[In the following essay, Booth discusses Gordon's artistic development and the major themes in her novels. According to Booth, “The ‘motion’ in Mary Gordon's fiction, her novels in particular, has gone from a focus on defining a spiritually adult self, to defining a female self, to defining a parenting, creating self.”]

“I guess as I began writing more and more and I began confronting in my writing a lot of the issues which really stemmed from my childhood, I began to see that I had a kind of religious hunger and that I had shaped many experiences in religious terms.”

Mary Gordon in Once A Catholic by Peter Occhiogrosso

The poet Galway Kinnell has observed, “Everyone knows that human existence is incomplete. Among those who are especially troubled by this are those who turn to writing ＼which］ is a way of trying to understand the incompleteness.” Mary Gordon's work, more obviously than that of many writers, has evolved as a kind of investigation of this incompleteness. Her three novels—Final Payments （1978）, The Company of Women （1980）, Men and Angels （1985）—and book of short stories—Temporary Shelter （1986）—portray interior journeys of seeking. Religious issues have been the impetus for these travels, but not their end, for it is in the compelling nature of human affection and the artist's need to render it that the author finds resolution.

The “motion” in Mary Gordon's writings, her novels in particular, has gone from a focus on defining a spiritually adult self, to defining a female self, to defining a parenting, creating self. The process is an accretive one, like experience, so that the heroine of Gordon's latest novel, Men and Angels, is coping with a residue of issues faced by her predecessors in Final Payments and The Company of Women. By the same process, the author poses increasingly complex problems. Men and Angels thus involves an intricate calculus, one that will yield the answer to an old question: “What am I called to do?”—and its peculiarly twentieth-century corollary: “What are the balances to be struck?” If less satisfying as a novel than the earlier books, Men and Angels is also more ambitious in the scope of the questions it raises.

We see this development in the outpouring of themes that run like rivers through Gordon's novels and stories: the character of love; the sources of moral authority; the duty of parents; and the meaning （and demands） of sacrifice, intellectuality, passion or sensuality, loss, and creativity. The author launches these themes in terms of contrasts, contrasts between male and female, corporal and spiritual, Catholic and Protestant. Her characters often define themselves not by what they are, but by what they are not. Social class is less examined than alluded to, but is also a discernible motif.

The author's Roman Catholic background colors the terms of her arguments and accounts for the courts in which they are debated; that background also explains the seriousness and care with which her arguments are presented. Her heroines hone their own ethics—but in response to an accepted, orthodox mandate—to find a moral solution to their dilemmas. Their eventual understanding of charity, for example, may differ from the one they inherited （though the inheritance always affects how the subject is framed）, but they cannot escape constructing a meaning that can be acted on in their own lives.

Mary Gordon says that she is interested in the novel “as a form of high gossip” and that “novels should be about people” （Diana Cooper-Clark, “An Interview with Mary Gordon,” Commonweal, May 9, 1980）. Her work, rooted in quotidian topics that carry great weight, from food to clothing, from phone calls to bus rides, reflects that bias. The stories abound in details supplied with the precision implied by a philosophical rootedness in the world and in things （e.g., a child in “Billy” is described as “‘spoiled’ … a terrible word, suggesting meat gone iridescent”）, but nothing is at a trivial level. Although Mary Gordon's writing reflects her belief that the function of the novel is to give pleasure, perhaps the overriding note of the texts is her earnestness of purpose. In the short story, “Now I Am Married,” forty-year-old Gillian, a former schoolteacher, notes “Now I've gone back to writing. I don't know if I'm any good. I don't suppose it matters, really. It's a serious thing, and that's important.” Over the decade of her writing, the questions which Gordon heroines confront have changed, but they all obey an urgent imperative to find satisfactory answers.

Mary Gordon's first novel, Final Payments, considers the overwhelming issue of establishing a self, distinct from one's parents, and, in particular, forming an independent moral conscience. The story follows thirty-year-old Isabel Moore in the months after her father's death, starting with his funeral. As in James Agee's A Death in the Family, all of the events are infused with the central fact of a father's dying. Unlike Agee's work, Final Payments is not elegiac in tone but forward-looking, a novel describing the aftermath of an event, not the prelude to it. Having been her father's sole caretaker for eleven years （and motherless since infancy）, Isabel is suddenly free—compelled, really—to decide what she will do, where she will live, and, of crucial importance, who she will be.

Isabel searches desperately for an understanding of charity or love, of the way to relate to her fellow human beings, whom she must now engage. The fundamental choice she perceives （albeit an artificially stark one） is between the claims of the body and those of the spirit. Thus, she can indulge her nascent affections by lavishing them on those she genuinely loves, or she can follow what she recalls as the church's exhortation to a higher level of love through self-sacrifice. In the story, Isabel must choose between continuing an affair with Hugh, the （married） man she loves, and moving in with Margaret, who kept house for the family in the years following Mrs. Moore's death, until Isabel came of age and forced the housekeeper out. While the whole of Isabel's caring is for Hugh, she feels compelled—for a while, at any rate—to choose Margaret, to obey what she sees as the stronger moral imperative, that of expiating her father's death by renouncing sensuality and joy in her own life.

Perhaps a novelist raised as a Protestant would have selected a different set of options from these. I think it's also likely that many Catholic novelists would pose the issues differently. After all, in choosing to stay with Margaret, Isabel would have been obeying the letter of the law but not its spirit, hardly a sanctified choice—but this reading gets too tangled. Ultimately, of course, the decision is understood as a broader one （Margaret can be offered a less drastic sacrifice）, and this broadening forms the crux of Isabel's growth. Isabel considers the higher calling—to love others “as God loves His creatures, impartially, … without wanting anything in return”—and rejects it in favor of love realized “in the body.” In doing so, she acknowledges her need to be loved for herself alone, in her own body, and in that way accepts herself as human. Isabel essentially refuses austere sanctity in favor of flawed life. This spiritual maturation allows her to cast off at once the moral authority of an anonymous church （“the faceless priests who blessed my father's coffin”） and her guilt over her father's death （“my father had died, but I had not killed him”）. In turn, she accepts the role of a person liable to experience pain and loss, because she is willing to risk loving someone whose love she also desires in return.

Final Payments illustrates Mary Gordon's skill at characterizing dilemmas by the use of contrast. In this case, the distinction between the repulsive Margaret and the emerging Isabel sharpens the choice to be made, for Margaret carries the multiple burdens of superstitious beliefs, frumpy appearance, obsolete taste, and a whining demeanor. The descriptions of her are some of the best in the book:

You can imagine how unbearable the brown patches on her skin—they were not moles but large, irregular in shape, like the beginning of a cancer—were to a child, or even worse, to an adolescent. … All her clothes seemed damp, as if her body were giving off a tropical discharge. … Her feet were flat as a flash, except where the bunions developed like small crops of winter onions. The sound of her slopping around the house in her slippers is the sound of my nightmares. … How I hated her method of waking me. … It was Margaret, always, knocking on my door like some rodent trapped behind a wall.

In finally rejecting the old woman's claims, Isabel embraces instead a world of youth, passion, and culture. Although Margaret had nominally been the Moore family housekeeper, it is clear that she had also served psychologically as Isabel's mother, and it was only by rebelling against her mores, attitudes, and even appearance that Isabel could grow up. Unlike Joseph Moore, who had been a professor, Margaret is not an intellectual; her unforgivable sin in the young woman's eyes is to speak disparagingly of Jane Eyre. From the first chapter, Isabel affirms this dichotomy: “Margaret's unattractiveness and stupidity made the shape of my life possible. I always knew who I was; I was not Margaret.”

Isabel's rejection of Margaret is complete, down to the last details （diet, haircut）, and her consequent growth is into an acceptance of herself as a passionate, intellectual, and, in the end, loving individual. Yet, because Margaret is also impoverished and dull, Isabel is also renouncing any identification with the social class she represents. Like the slovenly Mrs. Delehanty （“The Murderer Guest”） or slatternly Mrs. Lynch （“The Neighborhood”）, Margaret has a self so repulsive as to be grounds alone for rejection. At the same time, since her Catholicism is also of a lesser order （novenas and rosary beads rather than Latin missals and medieval paintings）, refusing her is in effect a repudiation of a vulgar approach to religion.

If the heroine is not Margaret, who is she? Gender aside, she is clearly not identical with either of the two “fathers” in the story—the memory of Isabel's own father or the reality of his replacement, Father Mulcahy—who are intellectuals with passionate flaws. In fact, in shirking an alliance with Margaret, Isabel also discards the notions of the authoritarian spirituality she has imbibed from her father and the paternal priest.

The answer is more fully developed by Felicitas Taylor, the central character in The Company of Women. More rambling a story than Final Payments, this novel is also richer in its panoply of characters. The story takes place from 1963 through 1977. Its title invites two interpretations. In one sense, it means group, a reference to the band of five women who revolve like satellites （or disciples） around their energetic, dogmatic leader, Father Cyprian Leonard. One of the women has a daughter （but no husband, who died six months after the child was born）, and it is the simultaneous development of this child from apprentice devotee to independent woman and of the priest from unassailable guru to admitted fellow traveler that forms the novel's plot. In a second sense, the title connotes companionship, an allusion to the mutual friendship which exists among the women. The two meanings converge in the corps itself, which is more than the sum of its members, who create, as the novel's epigraph suggests, a “common world between them.”

In a 1981 interview, Mary Gordon described one of her themes in this novel as “the relationship between the male spiritual authority and the female” （Le Anne Schrieber, “A Talk with Mary Gordon,” New York Times Book Review, February 15, 1981）. On the one hand, there is Father Cyprian, the passionate absolutist, prescribing a view of the world; on the other, there are his middle-aged acolytes, forming among themselves a kind of composite woman. Like Mrs. Hastings in “The Magician's Wife,” the women absorb a feeling of privilege simply by association with the magicmaker.

Though none of the women themselves is remarkable, the collective weight of their personalities compels. Felicitas's attention: “When all of them came together, they were something.” The women are not driven by an ideal, like Cyprian, but rather by their needs, which are ordinary. Their habits vary, from a coarse earthiness, to a penchant for fine goods, to a love of literature, but the sights of all five are fixed on things of the world and they offer models of everyday nurturance. Felicitas is drawn to defining herself in relation to this corporate matriarchy as distinct from the priest, her relentless spiritual mentor, who, ignoring her sex, had singled the girl out to inherit his mantle.

The portraits of the women are wonderfully drawn, neither effusive nor restrained. In their complicated individuality they are sisters to the women in several of Mary Gordon's short stories, “Now I Am Married,” “Delia,” “Agnes,” or “Eileen.” By contrast, Cyprian appears a creature of his tenets and philosophy, and his attraction comes from the authority of the dogma he preaches and its mesmerizing exhortations to heed a bygone tradition. The priest's words resemble those of the American followers of the conservative Archbishop Lefebvre, once described by Mary Gordon as opposing all the elements of modernism, from atheism and communism to liberalism, socialism, and democracy （“More Catholic Than the Pope; Archbishop Lefebvre and a Romance of the One True Church,” Harper's, July 1978）.

Through her exposure to a decadent academic-hippie “group” that parodies the Cyprian discipleship, Felicitas grows skeptical of the priest's position and the women's role in perpetuating it. Subsequently, by deciding to bear the child she unwittingly conceives （and whose father is never known）, Felicitas signals her decision to join the women, to accept her role as one of them. Ironically, it is by thwarting Cyprian's plans for her as a surrogate son—someone different from the women because intellectual, unsentimental, and independent—that Felicitas gains the moral authority she needs to confront the priest as an equal. She comes to recognize his limitations. “He had three ideas,” she concludes, “the authority of the church, the corruption induced by original sin, and the wickedness of large-scale government. All the rest is instinct and effusion.” This recognition in turn frees her to adopt Cyprian's intensity of conviction, his “compelling sense of the ideal” （New York Times Book Review, February 15, 1981）, and adapt it for her own imaginative use.

It's hard not to compare Felicitas's perceptions about Cyprian with a feminist perspective on the Catholic church: Here is the elderly priest, whose word is taken without question by his pious handmaidens, dictating their very life choices, even as he derides their “Womanish” religion. The shakeup （such as it is） comes about almost by biological accident—Cyprian is confronted with the fact of Felicitas's pregnancy, and the recognition forces him to accept her femininity. Felicitas's child, who turns out to be a girl （Linda）, ultimately augments the female ranks, and in the end Cyprian finds himself “surrounded by the muffling, consoling flesh of women … dragged … down to the middling terrain of their conception of the world, half blood instinct, half the impulse of the womb.” Instead of adhering to his old ideal of “objective of impersonal” love, he will now be “pulled down by the irresistible gravity of affection and regard.”

With Cyprian's capitulation comes a change in the women, too, who must face the end to one kind of ordering in their lives—that provided by a heretofore unassailable leader. They offer varying observations on this development, which can also be read as a spectrum of comments on changes in the church during the sixties and seventies. Felicitas's mother, the practical Charlotte, for example, is unfazed by what has happened, remarking. “You could look at us and say, There they are, five old women waiting for an old man to die … ＼but］ we're a lot better off than a lot of people.” Elizabeth, who spends her days reading poetry, sees the end （and Cyprian's eventual death） “in terms of the breakup of the neighborhood” and prays, “Let things stay as they are.” Clare sees herself as the end of the line, the last of a dying race” and mourns the end of reverence for, “formal rules.” While Cyprian feels defeated by the ascendancy of the female principle and its destruction of this moral ideal, the older women are nostalgic but more or less at peace over it. Felicitas admits to a defiant agnosticism but is philosophical, while her daughter, Linda, is jubilant at the new order. “I am running toward them. They are standing under the apple tree. My mother picks me up and holds me in her arms. My grandmother is laughing. My mother lifts me up into the leaves. We are not dying.”

In The Company of Women Mary Gordon has developed a heroine who secures a female self by acknowledging the strengths and cadences of women and by accepting the fleshly, emotional side of human life. Just as Isabel needed to reject the role of martyr in order to take part in human events, so Felicitas had to refuse that of priest （the isolated, cerebral being） in order to embrace life as a woman. However, the new woman is not permitted one indulgence granted the old—that of dependence on a man. Instead, her maternity brings into relief her responsibility to protect others. “All the people I love are frailer than I,” says Felicitas. “There is no person … for whom I do not have to watch out, who can take physical charge even for a little while. And if the physical charge is mine, the moral charge must be mine also.”

Men and Angels again examines the theme of woman's spiritual role. Laura Post, a self-anointed prophet who preaches the perils of the flesh, is absorbed into the household of art historian Anne Foster, who hires her as a babysitter for her two children. Anne is enraptured with motherhood. The surface struggle is between Laura's and Anne's views of what matters in life: obedience to the spirit （articulated by Laura） or attention to the needs of the flesh （embodied in Anne's children and in her own sexual desires）. But in fact a third viewpoint intrudes, that of the neglected, talented, early-twentieth-century painter, Caroline Watson. Anne is hired to write the catalogue notes for an exhibit of Caroline's work, and the duty to one's art or creative calling becomes one of the elements she must reconcile.

It is a particularly poignant issue for a woman, as Mary Gordon herself must realize, because of the conflicting demands posed by children and creative work, such as writing, “Caroline was a woman and had a child and had created art: because the three could be connected in some grammar, it was as though the pressure to do so were one of logic.” Caroline had succeeded in creating great works of art, an achievement Anne admires. At the same time, she faults Caroline for neglecting her son, whom she more or less abandoned and who died young. The development that must occur in Anne, then, is to build a life that tends to multiple dimensions: the needs of her husband and children; the demands of her own body and soul; and the exigencies of her art, the work she is completing on Caroline Watson.

The needs of her husband and particularly her children seem primary. Anne enjoys a “primitive” exultation in her children's bodies, “flesh and flesh, bone, blood connection,” and believes her primary charge is “to keep her children safe.” In this outlook, she resembles other Gordon characters, such as the wife and mother in “Safe,” who says of her husband and baby, “It must be the shape of my life to keep them at least from the danger I could bring them.” Yet after the violent upheaval of Laura's suicide, Anne recognizes that even if she expends all of her energies to protect her children, she will not succeed, for they will necessarily be exposed to events without her, some of them dangerous and all of them carrying risk. In her turn, although she is a mother, she takes part in activities that do not involve her children, realizing that a mother's love is “not all of life.”

Another dimension that engages the author's imagination in Men and Angels is the purely spiritual, personified in the ill-fated Laura. The babysitter moves into the Foster household with the intention of teaching the family “that the flesh was nothing; a mother and her children, all that famous love, was nothing more than flesh to flesh, would drown them all, would keep them from the Spirit.” As for marriage, “the idea of it disgusted her: choosing a partner for the urges of the flesh, in filth creating children to be hurt and caused to suffer.” As the personification of a radical attitude—that the only reality worth pursuing is a spiritual one—Laura is understandable, but as a character she comes across as too thin and bloodless to compel attention. Because she commands so little sympathy, it is hard to feel the attraction of the spiritual perspective that she is intended to represent. Nevertheless, Laura's presence is ubiquitous （every other chapter of the twelve-chapter novel is told from her point of view） and we are forced to notice her, most graphically by her self-slaughter at the novel's conclusion.

Laura is like a young Margaret （of Final Payments）, if Margaret were inclined to proselytize. Like Margaret, she lacks love but cannot even command pity, for she exerts no effort to make herself lovable. As a result, it is difficult to feel Anne's guilt and torment at not having loved Laura （or, by implication, having attended enough to her own spiritual needs）, for even in life the babysitter seems ghostlike, an anemic imitation of a person. Anne's failure to love Laura, which precipitates the girl's suicide, is even less understandable as a failure of charity than Isabel's disdain of Margaret, for Laura is not only single-minded, but also mute and her hopes, verbalized silently, are seldom shared.

The most credible part of Anne's struggle is in the realm of her work, which she finds absorbing in a different way from her relationships with her family or Laura. Unlike the subjects of Anne's earlier research, Caroline Watson takes hold of the historian's feelings so that in writing about her Anne comes to see her task as that of “build＼ing］ a house for the woman she loved.” This realization moves catalogue-writing from the category of job to that of vocation, one in which Anne will try to discover the soul of her subject and thus enlighten herself. The product must not only be faithful to Keats's dicta—true and beautiful—but faithful to Anne's feelings, an expression of love. The process of writing promises at the same time to increase Anne's understanding of how to reconcile her own creative needs with her responsibilities to her husband and children. Some distance from them would be required, some cost in closeness. “The truth of the matter was that for a woman to have accomplished something, she had to get out of the way of her own body,” Anne observes. “This was the trick people wanted to know about. Did she pull it off? … One wanted to believe that the price was not impossible, … that there were fathers, husbands, babies, beautifully flourishing beside the beautiful work. For there so rarely were.”

In her essay, “The Fate of Women of Genius” （written as an introduction to a special edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and published in the New York Times Book Review, September 13, 1981）, Mary Gordon wrote:

Woolf's sense of the writer's vocation is religious in its intensity. The clarity of heart and spirit that she attributes to writers like Shakespeare and Jane Austen, who have expressed their genius “whole and entire,” demands a radical lack of self and ego that might be required of a saint. Yet the writer cannot, for Woolf, work to be rid of the self.

The qualities that are called for in a writer, Gordon notes in the same essay, require an absence of personal grievance. She lists these qualities as “＼s］erenity, selflessness, freedom from rage ＼words which］ recall the mystics' counsels,” but which in Virginia Woolf's case （and in Mary Gordon's） include an appreciation for the body and its pleasures. The artist—perhaps especially the woman artist—remains an outsider. She is like the narrator, Nora, in several of Mary Gordon's short stories, one of whose legs is shorter than the other and who feels herself odd and conspicuous as a result. Disclosure and consequent shame remain a constant possibility. However, in observing the damaged Agnes in a story of the same name, Nora realizes that, in spite of her handicap, “it might be possible to live a life of passion.” What is called for in the artist （or writer） is not to remain aloof from passion, but to capture it in her art.

In the end, Anne recognizes too that her work will require a singularity of vision. She must achieve this, not by abdicating her role as wife and mother （nor by forswearing sensual pleasure） but by undertaking her writing task with a concentration of purpose. If Isabel Moore's fulfillment came through rejecting the role of victim, and Felicitas Taylor's in spurning that of priest, Anne Foster succeeds by accepting a calling akin to that of prophet, not in a religious sense （like Laura）, but as someone proclaiming life, in its terrible as well as shining dimensions. She acknowledges in the end her resolve to begin, to:

take her mind, sharpen it, make it single … ＼to］ take the facts that she had learned, the words that there were for them. Join them together. … She would write … ＼h］ard words, formed words, white stones that she could hold and separate. And then, refreshed, she could dive back down to the dense underworld, to her children, and say, “This is life. What shall we make of it?”

From Isabel Moore to Felicitas Taylor and Anne Foster, the central figures in Mary Gordon's novels reflect a kind of early imprinting with the form and habit of asking religious questions, so that they can never quiet them later, but only dull their sound or attempt to ignore it. She presents people who have been permanently marked with a spiritual dimension. In the vividness of her characters and in the seriousness of their questionings, Mary Gordon has constructed an involving set of works, one that describes the intricacies of a moral life, in terms not exclusive to women but especially compelling for them. Finally, her books reflect Virginia Woolf's exhortation to the woman writer, “Above all, you must illumine your own soul.”