinne’s mind immediately goes into protector mode, not only of her child but of her husband. Corinne knows her husband well; she understands the gruff exterior hides emotional fragility and that the effects of his father’s abandonment have played a large part in his psychological development: “when there was disturbing family news […] it fell to Corinne the mother to inform Michael the father” (132).

Corinne chooses to wait for Michael in her shop rather than at their house, which shows her desire to shield the family home from the intrusion of the terrible news, and, almost as if he knows to avoid it, Michael is late in returning to High Point Farm. Once he has learned the truth, Michael makes himself the center of attention; “he might be having a heart attack or a stroke (his blood pressure was high—oh why hadn’t she remembered!)” (136). It is precisely in this moment that Marianne slips into the background of her own trauma. (In truth, this is partly due to her own retreat, as she instinctively understands that the Mulvaney family will have to expunge her experience to maintain the pretense of community.) In that sense, Judd’s ruminations in Chapter 15 on the ephemerality of life and losing loved ones act as a foreshadowing accompaniment to Marianne’s process of becoming The Pilgrim and The Penitent, ostracized and removed from the core of the life she knew.

Michael’s behavior in Chapter 16 seems at first like an unthinking, culturally nurtured reaction of a male animal protecting its young. However, it becomes more of an enactment of what a father would do than an expression of Michael’s innermost need to avenge the despoiling of his only daughter, which we see in his first thought as he rushes to the Lundts’ house: “But Mort Lundt is a friend of mine” (139). Although we can interpret this sentence as incredulity that Zach Lundt would do such a thing, the fact that Michael centers his thought on Mort rather than Mort’s son indicates that even in the heat of the moment, he processes the news in relation to himself, and what this event means for his social aspiration. Furthermore, Michael’s angry charge soon dissolves into “the men […] talking disjointedly together, in the Lundts’ foyer” (140). Only then does Michael manage to partly verbalize the crux of the matter: “Your goddamned son, he hurt my daughter, my little girl, last Saturday night. Hurt her!—abused her!” (140). Even in the white heat of anger, Michael cannot pronounce the word “rape,” and the word and what it signifies will soon become the unspeakable overbearing presence within the whole Mulvaney family.

Penance in religion represents acts of self-punishment (symbolic or physical) to atone for sins committed. For Marianne, her strong religious convictions and sense of religious morality dictate that she should accept her ordeal in all its confusion. Chapter 17, thus, depicts the process through which Marianne elevates her trauma into a symbolic atonement through suffering, feeling alone and isolated from the rest of the world in her ecstatic pain both inside and outside. Oates offers a poignant objective correlative (evoking an emotion through a symbol that indicatively represents it) for Marianne’s experience in the rodent’s heart she finds while roaming the house at night (the rodent symbolizing her tarnished chastity). Her act of flushing the heart down the toilet captures the symbolic process Marianne is undergoing, as she discards her own self as sacrificial offering. This is why, in Chapter 19, Marianne does not even register the boys’ attempt to bully her by branding her a whore, because Marianne is already performing self-flagellation and does not need or require outside contribution.

Concurrently with Marianne’s process of self-effacement, we witness Michael’s descent into unbearable, emasculating fear of helplessness and redundancy. First, we witness his inability to adapt to the new reality within the family core, as Michael shows himself incapable of focusing on Marianne’s trauma without turning it as a mirror onto himself, which causes him to detach from the rest of the household. His feelings of inadequacy, harking back to his own trauma of family rejection, resurface and, fatally, he repeats the process. Thus, Chapter 18 acquires an ironic undertone, as Judd attempts to find out from his brothers what has happened, only to be told to “ask dad,” because none of the siblings understand yet that their father cannot help.

In Chapter 20, Oates continues to chart Michael’s downfall through depicting the second level of his detachment: He begins to drink again, and his behavior becomes erratic as the “upstanding” citizens of Mt. Ephraim turn on him and his family’s shame, relishing the Mulvaneys’ new, blemished reputation. This rejection crushes Michael precisely because it represents the loss of a lifelong dream to belong to a group that would bestow a badge of success and acceptability upon him. He regresses into his youthful unpredictability, symbolized by his return to his old, hard-drinking and hard-partying friends, and the combined weight of Marianne’s rape and the “betrayal” of his Mt. Ephraim friends break his fragile ego, built as it is upon a fantasy of realizing the ever-elusive American Dream. 

Seen from young Corinne’s perspective, Wolf’s Head Lake, as its name suggests, is a treacherous place. Once before she has had “to struggle for her husband’s very soul” (168) in that place, and now he retreats there again, like a wounded animal. In this symbolic place of danger, Michael and Corinne reach the decision that will forever change them and destroy their family in the process: They too must sacrifice Marianne for the sake of their sense of self. Michael is too weak to perform the final break with Marianne on his own; Corinne thus makes the executive decision: She sacrifices her daughter for her husband. The choice she makes seems instinctive; she is a woman who believes in providence and predetermination. Thus, she might feel there is no other choice to make but to remove Marianne from the family to keep the family’s heart alive.