The Rage of the Dying Animal: Mary Gordon’s The Other Side

Abstract

On August 14, 1985, eighty-eight-year-old Vincent MacNamara reluctantly returns from a nursing home to the house he has shared with his wife Ellen, who is demented and dying at ninety, to keep his promise to her that he would let her die at home. Mary Gordon’s The Other Side tells the story of the events leading up to this single day in the life of a family. On such a day as this, the whole family is expected to assemble; on such a day, all the flaws in this Irish Catholic version of the “ ‘house of Atreus’ “1 are exposed. The MacNamara family’s history is narrated in a series of flashbacks from multiple viewpoints, explaining how each of the MacNamaras came to be what they are on this day. In his essay on recent New York Irish writing, Charles Fanning describes Gordon as portraying Irishness in this novel as “a genetic defect and a cultural curse, an unqualified burden to be escaped and overcome.” 2 The negativity to which Fanning is responding is surely present in The Other Side, but it is mainly as part of the characterization of Ellen MacNamara; and it is counterbalanced by the characterization of Vincent, whose position with respect to his own past and to that of the Irish people is more subtle. While Ellen and Vincent are in many ways typical of their emigrant generation, Ellen diverges from type in her unremitting anger. Whether as a young girl considering emigration or as a dying old woman, Ellen rages against experiences shared by many of her peers. Both Ellen and Vincent participate, and with some success, in the great historical events in the joint history of Ireland and America in their lifetime; but while Vincent derives satisfaction from his own role in these, Ellen cannot.