We Were the Mulvaneys

The Pilgrim is a print of an “antiquated painting by an unknown artist” (80) Marianne has found in her mother’s shop. The painting portrays a young woman, who is “barefoot and seemed to have made her way across a rocky terrain […] a shawl modestly covering her head,” kneeling in front of “a likeness of Jesus’ face in the sky” (80). The painting bears a quote from the New Testament, Matthew 16:25: “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” The pilgrim, in religious terms, is a person who embarks upon a difficult journey of life in the secular world, moving symbolically from despair and strife to a state of grace.

Both of these concepts symbolize Marianne’s ordeal. Even before her rape, because of her strong religious faith, she has identified with the image of the girl in the painting, delivering herself unto Christ. After the event that will change her and her life forever, she becomes The Pilgrim, as her exile from the family symbolizes the entry into the unsheltered, unsafe profane world, and her roaming represents a pilgrim’s journey to God. As she lies in the bathtub, trying to wash off her sin, ”The Pilgrim rose, took shape. It hovered suspended until finally it faded into numbness and oblivion, a gouged-out hole in the very space of consciousness” (81).

Part 3 of the novel bears the same name, “The Pilgrim,” as does Chapter 36. The third section of the book deals with Marianne’s journey as she embarks on her “rag-quilt” life of a pilgrim searching for a return to the holy state (symbolized in her awaiting the call from her parents to ask her back home and into the family). In Chapter 36, Oates describes a journey within a journey for Marianne, as she learns of her grandmother’s death and decides to attend the funeral against her mother’s wishes. She observes the funeral rites from afar, hidden behind rocks, similar to the girl in the picture, understanding that her sacrificial journey is not over. As the embodiment of the symbol of the pilgrim, Marianne never questions her parents’ decisions, or her own passage through the world outside, and by the end of the novel, she has arrived back into the nook of the family, having delivered herself from sin through her pilgrimage.  

The Huntsman is a German woodcut Patrick admires as a child. Significantly, “the huntsman and his prey drew the eye like a narrative about to explode into action, not just a static picture to hang on a wall” (237), just as Patrick is restlessly poised to commit an act of revenge for his sister’s rape. The hunter symbolizes Patrick’s gestating desire for revenge, his need to go “on the hunt” for the man who has gone unpunished by his father and older brother as well as the wider Mt. Ephraim society.

Both Part 2 and Chapter 25 bear the same name, “The Huntsman”; however, the chapter deals with the detailed description of the woodcut, into which Judd the narrator inscribes meanings that signify Patrick’s intent and determination. The section covers Patrick’s journey from a self-involved boy to a young man obsessed with the need to redress a wrong committed against his closest sibling, symbolically contained in the hunting image in which “the artist surely intended [the hunter and its prey] to be twins of a kind” (238). This reflects Patrick’s fantasy of coming up against a monster of an opponent, which in reality proves to be just that, a fantasy. As opposed to the image, forever frozen in place in the moment of the hunt, once Patrick has spent his avenging energy, he moves away and forward from being the huntsman.  

The motif of family is central to the world of the novel. The Mulvaney family members are known for their harmonious relationships, their peaceful life at High Point Farm, and Michael’s successful roofing business. At the start of the novel, every member of the family seems to lead a charmed existence, which is a source of envy among their peers in the small town of Mt. Ephraim. Oates depicts the Mulvaneys as the all-American, picture-perfect clan, with four model children: “head heart hands health” (131), as Corinne calls it, invoking the motto of a network of youth organizations dedicated to young people reaching their full potential. (Incidentally, each of the children’s characters corresponds to a part of the credo: Mike Jr.—hands; Patrick—head; Marianne—heart; and Judd—health.) However, after Marianne’s rape, the family seems to implode and shatter upon itself, which shows how fragile the concept of an “ideal” family really is. Oates charts the way each member falls apart in his or her way after they fail to support Marianne through her ordeal, thus revealing a fatal flaw in their unity: It rests upon each member’s conditional acceptability, achieved through living up to the family’s standards.

The past tense of the title We Were the Mulvaneys indicates that the family’s ideal existence will disintegrate once the family faces the harsh reality of the wider world (ironically, the “wider” world is just the small town of Mt. Ephraim). However, all members of the Mulvaney family, except Michael, whose pride is too immovable to change, will find a way to form new alliances and new families, on fundamentally different grounds, and the Mulvaney name will acquire a new meaning, not caught up in the isolating fantasy of ideal unity but rooted in the realities of life. 

The motif of trauma works on several levels within the novel. Marianne suffers the physical trauma of rape, after which she experiences post-traumatic stress disorder that sends her spinning into a personal maelstrom of self-doubt, self-effacement, and all-pervasive sense of guilt (all traumatic on their own). The Mulvaney family members each experience trauma in the aftermath of the rape: Michael’s ideal family life, which defines him and is a source of immense pride, explodes through his inability to face the facts and come to terms with them, leading him to a life of alcoholism and poverty. Corinne, deeply religious, experiences an existential crisis that causes her to disavow her own daughter, and she spends the following years trying to play-act a happy family, fully committed to maintaining the fantasy. The three remaining siblings experience a cruel awakening concerning their idealized parents, and each of the brothers carry the trauma over into his adult life, causing Mike Jr. to join the marines, Patrick to avenge his sister and spend years roaming the country, and Judd to leave the family at age 17 to build a life of his own.