I thought that ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder, a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial women,” says the narrator of Edna O’Brien’s story, “A Scandalous Woman.” Of Irish murder and Irish shame we have heard much, but the news has been in the mouths of men. Edna O’Brien tells the Trish woman’s inside story. She has — as only the finest writers can created a world; she speaks in a voice identifiably and only hers. No voice could be less androgynous or more rooted in a land. Her great subjects are childhood and sexual love; both themes come to flower in a soil teeming with lively and portentous objects. Clothes, stuffs, foods, medicines, in her hands turn into vessels brimming with meaning and value. And her language itself takes on the texture of a precious thing, precious and yet familiar, held close to the body, kept always, in the center of the home. Think of the sentence I quoted at the beginning of this paragraph: “shame,” “murder,” “strange, “sacrificial.” All the words are fitting: none of them shocks. But only Miss O’Brien would use the word “throttled.” It is the emblem of her genius: the genuinely surprising word, not in itself exotic but conjuring in the reader a response inexorably physical and true.
The narrator of many of the stories in A Fanatic Heart is a young Irish girl who lives the life of the overwrought, obsessively observant outsider. The world of adults she perceives is often incomprehensible to her. She watches adults move, as if in a trance toward their destruction, propelled by a passion she finds beautiful and wishes to share in herself. Sex for these doomed creatures always brings tragedy: this is Ireland, and the love between men and women can only leave women worn out and men jaded, careless, longing to be away, or choked in a helpless romance unable to express itself. Everyone pays, but women pay the highest price.
Miss Amy Connor in “The Connor Girls” falls for a wastrel bank clerk who disappears mysteriously before the wedding; she leaves the town, and it is rumored “that Miss Amy had worked in a beauty parlor in Stephens Green, had drunk heavily, and had joined a golf club.” Another bank clerk is the cause of grief to Eily in “A Scandalous Woman.” Eily is one of the town beauties: “She had brown hair, a great crop of it, fair skin, and eyes that were as big and as soft and as transparent as ripe gooseberries. She was always a little out of breath and gasped when one approached, then embraced and said, ‘Darling’…. For one Advent she thought of being a nun, but that fizzled out and her chief interests became clothes and needlework.”
This description-the gooseberry eyes, the breathlessness, the temporary religious vocation replaced by interests of a more ordinary girlish sort—is Miss O’Brien at her best. The physical detail burrows into the mind; how clearly one sees Eily—the breathless transparent one, bound for sex trouble. The girl who is the narrator of this story is younger than Eily, honored by her friendship with this beautiful, worldly creature and more than happy to be the go between for her and her Protestant lover. Of course, Eily becomes pregnant; the town forces her lover to marry her. He is resentful and does his duty reluctantly, moving away from her emotionally until she goes mad. At the end of the story, the narrator, now a pregnant, unhappily married woman, sees Elly chastened, psychiatrically rehabilitated, a ghost of her former self.
Of course, not all Irish women so flagrantly and casually betray the secret of their sex; there are nuns and mothers in whom sex is concealed or pressed into the service of another love. “Sister Imelda describes the rapt, devoted love of a passionate, intelligent, and lonely young nun and a young girl, equally passionate, intelligent, and lonely. Their love, although partaking in aspects of the sexual is more or less than that. It is the love of two sensualists caught up in a fantasy of asceticism; it is all about the dream of perfection and perfectibility, about self-denial and the areas of human life unable to be quashed despite good intentions and, indeed, holy vows. By the end of the story, the young girl grows out of her crush on the nun, becomes worldly, wears too much makeup, chases after boys. Always, though, in her mind’s eye will be the image of the betrayed, mysterious one she had to leave if she was to have an ordinary life.
Mothers, too, in these stories must be left and left violently if the daughters are to mature into women of any sort. In “My Mother’s Mother,” a young girl says, “I thought how much I needed to be without her so that I could think of her, dwell on her, and fashion her into the perfect person that she clearly was not. I resolved that for certain I would grow up and one day go away. It was a sweet thought, and it was packed with punishment.”
The punishment, of course, is mutual: for the obsessed, starved mother-whose love is a salvation for the child, a threat for the maturing woman—and for the woman herself. “A Rose in the Heart of New York” is a brilliant evocation of the balked tenderness between a mother and a daughter. As a child, the daughter cannot bear to be separated from her mother; to be out of the mother’s sight is, for her, a little death.
Yet as a woman, trying to mend her estranged relationship with her mother by taking her on vacation, she can only be brutalized by the woman’s unhappiness, her attempts to instill guilt, her lust for consolation. Brutalized by her mother’s hungers, she must brutalize until, at the end, the mother’s death only marks the final failure of mutual love. After the funeral, the daughter finds, hidden above a mantelpiece, an envelope addressed to her. There are no words for her, only crumpled, many-times-folded money. “In her mind she concocted little tendernesses that her mother might have written words such as ‘Buy yourself a jacket,’ or ‘Have a night out,’ or ‘Don’t spend this on Masses.’ She wanted something, some communique. But there was no such thing.”
The overwrought, observant girl in these stories grows into a woman who leaves the things she has loved and feared in Ireland. She becomes an exile: un-mothered, unbefriended, torn from the land. Of course, she will try to find in the sexual love of men all she has left behind; she will look to romantic love for the placement she had in the home she could not wait to leave. And of course, the romances will be doomed to fail; no human relation could bear so much freight. But in the failure how splendid, and what a rendering of sexual life Miss O’Brien spreads before us in the stories about men and women that account for so large a part of her reputation.
In turning from the stories of childhood to the stories of sexual love, we lose the mocking humor whose source in the Irish stories is the provincial’s insistent misapprehension of the larger world. The lovers in Miss O’Brien’s stories are, for better or for worse, powerful citizens of the great world. They inhabit the glamorous professions: the women are journalists, poets, television stars; the men are wealthy businessmen dealing in interesting, valuable commodities. For these people, crossing the English Channel, or indeed the Atlantic Ocean, means no more than crossing to the next village meant to the people in the stories about Ireland. Actually, the larger journey is of less significance, for the people who cross the ocean are equally at home in any city they touch down on, whereas for the Irish villagers, to walk a mile down the road is to make a journey to the moon.
The women in these stories give themselves to love as a kind of self-immolation; to open themselves to love is to open themselves to madness, and each time, knowing this fully, they cannot resist. They are lifted up, these women, they are cruelly dropped down, and all their awareness does nothing to prevent them from their fate. Body and soul, they are taken over.
The woman in “Baby Blue” “did rash things, went outdoors, but had to be indoors at once, and barely inside was she than suffocation strangled her again, and yet out in the street the concrete slabs were marshy and the spiked railing threatening to brain her.”
These love affairs take place in the carefully appointed houses of women whose houses mean a great deal to them but for whom domestic life has no place. The women try to do ordinary tasks— cook an ordinary meal, sew on an ordinary button – but the acts become incandescent.
Every gesture, however innocently intended, turns into seduction and must lead the lovers out of the kitchen and into bed. Children, in these stories, are absent: away at school, snatched from their mothers by their punitive fathers, who declare their former wives unfit by virtue of the very passion that drives them to the husband of some other woman, allowed to keep her children and to share her man.
Miss O’Brien, however, does not present us with another tired episode in the ancient history of “the other woman.” Glimmering in these stories, like a gimlet in a swamp, is a pervasive ironic morality.
The other woman, after all, is not so different from the wife; she is grasping, she is vengeful, she is greedy, and she has the will to hurt.
In these stories no one is an innocent, and everyone must suffer.
Ireland can be left, but the curse of sex hangs over the head of all the world.
Miss O’Brien combines the romantic’s passionate feeling for language and the material world with the classicist’s unerring sense of form. Each of her stories is shaped into a complete and satisfying whole; she has the courage and the sureness of vision to derive from the singularity of her characters’ experience general truths about the world. It is a painful world, a vale of tears where ghosts jostle the beautiful fleshly living for a place in the fanatic heart.
From Good Boys and Dead Girls and other essays.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the July/August 1991 issue of Irish America. ♦
Leave a Reply