Profanity as Intimacy

I. Vulgarity as a Password, Not a Symptom

A common assumption in both popular and critical reading is that profanity in fiction signals a breakdown — of composure, of civility, of relationship. In these stories, however, profanity often appears among people who know one another well, while its absence can signal distance or caution. This essay follows that pattern as a recurring feature of voice rather than assuming that every instance carries the same meaning.

One useful statement of this pattern comes from Nonna herself, correcting Molly’s directness with a borrowed line of poetry rather than objecting to profanity as such: “She had spoken with me several times about perceptions and how important it was for me to foster interpersonal skills. She said that my directness was admirable, but others might perceive it as rudeness.”¹ Nonna does not seem to object to bluntness itself — she is, after all, frequently profane — but cautions against using that register with people who do not know Molly well. The distinction guiding this essay is therefore tentative: profanity among family can be affectionate, while profanity aimed at strangers can create a social risk that Nonna coaches her granddaughter to manage.

II. Nonna’s Profanity as a Love Language

Nonna’s cursing is inseparable from her tenderness throughout the story cycle, frequently occurring in the very same sentence as an endearment, so that the two registers reinforce rather than contradict each other. Describing her relationship with Mr. Scarfone, she tells Molly, without embarrassment or hesitation, “Oh, he’s just a good fuck,” and when Molly reacts with shock, Nonna “whacked me playfully with the bag of fruit and Italian bread she had brought,” a gesture of physical affection delivered in the same breath as the vulgarity.² The scene repeats, nearly verbatim, later in the volume, which is itself significant: Mulhern does not treat this joke as a single comic beat but as a stable feature of how Nonna and Molly relate to each other, worth restating because it is characteristic rather than exceptional.²

The pattern holds even at Nonna’s most protective and most frightened. Fleeing Lady Jane’s parlor after the “Angel of Death” prophecy, Nonna’s parting words are pure profanity — “Ffangul’!” — and Molly, absorbing her grandmother’s register in the moment of greatest anxiety, silently mouths “Fuck you” back at the healer.³ The grandmother and granddaughter share a private linguistic register in this scene precisely because they are frightened together; the profanity is the sound their intimacy makes under pressure, not a breakdown of the relationship but a demonstration of how completely aligned the two of them are in that moment.

III. Nana’s Restraint as the System’s Negative Space

“A Bath” supplies the essay’s most important control case, because Nana is markedly less profane than Nonna, and the essay argues this is not a difference in the two grandmothers’ capacity for intimacy but a difference in what kind of intimacy each scene requires. Nana’s one moment of registered vulgarity arrives exactly where the story’s emotional stakes are highest, when she learns her daughter has been hit: she does not curse at the man who did it, or curse in anger at all; instead, her profanity is reserved for the earlier, lesser offense of her son’s absence and his wife’s falseness — “Darlene’s a phony through and through. Even her body is fake. I know those breasts aren’t real”⁴ — leaving her response to the actual disclosure of violence to occur in a register of plain tenderness rather than profanity: “You’re not that horrible word, Gracie. You’re opinionated and strong.”⁴

This distinction matters to the essay’s argument: in these stories, profanity often accompanies casual, comic, everyday intimacy (Nonna’s register with Molly, Nana’s register describing her daughter-in-law) but may be withheld at moments of grave disclosure, in favor of plainer diction. Billy’s single profanity in the story — “You fucked him, didn’t you?”, asked of his mother about the father he has never known — earns him an immediate slap, the story’s clearest instance of profanity producing rupture rather than intimacy.⁴ Rather than proving a rule, the episode complicates the pattern: Billy directs a familiar register at his mother’s trauma as an accusation, not as solidarity, and the exchange has not developed the shared comic context found in Nonna and Molly’s conversations about Mr. Scarfone or Lady Jane.

IV. A Register Reserved for Love

Taken together, the two grandmothers suggest a recurring pattern: profanity in these stories is not simply a marker of class, education, or moral looseness, and it is more than comic relief, though it can produce comedy. It often accompanies relationships able to absorb it, and it may be withheld or challenged when a character reaches for it before trust is established or when a subject is too raw for its casualness. Nonna curses often and warmly; Nana curses more rarely; Billy curses once, in an ill-timed question, and is slapped for it. Across these cases, vulgarity can help a reader notice shifts in intimacy and distance without fixing the meaning of every exchange in advance.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays The Grammar of Interruption Domestic Violence and Silence