62 pages • 2 hours read
Joyce Carol OatesWe Were the Mulvaneys
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Family Pictures”
Chapter 1 Summary: “Storybook House”
The narrator, Judson Andrew Mulvaney, known as Judd, and in his family as Dimple, Pretty Boy, Baby, and Ranger, is 30 years old in 1993, and works as an editor-in-chief at Chautauqua Falls Journal in the town of Mt. Ephraim, New York. He is the youngest of four children of Michael and Corinne Mulvaney, who from 1955 to 1980 owned High Point Farm, a local landmark. His siblings are Michael Junior, Patrick, and Marianne.
As the youngest child, Judd always had the feeling that he missed the best in family history: “the Mulvaneys were a family in which […] everything that was precious was stored in memory and everyone had a history” (5). Judd implies that something happened to change the family and how the town regarded them. Judd reveals that although everyone considers him “wonderfully civilized” (6), he has been involved in two felonies and was almost an accessory to murder, which his brother Patrick might have committed. He thinks of his writing as family album and not a document, hoping, as a “neutral observer” to “set down what is truth” (14) by telling the story of his family, using facts and conjecture, “imagined but not invented” (14).
During his childhood, the family was outgoing and active and the farm always busy. His father kept 23 acres of the original 300, and leased 15 to neighbors, while he owned and operated Mulvaney Roofing in the town, and Corinne bought “antiques,” used things she liked and pretended to want to sell. The family kept many animals, especially horses, cats, and dogs. His family was like “the sprawling, overgrown and somewhat jungly farm itself, blurred at the edges as in a dream” (8). The house was huge and sprawling, once a safe house in the Underground Railroad: “A storybook house, you’re thinking, yes? Must be, storybook people live there” (12).
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Doe”
Judd is 11 years old when deer wake him at 3:25 a.m., and he follows them barefoot to the pasture pond. He finds the deer hypnotizing and sneaks out into the moonlit night. At the pond, he finds a single doe: “by moonlight the doe was drained of color and on the pond’s surface light moved in agitated ripples from where she drank” (21). As he observes, he hears the approach of dogs and fantasizes about shooting them for hunting the doe. He runs back home in tears, cutting his foot. His oldest brother, Mike, arrives home at the same time, drunk, and admonishes him.
Chapter 3 Summary: “St. Valentine’s 1976”
Something has happened to Marianne (nicknamed Button or Chickadee in the family) that “no one would be able to name” (26), yet even Corinne “failed to hear anything in the child’s voice that might have indicated distress, or worry. Or controlled hysteria” (27). Sunday afternoon after the St. Valentine’s prom at Mt. Ephraim High, Marianne phones from her friend Trisha’s house, where she has spent the night, “sounding perfectly—normal” (27). Corinne has forgotten that Marianne’s date, Austin Weidman, should have brought her home after the party: “Corinne prided herself on never having been a mother who fussed over her children” (27).
Marianne, a devout Christian, has omitted to speak the truth of what transpired. She is young for her age (17) and innocent, and Corinne favors her. She and Michael wanted a large family, especially as Michael, who comes from an Irish family with nine children, quarreled with his father, who renounced him and never allowed the rest of the family to stay in touch.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Ringing the Cowbell”
Ringing the cowbell at the back veranda is the family’s “code for Who’s in the mood for an outing? a nice surprise?” (33). Patrick drives seven miles to pick up Marianne. She’s silent, but he does not register anything unusual for lack of interest, as he sees Marianne “a year behind him in school but light-years distant from him […] in matters of significance” (35). Afterwards he will wonder why she never told him, and his mother would comment, “I thought you and Marianne were so close” (36).
Patrick is very intelligent and has won a scholarship for Cornell. He disapproves of Marianne’s popularity and is afraid she will become the object of desire for boys at school. As he drives home, the car skids on the ice and he almost loses control, and by this time he is “becoming annoyed, hurt by his sister’s silence” (39). Marianne clutches her dress in a garment bag. When she drops it on her way to the house, Patrick hesitates to help her, and she rushes to pick it up herself, with “fear in her eye” (42).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Family Code”
Judd talks about how “many things were coded at High Point Farm” (43). Every member of the family has several nicknames, and choosing which one to use is “a matter of exquisite calibration, tact” (43). The family also used coded speech to tell each other off by ostensibly addressing the family pets. The morning after the prom, Marianne does not attend church, and when Corinne “asks” their canary why, Marianne refuses to play along, stating that keeping a canary in a cage is a sin. This causes Corrine “hurt and indignation” (47), and Judd retrospectively asks Marianne if she was aware that, ”by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?” (47).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Dirty Girl”
When Mike Jr. was a senior in high school, he knew that some of his football team friends ganged up on a girl, Della Rae Duncan, who came from a poor and uneducated family; the football players took her to a cemetery and probably raped her. Mike Jr. protested vaguely but did not do anything. Della Rae’s brother, Dwight David, who died in Vietnam, used to work for Mulvaney Roofing. The news of his death caused another fight between Corinne and Michael about America’s involvement in the war. Mike Jr. was a patriot like his dad, and Patrick and Marianne were “dissidents.”
One day, in school, Marianne, came across Della Rae in the girls’ locker room, looking disheveled and half-dressed. She said a bright hello, in “the very voice, a lilting soprano, of Caucasian privilege” (55), only to have Della Rae stare at her “with undisguised hatred” (56). The teacher, Miss Deltz, commented, “Those people, they cause more trouble…That kind of a girl” (56).
Part 1, Chapters 1-6 Analysis
Oates reveals the unreliability of Judd as a narrator because he is an adult looking back upon events taking place within his family at least 17 years ago. Judd is the youngest child, and his memories come from a “communal” storage of family memories, shared as stories. He even writes in Chapter 1 that he will write about events he has not experienced. Judd’s first-person narration often fades into what appears to be omniscient third-person narration of events Judd could not have witnessed, and emotional states he could not have understood or known.
In Chapters 3 and 4, Oates introduces the crucial event of the novel: Marianne’s rape after the St. Valentine’s prom. Oates uses elliptical language to describe this event: allusions, indications, momentary glimpses, and innuendos, as readers never get the chance to witness the act itself, only catching echoes of it. This authorial choice is logical in terms of the narrator’s position: Judd is a child when the event occurs, he is unaware of most of the goings-on, and as an adult, he is loath to imagine what his sister must have gone through. Furthermore, Marianne’s own recollection of the event is fragmented and chaotic: To identify with her character, readers must experience the same confusion and lack of clarity, while at the same time feeling a sense of heightened drama and traumatic disorder.
Marianne and Patrick’s bond weakens because of Marianne’s inability to voice her experience and Patrick’s youthful lack of sensitivity. As shown in Chapter 5, Marianne’s failure to either verbalize her trauma or subsume it within herself causes an immediate rift within the family, which has previously seemed invincible. Oates exemplifies this through Marianne’s symbolic breaking of the family code. Judd as the narrator and Oates as the author both imply that the first time Marianne questions the accepted ways of the family (refusing to play along with her mother as she talks to her by addressing the canary), she causes a disproportionate (and irrevocable) reaction as her mother’s voice in reply “was tremulous with hurt and indignation.” The reaction tells Marianne that she has broken the rules, and her place in the family is instantly and cruelly brought into question.
Chapter 6 offers examples of the use of unattributed dialogue as shorthand for a range of experiences and a potent juxtaposition of Della Rae Duncan and Marianne. Oates does not identify the young men who rape Della Rae at the cemetery because their names are insignificant: The patriarchal macho-posturing and casual misogyny is so prevalent in middle-class American society of the 1970s that any single man could stand in for the multitude. Furthermore, the victim, “a dirty girl because her skin was dirty, and her clothes” (49), is not important enough for the people of the town to react to rumors and admit knowledge of what has taken place: “Maybe, in fact, it was better not to know why? You could feel sorry for that person, and generous. You didn’t shrink away in disgust” (50).
In the scene where Marianne sees Della Rae in the locker room, Oates offers a reminder of how brittle sense of entitlement or privilege can be. As Della Rae looks at Marianne with dark, brooding eyes, “Marianne felt her face burn at once, and her heart kicked as if she’d been shot, like a bird in flight, yet like a wounded bird carried forward by sheer momentum” (55). At this point, Marianne is still the popular cheerleader, unstained and unsullied, the daughter of a respected family. Invoking Della Rae’s experience and depicting their meeting, Oates signals the change that awaits Marianne as she falls from precarious grace of a misogynistic society.
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