A Bionian Reading of the Mother in Anne Enright’s The Green Road

ABSTRACT

Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015a) centers on the mother, Rosaleen. When she leaves her children and her home in the West of Ireland to walk the Green Road, Rosaleen asks herself, “Where did it begin?,” which is “more a cadence than a question” (p. 259). Her journey echoes that described by Wilfred Bion, with reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “like one that on a lonesome road, doth walk in fear and dread” (Bion, 1970, p. 46). Rosaleen is attempting to escape the feeling that she does not exist. As she travels, reality gives way to fantasy as time and space appear to merge. Eventually, she is frightened to turn back because “she had fallen into the gap” (Enright, 2015a, p. 266). This may be read as the emotional state of transformation in O. Bion (1970, p. 43) exhorts us to forget what we think we know: memory, desire, and understanding. Applying this to a consideration of Rosaleen, whose children know her by so many names (“Mammy,” “Mama,” “Ma,” “Rosaleen,” and “Dark Rosaleen”), provides for an exploration, alongside Rosaleen, not of who she was in the past or who we might wish her to be but beyond preconceived ideas of Irish motherhood to a place where new meaning may emerge.

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Margaret O’Neill

Margaret O’Neill, Ph.D., lectures in English Literature in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Limerick. She publishes and teaches in the areas of gender and psychoanalytic theory and 20th-century and contemporary Irish writing.