We Were the Mulvaneys

At the St. Valentine’s prom in 1976, Marianne is 17-years old, “still very young, and young-looking; with a fair, easily marred skin, no freckles like her mom; deep-set and intelligent pebbly-blue eyes; dark curly hair that snapped and shone when briskly brushed” (30). Her naivete stems from living a sheltered life as the only daughter in the Mulvaney clan, but also from her deeply rooted religious feeling, which she has inherited from her mother. She possesses a gentle disposition. In school, she is popular, a cheerleader, although not as academically gifted as her closest brother, Patrick. Up to the moment of her rape, Marianne lives a charmed life.

A young man from a rich family, Zachary, changes that in an instant, seducing the already inebriated Marianne with flattery, and then coercing her through threats. The rape traumatizes Marianne, so that she starts losing her grip on reality. At the thought that Zachary has invaded “her body [that] was her own, her private self” (72) because she has let him do it, and especially at the idea that her parents will find out about it, something breaks in Marianne, and she feels like there is “a gouged-out hole in the very space of consciousness” (81). This leads her to connect her ordeal with that of The Pilgrim and The Penitent, and from then on, she continues to live her life accordingly. She never questions Corinne and Michael’s decision to remove her from the family, because she herself feels she no longer deserves a place in it, not before she completes her pilgrimage of shame and redemption.

During the next 12 years, Marianne moves from place to place, in a daze of ecstatic pain and mental blankness. However, once she arrives at the Stump Creek Hill Animal Shelter & Hospital, she feels at home, together with other injured, abandoned, old, or sick animals. She grows to understand, love, and admire the owner and veterinarian, Whit West, who manages to break through her isolation and hurt, which symbolically coincides with her mother calling her back to visit her dying father. Her pilgrimage over, Marianne moves on and starts a family of her own, having expunged the trauma of her ordeal through self-inflicted suffering and willingly accepted exile.  

Patrick, the second Mulvaney child, is “the self-declared loner of the family” (16). Nicknamed Pinch in his childhood, when he was a “sweet-shy short-tempered” (29) boy, Patrick is academically the most advanced of the Mulvaney children. With an IQ of 151, he is intelligent and perceptive, and he despises the idea of school as a popularity contest, while also eschewing sports and other group activities. At the age of 12, he loses most of the sight in his left eye when a frightened horse stamps on him, which additionally alienates him from his peers. However, by 17, he has earned a prestigious scholarship to attend Cornell University, and his path in life seems clearly delineated.

When Patrick picks up Marianne after her prom, he is too self-involved to notice the change in her, and he is hurt when she refuses to talk to him. This selfish obliviousness will come to haunt him in later years, as he realizes he has betrayed his sister by not being there for her. As opposed to other members of his family, Patrick is rational and logical in his thinking, an “American teenager who just wanted things to make sense” (63), and he cannot conveniently forget the truth of his sister’s exile and that the whole family has tacitly agreed to it. This is the reason he welcomes going to college, to a place where he can be anonymous, not a Mulvaney at all, because he cannot stand the hypocrisy of his parents.

After Marianne’s visit to Cornell when he witnesses the profound change in her firsthand, Patrick’s guilt transforms into an obsessive sense of duty to redress the wrong done to her, weighted down as it is by the truth of his father and older brother’s inactivity. He experiences an existential crisis, through which his personality shifts away from the family-shaped quiet, academic façade of normality and into acceptance of his own separateness from most ordinary people. Ironically, through his violent act of executing revenge upon Zach, Patrick liberates himself from the burden of his old self, the self that the Mulvaney family lovingly built for him. He leaves his old life, free to search out his destiny. In that sense, his return to the family at the end of the novel, as a profoundly changed man, “with hard tight compact arm- and shoulder-muscles, ropey-muscled legs gleaming fuzzily bronze, his hair sun-bleached and shaggy to his shoulders” (441) and full of altruistic purpose, is the introduction of the real Patrick Mulvaney. 

Michael John Mulvaney Sr. comes from Pittsburgh, born into an Irish family, and he has five brothers and three sisters. His father worked in a steel mill and was an alcoholic, abusive towards his wife and his children, where he “slyly cultivated a game of pitting Michael and his brothers against one another” (31). Michael carries the trauma of growing up unloved and having to “earn” the approval of his father by competing with his brother into his adult life. At age 18, Michael stands up to his father, and “his father retaliated by cutting Michael out of his life permanently: he never spoke to him again, not even on the phone” (31). Despite this experience, or perhaps because of it, Michael will commit the same crime against his daughter Marianne in a potent yet terrible narrative parallelism.

Corinne is the governing force to the good in Michael’s life. However, Corinne could not pray away Michael’s deep sense of low self-esteem, which has over the years transmuted into snobbish pride and his need for approval from the society to which he has always fantasized of belonging. After Marianne’s rape, his fragile ego cannot withstand the trauma of what has happened, and Michael cannot come his daughter’s aid; he remains frozen in the shock of what the shame means for him. His most precious child becomes a reminder of his shattered dreams, a constant source of irritation and rage at the injustice life has brought him. He worsens the situation by losing all sense of proportion. Rejecting Corinne’s guidance, he begins to burn all of his carefully built bridges, ruining himself and his family.

Even though Corinne makes the executive decision to remove Marianne from their lives, this happens because of Michael’s weakness and hurt pride. He banishes his blameless daughter because he cannot stand what she represents: the reality of his fragility. Regardless, Michael does not have the strength of character to recover from the loss of his daughter as well as from his perceived loss of social standing. He spirals quickly into alcoholism and reckless behavior, losing his business and the High Point Farm in the process. Finally, his obsessive desire to destroy leads him to abandon Corinne as well, aware that she is the only anchor in his life, thereby sentencing himself to a life of dire poverty, alcoholic stupor, and an undignified and lonely death. Ironically, his death allows the remaining members of the Mulvaney family to reunite, which proves how much of a destructive force Michael has become. However, by the end of the novel, the family members choose to remember Michael as a hard but loving father, rather than the empty shell of a man he tragically became.