The Confessor-Grandmother Across the Corpus

I. One Figure, Several Names

Every grandmother in James Mulhern’s fiction performs a recognizably similar function long before she performs a similar personality: she is the household’s final court of appeal, the person to whom a child or grandchild brings a secret too dangerous to bring to a parent. This essay treats three of these women — Nana in “A Bath,” the unnamed grandmother of “Assumptions” (referred to as Helen by the narrator’s grandfather and aunt), and Nonna across the Molly Bonamici story cycle (“Useless Things,” “Mia Bambina,” “Myra Bocca”) — not as three discrete characters who happen to share a role, but as variations on a single composite archetype the corpus keeps rebuilding under different names. The essay elsewhere on this site devoted to unlicensed confession, “The Confessor Archetype and the Ethics of Listening,” has already established that these women hear confession without institutional warrant.¹ This essay asks a related but distinct question: once a grandmother has heard a confession, what does she do with the power it gives her, and does the answer differ meaningfully across her various incarnations?

The claim requires some care, because the three women are, on the surface, quite different: Nana is Irish-Catholic, working-class, and gentle in her bluntness; Helen is Irish-Catholic, more genteel, and complicit in a family’s casual cruelty toward a disfigured neighbor; Nonna is Italian-American, connected to organized crime through her friend Mr. Scarfone, and, by the end of her story cycle, an active accomplice to murder. What unites them is not temperament but structural position: each is the family member with the least formal authority (none of them is a wage-earner, a professional, or a head of household in any legal sense) and the most actual authority (each one’s word ends every argument in her family, and each one is turned to first when something has gone wrong).

II. Nana: Authority Earned Through Disclosure

Nana’s authority in “A Bath” is built, almost entirely, on her willingness to disclose her own vulnerability before demanding her daughter’s. When Grace finally admits she has been hit by a man, Nana does not respond with the shock or judgment a reader might expect from a woman of her generation; she responds by immediately equalizing the confession with one of her own: “A few times. When he was drunk. Men were different back then.”² The essay on domestic violence and silence elsewhere on this site treats this moment for its function within a single story’s formal restraint; here the point is comparative: Nana’s specific technique — earning the right to hear a confession by offering one first — is a version of moral authority built on reciprocity rather than hierarchy, and it recurs, in modified form, in both of the other grandmothers this essay considers.

Crucially, Nana’s authority never curdles into hazard within the story’s frame. She tells Billy, “Promise me you’ll never lie to your grandmother again,”² extracting a vow of honesty rather than a vow of silence, which is the opposite of what Nonna, in a later section of this essay, will ask of Molly. Nana represents something like the composite archetype’s unfallen state: total authority, deployed only toward disclosure and comfort, never toward complicity in harm.

III. Helen: Authority That Chooses Not to Intervene

The grandmother of “Assumptions” represents a harder case, because her authority is real but her use of it is passive rather than actively harmful. Watching her neighbor Peggy Fleming’s decline into alcoholism and self-neglect, Helen’s characteristic response is sympathy without action: “Well, the poor thing!”³ she says, in a family card game where Peggy’s ruined life is treated as evening entertainment. Later, when Peggy is found by police “wandering the streets of a nearby square, bruised and beaten-looking,”³ it is Helen’s house Peggy is brought to, confirming that Helen functions, within the neighborhood’s actual social structure, as exactly the kind of ultimate authority this essay is describing — the place trouble gets brought when there is nowhere else for it to go.

What Helen does with that authority is the essay’s hinge case: she absorbs Peggy into her household’s care (bringing her on the Feast of the Assumption outing that gives the story its climax) without ever addressing, confronting, or attempting to resolve the underlying alcoholism and grief that produced Peggy’s decline. This is neither the unqualified moral authority of Nana nor the active moral hazard Nonna will represent; it is authority exercised as containment rather than either healing or harm, and it is the version of the archetype that this essay argues is easiest to overlook precisely because it produces no dramatic consequence within its own story — Peggy’s fate is simply absorbed into the family’s ongoing life, cared for but never repaired.

IV. Nonna: Authority as Active Hazard

Nonna is where the archetype’s two faces — moral authority and moral hazard — become fully and finally indistinguishable, because the same qualities that make her Molly’s most reliable protector are precisely the qualities that make her a willing accomplice to murder. Nonna’s protective ferocity is established early and played for comedy: cutting in line at the faith healer’s parlor, she lies without hesitation, “explaining to them that I had leukemia ‘very bad’ and the doctors gave me three months at most… She’s my granddaughter!”⁴ The comic register never fully disappears even at the graduation party, when Mr. Scarfone jokes, “No one calls Nonna’s granddaughter an Angel of Death,” referring back to Lady Jane’s prophecy, and Nonna answers, laughing, “If anyone is an Angel of Death, it’s Jimmy here”⁵ — a joke that the reader, by this point in the volume, can no longer fully enjoy, since Molly has by then already confessed her own murder to the reader if not yet to Nonna.

The archetype’s authority and hazard finally collapse into the same act when Molly asks Nonna to help poison Ashley’s cookies, and Nonna agrees with the same casual warmth she has shown throughout: “Sure mia bambina. What’s one more ingredient? Not a problem.”⁶ This is the composite archetype’s terminal form: a grandmother whose total, unconditional loyalty to her granddaughter — the very quality that makes Nana’s and Helen’s versions of the archetype recognizable as loving — becomes, in Nonna, the mechanism of a murder. Nonna does not stop being a loving grandmother in this scene; she is, if anything, performing love exactly as she always has, which is the essay’s central and most uncomfortable claim.

V. Authority and Hazard as a Single Quality

Read in sequence — Nana’s reciprocal honesty, Helen’s passive containment, Nonna’s active complicity — the three grandmothers do not represent three different moral types so much as three points on a single spectrum defined by one unvarying trait: absolute, unconditional loyalty to the family member who has come to them in trouble. What varies is not the grandmother’s character but the nature of the trouble she is asked to absorb, and the corpus’s deepest argument about this archetype may be that the difference between a protective grandmother and a dangerous one is not a difference in the grandmother at all. It is a difference in what her grandchild asks of her, and how far her love is willing to follow the request. Nana is asked only to receive an honest disclosure and offers one in return; Helen is asked, implicitly, only to keep watching over a woman she cannot save; Nonna is asked to become an accessory to homicide, and does so in the same voice, and with the same casual tenderness, she has used throughout to call her granddaughter mia bambina. The grandmother archetype in Mulhern’s fiction is not, this essay concludes, a study in contrasting characters. It is a single, stable, deeply loving moral force, observed at different depths of the exact same water.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays The Confessor Archetype Domestic Violence and Silence