Beyond the stereotypes: Mary Lavin's Irish women

Abstract

This paper discusses Mary Lavin's place within the Irish literary tradition by means of an analysis of her representations of female characters. It argues, first, that Lavin's short stories depart from the short story tradition in general and the Irish short story tradition in particular by failing to subscribe to the cultivation of the romantic outsider and focusing instead on family relations and social responsibilities. Second, Mary Lavin's marginal position in a feminist or female literary tradition is explained through her unwillingness to portray women as victims and through the absence of a clear critique of patriarchy in her work. The paper then tries to characterise the relationship between individual and society in Lavin's short fiction in a more positive way, by focusing on the notions of individual fate and personal responsibility, which turn out to be crucial to Mary Lavin's philosophy. This philosophy is first discussed explicitly in a reading of the story ‘Happiness’ and ‘The Widow's Son’ and subsequently shown to lie behind the oppositions and dilemmas in several other stories. Finally, the article demonstrates how Lavin manages to realise her Nietzschean belief in an Amor Fati in some of her most positive female characters through a clever use of imagery and point of view, without thereby succumbing to sentimentality or cliché.

Keywords:

• Irish short story
• Mary Lavin
• feminist literary criticism

Notes

 1. See Sarah Briggs’ 1996 essay for a detailed description of Lavin's critical neglect. Briggs, ‘Mary Lavin’, 11.

 2. As indicated clearly in her ‘Preamble’, Walsh-Peavoy has included these stories not in the order in which they were written or published, but in a sequence which traces the events of Mary Lavin's life (xiii–xvi).

 3. Preferably, this should be an annotated edition as Lavin has extensively rewritten earlier stories for inclusion in later collected editions.

 4. O'Connor, The Lonely Voice, 203.

 5. Peterson, Mary Lavin, 145.

 6. Several critics have argued that the dominant presence of the storyteller in the Irish short story is due to the influence of the oral storytelling tradition, which survived in Ireland – unlike in Britain, for instance – into the twentieth century. See, for example, Kiberd, ‘Story-Telling: The Gaelic Tradition’, in Rafroidi and Brown, The Irish Short Story, 13–26; and Kilroy, The Irish Short Story.

 7. Meszaros, ‘Woman as Artist’, 39.

 8. Interestingly, the three stories which Weekes discusses in detail are from Lavin's so-called widow stories which are set in Dublin and which more explicitly engage with the problems of modern life and modern women.

 9. Eavan Boland, ‘Mary Lavin’, in Chamberlain, Writing Lives, 140.

10. O'Connor, The Lonely Voice, 136.

11. In the preface to her Selected Stories she likens her work to the craft of the watchmaker (Lavin, ‘Preface’, in Selected Stories, and in an interview for The Irish Times she quite literally states that she has ‘dedicated her life to the craft of the short story’ (emphasis added), quoted in Kelly, Mary Lavin, 13.

12. In interviews Mary Lavin repeatedly emphasises the organic relationship between her writing and her household tasks by pointing out, for instance, how she wrote her stories on the dining table, sometimes amidst the remains of supper and always with other family members present. Similarly, she invariably presents her duties as mother and wife as a factor beneficial, rather than detrimental, to her creative work, as when she states in the same preface to Selected Stories: ‘If my life has set limits to my writing I am glad of it. I did not get a chance to write more stories than I ought; or put more into them than ought to be there’ (vii).

13. Wendell Harris, ‘Vision and Form: The English Novel and the Emergence of the Short Story’, in May, The New Short Story Theories, 188.

14. O'Connor, The Lonely Voice, 19.

15. O'Connor, The Lonely Voice, 18–21.

16. David Norris, ‘Imaginative Response vs. Authority Structures. A Theme of the Anglo-Irish Short Story’, in Rafroidi and Brown, The Irish Short Story, 39–40.

17. Bowen, Mary Lavin, 23.

18. Lavin, ‘Lilacs’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, Vol. III, 7.

19. Seamus Deane, ‘Mary Lavin’, in Rafroidi and Brown's The Irish Short Story, 245.

20. Frank O'Connor seems to sense that Lavin, whose work he discusses in the final chapter of his book, does not adhere to the format of the short story he has set out so far. Yet he does not really analyse the problem. He merely dismisses her different concerns and values as typical of women and concludes, quite curiously, ‘[T]hat different set of values means that Miss Lavin is much more of a novelist in her stories than O'Faherty, O'Faolain, or Joyce’. O'Connor, 211.

21. Heaney, ‘No Sanctuary from Hatred’, 296.

22. Deane, ‘Mary Lavin’, in Rafroidi and Brown's The Irish Short Story, 237–8.

23. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 409.

24. Lavin, ‘Loving Memory’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, vol. II, 265.

25. Lavin, ‘The Will’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, vol. I, 140.

26. Heaney, ‘No Sanctuary from Hatred’, 307.

27. Weekes, Irish Women Writers, 142.

28. Deane, ‘Mary Lavin’, in Rafroidi and Brown's The Irish Short Story, 238.

29. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 409.

30. For a convincing analysis of this situation in Edna O'Brien's fiction, see, for instance, Shumaker, ‘Sacrificial Women in Short Stories by Mary Lavin and Edna O'Brien’, 185–97; and Ann Owens Weekes, ‘Martyrs to Mistresses? The Mother Figure in Edna O'Brien's Fiction’, in eds. Patricia A. Lynch, Joachim Fischer and Brain Coates Back to the Present Forward to the Past: Irish Writing and History since 1798, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 309–24.

31. For a thorough discussion of all the priests figuring in Lavin's short fiction, see Kelly, Mary Lavin, 85–113.

32. See, for example, ‘The Villas’, ‘What's Wrong with Aubretia’, and ‘One Summer’.

33. Lavin, ‘The Nun's Mother’, in The Long Ago and Other Stories, 201.

34. Ingman, Twentieth-century Fiction by Irish Women, 118.

35. Shumaker, ‘Sacrificial Women’, 188.

36. Ann Owens Weekes, ‘Figuring the Mother in Contemporary Irish Fiction’, in Harte and Parker, Contemporary Irish Fiction, 108.

37. This revised version of ‘The Nun's Mother’ can be found in volume II of The Stories of Mary Lavin.

38. Kelly, Mary Lavin, 163–8.

39. After all, Mrs Latimer has been able to sufficiently forget her convent morality to enjoy a healthy sexual relationship with her husband.

40. In ‘Woman as Artist: The Fiction of Mary Lavin’, Patricia Meszaros gives an excellent reading of the highly ambiguous status of the woman artist in Lavin's fiction through a reading of ‘In a Café’ and ‘The Becker Wives’.

41. Lavin, ‘Trastevere’, in In a Café, 300.

42. Lavin, ‘Trastevere’, in In a Café

43. Lavin, ‘Trastevere’, in In a Café, 302.

44. Lavin, ‘Trastevere’, in In a Café, 312.

45. Mary Lavin, ‘A Memory’, in A Memory and Other Stories, 164.

46. Mary Lavin, ‘A Memory’, in A Memory and Other Stories

47. Mary Lavin, ‘A Memory’, in A Memory and Other Stories, 165.

48. Mary Lavin, ‘A Memory’, in A Memory and Other Stories, 175.

49. Mary Lavin, ‘A Memory’, in A Memory and Other Stories, 196.

50. Mary Lavin, ‘A Memory’, in A Memory and Other Stories, 197.

51. Mary Lavin, ‘A Memory’, in A Memory and Other Stories, 201.

52. Peterson, Mary Lavin, 140.

53. Lavin, ‘A Memory’, 165. See Ingman, Twentieth-century Fiction by Irish Women, 118, for a Kristevan analysis of Myra's repression of her body.

54. O'Connor, Emerging Voices, 86.

55. O'Connor, Emerging Voices, 103.

56. See, for example, Peterson, Mary Lavin, 84–6.

57. Lavin, ‘The Widow's Son’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, vol. I, 113.

58. Peterson, Mary Lavin, 25–43; A.A. Kelly, Mary Lavin, 30; and Deane, ‘Mary Lavin’, in Rafroidi and Brown's The Irish Short Story, 234.

59. The many questions in the story, as Vera's daughters struggle to understand her meaning, also function as Socratic steps in a philosophical treatise, eventually leading the daughters – and the reader – to a grasp of Vera/Lavin's philosophy. In this interpretation, I disagree with Mark Hawthorne's reading of ‘Happiness’ as a parable of the failure of communication and understanding owing to the inherent ambivalence of words in this story. Hawthorne, ‘Words That Do Not Speak Themselves’, 683–8.

60. Lavin, ‘Happiness’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, vol. III, 22.

61. Lavin, ‘Happiness’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, 24.

62. Lavin, ‘Happiness’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, 32.

63. In her discussion of the different types of narrative situation used in Lavin's Selected Stories, Maria Gottwald argues that Lavin employs an external perspective in ‘Happiness’ so as to ‘render the autobiographical experience more objectively’. Gottwald, ‘Narrative Strategies in the Selected Stories of Mary Lavin’, 184.

64. Lavin, ‘Frail Vessel’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, vol. I, 19.

65. Lavin, ‘An Akoulina of the Irish Midlands’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, vol. II, 202.

66. Lavin, ‘Posy’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, vol. I, 79.

67. Lavin, ‘Posy’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, 93.

68. Lavin, ‘The Will’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, vol. I, 137.

69. Lavin, ‘The Will’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, 139.

70. Cf. David Norris, who considers Lally one of Lavin's characters who manages to escape from the limits of middle-class Ireland, and James Heaney who argues, conversely, that Lally is ultimately weighed down by the strictures and pressures of post-independence Ireland (cf. above).

71. Lavin, ‘My Molly’, in The Stories of Mary Lavin, vol. II, 224.