We Were the Mulvaneys Social Concerns

We Were the Mulvaneys Social Concerns

With the tide We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates places the emphasis of her novel on how the family creates itself within the environment of a socially mobile and often violent twentieth-century America. Michael Mulvaney, Sr., the disowned son of an Irish steelworker from Pittsburgh, and Corinne Hausmann, a farm girl from upstate New York, have married and settled on picture-perfect High Point Farm in Mount Ephraim, New York. Here they have been successfully raising their family of four, integrating their life on the farm with their life in a town that has recognized Michael's success in the business community by inviting him to join the local country club. Michael has "reimagined himself as a small-town American businessman who owned property, had money and influence, was 'known' and 'liked' and 'respected' in his community.

He'd been a loner in his late adolescence, and was now a 'family...
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