Making It New: 1900–1945 459sphere”; and what it reveals, fundamentally, is a lack of progress, thanks to the
damaging norms of masculine aggression and feminine passivity. Despite their
optimism about the possibilities of modern life, these Vassar women find that they
depend on men for economic and social survival much as their mothers did. Among
McCarthy’s other novels are Birds of America (1971), which explores both the
contemporary gap between the generations and the cultural collision between
Europe and America, and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), which confronts the
moral and social issue of terrorism. But at least as important as her fiction is her
political commentary, in works like Vietnam (1967), Hanoi (1968), and The Mask
of State: Watergate Portrait (1974), her travel books with their accompanying
social comment, such as Venice Observed (1956), her critical work and journalism
collected in Occasional Prose (1985) and other volumes, and her autobiographical
writing. Of the autobiographical work, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) is
the most significant and characteristic. After she was orphaned at the age of 6,
McCarthy was sent to Catholic schools by relatives; and Memories describes how, at
convent school, she felt herself to be “an outsider.” “I did not fit into the convent
pattern,” she recalls and, in order to give the appearance at least of fitting in, she was
forced to pretend. “I was a walking mass of lies,” she recalls, “pretending to be a
Catholic and going to confession while really I had lost my faith,” and accepting a
nickname given to her by the other girls, “Cye McCarthy,” when she really did not
know what the name meant and hated it. “I loathed myself,” she remembers,
when “I had to identify myself ” as “Cye”; “and yet I subscribed to the name totally,
making myself over into a sort of hearty to go with it – the kind of girl I hated.” Finally,
however, she resisted. Leaving convent school for “public high school,” McCarthy
gave up her nickname, along with her Catholicism and, with them both, her “false
personality.” “I got my own name back,” McCarthy informs the reader; she “sloughed
off ” the mask she had been forced to wear, the spurious title she had been forced to
accept, and the pretence she had been forced to live. And she became herself. It is the
perfect illustration in miniature of the prevailing theme in McCarthy’s work, and
the one she summed up quite simply when she said that it is necessary “to choose the
self you want.”
Meridel Le Sueur is less well known than McCarthy, Hellman, or even Smith.
Nevertheless, she is an important radical voice in American writing, speaking in
particular for the social and mythic possibilities of women. The work that Le Sueur
wrote and began to publish during the 1920s explored subject matter and established
themes that she has pursued throughout her work. Central to these explorations in
the early writing is the figure of a “raw green girl,” lonely, curious, seeking. Sometimes
this figure is connected, as in a story called “Persephone” (1927), to a mythic
formulation of experience: the separation from the mother, the plunge into the
darkness of the underground, the woman (or the earth) as wounded, invaded, and
raped. In time, although not in the early work, the further, more positive implica-
tions of the myth of Persephone and her mother Demeter would be explored too:
the rebirth from the darkness and the return to the mother and the world of women.
In the later work, the young and wandering Persephone, orphaned and “lost to theGGray_c04.indd 459ray_c 04 .indd 459 8 8/1/2011 7:54:01 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 01 AM