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 4, Chapter 41-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Hard Reckoning”
Chapter 41 Summary: “The White Horse”
Michael’s life has changed drastically, culminating in his leaving the unbearably faithful Corinne and moving to Rochester, but feeling “they were gone. The Mulvaneys who bore his name, not just the kids but the woman, too” (381). He lives a confused life, drinking heavily, unable to hold a job working for other men. He slowly loses his health, as Corinne keeps worrying about him from afar. Michael believes his children have betrayed him.
In August 1986, he has dinner with Mike, who is shocked to see his father so decrepit. Mike Jr. tells him he is about to be married, but the words flow in and out of Michael’s ravaged mind. He gets into an argument with Mike Jr. about the marines, in response to Mike’s dogged respect for military order. Michael also has a vague idea that he once owned and rode a white horse, even though Mike Jr. cannot remember. At the end of the night, Mike Jr. gives him some money and half-carries him to his shabby and dirty room. Michael experiences a vision of riding the white horse, followed by his children on their horses, while Corinne looks on and waves happily.
Chapter 42 Summary: “Stump Creek Hill”
Marianne leaves the poet Penelope Hagström secretly during the night, after she offers her to become associate director of the Hagström Foundation while remaining her personal assistant: “The problem was, Marianne Mulvaney was becoming too important there, somehow” (400). The woman began to have more and more expectations from Marianne, which disturbed the young woman, who was not ready to commit. She randomly travels to Sykesville, where she rents a cabin and begins to work at the town market.
Her cat Muffin begins to display signs of illness, and Marianne takes him to the Stump Creek Hill Animal Shelter & Hospital, a few miles out of town. There, she meets Dr. Whittaker West, a curt but kind veterinarian who helps cure Muffin from kidney failure. The unusual zoo holds “sick, injured, abandoned “ (412) exotic rescue animals, and those too old to be of use to farmers, and Marianne is so enchanted by the place that she decides to stay, without ever going back to Sykesville. She joins the shelter staff, doing clerical and manual work, and helping with the animals. Whit has founded the place with an inheritance and because of a generous legacy from a woman whose cats he treated. For the next four years, Marianne never leaves the shelter. She grows to admire and love Whit, who also shows signs of interest in her, but in a jocular, friendly manner, which does not disturb Marianne.
In October 1988, Corinne calls Marianne saying, “Honey! Your father wants to see you! How quickly can you get here?” (398), and Marianne drives off to Rochester in a hurry, “after twelve years of exile” (399).
Chapter 43 Summary: “Intensive Care”
After driving 300 miles, Marianne arrives to the hospital, barely recognizing Corinne and Judd after so much time. Michael has had surgery to remove a cancerous lung, and he is unconscious. Marianne and Judd go for a walk, and she asks him anxiously, “I guess he’s forgiven me? I mean—he loves me again, he’s not ashamed of me?” (428), and Judd assures her he wanted to see her because he has said her name, but it is not clear whether he said Marianne or Marian (one of his sisters). Marianne decides to believe he said her name.
Chapter 44 Summary: “Gone”
On an October morning, the family (except for Patrick) drives beyond High Point Farm, where they scatter “the earthly remains of Michael John Mulvaney, Sr. to the wind” (430). As the last of the ashes drifts away, Corinne says she can hear “Dad” laughing.
Epilogue Summary: “Reunion: Fourth of July, 1993”
Corinne invites Judd to a Fourth of July reunion. She now lives with a friend, Sable Mills, on a small farm where they have opened an antique shop together. Corinne and Sable have a comfortable friendship, and Judd wonders if Sable knows about their family. Judd arrives to find many guests there; Mike’s wife Vicky, pregnant with their third child, and Marianne and Whit with their two children. His sister excitedly tells him Patrick has come. Judd observes a group playing softball, including Mike, Corinne, and Sable. He barely recognizes Patrick. He watches the game, thinking how much Mike Jr. resembles their father, until Patrick spots him and embraces him.
Whit toasts Corinne, Sable, and the Mulvaneys. Judd looks on, thinking, “How did we get to this?—how do we deserve this?” (446). To his astonishment, there are cakes to commemorate his upcoming 30th birthday, and Whit takes a photo of the group wishing “to prove that you Mulvaneys all exist in the same time frame” (446). Corinne toasts her youngest son, saying, “It just seems so amazing and wonderful and, well, a miracle, but I guess it’s just ordinary life, how we all keep going, isn’t it?” (446). In the evening, Judd walks out on his own: “twenty feet away I saw a doe and two fawns at the brook, drinking” (452). Patrick approaches him, and they tentatively speak of past events, and then “there was a moment of silence between us […]. As if we’d been like this, at such ease with each other, for all of the fourteen years we’d lost” (454). Patrick shows Judd his tent, and they laugh like “when we were boys, when we were the Mulvaneys” (454).
Part 4, Chapter 41-Epilogue Analysis
Chapter 41 delineates Michael’s last years in a tragic spiral towards undignified, solitary death, regardless of the presence of members of his family around his hospital bed. Reality has taken Michael by surprise, and the once abandoned boy in him resurfaces; not even Corinne, once his savior, can help him anymore. After he abandons his wife and moves to Yewville, he gradually sinks further into irrevocable depression and alcoholism. During his final encounter with Mike Jr., on whose resemblance to his father Judd remarks several times, we see just how terribly changed Michael is. A ravaged man, he is now the antithesis of Mike, a marine sergeant. The father and the son have never been more distant, which their desultory conversation only emphasizes. Michael’s muddled recollections of a white horse he believes he used to ride confuses Mike, who has no imaginative capacity to understand his father’s desperate vision as a symbol of his dreamed-of life of freedom, prosperity, and social acceptance, at times within reach but never fully realized.
Having suffered a traumatic break with his original family, Michael would probably never learn to be fully happy with his life, but the tragic truth of his character is that he cannot hold on to his happiness, and he finds a way of rejecting his near-perfect Mulvaney family out of mortal fear of being rejected by them. This is why, in Chapter 43, on his deathbed, Michael conflates his two families and calls out for either his closest sister Marian or his daughter Marianne, because in the moment of his final reckoning he needs them both equally. Oates allows “Judd the narrator” to leave Michael’s utterance vague, thus doing a favor both for his sister and for his dying father.
Chapter 42 follows the latter half of Marianne’s pilgrimage, as after her escape from poet Penelope Hagström (she, too, made the mistake of openly praising Marianne and her abilities) she reaches Stump Creek Hill (with its symbolic name), and the Shelter for injured and abandoned animals. Connecting to the symbol of the doe (Chapter 2 and Epilogue), Marianne’s choice to stay on at the shelter implies her symbolic identification with the animals, abandoned but “survivors.” Having arrived there to seek treatment for Muffin the cat, Marianne spends the night on the roof of one of the sheds; “the Stump Creek Hill zoo was like home. Each of the animals had not only a name but a story” (412). (The second sentence is significant as it recalls the opening chapter and Judd’s statement that “my earliest memories were of animals with personalities stronger than my own” (7), as if the story is coming full circle.)
Marianne will spend the next four years never leaving the shelter. It becomes her home and her place of work, and Whit West, the vet, cures Marianne as he cures the animals: he “was just too—real. And the trouble with such people was, they seemed always, simply by singling you out for attention, to make you real, too” (419). However, as opposed to Abelove and Miss Hagström, Whit knows how to treat skittish animals, and he approaches Marianne in the right manner. This is how he manages to turn The Pilgrim back into Marianne, and it comes as no surprise that she falls in love with him. Whit West is the only one who has treated Marianne as her complex nature dictates.
The Epilogue takes place in 1993, which is the year in which Judd writes his account of the Mulvaney family. Corinne, thanks to her indomitable faith in God and people, has managed to start her life anew, and the return of all of her children to her new home represents a final symbolic forgiveness for her earlier actions. There was never a question of whether Corinne was doing things from a place of love: The issue has always been for whom her love has been the strongest. With Michael gone, she too is free from the constraints of her damningly faithful love and welcomes the children she has lost along the way back into the fold.
All the children (including “Judd the narrator”) accept their mother with her foibles and regard her sympathetically, treating her “like some fragile about-to-shatter old thing” (439), almost as if the events of the past 17 years never happened. The reunion of the Mulvaney family reveals the profound spirit of generosity and forgiveness that runs in the family. Patrick has joined the family after a long absence. As he shares with Judd his journey after his hunt of Zachary, we understand that for each member of the Mulvaney clan, the power to forgive has proven stronger than the desire for revenge. This is why the reunion in the Epilogue reads as a new beginning for the Mulvaneys.
Related Titles
By Joyce Carol Oates
