Chapter Three: Women, Power, and Representation
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
--Yeats, “Leda and the Swan”
Here mythic history—that of the ancient Greeks, that of Helen of Troy and the Trojan War—is set in the context of the all-powerful god Zeus appearing in the form of a swan to rape Helen’s mother Leda. The most intriguing question Yeats raises does not, after all, come to light until the last stanza, where the intricate entwining of power” and “knowledge” is put forward and even questioned. I have already
interpreted the complex male/female hierarchical duality of the poem, the duality of male (divine) rapist and female (human) victim, via a sort of Derridean reading. This reading lays bare a perhaps unintentional mis-representation, by the male, of the
female as “powerful” when after all hers can only be a mythic power, the sort of fantastic (as opposed to real political) power that men project onto woman.
This interrelation of power and knowledge has been famously interpreted by Michel Foucault in his theory of discourse. Foucault advocates that “the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations… [is]….a permanent political task in all social relations” (“The Subject of Power” 223). Foucault argues that power is never a quality merely possessed by an individual or political institute but that it is invariably involved in a network of power-relations governed by
language. Power, according to Foucault, is infinite. Power is so diffuse and nebulous that it permeates almost all aspects of human life; furthermore, it is so closely bound up with knowledge that one can by no means exist without the other. Explicating the genuine attributes of power, Foucault comments that:
Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, it’s “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader 72-73)
In a sense, truth and knowledge are here inflexibly trapped within the web of power, and vice versa. To make possible the actualization of truth, something or someone is destined to be oppressed or silenced under the sway of overpowering “discourse.”30
30 For Foucault, the discourse of any dominant agency governs the production of knowledge
Foucault’s theory mentioned above to a great extent helps shed light on the interpretation of the final stanza in Yeats’ “Leda and Swan.” At the instantaneous moment of sexual intercourse, Leda undeniably is endowed with Zeus’s power as embodied in the act of love-making, whereas she is apparently robbed of the knowledge to know the forthcoming destruction caused by this affair. The question mark at the very end insinuates that the poet himself casts acute doubt on whether she is capable of “puttingon his knowledge with his power.”31 Irish women in Yeats’
own time was never meant to be both powerful and knowledgeable. Leda’s power transmitted from Zeus is doomed to fail in that the given power is destitute of some compulsory prop (mighty episteme, in Foucault’s terms) to perpetuate and consolidate the operation of power.32 Leda’s grip of knowledge is so fragile that nothing, not even the fleeting sexual power from “the brute blood of the air,” is able to render her the vision of “the broken wall,” the burning roof and tower.” This split between power and knowledge on the part of Leda substantiates again the female disempowerment in modern Irish culture.
Foucault’s concept of knowledge/power departs from the norm in asserting the controlling characteristic of knowledge and its concomitant reliance on power.
within it. In his earlier writing like The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault elaborates more on this idea.
31 This relentless severance of power from knowledge smacks of that happening to Sibyl in Greek mythology. In the story Sibyl was once offered by Apollo anything she wanted if she was willing to be his lover. Overjoyed with this grand offering, Sibyl asked for as many years as there were grains in a pile of a sweep, which was then counted to be one thousand. It’s a pity that she should forget to ask for youth simultaneously, leaving her long-lived yet haggard in the long run. This girl, in my opinion, belongs to one of the long list of the demonized female characters in western literature.
32 When referring to Eavan Boland’s poetry against the Irish literary history, Anne-Marie Fyfe emphasizes that the robust feminine images, “warrior queens and saints” are inappropriately turned into such notorious representations as either poor, old-aged women or tender young girls. (191)
Whereas common people may think of knowledge as providing them with power to deal with matters that otherwise cannot be done, Foucault claims that knowledge itself is a power over others and a discipline to define others. Knowledge then becomes not so much a liberation as a mode of surveillance, regulation, and discipline. In
Discipline and Punish Foucault says:
The examination combines the techniques of observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the
examination is highly ritualized. In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the
establishment of truth. At the heart of the procedures of discipline, it manifests the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected. (184-85)
In a nutshell, the exertion of power will be such a systematically “normalizing gaze”
and “surveillance” that one can hardly resist. Coupled with “the ceremony of power,”
“the form of the experiment,” “the deployment of force,” and “the establishment of truth,” power becomes cellular, sophisticated, interdependent, and omnipotent. The entrapment into the intricate web of power plunges one into the doom of
objectification with little hope of return.
Based on Foucault’s theory, this chapter concentrates on Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy, inclusive of The Country Girls, The Lonely Girlor Girl with Green Eyes, and Girls in Their Married Bliss, all of which sanguinely contributes to
scrutinizing this female writer’s portrayal of the position of women in modern Irish society, the repressive nature of their upbringing and the concomitant lack of fulfillment in particular.33 However, with all its adversity, women characters like Caithleen and Baba in these fictions are brave enough to challenge the
male-dominated culture either by ingenuous getaway or by standing up to the injustice imposed on them. My argument is that for women such as Caithleen and Baba,
modern Irish society is structured like a prison, in Foucauldian terms the Panopticon, in which they are constantly circumscribed, interrogated, and even castigated, but, as Foucault suggests, against such patriarchal power exertions there is inevitably a counter force in response from these underprivileged females, though the result might not live up to their great expectations on love and happiness.
O’Brien (1930--) has been a controversial writer in Ireland since the publication of her first book The Country Girls in 1960. Against the secluded, conservative Catholic society, she was vilified critically for her audacious portrayals of the sex lives of women. So inflammatory were her works that many of them were censored in Ireland, including The Country Girls Trilogy and six subsequent works. Disappointed at the ban on her fictions, O’Brien left Ireland and kept writing in London most of the time. The self-exile, however, didn’t stop her from writing for Irish women, especially women from the rural in the western county. When asked why she left her motherland, O’Brien replied: “I left Ireland because my first books were banned. I was frightened;
33 In the biographical introduction to Edna O’Brien, Norton Anthology editor points out the similarity between O’Brien and James Joyce, quoting Frank Tuohy, an Irish novelist as saying that “the world of Nora Barnacle (the Dublin chambermaid who became Joyce’s wife) had to wait for the fiction of Edna O’Brien” (qtd. in Abrams, 2338) The editor goes on to comment as follows: “Growing up under the shadow of violent fathers, both women turned for comfort to the their suffering mothers, and both had their first experience of a world outside the family in the convent school.” (2338).
and the climate of censorship was strangulating. But although you physically leave the country, mentally you bring it with you.”34 These novels concerning the lives and developments of women were characterized by Catholic women’s longing for love and sex, their rage at moral bondage, and the unfavorable biases against rape and abortion in modern Ireland. Such discussions, though at odds with the purified image of women proposed by the Catholic church, realistically mirrors the lives of modern Irish women manipulated in the patriarchal society.
The reflections on Irish women’s images and problems are never absent in O’Brien’s Writing. In Mother Ireland, a semi-autobiographical work, for example, she articulates her close observation of her mother land with precision. At the very
beginning, she reiterates the idea that Ireland is a woman. “Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare” (12). There is nothing new in such a passive image of woman characters when one takes into account characters like Cathleen in Yeats’ plays, Crazy Jane in Yeats’ poems on Crazy Jane and the Bishop, Maurya in Synge’s Riders to the Sea, Nora in The Shadow of the Glen, the mother in Lady Gregory’s The Travelling Man, Mary Cahel and Mary Cushin in Gregory’s The Gaol Gate and so on. These woman characters might come in different forms, but they have one thing in
common—all of them, as symbols of Ireland, are supposed to sacrifice for the family and the country. In the face of such pre-determined bondage, most women choose to succumb to their fate, while some brave enough opt for their own identity and their
34 http://www.lectures.org/obrien.html. The case of O‘Brien smacks of that of James Joyce.
Though both of them are exiled for most of their mature years, with Joyce in Paris and O’Brien in London, their works never move beyond the boisterous yet endearing Ireland. In fact, O‘Brien is so smitten by Joyce’s writing that she even wrote a well-known biography James Joyce for Joyce.
own future. Nora in The Shadow of the Glen, for example, envisages a Romantic vista together with the outsider instead of subjecting to her husband’s long-term infliction in the barren countryside. However, not every woman succeeds in her endeavor. Mary Cahel and Mary Cushin in Gregory’s The Gaol Gate, for instance, are comparatively more susceptible to the sway of patriarchal control, though they do try hard to save Denis Cahel’s life.
Actually, in connection with the underprivileged female figures portrayed in works by Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge, Mother Ireland testifies to the fact that Ireland is by all means a woman and that the woman suffers while their male counterpart is engrossed in drinking. The following excerpt well exhibits such contrasting opposites between men and women in Ireland.
Loneliness, the longing for adventure, the Romantic Catholic Church, or The family tie that is more umbilical than among any other race on earth?
The martyred Irish mother and the raving rollicking Irish father is not
peculiar to the works of exorcized writers but common families throughout the land. (19)
Like what O’Brien did in the following works, The Country Girls Trilogy lay bare the crushing pressure imposed upon modern Irish women, be it from family, church, or nation. Overall, the trilogy tells of the adventures of two girls, Caithleen BradyKateand Bridget BrennanBaba, escaping from their Irish hometown and convent school to Dublin and then London in search of their castle of love. The trials, temptations, and temporary excitement they encounter en route, however, bring home to them the hard-won realization that they are walking on a path of frustration and disillusionment. Foucault’s idea of disciplinary power functions well in the analysis of
the trilogy, not least because the masculine power operations penetrate through all the textures of Kate’s life. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault reiterates his concept of power as follows:
It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations, immanent in the sphere in which they
operate and which constitute their own organizations; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the
dysfunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. (92-93) As is often the case, power for Foucault is flowing, fickle, and everywhere in the world. Through a series of struggle, confrontation, and adaptation, power exerts itself on the submission and affiliation of the other, making itself the mouthpiece of knowledge and truth.
In the Country Girls Trilogy, the patriarchal power viruses virtually spread far and wide around Caithleen in the form of father, male lovers, religion, and so forth. In a sense, Caithleen’s life is composed of her aspirations toward love and, sad to say, complete bafflement and desperation caused by a long line of rascals, including his drunken father, Mr. Gentleman, Eugene Gaillard, and Duncan. Isolated in such
a stifling world of men, Caithleen stands little chance to secure a room of her own. As a matter of fact, Caithleen’s problem is foreshadowed in that of her mother, who has
long been a victim of her father’s abusive drunkenness. In The Country Girls Caithleen once described her mother’s plight as follows:
Dada’s blind was drawn so I didn’t go up to see him, though I knew he would have liked a cup of tea. I hated going into his room when he was in bed. I could see Mama on the pillow beside him. Reluctant and frightened as if something terrible were being done to her. She used to sleep with me as often as she could and only went across to his room when he made her.
He wore no pajamas in bed, and I was ashamed even to think of it. (50) Obviously her mother is traumatized in her interaction with the brutish father. She
suffers from the domestic violence over and over, falling victim to the patriarchal society constructed and consolidated in “Father Ireland.” For her, sexual love is less pleasure than sorrow. In this first part of the trilogy, compared with all the other characters, Caithleen’s mother is rarely mentioned. Such a traditional and obedient woman is she that her husband always has his way. Her early death because of drowning expels her out of the game and technically silences her—a melancholy brand molded upon Caithleen for long.
In contrast to his domineering father, Caithleen’s mother takes the secondary place all the time. She is said to be preoccupied with worry and concern. “Poor Mama, she was always a worrier” (6). Waiting, coughing, and crying become the routine of her mother’s life. With all her labor and suffering, Caithleen’s mother never complains but rather accepts what responsibility she has to take. While mashing a bucket of meal and potatoes, her mother lowered her head and cried, accepting her fate as a woman with resignation.
“Ah, that’s life, some work and others spend,” she said as she went off
toward the yard with the bucket. Some of the hens were perched on the rim of the bucket, picking. Her right shoulder sloped more than her left from carrying buckets. She was dragged down form heavy work, working to keep the place going, and at nighttime making lampshades and fire screens to make the house prettier. (8)
Actually, nowhere could one find happiness along with Chithleen’s mother, who is always unduly saddled with manual work and household chores. So worried about her mother’s health is Caithleen that she keeps crying at the thought that her mother might die while she is at school. “In her brown dress she looked sad; the farther I went, the sadder she looked. Like a sparrow in the snow, brown and anxious and lonesome” (9).
It is quite ironical that one of the few times that her mother was truly happy when her father was sent to the hospital for recovering from drinking sprees (10).
The mother-daughter relationship is so strong in Caithleen that she is obsessed with the image of her mother, even long after her mother’s death. Once when she spoke something in the manner of her mother, she was taken aback by the
resemblance. The similarity was repugnant to her, for she did not want to be as miserable as her mother (77).35 As a matter of fact, all her life Caithleen has been trying to get away from the shadow of her mother looming around, though such efforts prove in vain. Time and again she is asked to imitate what her mother has to do as a woman in Ireland. The following passage from Jack Holland, a worker in her family, well demonstrates such stereotype associated with Caithleen: “And, my dear
35 In the later part of the trilogy, Caithleen shows her great dislike of her mother for her
self-sacrifice and self-devotion at the cost of her own happiness. “Hills brought a sudden thought of her mother, and she felt the first flash of dislike she had ever experienced for that dead, over-worked woman…. Now suddenly she saw that woman in a different light. A self-appointed martyr” (476-477).
Caithleen, who is the image and continuation of her mother, I see no reason why you shall not return and inherit your mother’s home and carry on her admirable domestic tradition” (81). It is this domestic tradition that Caithleen’s mother is yoked, and unlike her mother who resigns to the dictate of convention, Caithleen tries hard to get out of such constraint. However, her efforts to fight against tradition are never meant to be easy, which finds potent evidence from the recurring reminiscences of her mother on many occasions. As the mother image stalks around her, so does the phantom of tradition sticks to her life unconsciously. “But all the night I slept badly. I tucked my legs up under my nightgown and was shivering. I was waiting for someone to come and warm me. I think I was waiting for Mama” (170).
The memory of her mother is intermixed with sorrow and sweetness. All her life Caithleen suffers from her encounter with the patriarchal world, yet the thought of her mother offers her consolation and timely support. The companionship between mother and daughter provides her mother the shelter from daily labor and family burden as well. “She was the best mama in the world. I told her so, and she held me very close for a minute as if she would never let me go. I was everything in the world to her, everything” (6). Saddled with heavy household chores and the duty to support the family financially, Caithleen’s mother has to face up to the reality that her husband, like many other Irish men in modern Irish literature, might be drunk anytime
anywhere.36
36 Such stereotype is ingrained in Irish literature. Examples can be found in all kinds of literary descriptions, short stories and novels in particular. James Joyce’s Dubliners are crowded with such drunken men. Mahon’s father and Dan Burke in John Synge’s plays The Playboy of the Western World and The Shadow of the Glen respectively also serve as good examples. Likewise, the father figure Malachy McCourt in Frank McCourt Angela’s Ashes is seriously addicted to alcohol, so much so that he never takes good care of his family.
She was thinking. Thinking where was he? Would he come home in an ambulance, or a hackney car, hired in Belfast three days ago and not paid for? Would he stumble up the stone steps at the back door waving a bottle of whisky? Would he shout, struggle, kill her, or apologize? (6)
Such worries about her husband, coupled with the responsibility to care for the whole family, crumple Caithleen’s mother, which explains why she has a tighter relationship with her daughter, from whom the mother manages to seize a slice of solace and identification. The lack of a reliable husband happens to be compensated for by Caithleen; on the other hand, her mother’s love significantly makes up for the absence of a responsible father. The mother and the daughter then combine in an interlocking, interdependent bond.
How are Irish children influenced by the previous generations? O’Brien’s comment on the problem of Irish people in Mother Ireland is helpful in figuring out such connection. “The children inherit a trinity of guilts (a Shamrock): the guilt for Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion, the guilt for the plundered land, and the furtive guilt for the mother frequently defiled by the insatiable father” (19). The three concerns for children of Ireland mentioned here, Catholicism, nation, and family actually pose tremendous threat to the lives of modern Irish people, especially those of Irish women.
While the word trinity connotes strong religious flavor, the term shamrock is
suggestive of nationalistic spirit.37 As elaborated in Chapter Two, modern Ireland is
37 For details of such connotation, works by 19th-century Irish poet Thomas Moore are very helpful. In fact, the advocacy of national spirit in Moore’s Irish Melodies manifests itself in a series of symbols, the shamrock and the harp in particular. Apart from the shamrock that connotes Irish native spirit, Moore adopted the harp, another symbol of Ireland in musical terms, in honor of the indigenous culture. Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind” pleaded for the west wind’s collaboration to scatter his
notorious for its bid for the establishment of the nation at the expense of women’s civil rights. The confrontation between Irish women and Catholic religion, moreover, will be analyzed later when Caithleen is tortured by Father Hagerty while her
supposed love for God is cast askew on the desired lover, Eugene Gaillard. As to the guilt felt for the mother being tainted by the father, it is well demonstrated in the case of Caithleen and her parents. Such trauma will linger on in the coming days of
Caithleen’s life.
Actually, in contrast to the closer mother-daughter relationship, Caithleen’s interaction with her father is terribly bad as could be. When referring to her father, Caithleen never speaks without hatred and tremor from the outset to the end of the trilogy. “In fear and trembling I set off for school. I might meet him on the way or else
Romantic inspiration around the world: “Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth,/Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind” (Abrams 678). In a striking contrast to Shelley’s spiritual breeze, Moore normally utilized the harp to compose his dirge for his colonized native land. In “Shall the Harp Then Be Silent,” for instance, he asserted:
No—faint tho’ the death-song may fall from his lips, Tho’ his Harp, like his soul, may with shadows be crost, Yet, yet shall it sould, ‘mid a nation’s eclipse,
And proclaim to the world what a star hath been lost (182).
In the preceding stanza, the poet-speaker wondered whether the Minstrel of Erin had to stop playing when the harp, unreserved symbol of Ireland, ceased to exist. Intriguingly enough, it was not long before the speaker refrained from his misgivings, and persisted in the perseverance of the harp, however hard it might be. But, unlike Shelley, who capitalized on the wind to disseminate his spiritual vision, Moore would like to make public the right and glory of his Celtic homeland. Even though colonialism clouded over Erin, in other words, the elegy from the harp hardly ever ceased. “In the calm of retreat, in the grandeur of strife,/Whether shining or clouded, still high and the same” (184).
he might come home and kill Mama” (9). Evidently not merely her mother but
Caithleen suffers from domestic violence from her father. It would be no exaggeration to say that the fear of and hatred for her father never cease in the trilogy. So estranged from each other are Caithleen and her father that sometimes she even regards him as a mere stranger (80). Once in a while she argues with her father and utters her
resentment of him vehemently (107). Once upon a time when her father was stricken with some disease and became very weak, Caithleen did not in the least feel upset but rather felt excited, for, in that case, she might have the chance to get away from her father’s control (265). It is interesting to know that Caithleen did feel pity for her father once: “I felt sorry for him—so weak and broken, and unlovely” (252). Such rare sympathy, however, was immediately swept away when she thought of all the suffering her mother endured because of her father. “Don’t be an ass, stop pitying him, that’s what ruined your mother’s life, I told myself as I raised my hand to the black emergency cord. I was shaking like a leaf” (253). In brief, the trauma caused by Caithleen’s father is double—for Caithlee and her mother as well. This explains why Caithleen’s abhorrence to her father is so strong, so much so that she can never really forgive her father with ease, let alone accept him and treat him like a father with affection.
What with her impression studded with her mother’s suffering and what with her own experience dealing with her father, Caithleen feels repugnant to keep her father company. The narrator, for example, shows how Caithleen is mistreated by her own father:
He came over and gave me a punch under the chin so that my two rows of teeth clattered together, and with his wild lunatic eyes he stared at me.
“Always avoiding me. Always avoiding your father. You little s----.
Where is your mother or I’ll kick the pants off you.” I shouted for Baba and she came tripping down the stairs with a beaded bag of Mama’s hanging from her wrist. He took his hands off me at once. He didn’t like people to think that he was brutal. He had the name of being a gentleman, a decent man who wouldn’t hurt a fly. (27)
What a hypocrite Caithleen’s father is! He never really takes good care of her but threatens her with “punches” and “kicks” instead, especially after some glasses of wine. No wonder that all her life Caithleen is bent on escaping from her father, though her efforts prove to be futile. She endeavors to secure some romantic lovers to shelter her from the threatening world, represented by her father, yet ironically the very efforts make her involved with a bundle of her father’s replicas. It is noteworthy that her significant lovers invariably are old enough to be her father and that the only difference is the way they lead her to suffering and torture.
Jack Holland, a young man who likes Caithleen, for example, is said to have the resemblance of her father. Holland and her father were so much alike that Caithleen once mistook him for her father. “At first I thought it was Dada. They were about the same height and they both wore hats instead of caps” (11). Mr. Gentleman, another father-like figure for Caithleen in The Country Girls, is a rich, married, middle-aged Frenchman and Dublin solicitor. Smitten by Mr. Gentleman’s charm, Caithleen is too innocent to resist his flirtations. The thought of Mr. Gentleman is so strong that she even concocts some sexual imaginations about him. “I was thinking of his mouth, of the shape of it, and the taste of his tongue, while I had one short, self-conscious puff”
(53). From these frank descriptions we can understand why O’Brien’s works were
banned in Ireland, for such candid portrays of sex was evidently against the pure mother image preached not only by the government but by the Catholic churches.
The hierarchical contrast between Caithleen and Mr. Gentleman is also evident in their characterization. Whereas Mr. Gentleman belongs to men of the higher class, Caithleen is only a girl from the countryside. Mr. Gentleman is said to be an elegant, French-speaking solicitor. He is kind of mysterious and unapproachable for the
provincials in the country. “He was French, and his real name was Mr. de Maurier, but no one could pronounce it properly, and anyhow, he was such a distinguished man with his gray hair and his satin waistcoats that the local people christened him Mr.
Gentleman” (12). While Mr. Gentleman is sanctified, Caithleen is nothing but a beautiful adornment.
“It’s not a lie. He gave me chocolates, and took me to the pictures. He told me that I was the sweetest thing that ever happened to him. He said the
color of my hair was wonderful, and my eyes were like real pearls and my skin like a peach in the sunlight.” (61).
Caithleen is obviously materialized in these lines. She is associated with chocolate and peach to be eaten, or pictures, the hair, the eyes, pearls to be gazed at. Nothing is mentioned about her individuality, her capability or her intelligence. She becomes an object to be desired rather than an entity endowed with its own value. In great contrast to the legendary noble man, Mr. Gentleman, Caithleen appears superficial and
insignificant. In the later part, Caithleen reveals to her friend Baba that those elaborate praises of her sensual beauty are merely from her own concoction, a fact that
insinuates her internalized consciousness of female prettiness. In a word, from the make-up story Caithleen unconsciously replicates the stereotype that women are
supposed to be beautiful for male gaze.
Mr. Gentleman promises Caithleen happiness, yet the utopian prospects
proposed by this father-like figure prove to be a castle in the air. From the light of Mr.
Gentleman, Caithleen is only an innocent, foolish girl. Near the end of The Country Girls, Caithleen is desperate when receiving a telegram from Mr.Gentleman. It says:
“EVERYTHING GONE WRONG.. THREATS FROM YOUR FATHER. MY WIFE HAS ANOTHER NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. REGREAT ENFORCED SILENCE.
MUST NOT SEE YOU” (sic 175). Clearly, while her father’s phantom sticks around, Caithleen suffers from still another romantic breakdown caused by Mr. Gentleman, her first lover. Her agony and helplessness can be discerned from the ending of the story: “I came out to the kitchen, and took two aspirins with my tea. It was almost certain that I wouldn’t sleep that night” (175). Nevertheless, as a secondary, marginalized woman in the suffocating modern Irish society, what else could Caithleen do but take the long day’s romantic journey into night.
The first story is followed by The Lonely Girl, which, like the previous fictions, focuses on the female protagonist’s village community, the repressive effects of her family and her convent education, and furthermore, her attempts to break free from the various forms of patriarchal control. Caithleen is again involved romantically with another father-like man, Eugene Gaillard, a half-French maker of documentary films.
“My elbow touched his; and I had that paralyzing sensation in my legs which I hadn’t felt since I’d parted from Mr. Gentleman” (186). The man/woman, right/wrong, knowledge/ignorance, reason/superstition binary oppositions manifest themselves evidently in their interactions. The way Eugene speaks betrays his sense of superiority to the socially inexperienced, economically humble, and educationally disadvantaged
Caithleen. “Your inadequacies, your fears, your traumas, your father…,” reproaches Eugene in an argument with Caithleen (359). Actually, throughout their interactions, it is Eugene that does most of the teaching. “Eugene guarded me like a child, taught me things, gave me books to read, and gave pleasure to my body at night” (323).
However, in the process of his teaching and guiding, Eugene is in fact confirming his sense of superiority at the same time. Their unequal status sometimes makes Caithleen feel uncomfortable, so much so that she proclaims her hatred of “his strength, his pride, his self-assurance” (335).
Compared with Eugene who stands for justice, power, and knowledge, Caithleen is caricatured to be innocent and ignorant all the way. In their argument over something, for example, it is always Caithleen that admits her mistake first, though she is not sure who is right (344). She cannot help it. The long-term dominance of Eugene makes it a rule for Caithleen to take the second place all the time. The following excerpt from The Lonely Girl again exhibits her disadvantageous position.
And even in loving him, I remembered our difficulties, the separated, different worlds that each came from; he controlled, full of bile and intolerance, knowing everyone, knowing everything—me swayed or
frightened by every wind, light-headed, mad in one eye (as he said), bred in (as he said again) “Stone Age ignorance and religious savagery.” (345) Indeed, as Caithleen perceives, Eugene and she are from the very beginning people of totally different worlds. While Eugene is rendered omniscient like God, she is a mere human being blinded by simple-mindedness. The inequitable sexual hierarchy is pre-determined and further reinforced throughout the interactions between Caithleen
and Eugene. What is worse, Eugene even regards her as a lunatic, a biased stereotype typical of women characters in western literature.38 More than once Caithlen is referred to as a “red-haired woman” not to be trusted, which unfavorably alludes to her abnormality and insanity (331, 360).
It is a pity that while Caithleen strives hard to run away from the patriarchal control from her father, her efforts to gain freedom and happiness from Eugene plunge her into still another abyss. Sad to say, what Eugene brings her is not only instruction but also hindrance in terms of her self-development. The dominance of Eugene over Caithleen was so vehement that the female protagonist puts forward her grievances after the long-term subordination.
He was too articulate, too sure of his own rightness. “I give you
everything—food, clothes—.” He pointed to my clothes hanging in the wardrobe door opened quite suddenly as if there were a ghost in it. It had opened just then. “I’ll try to educate you, teach you how to speak, how to deal with people, build your confidence, but that is not enough. You now want to own me.” (358, emphasis added)
Comparatively speaking, Caithleen is inferior in terms of education, social experience, as well as social status, which to some degree accounts for her awkwardness in
articulating for herself in Eugene’s presence. In a research conducted by David E.
Schmitt on Irish women, such inferiority and inferiority are affirmed. Irish society, Schmitt proposes, is predominantly occupied and manipulated by males, while
38 For example, Medea in Euripides’ Medea is said to be so passionate and insane as to kill the bride Jason plans to marry. The most astonishing fact, however, happens when she kills her two sons to take revenge on Jason. Snake-haired Medusa, in addition, is not only ugly-looking but detrimental to human existence, for men who see her face are petrified.
females, especially those living in the country, recede from the spotlight to cater to the interests and requirements of the patriarchal society and the Catholic Church.39 It is such sexual inequality that yokes Caithleen for a long time, which significantly prevents her from getting free out of the patriarchal control. However, so indulged in the love affair is Caithleen that she fails to have such awareness. That’s why she constantly harbors the hope that Eugene will love her and protect her when they are together (367).
The repressive effects of the patriarchal society are hardly assuaged by the Catholic Church and its proscriptions. On the contrary, the Catholic Church in reality intensifies the restriction on Irish women from still another aspect. The influences of Catholic religion on Caithleen can be found everywhere in the trilogy. From her early years on, guilt-ridden Caithleen has always been afraid of divine punishment. Her young love for the workman, Hickey, makes her much embarrassed, for sexual desire is prohibited for a girl of her age. “I got out of bed six or seven times every night as an act of penance. I was afraid of hell” (4). In addition, the pure image of Virgin Mary is so rooted in their brains that many girls, including Caithleen and Delia Sheeby, are determined to be nuns when they grow up. To be a nun then becomes another escape from the troubles in this mundane world. As Caithleen recalls later, her mother would like her to be a nun in the future, for being a nun “was better than marrying” (67).
Living in such Catholicism-centered surroundings, Caithleen cannot help projecting her ideal dream onto the religious world, yet her later life in the convent brings her more disappointment than happiness.
39 In contrast, David E. Schmitt finds that women in the urban areas tend to have more self-awareness to fight for their right, either in politics, careers, or marital affairs.
Caithleen feels disappointed at the life in the convent because the monotonous and austere life practiced there can never satisfy this love-longing youngster. After her mother’s drowning accident, Caithleen spends her mid-teen days boarding in this strict convent-school, from which she is repeatedly inculcated the importance of faith, love, and obedience. The following descriptions of the convent by young Caithleen well betray its stultifying atmosphere: “The convent was a gray stone building with hundreds of small square curtainless windows, like so many eyes spying out on the wet sinful town. There were green railings around it and high green gates that led to a dark cypress avenue” (64).
Such pathetic delineations of the convent life are echoed in “Sister Imelda,”
another short story also by O’Brien telling of the stoic life characteristic of the Catholic convent.
We had returned from our long summer holiday and we were all wretched.
The convent, with its high stone wall and green iron gates enfolding us again, seemed more of a prison than ever—for after our spell in the outside world we all felt very much older and more sophisticated, and my friend Baba and I were dreaming of our final escape, which would be in a year.
And so, on that damp autumn evening when I saw the chrysanthemums and saw the new nun intent on prayer I pitied her and thought how alone she must be, cut off from her friends and conversation, with only God as her intangible spouse. (124)
In great contrast to the secular world in which freedom is taken for granted, the world inside the convent is manifestly composed of poverty, solemnity, and insularity solidified by high stone walls and green iron gates. No wonder the thought of escape
never fails in the convent girls’ mind.
In addition, the narrator’s analogy of the convent to the prison is in fact in accordance with what Foucault proposes in Discipline and Punish. For Foucault, the managerial transformation of the prison from the monarchical power to modern disciplinary power is incarnated in the Panopticon, a regulatory device set near the end of the 18th-century. Whereas prisoners in the past are aware of their own subjection, detainees in the Panopticon are in danger of being observed from the central tower. In consequence, the prisoners gradually internalize their fear to be scrutinized and thus formulate the self-surveillance to the benefit of the authorities.
Such mode of power and control as practiced in the Panopticon, according to Foucault, is widely applied to the management in schools, the army, hospitals, and religious institutes (195-228).
It is no exaggeration to regard the convent as an embodiment of the
“Panopticon.” In the convent, modesty, decorum, and discipline are held in high esteem, so Caithleen and other girls are trained to behave themselves without the slightest thought of material enjoyment. No wonder those convent girls keep crying and sobbing under the covers at night. “Everyone seemed to be eating and crying for their mothers” (70). From this perspective, the convent is far from a shelter for these Irish girls but rather another prison that deprives them of their humanity. Such dull life in the convent, however, cannot stop Caithleen from longing for her ideal dream land.
My bed faced a window and I could see a sparkling of stars in one small corner of the sky. It was nice to lie there watching the stars, waiting for
them to fade or to go out, or to flare up into the brilliant firework. Waiting for something to happen in the deathly, unhappy silence. (70)
Situated in the suffocating Catholic convent, Caithleen tries to imagine her brighter future by looking out of the window for the sparkling stars. The fate of the stars well corresponds to that of her, either to die out or to explode with magnificent glitters.
Though the life in the convent is harsh, she is never disheartened but rather hopefully waits for something nice to happen. However, she is doomed to despair because, as the story later unfolds, her hope for the future comes along with Mr. Gentleman, Eugene Gaillard, and some other men that keep on frustrating her in still other ways.
Indeed, as Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality, the manipulation of sex charters the unbalanced disciplinary power relations between the authorities and the dominated subjects. The Catholic convent is characterized by its strict regulation of sex and pleasure on its members, yet in O’Brien’s works, such restriction is both depicted and challenged. For instance, Caithleen and Baba in The Country Girls’
Trilogy are subjugated in the convent, but they work hard to leap out of the yoke. In
“Sister Imelda,” moreover, the stereotype of the convent and the nun is inculcated in the consciousness of the convent girls. The unidentified narrator vividly articulates her impression of the harsh life as follows:
We knew something about the nuns’ routine. It was rumored that they wore itchy wool underwear, ate dry bread for breakfast, rarely had meat, cakes, or dainties, kept certain hours of strict silence with each other, as well as constant vigil on their thoughts; so that if their minds wandered to the subject of food or pleasure, they would quickly revert to thoughts of God and their eternal souls. (131)
Catholic dogmas, in a nutshell, mold the nuns to be religious robots without the slightest thought of emotion and enjoyment. Saddled with the overwhelmingly
powerful love of God, nuns are trained to cast aside their human love to lead puritanical lives. However, if the nuns or the convent girls simply follow the rules preached in the church, they are far from O’Brien’s creation.
O’Brien is never satisfied with the mere depiction of the harsh realities within the convent but rather devotes herself to the slacking or even deconstructing such restriction on women. “Some of the most vivid contrasts in O’Brien’s fiction are accompanied by such juxtaposition of sheltered, expectant girlhood and the liberating, but daunting range of experience her young women undergo in the outside world as young adults” (Mahony Christina Hunt 213). Consequently, aside from the stultifying atmosphere of the convent, the narrator in “Sister Imelda” also directs readers’
attention to the unusual portrayal of pleasure and sexuality rarely seen in modern Irish literature. The short story, in fact, is fraught with not merely rigid convent conventions but also sexual imagination ignited by pretty Sister Imelda. The narrator’s detailed accounts of Sister Imelda’s physical features bear witness to the sexual aspect of the convent.
When I got back later, she was sitting on the edge of the table swaying her legs. There was something reckless about pose, something defiant. It seemed as if any minute she would take out a cigarette case, snap it open, and then archly offer me one….I wonder if she had supplanted my mother, and I hoped not, because I had aimed to outstep my original world and take my place in a new and hallowed one. (130)
The scene would never remind people of the divine world. However, what appeals to the narrator is not the divinity crowned upon Sister Imelda but rather the alluring sexuality peculiar to her. Smitten with the nun’s audacity and beauty, the narrator
develops an unusual secular attachment to her. But, as the narrator suggests, the bond between them is different from that between her mother and her. Instead of the pure mother-daughter relationship, the love is quasi-homosexual.
As time goes by, closer fondness is established between Sister Imelda and the narrator. They pour their inner feelings to the other, exchange gifts with each other, and play secretly together. Once after the narrator’s performance on the stage, she is greeted by Sister Imelda with “a shower of kisses” (133). As their intimacy grows, the narrator seems to know her partner’s happiness in the boring convent life. “Yet she was radiant as if such austerity was joyful. Maybe she was basking in some secret realization involving her and me” (133). However, the convent is by no means a nice place for them to embrace. Conventions and religious doctrines sometimes stop the nun from getting in touch with the narrator. “You know it’s not proper for us to be so friendly,” says the nun (134). Torn between such ambivalence between divine love and secular love, Sister Imelda is finally forced to abide by religious rules by containing her love and desire. “We must not become attached,” says the nun (134).
The nun’s intentional indifference and detachment, however, dismays the budding narrator, who is so enraged as to assert that “convents were dungeons and no doubt about it” (134). Paradoxically the secular love between Sister Imelda and the narrator happens to consummate in their service of God. As the narrator recounts: “ I made up my mind that I would be a nun and that though we might never be free to express our feelings, we would be under the same roof, in the same cloister, in mental and
spiritual conjunction of our lives” (136-37).
Aside from the strict discipline imposed on convent girls, the constraint of Catholic religion arises again in thwarting Caithleen’s sexual desire. Later in The
Lonely Girl, when she is found to be together with Eugene, Caithleen is severely condemned by Father Hagerty as well as her father. She is charged with the crime in
“walking the path of moral damnation” (269). When accused of sin because of her liaison with Eugene, Caithleen is infuriated at Father Hagerty’s allegation. She is so angry as to question Father Hagerty’s indictment and is replied as follows: “This man is dangerous company. He has no faith, no moral standards. He married a woman and then divorced her—whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder” (269).
Though Caithleen tries hard to justify herself, she is preached with a series of grim sermons by Father Hagerty.
God is testing your love; God has allowed this man to cross your path and tempt you, so that you will reaffirm your love for Him. You have only to ask, and He will give you the grace to resist this great temptation.”
“If God is good, He won’t burn me,” I said to Father Hagerty, quoting Eugene’s exact phrase.
The priest sat upright and shook his head sadly from side to side. “Child, don’t you realize that you are speaking heresy! You know that you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless you obey the word of God. You’re turning your back on God,” he said, raising his voice. (270)
The hierarchical dichotomy between Father Hagerty and Caithleen is from the very beginning confirmed. As the agent of God, Father Hagerty tries every means possible to interrogate Caithleen simply because of her human love with the divorced Eugene.
From the preceding dialog, it is clear that Caithleen is situated in a comparatively underprivileged position all the time, for she is always the one questioned by the superior authorities, be it her father, her lover, or the Catholic Father. In other words,
her affliction comes notably from triple sources, her father, the Catholic Father, and her ideal father-like lovers, each of whom collaborates on her irrevocable damnation.
Baba’s comment on the Catholic religion well explains how Irish women are
subordinated in the face of religion. The Catholic churches, for Baba, merely place restrictions on women, which is definitely unfair. Pope John II, for example,
constantly warns women of the danger of sin, but he never considers the detriment to the happiness of women. “He’s still for keeping women in bondage, sexual bondage above all” (522). In a conversation with her husband Baba further expresses her objection to the subordination of women in the face of God.
Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you’d have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more.
Roaming around all that time with a bunch of men, fishing; and Sermons on the Mount. Abandoning women. (473)
In a nutshell, the Catholic religion is totally in the charge of the patriarchal power, God, Jesus Christ, the clergy, and so forth. Unfortunately, these male administrators of religion rarely take good care of the female disciples because they are ignorant of female concerns. 40
Foucault’s theory of power, sex, and confession is illuminating in the
interpretation of Caithleen’ confrontation with Father Hagerty. In The History of Sexuality, Volume one, Foucault proposes that the aim of the book is to “define the regime of power--knowledge—pleasure” in the analysis of the discourse on human sexuality in the West (11). For Foucault, sexuality is the means by which we could
40 Impacts of Catholic churches on Irish women have been studied by many scholars. With some minor differences, most scholars, however, agree on its detrimental effects on the self-development of Irish women. For details, please consult Evelyn Mahon 184-215; Tom Inglis 59-77; Tony Fahey 53-70.
understand how social power relations are produced and sustained, and how the subjects are ruled and then resist. Among others, the constitution of the body becomes the commonest way for such control. One salient example of the control of the body, Foucault maintains, is the confessional mode in the Catholic churches.
But after all, the Christian pastor also sought to produce specific effects on desire, by the fact of transforming it—fully and deliberately—into discourse:
effects of mastery and detachment, to be sure, but also an effect of spiritual reconversion, of turning back to God, a physical effect of blissful suffering from feeling in one’s body the pangs of temptation and the love that resists it. (History of Sexuality, Volume One, 23)
In other words, confession for Foucault serves as an important tool in disciplining the Christian subjects. By turning recourse to the limitation of desire, the confessional mode in Christianity reaffirms the hierarchy between the clergy and the confessor.
Whereas the questioner, the religious authority dominates the speaking subject by probing and passing judgment on the matter, the confessed speaker is always and already subjected to the power and supervision of the religious discourse. Such reinforced re-conversion to religion then becomes a useful strategy by which the Christian church consolidates its sovereignty over its subjects. Foucault’s concept of confession helps explicate how Caithleen is unfavorably positioned in the religious interrogation. As the preceding dialog between Caithleen and Father Hagerty shows, the female protagonist’s sexual desire is said to be the trial and temptation dictated by God. Caithleen is commanded to remove from the sexual enticement to the embrace of God’s grace. Sex and the body then function as another legitimate agency of male dominance.
In addition to the dominance from her father and Father Hagerty, Caithleen’s pressure comes from everywhere in the society. She lives away from her father, yet everything that happens to her seems to be closely watched. The following letter written to Caithleen’s father, for example, shows how Caithleen’s life is supervised by the patriarchal eyes.
It is high time you knew about your daughter and the company she keeps.
For over two months now she’s having to do with a married man, who is not living with his wife. He is well known in this city as a dangerous type. No one knows where he gets his money and he has no religion…. I hope I am not too late in warning you, as I would not like to see a nice Catholic girl ruinedby a dirtyforeigner. (246)
The unidentified letter to some extent represents the surveillance of the patriarchal society as a whole. Rigid Catholic belief and morality are normalized as the criterion to domesticate and penalize its subjects. In this way, as Foucault argues in both Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, an intricate web of authoritative regulation is interconnected with family, religion, society, and nation. Confronted with such overwhelming power from the patriarchal society, Caithllen is driven to the corner all the time.
However, the harsh and demanding circumstances circumscribing Caithleen do
not ruin her from the start, for amid so much depression and affliction, she never fails to seek out the way out or even strike straight back. The rigid convent life, for
example, cannot prevent her from envisaging a promising vision in the future by watching the starry night. Instead of submitting to what the patriarchal society has to offer her, Caithleen time and again chooses to follow her instinct so as to realize her
dream. The manipulation of patriarchal power and its manifold exertions are then challenged by Caithleen’s audacious pursuit of sex and love with a series of interrogating and violating attempts. In fact, since early childhood, Caithleen has shown some traces of self-awareness as an individual. To a certain extent, she is able to appreciate her physical advantages and assert herself as an individual human being.
Once when she wore a new pair of shoes for the coming of Christmas, for instance, Caithleen revealed her excitement without reservation. “I looked in the wardrobe mirror at myself and admired my legs a thousand times” (86). Her self-consciousness is so strong that she can insist on her own choice irrespective of others’ opinions.
Once on her way to Dublin with Baba, Caithleen expressed her desire to be herself.
“We’ll look for one,” I said, and we went down the corridor, giggling and giving strangers the “So what” look. I suppose it was then we began that phase of our lives as the giddy country girls brazening the big city. People looked at us and then looked away again, as though they had just
discovered that we were naked or something. But we didn’t care. We were young and, we thought, pretty. (121)
The last sentence reminds one of Langston Hughes’ slogan in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” saying that “Why should I want to be white? I am a
Negro—and beautiful” (qtd. in X. J. Kennedy 1146). If Hughes’ proclamation is uttered in defiance of the long-term distortion of the black’s self-image in 1920s, Caithleen’s words here might suggest the long-standing subordination Irish women endure. The contempt from other passengers in the carriage, however, is dismissed by the fun-loving female protagonists, who in the process of growing up have learned to
live more for themselves than for others, many times imposing chauvinistic demands on them. Therefore, though pressures from the patriarchal Irish society come in multifarious forms, rural female characters in Edna O’Brien’s fictions tend to defy unreservedly such overwhelmingly constructive forces.
With all her intrepidity to have her own way, Caithleen’s pursuit of her self is not without some obstacles. From early childhood, Caithleen is rarely allowed to make her own decision, a fact that well betrays the marginality prevalent in modern Irish women. Once in her reflections on her previous life, Caithllen was surprised at the finding that she was incapable of self-determination.
But I could not decide; I had never made decisions in my life. My clothes had always been brought for me, my food decided on, even my outings were decided by Baba. I walked round and round, touching the damp trees, inhaling the wild smells of the damp wood. (232)
More than once Caithleen finds it difficult to assert herself as a self-autonomous human being. It is not because she is not endowed with the ability to tackle anything in the real life but because customarily Irish women are not supposed to be self-reliant.
As the Irish Constitution of 1937 proclaims, Irish women are legitimized as the caretakers of family for the continuation of the nation. No wonder it takes Caithleen such much time and so many efforts to learn to how to live the life of her own.
However, tradition and discipline from the male-dominated Irish culture fail to curb the desire inherent in women, which finds proof in Caithleen’s attempt to fight against the partiality unfavorably imposed upon her. The resisting counter-discourse adopted by Caithleen smacks of what Foucault in Power/Knowledge proclaims concerning the productive force of power relations. Unlike most theorists paying their
undivided attention to the constraining effects of power, Foucault ingenuously points out the constructive reproduction of power against the dominant power discourse (119). Caithleen is trained to be docile and obedient, yet her homage to convention and regulation is many times broken off by her unquenchable yearning for a better tomorrow. Such ambivalence as to go or to stay in the confined countryside of the west of Ireland has always been a trouble haunting Caithleen. When working in Dublin at a grocery in The Country Girls, Caithleen once recalled the scenes
reminiscent of her home land while listening to the words of Mr. Burns, her employer.
I saw the bog water and the bog lilies and the blackened patches of ground where we had made fires to boil a kettle, and the heather which brushed my ankles and the great limestone ridges that rose out of the brown and purple earth…. The edge of the bog lake was fringed with bulrushes, and at certain times of the year their heads were a soft brown plush.... At the far edge of the lake there was a belt of poplar trees, shutting out the world.
The world I wanted to escape into. And now that I had come into the world, that scene of bogs and those country faces were uppermost thoughts. (137) These romantic vistas projected on her home village may well explain the trailing attachment to custom and tradition inherent in Caithleen’s mindset. Just as Yeats is beckoned by the “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore” in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” (Collected Poems 43 ) so Caithleen is summoned by the native bog land, the bog lily, the gorgeous limestone ridges, the bulrushes, the poplar trees unwittingly.
These scenes are by no means mere descriptions of something pretty but rather projections of the protagonist’s identity.41 The ambivalence in Caithleen is so strong
41 With the introduction of cultural geography, more and more scholars are taking heed of the
that she is torn between two worlds—the conventional, pastoral world from which she comes and the modern material world she longs for in Dublin and London. While Caithleen endeavors to get away from the suffocating country in her teens, she cannot help thinking about the romantic wilderness of her hometown when working in the hustle-and-bustle London. Such oscillations between the past and the future, between patriarchal convention and female imagination stamp the dilemma of Caithleen throughout the trilogy. Without doubt Caithleen craves for her ideal love when stuck in the mire of tradition, yet so overwhelming is the force of male-dominated
patriarchy that she cannot utterly keep herself from the encroachment of her past, her hometown, and of course the patriarchal value system hidden behind as a whole.
However powerful the force of tradition may be, the longing for love and the craving for happiness sometimes push Caithleen to grapple with the Irish patriarchy embodied in various forms. When Caithleen is found to be together with Eugene, for example, her father tries hard to separate them regardless of her daughter’s feeling. In response to her father’s intrusion and hindrance, Caithleen exceptionally exhibits her
relation between literature and geography, and drawing insights from the mutual study of these two fields. Scholars like Christopher L. Salter and William J. Lloyd , for example, points out in Landscape in Literature that since 1970s geographical study has been quite changed with the inclusion of literary delineations of landscapes. For them, landscapes in literature even present a more authentic world than those recorded in traditional geographical texts (2-5). It is now believed that along with the study of landscapes in literature comes the understanding of one’s identity, be it national, sexual, or cultural.
Landscape, for example, is regarded as something closely associated with one’s national identity. For many critics, with the creation of an account on an identifiable region, writers help their fellowmen to muster their mutual identity by returning from “the unfamiliar to the familiar” (Barnes and Duncan, 11-12). In addition, the dominant image of the west of Ireland, along with Catholicism, suggested N.C.
Johnson, was crucial in the late nineteenth-century construction of nationalist consciousness (159). In the wake of such nationalistic awareness, the west of Ireland, especially the Aran Islands, becomes the normalized and idealized landscape. The Aran Islands are chosen as the cultural sanctuary by Irish nationalists mainly because these three islands are geographically remote from colonial encroachment, linguistically unalloyed with English, and culturally intact from material deterioration. In Irish people’s struggle with the British colonizers, these islands then become the expedient imaginary homeland for nationalists, national and cultural alike.
determination to be her own master. “I’m my own boss. I’ll do what I like” (246).
Such vehement response to the patriarchal control is echoed by still a lot of actions taken by Caithleen when dealing with Father Hagerty and Eugene. Charged with the sin to have an affair with Eugene, a married man, by Father Hagerty, Caithleen nevertheless tries every means possible to defend her own position. Father Hagerty’s condemnation of Caithleen eventually proves to be futile, for Caithleen is not willing to be confined to Catholic doctrines or social conventions. “SheCaithleen’saunt seemed to think that everything was all right now, and that I was out of danger. The funny thing was that I was more determined than ever to get away” (272).
Another struggle from Caithleen against the patriarchal dominance pathetically happens between Caithleen and her husband, Eugene, in the last part of the trilogy, Girls in their Married Bliss. Compared with the previous strife with her father and Father Hagerty, the contention with Eugene is much more fierce and destructive. Near the end of The Lonely Girl, Eugene’s chauvinistic prejudice that women are not meant to be self-autonomous as a thinking subject is clearly delineated.
He leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece, pushed a bowl of primroses in from the edge, and said, “You are incapable of thinking. Why don’t you get up and wash your face and put some powder on? Do something. Sink your inadequacy into washing walls or mending my socks or conquering your briary nature.” (359)
Actually, Eugene’s contempt for Caithleen (or women as a whole) is self-evident in this excerpt. From his perspective, Caithleen as a woman is not meant for a thinker but rather a flower-like dummy. Time and again Eugene tries either to materialize Caithleen by urging her to focus on her superficial beauty or to devote herself to
manual labor, both of which merely highlight the supposed femaleness as stipulated in a traditional, patriarchal society. In addition, the reference to her “briary nature”
indicates Eugene’s caricature of Caithleen as an unruly madwoman to be tamed and domesticated. For Eugene, women appear to be characterized by their emotion, irrationality, and incompetence and are thus foreign to great achievement. This very categorization of women’s feeble feminine attributes in contrast to the fertile features typical of men is under fire from contemporary feminists.42
In the presence of domineering Eugene, Caithleen appears to be passive, yet she does try to change the status quo by moving away, this time not from his hometown to Dublin but from Dublin to London.43 However, though the movement to London in one sense signifies the woman character’s search for a better tomorrow and for their self-identity, Caithleen is not absolutely free from man’s control. Not long before Baba and she start off, Caithleen still harbors the hope that Eugene will soon appear after receiving her farewell letter and will definitely love her at seeing her. She feels no doubt that Eugene will “love me and want to protect me again,” (367) only to find that Eugene is absent all the time. After all, Eugene does not show up as she expects.
Intermixed with longing and hatred, Caithleen comes to realize that things are not as optimistic as she surmises, though the germ of love never perishes in her heart. Near
42 For example, French feminist Helene Cixous is famous for her attack of such sexual
dichotomy in her essay “Sorties.” Details of Cixous’ deconstruction of such hierarchy will be illustrated in Chapter 4.
43 Emigration has always been a method for Irish to deal with their domestic problems. The Great Famine in 1845 not only claimed roughly the lives of one million Irish people but forced about two million Irishmen to leave Ireland. It is estimated that since 1820s half of the population in Ireland chose to emigrate from Ireland (W. J. McCormack 195-97). Even after their independence in 1948, people in Ireland saw economic recession and continual emigration. What distinguishes Irish
emigration from those of other European countries, however, is the large number of female emigrants.
In the mid-20th century Ireland, there are more female emigrants than male emigrants in Ireland, a phenomenon unique around Europe at that time (McCormack 616). Emigration appears to be a necessary evil to which Irish women turn for changing their disempowered social and economic status.
