Splintered Selves: Writing Singleness and Widowhood in the Fiction of Mary Lavin and Janet McNeill

Single women and widows predominate in the short stories of Mary Lavin and the novels of Janet McNeill. Lavin and McNeill endow these figures with an unusual centrality and deploy their contrarian views of society and thwarted existences to explore unwieldy female lives that are frequently occluded and discounted and to experiment with the form of the naturalist short story and the realist novel. The stereotypical associations of the spinster and widow come under scrutiny in these narratives and are in part dismantled. These awkward protagonists may be seen as belonging to the overlooked and indeterminate sexual category of the celibate but also reveal affinities with an unacknowledged history of queerness. They also are connected to a muted but ongoing history of feminist struggle. Yet, such radical aspects aside, they exist ultimately in a marginal domain that resist easy identification and hover uneasily between the traditional, the regressive, and the modern.