Refashioning the Wedding Dress as the “Future Anterior” in Marina Carr and Edna O’Brien

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Notes

¹ Elizabeth Freeman’s The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture is one of the few exceptions. In The Wedding Complex, Freeman analyzes representations of the Anglo-American wedding in relation to queer theory, American studies, and cultural studies.

² State- and religious-sanctioned weddings have generally only been available to heterosexual couples, although this is changing in Ireland with the recent May 2015 marriage equality referendum: over 60% of the voters supported the referendum. Thus while access to the institution of marriage is changing from a legal perspective for LGBTQIA individuals, the pace is slow, and the LGBTQIA community’s mobilization, harnessing, and subversion of “traditional” wedding fare will surely be a rich field for scholarly research. Moreover, as queer theorists have noted, there is an important ongoing debate regarding whether non-traditional families betray their radical principles by advocating for their inclusion into typically heteronormative (and now homonormative) frameworks.

³ More recently, and probably most well-known in the fields of sociology and cultural studies, is Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.

⁴ The stage directions indicate that while Hazel is “in her twenties, she seems and behaves much younger” (6). Hazel arrives on Mr. Berry’s doorstep, explaining that she has “‘come about the garment’” that she is in search of “for a client” who has been “invited to a black-and-gold ball” where the “theme is the twenties” (6). Although Mr. Berry reveals that his wife has been known to sell her clothes that no longer fit to a nearby clothing store, it is clear that Mr. Berry is operating without Mrs. Berry’s knowledge. As Hazel and Mr. Berry’s conversation proceeds, Hazel reveals that her mother is “lost,” and a moment later Mr. Berry implies that he is suffering from the loss of a loved one as well—his wife (10).

⁵ Discussing the importance of dress as it relates to Edna O’Brien’s fiction, Sinead Mooney builds on a 1990 essay by Mary Salmon, who writes that clothes serve “as a metaphor for identity” in O’Brien’s fiction (194). Mooney takes this notion one step further and argues that “psychoanalytic readings of clothing suggest that dress both promises to complete the gapped and lacking self by constructing of framing the body, thereby enforcing its precarious limits, and also, paradoxically, complicates and blurs the body’s edges” (197).

⁶ The play Hazel prepares for will not be performed on a stage, but rather at a “hospice” for a “birthday party for an old woman” (59).

⁷ The rest is represented as a sort of mid-twentieth-century rehabilitation center for drug addicts and alcoholics.

⁸ In the introduction to Haunted, O’Brien writes that when she first moved to London in the 1960s and then to “outer suburbia” she “became fascinated by the hidden lives of those in the forgotten streets, an outward façade of apparent normality, but surely not without many machinations and pipe dreams behind drawn curtains. … I wrote a series of television plays about that world, one charting the droll odyssey of a Mr and Mrs Berry. Almost fifty years later I came to write Haunted, wishing to dig deeper into the lives of such characters, masking and unmasking, contriving their different dances against an gnawing loneliness” (viii–ix).

⁹ By the Bog of Cats is not the only play in which Carr features wedding dresses. On Rafferty’s Hill could easily factor into my analysis as well. Melissa Sihra notes the long literary tradition of the wedding dress that Carr harnesses in On Rafferty’s Hill: “In On Raferty’s Hill (Gate/Druid 2000), we remain trapped, along with the characters, within the walls of the single-set country kitchen. In the final year of the twentieth century, this play is a radical rewriting of Gregory’s and Yeats’s Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902). … Carr’s play depicts the same country kitchen … and almost the same array of characters—a young couple about to wed, a father, a mother and an old woman. There is talk of land, money, inheritance and wedding clothes. In Carr’s play the old woman, Shalome, is an exile within the home, repeatedly seeking futile escape across the threshold. … In the final moments of the drama the old woman [Shalome] reappears inside the kitchen in the soiled wedding dress of the young bride-to-be, Sorrel, inverting the actions of the Poor Old Woman in the earlier drama and refusing the myth of an idealized Mother Ireland” (213). I would add that Carr is likely summoning Synge’s Playboy of the Western World as well; In the opening scene of Synge’s play, Pegeen is writing out a list of items to be purchased for her wedding. She writes that she requires “Six yards of stuff for to make a yellow gown. A pair of lace boots with lengthy heels on them and brassy eyes. A hat is suited for a wedding-day …” (74).

¹⁰ As Mary Burke explains, “[t]he Travellers, or to most Irish sedentary people before the 1960s, the ‘tinkers,’ members of a historically nomadic and numerically tiny minority community defined by anthropologists as an ethnic group, have existed on the margins of Irish society for perhaps centuries” (2). For an extensive cultural history of the Irish Traveller, particularly in relation to dramatist J. M. Synge, see Mary Burke’s superb “Tinkers”: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller.

¹¹ Indeed, the editors note Turner was compelled to admit that literature offers a unique space to consider the more abstract elements of rites of passage and rituals: “For literary and women’s studies, work on rites of passage provide spaces in which the representation of women’s diverse experiences can be analyzed. … Turner implicitly acknowledges this when he states that, in explaining the concept of communitas, he finds himself having ‘recourse to metaphor and analogy’ (127)” (xi).

¹² This is only just after Carthage’s mother chastises him for not coming to see the “new dress” she will be wearing at his wedding later that day after he “promised” he would (282). Josie asserts that she will wear her communion dress to her father’s wedding, setting off an already foreshadowed series of events (the last time Hester saw her mother she was wearing her communion dress, 297).

¹³ Carr’s choice to place Josie in a communion dress must be remarked on here too in terms of deconstructing another ritual and rite of passage within Catholic Ireland. In the past few years, the communion dress in Ireland has sparked a new level of interest. As a recent news article reported, the popular Channel 4 show My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding has led to a marked increase in the demand for “tulle bustled and diamante-encrusted billowing fairytale-style [communion] dresses … popular in the traveller community for some years now” (Kelleher 65). The dressmaker Thelma Madine noted that the orders come “‘from parents who are travellers and lots of people who aren’t travellers … Irish people would probably be our biggest customers’” (Kelleher 65). She added that the dresses get “‘more and more extravagant each year,’” with communion dress orders “‘making up about half of her…business’” (Kelleher 65).

¹⁴ For one potential way to view the “bridezilla” on the reality television show Bridezillas, see Erika Engstrom’s article “Creation of a New Empowered Female Identity in WEtv’s Bridezillas.”