Mothers and others in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls

Abstract

This essay responds to critical assertions that the absence of functional maternity in Edna O'Brien's famous 1960 novel The Country Girls reflects O'Brien's frustration with the cloying myth of ‘Ireland-as-motherland’. While I agree that O'Brien centrally considers the imbrication of femininity with nationality in a culturally conservative post-independence Ireland and enumerates the devastating lived effects of this discourse on Irish women, I argue that The Country Girls offers a potentially productive step beyond lamentation or complaint: namely, a nascent transnational poetics. I contend that the novel hinges on a character heretofore neglected by the criticism – Caithleen Brady's Austrian landlady, Joanna – and suggest that O'Brien slyly positions Joanna as Caithleen's potential surrogate mother, framing a ‘foreigner’ as a source of subversive family ties. Joanna's presence, I believe, indicates an effort on O'Brien's part to negotiate a political response to both gendered oppression and literary parochialism (the much-remarked climate of censorship that marked the newly independent Ireland's intellectual culture): the notion that community and security might be transformatively relocated in strategic ‘translocal’ networks rather than within the confines of the nation-state. Joanna signifies O'Brien's look beyond Mother Ireland – a desire to open the country to both global feminisms and transnational textualities.

Keywords:

• Edna O'Brien
• The Country Girls
• 1950s Ireland
• feminism
• maternity
• transnationalism

Notes

 1. O'Brien, Mother Ireland, 1.

 2. Morgan, ‘Mapping Out a Landscape of Female Suffering’, 458.

 3. See Morgan, ‘Mapping Out a Landscape of Female Suffering’, 458 and Weston, ‘Constitutive Trauma in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy’, respectively.

 4. Kiberd, ‘Growing up Absurd’, 151.

 5. See Gerry Smyth's Decolonisation and Criticism for details. Smyth frames this climate of censorship as the literary counterpart to local politicians' efforts to retain and revive uniquely Irish cultural phenomena, and treats both as symptoms of Ireland's insular brand of nationalism.

 6. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, xii.

 7. Other critics have usefully pioneered this approach, most notably Declan Kiberd (‘Growing up Absurd’).

 8. O'Brien, The Lonely Girl, 179.

 9. O'Brien, Girls in their Married Bliss, 439, 468.

10. O'Brien, The Lonely Girl, 373.

11. O'Brien, Epilogue, 523.

12. Chase, ‘Rewriting Genre in The Country Girls Trilogy’, 93.

13. O'Brien, The Country Girls, 17. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

14. Jack Holland's words above repeat the final line of Yeats's Cathleen Ní Houlihan, a play that centrally perpetuates these myths. After Yeats's Old Woman persuades Michael to join in the 1798 Rebellion and departs with her charge in tow, Peter asks Patrick ‘Did you see an old woman going down the path?’ Patrick responds ‘I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen’ – a line suggesting the almost supernatural capacity of the republican fighter to redeem a feminised Ireland (11).

15. Ingman, ‘Edna O'Brien’, 254. Significantly, O'Brien points out later in the trilogy that it is not only native men who conflate Irishwoman with country; the Mother Ireland myth is apparently quite far-reaching. In The Lonely Girl, Eugene Gaillard, Cait's cosmopolitan half-French, half-Irish lover, almost immediately asks Cait to stand in for Ireland, prescribing her rural innocence and supposed ‘authenticity’ as a sort of tonic to the airs of his worldly American wife. For example, Eugene initially claims that Cait ‘ha[s] a face like the girl on the Irish pound note’ (187), and later professes, ‘[a]h, the bloom of you, I love your North Circular Road Bicycle Riding Cheeks’ (198). Of course, Eugene later comes to resent these traits in both Cait and country, accusing all things Irish of ‘Stone Age ignorance and religious savagery’ (345).

16. Taoiseach.gov.ie.

17. O'Brien, Mother Ireland, 15.

18. Kiberd, ‘Growing up Absurd’, 153.

19. O'Brien, Mother Ireland, 36.

20. O'Brien, Mother Ireland, 36, 101.

21. O'Brien, The Country Girls, 77. O'Brien has frequently pointed out in essays and interviews that this notion of feminine modesty fundamentally conditioned her own young life. The Country Girls was published to scandal in Ireland given its frank depictions of female sexuality, and O'Brien's mother was thoroughly ashamed of her daughter's literary success. In ‘Causing a Commotion’, an essay published in The Guardian in 2008, O'Brien vividly recalls how her mother ‘erased with black ink any of the offending words’ in the novel, put the book in a ‘bolster case’, and ‘placed [it] in an outhouse’ (Guardian.co.uk).

22. Ó Tuathaigh, lecture, 20 June 2011.

23. Weston, ‘Constitutive Trauma in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy’, 93.

24. Declan Kiberd has argued that The Country Girls features a country unsure of finding its way nearly forty years after independence; the novel, he suggests, takes to task an Ireland of ‘applelickers’, of the boring and mediocre, of adherence to censorship culture (lecture, 24 June 2011).

25. Burke, ‘Famished’, 225–8.

26. Burke, ‘Famished’, 225–8, 228.

27. Burke, ‘Famished’, 225–8, 225.

28. O'Brien, The Country Girls, 133. While Joanna and Mrs Brady are in many ways antithetical, the two women are similar in one respect: both are framed as hardworking and thrifty, and both must compensate however they can for their husbands' financial failings. This convergence allows O'Brien to make a broader argument about the under-recognised value of women's labour, one that reveals the folly of the infamous Article 41: all women, mothers included, are ‘obliged … to engage in labour’ (Taoiseach.gov.ie) both within and beyond the home, whether or not that labour is obscured or elided by masculinist discourse.

29. O'Brien, The Country Girls, 133. While Joanna and Mrs Brady are in many ways antithetical, the two women are similar in one respect: both are framed as hardworking and thrifty, and both must compensate however they can for their husbands' financial failings. This convergence allows O'Brien to make a broader argument about the under-recognised value of women's labour, one that reveals the folly of the infamous Article 41: all women, mothers included, are ‘obliged … to engage in labour’ (Taoiseach.gov.ie) both within and beyond the home, whether or not that labour is obscured or elided by masculinist discourse, 134. Joanna even acts to protect and defend her own property when she thinks it's being threatened; when Cait and Baba later sneak their friend Bertie (‘the Body’) Counihan onto Joanna's couch, and Joanna hears him fussing downstairs, she rushes down ‘in her big red nightgown’ shouting ‘[t]hief, thief’, and douses him with the fire extinguisher's ‘white, sticky liquid’ (The Lonely Girl, 192). Joanna is therefore clearly an agent, even an aggressor, in the trilogy's first two books.

30. Joanna's maternal instincts become even clearer in The Lonely Girl. When Baba threatens to leave the boarding house, Joanna's eyes well up with tears, and she puts her usual practicality aside to indulge briefly in a near-familial sentimentality: ‘You cannot leave me, eh? I am gut to you like a mother’ (193).

31. Morgan, ‘Mapping Out a Landscape of Female Suffering’, 458. All the same, the subsequent books in The Country Girls trilogy confirm that ‘representations of Irish femininity in the name of nationalism’ will ultimately override Joanna's ‘Continental’ influence; Caithleen perpetually seeks out self-effacement in her romantic relationships, and is eventually driven to suicide (Chase, ‘Rewriting Genre in The Country Girls Trilogy’, 93, 99). It's important, though, that O'Brien forwards the feminist possibility of an alternative outcome here: Joanna represents (at least temporarily) a different path for Caithleen – a path that might be more easily trodden were Ireland willing to look transnationally for political and poetic currency. This argument reads the novel against the grain, as Caithleen's fate is typically considered predetermined; critics tend to suggest that O'Brien either tacitly ‘reinforce[s]’ or wishes to ‘draw attention to’ normative gender roles in mid-century Ireland, but take the point no further (Byron, ‘“In the Name of the Mother …”’, 22).

32. Taoiseach.gov.ie.

33. Moynihan, Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera 1917–1973, 35, 131.

34. O'Brien, The Lonely Girl, 261, 310.

35. O'Brien, The Lonely Girl, 261, 310, 327.

36. O'Brien, The Lonely Girl, 261, 310, 340.

37. This stance isn't incompatible with O'Brien's assertion that even in exile ‘the homeland [is] the font from which to draw stories and drama’ (‘Causing a Commotion’, Guardian.co.uk); as Heather Ingman puts it, it is simply a plea for ‘a more heterogeneous and polyphonic’ poetics (‘Edna O'Brien’, 263).

38. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, xii–xiii.

39. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, xii–xiii, 43, 58.

40. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, xii–xiii, 43, xii.

41. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 139. O'Brien critiques Irish Catholicism even more ardently in the trilogy's subsequent books, identifying the village priest's patriarchal collusion with Cait's father in The Lonely Girl (‘I'm surprised at you … to speak of your good father like that. Every man takes a drink. It's the climate’ [271]) and indicting the Pope himself for the subjugation of women in her 1986 Epilogue:

Now, when Pope John Paul II travels he says what Popes have been saying since secula seculorum – ‘Thou shalt not sin.’ He's still for keeping women in bondage, sexual bondage above all, as if they weren't fucked up enough with their own organs, and whoever said that all women in the world enjoy all the fucking they have to do – no one, certainly not me [Baba]. (522)

42. Quoted in Ball, Post-war German–Austrian Relations, 214.

43. Taoiseach.gov.ie. Another unique historical connection between the countries has to do with Sinn Féin founder Arthur Griffith's desire to take Austro-Hungary as a potential model for future relations between Britain and Ireland. His 1904 book The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland outlines his party's grounding principles, suggesting that Ireland abstain from participation in the institutions of the UK (as Hungary did from Austria) and use this passive resistance to negotiate its way towards an Anglo-Irish Empire – an arrangement involving separate governments but a shared monarch. The book, of course, celebrates Hungary's successful non-recognition of Austria's authority, but also frames Austria's acceptance of Hungary's terms as an (eventually) graceful acquiescence to an equal partnership between nations. Griffith cites Emperor Franz Josef's oath of allegiance to Hungary as a kind of blueprint for Britain to follow:

I, Francis Josef [sic], … by God's grace Apostolic King of Hungary, swear by the Living God, by the Blessed Virgin Mary, and by all the saints that I will uphold the liberty of Hungary and the rights, privileges, customs, and liberties of the Hungarian people of every creed and every station, and inviolably maintain the Constitution, privileges, and territorial integrity of Hungary, and do all that may be righteously done to spread the renown and increase the prosperity of this my kingdom. So help me God. (64)

Curiously, too, it was an Irishman, Maximilian Karl Lamoral O'Donnell (descendant of the O'Donnell dynasty of Tyrconnell) – an adoptive Austrian by virtue of the ‘Flight of the Wild Geese’ – who saved the emperor from an assassination attempt in 1853, allowing him to survive long enough to liberate Hungary. The political traffic between Ireland and Austria, then, enjoys a long and complex history.

44. Vansant, Against the Horizon, 22–5.

45. Vansant, Against the Horizon, 22–5, 25.

46. Vansant, Against the Horizon, 22–5, 21.

47. Kiberd, ‘Growing up Absurd’, 149.

48. O'Brien, A Pagan Place, 93, 94.

49. While Art-Club included a number of women (among them Maria Lassnig, Friederike Mayröcker, and Susanne Wenger), the Wiener Gruppe did not, and many modern avant-garde movements – surrealism, Dadaism, concrete poetry, and so on – have been framed as privileged ‘boys’ clubs'.

50. Quoted in Codrescu, The Stiffest of the Corpse, 32.

51. Lamb-Faffelberger, ‘Out from the Shadows’.

52. It is this feminist awareness that allows a post-war writer like Ingeborg Bachmann to mock those in Vienna who ‘read … Catholic writers as if it were imperative to reinvigorate Catholicism, though it could not have disappeared completely in just seven years and had to be a different Catholicism anyway’ as intellectual dilettantes, and to urge readers to ‘listen … to the … hidden [culture]’ rather than the ‘official culture’ of their city (The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann, 209).

53. Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism, 145.

54. Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism, 145, 96.

55. Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism, 145, 146.

56. There are, of course, a number of notable exceptions to this rule. For example, Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger (1942) is often cited as a post-independence revision of Revivalist tropes, particularly in its refusal to romanticise ‘the rural’ and its effort to imagine ‘a self-reflexive encounter between parish and empire’ (Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism, 142), and Thomas Kinsella's scepticism of national mythologies is evident in even his earliest work. In terms of criticism, Seán O'Faoláin's The Bell, while certainly a nationalist publication, did not transparently accept Catholicism as the essence of Irish identity, and often included pieces critical of the powers of the Oireachtas. However, as I've suggested, literary and critical deferrals to cultural nationalism were perhaps shaped in part by the political censuring and censoring of ‘non-standard’ literature: even Kavanagh was visited by the Gardaí and accused of obscenity after first publishing extracts from The Great Hunger in the journal Horizon.

57. Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism, 142.

58. Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism, 142, 96, 83.

59. Morgan, ‘Mapping Out a Landscape of Female Suffering’, 458. Once again, there are exceptions to this paralysis: the Irish Housewives' Association, for example, was formed in 1942 and was quite active throughout the 1950s, even fielding a few (unsuccessful) candidates in the 1957 general election. On the whole, though, their political contentions had to remain relatively conservative; as Hilda Tweedy argues in the Irish Housewife (the IHA's annual journal) in 1948, housewives, by virtue of their domestic work, have a right to a say in ‘the national house-keeping and home-making’ (in Deane, Carpenter, and Williams, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. V, 169). However, the significant role that feminists and suffragettes such as Constance Markievicz and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington played in Irish politics during and after the Easter Rising was in large part repressed post-independence. As Smyth puts it:

In the years after 1922, Pearse rather than (liberal) MacDonagh, (socialist) Connolly or (feminist) Sheehy-Skeffington emerged as first among equals. It was Pearse's version of the national narrative, emphasizing Catholicism, ruralism, and anti-modernism … which came to be adopted in the new state. (Decolonisation and Criticism, 92)

In the realm of literature, Teresa Deevy was one of the few woman writers able to be reasonably active after independence. She enjoyed an intimate relationship with the Abbey Theatre, and many of her plays were produced there throughout the 1930s, including several that staged the condition of female vulnerability in contemporary Ireland. Tellingly, though, when Ernest Blythe took over as Director of the Abbey in 1942, the theatre ‘closed its doors to Deevy's new work’ (Leeney, Irish Women Playwrights, 1900–1939, 164), and her plays were only infrequently staged thereafter. This movement is characteristic of dominant responses to progressive Irish literature during the period: Blythe was a former minister under de Valera, and he brought his conservative brand of nationalism with him to the Abbey, firing liberal directors and refusing to produce work that might appear critical of the state.

60. O'Brien, Mother Ireland, 126–7.

61. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, 40–1.

62. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, 40–1, 82.

63. O'Brien, Saints and Sinners, 20. The term ‘divorcée’ is telling here, given that divorce was constitutionally prohibited in Ireland until 1996, and is even now only sanctioned under specific circumstances (if spouses have lived apart for more than four years out of the past five; if there is no reasonable prospect of reconciliation between them). As Cait's aunt tells her in The Lonely Girl, for the faithful Irish Catholic, ‘[d]ivorce is worse than murder’ (260). There once again exists, then, a kind of political resonance in O'Brien's seemingly casual reference.

64. Brydon, ‘Dionne Brand's Global Intimacies’, 991.