Edna O´Brien

Nedanstående innehåll är skapat av Mimers Brunns besökare. Kommentera arbete

Some Central Themes in
Edna O´Brien´s Works


Högskolan i Jönköping
Engelska språket, C-nivå

Författare: Claes Andersson
Opponent: Christina-Löfström-Bark
Oktober 1994












1. Purpose

This paper will deal with some central themes in the novels of the Irish author Edna O´Brien.
Edna O´Brien is a prolific writer. Her authorship reflects many facets of human life which is evident when you read her twenty odd novels. A certain selectivity is therefore necessary.The central themes
selected in this paper are:

*love and loss of love
*guilt and religion
*feminism
*materialism/realism

Those are considered the main features in Miss O´Brien´s authorship. They are not quite as
separate from each other as outlined above. On the contrary, they are in reality very much
interwoven and intertwined.


2. Limitations

Edna O´Brien, born in 1932 ( some reference books say 1930 ) has been a whole-time, professional
writer ever since the early 1960s. She has published novels, short stories, plays for the theatre and
for television. Some of her books have been filmed in England and in the USA. During the last two decades Miss O´Brien has also published books for children, to some extent based upon Irish
folklore and tradition.
The books primarily chosen in support of this paper are:

* The Country Girls (1960)

* Girl With Green Eyes (1965)
(First published in 1962 as "The Lonely Girl")

* Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964)

* August is a Wicked Month (1965)

* A Pagan Place (1970)


They were all written in the 1960s and 70s and thus represent Miss O´Brien´s early authorship. The first three are perhaps those best known to the general public, and can be considered a trilogy and have been published as such since they constitute a sequence ( The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue, 1986 ).
Brief references are also given to other books by Edna O`Brien, such as Night and Casualties of Peace. These books are considered secondary.


3 Edna O´Brien´s Background

The early background has - many a time - proved essential to most authors´ artistic future. This is particularly the case with Edna O´Brien who, in an interview in 1970 ( Darcy O´Brien, 1982, p 179 ) said: " It´s amazing....... childhood really occupies at most twelve years of our early life .... and the bulk of the rest of our lives is shadowed or coloured by that time ".
Still, at the age of forty-one, Miss O´Brien was reflecting the effects of her childhood on her professional as well as on her private life. Nearly all of her novels have been, one way or another,
about breaking away - from home, from family and marriage or from love affair - and yet each is also
testimony to the the impossibility of the clean or permanent break. Childhood, family, husband and love live on to haunt heart and memory. Whatever the literary setting in her novels, one truth hovers
continuously near the surface of her prose and that is the persistence of memory, the impossibility of
forgetting. No one gets over anything, she tells us:" We carry with us till death each broken tie, vow
and love."


Since memory so dominates her works, it seems worthwhile considering certain generalities and specifics of Edna O´Brien`s childhood and early adult life.

Miss O´Brien was born in a small and quite isolated village i County Clare in the west of Ireland. County Clare was one of the poorest parts in an already very poor Ireland. Her education was placed entirely in the hands of the Catholic Church. She graduated from the Convent of Mercy at Loughrea
in her late teens. At the age of almost twenty, she attended the Pharmaceutical College in Dublin where she finally received a license in 1950.
In 1952 she married novelist Ernest Gebler and had two sons by him. The marriage lasted twelve years and ended in divorce in 1964. Edna O´Brien , who had by then already tried her luck at writing, made writing a full-time occupation after the divorce. ( The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, volume eight, pp 855-856)


From a cultural point of view, Edna O´Brien grew up in a " no man´s land ", a cultural void. She once
described how her total library of fiction consisted of two books; viz, Daphne de Maurier´s " Rebecca"
and Margaret Mitchell´s " Gone with the Wind ". These books were - from diligent study - in such
physical condition that the pages had to be assorted before reading. Apart from these two books there were only books on horses, cooking- and prayerbooks. Other sources of culture were occasional cinema or theatre plays and, of course, the Church as well as the Public House. What was taught in the Pub was of as much importance as the teachings of the Church. It was a mixed and motley society
where equality between sexes was an unknown concept. The man in general, and the family father together with the priest in particular, had almost unlimited and unquestioned power. In this society
almost everything was considered as sinful - the only things officially permitted were " eating, drinking, the carnival, the mission and the horse races. These activities were very much part of the men´s world and thus not forbidden" ( O´Brien: Mother Ireland, p 33 ). To this can be added that Ireland then had ( and still has ) a ban on contraceptives, abortion and divorce, whereas drinking
and violence were looked upon with a lenient attitude. This underlines the general hypocrisy pre-
vailing in the Irish/Catholic society that shaped young Edna; the State and the Catholic Church
have always been close allies in Ireland ( and in many other countries ).
The Catholic Church has - during the chaotic and almost weird history of Ireland - for long periods ( especially during the 800 years as an English colony ) been the only true bearer of the "National State and of Irish Values". This should be remembered in order to understand the strong position of the Catholic Church and its firm grip of the individual. Even today, Western Ireland is
the poorest and most backward part of the country, characterized by stagnation and immigration. Edna O´Brien wrote in her semi-autobiographafic book , Mother Ireland :

The West:
Rich in folklore and tradition but poor in soil. Thomas Carlyle saw in it nothing but
beggary and stone. He differed not from Cromwell who sent the natives there as an
alternative to hell.Today´s population consists of 391 000 souls, of whom 75 000 are
bachelors. ( p 16 )


This is the society that gives birth to mental disease, alcoholism, sexual aberration, inbreeding and degeneration, something amply displayed in Miss O´Brien´s writings. It is also a paradox that this same society has brought forward such great authors as Joyce, Yeats, O´Casey and Synge.
Edna O´Brien is - both from an English and Irish point of view - unique: The combination of woman,
catholic, lower middle class - should vouchsafe for a very bad start in her career as an author.
Reality proved otherwise.





4 A summary of The Country Girls, Girl with Green Eyes, Girls in Their Married Bliss, August is a Wicked Month and A Pagan Place.

The above five books form the basis for this paper. A short presentation of them seems appropriate.



The Country Girls ( 1960 ) describes the childhood and adolescence of the shy and sensitive
Caithleen ( mostly called "Kate " ) and her volatile and malicious friend Baba. The setting is Western Ireland. After Kate´s mother is killed, she is rescued from the custody of a drunken father by
Baba´s parents, who send both girls to a convent boarding school. They eventually contrive to be expelled from the convent, and set off to start a brave new life in Dublin. " The Country Girls ", which
is no doubt largely autobiographical, remains one of Edna O´Brien´s favourites among her books: "It
came like a song ", she says, "It was effortless" ( World Authors, p 1073 ). And this quality was re-
cognized by the reviewers, who were delighted by its " fresh comic bawdiness " and unforced charm.
Miss O´Brien´s acute perception and vivid wit make it a novel of enduring charm and vibrance. It received the Kingsley Amis Reward in 1962. Among many other things, " The Country Girls " gives
a first description of young Kate´s dependence upon the father and also the elderly " Mr Gentleman", with whom the teenage Kate experiences some kind of romance.



The emotional adventures of Kate and Baba are continued in Girl with Green Eyes , 1965 ( first edited as" The Lonely Girl ", 1962 ). They are now in Dublin. Kate meets Eugene, who is married, and becomes his mistress. At the same time she occasionaly meets " Mr Gentleman "who is some kind of reminiscence of her youth and who seems to represent the basic trust and security that her father could not give her. The father drinks heavily and does not care very much for his daughter. When Kate finds happiness with Eugene, the father intervenes in a " cloud of bad whiskey " and tries to regain his daughter, to rescue her from the clutches of the Devil, on the pretext that Eugene is married - but in vain. " Girl with Green Eyes " gives a clear description of Kate´s dependence upon men, her father, "Mr Gentleman " and above all - Eugene. Kate is almost obsessed with the fifteen year older Eugene, her husband-to-be. At the end of the trilogy they will all abandon her and let her down; even scorn her in the wretchedness caused by them.


In Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964) Kate marries Eugene and they have a son. Eugene, imagining himself as a highly educated and sophisticated man , more and more blames Kate for her lack of formal education and refinement, and treats her like a "country girl". Kate - in her state of
humiliation - finds a lover. Eugene finds out about his wife´s affair and gets a good excuse to divorce her and also get the exclusive custody of their son , named Cash. Kate is ousted - not just from their home but also from the every-day life with her son whom she loves more than anything else. She is allowed to see Cash on rare occasions - in parks, in cafes - which only adds to her humiliation.
Even Kate´s lover turns his back on her. Kate is left in loss, loneliness and bitterness. Never did Miss O`Brien describe love and the loss of it so well as in this book.

August is a Wicked Month is a continuation of the sense of being divided , so often displayed in
"The Country Girls Trilogy". " This is not me. I`m not doing this ",thinks Ellen, the heroine of the novel. While this person "Not I " goes on a personal sex crusade - a holiday in France - after her separation, her seven-year-old son is killed in an accident during holidays in Scotland with his father.
Unable to discover an adequate reaction to the loss of this part of her essential self, Ellen returns to England, only to find that she has contracted gonorrhoea during her spree in France. This disease was
"given" to her by her jet-set friends there. These new acquaintances proved to be fair-weather friends,
turning their backs on Ellen when she most needed them. In a way this novel gives the message that freedom has its price, especially for women who break the norms and standards of society; punishment comes to Ellen almost as through "an act of God ". Ellen is filled with bewilderment and guilt,divided between what she should do and would like to do.

In the books mentioned so far, Edna O`Brien has displayed an almost ingenious skill in describing reality, especially Nature. This capability is again demonstrated in A Pagan Place , which tells us of the problems of a young girl very similar to Kate in the trilogy. Its second-person narrative voice is a bold but sometimes disconcerting device. The girl in the book- always referring to herself as "you" -
restates her Irish childhood during the Second World War. The most notable tendency in O`Brien`s fiction in A Pagan Place is the progress from the realism in describing outward things to the introverted monologues, reminiscences and reconstructions.This " inner reality " is described by Miss O`Brien just as acutely as surrounding Nature. Edna O`Brien writes with what is sometimes labelled
"Total Recall ". At the end of the book, the young girl becomes a nun, fleeing alcoholism, poverty and
violence and all other inequities offered by Ireland. Becoming a nun is perhaps the only way open to a poor girl trying to escape this harsh reality.





5. Central Themes in Edna O´Brien´s Novels.


The themes chosen for this paper were presented in Section 1. Any keen reader of O´Brien´s
works will discover other themes, such as Irishness , Sex and Fear. Nor is any single
theme absolutely independent from the other themes. On the contrary, they are very much woven into each other to form a fine and lustrous web that might - in one sweeping term - be described as
" Ireland" in all its poverty-stricken beauty, as seen through the eyes of a most sensitive and intelligent author.



5:1 Love and Loss of Love

In the interview with Shusha Guppy ( 1982, p 38 ) the interviewer brings up the subjects dealt with in Miss O´Brien´s novels:


Interviewer

Let´s talk about the subjects that are dealt with in your work, its central themes which are romantic love and Ireland. Some people - and not only feminists - think that your preoccupation with romance verges sometimes on the sentimental and the "Romantic Novel " formula. You quoted Aragon in answer: " Love is your last chance, there is really nothing else to keep you there ".


O´Brien


Other people have said it too, even the Beatles! Emily Dickinson wrote:" And is there more than love and death, then tell me its name? ". But my work is concerned with loss as much as with love. Loss is every child´s theme because by necessity the child loses its mother and its bearings. And writers, however mature and wise and eminent are children at heart. So my central theme is loss - loss of love, loss of self, loss of God. I have just finished a play, my third, which is about my family. In it for the first time I have allowed my father, who is always the ogre figure in my work, to weep for the loss of his child. Therefore, I might, if the Gods are good to me, find that my understanding of love has become richer and stronger than my dread of loss. You see, my own father was what you might call the " archetypal " Irishman - a gambler, drinker, a man totally unequipped to be a husband or a father. And, of course, that coloured my views, distorted them, and made me seek out demons.


Interviewer

Is that why, in nearly all your novels, women are longing to establish a simple, loving, harmonious relationship with men, but are unable to do so?


O´Brien


My experience was pretty extreme, so that it is hard for me to imagine harmony, or even affinity, between men and women. I would need to be reborn.





In the interview, Edna O´Brien herself points at love ( and the loss of it ) as one of the central themes
in her works. Love is defined as love in all its forms - not just love between man and woman. Miss O´Brien´s women unhesitantly acknowledge sexual necessity while living independently of public
concerns: her feminists rarely recognize that their cause is public. Instead their object is love and their sorrow is its loss. The mother of Girl with Green Eyes dies, and motherlessness continues through the whole trilogy and goes on into Night .
In August is a Wicked Month , a woman´s only son dies and the novel is filled with death images;
in Casualties of Peace , the woman herself is accidentally murdered just when she and a dark lover have found happiness. The fear of loss is an everpresent burden of living; moreover, it is a
dominant attribute of love.




For several kinds of love, The Country Girls offers the widest range of possibilities .At the same
time as it reveals the transience of any single love or interpretation of another´s love.
First, young Caithleen´s ( Kate´s ) love of her father´s hired man , Hickey, is an extension of pre-adolescent fondness. More important is the love of the mother. Part of Edna O´Brien´s continued search for romantic love, however, also appears in the depiction of the mother who has apparently never totally surrendered her dream of romantic happiness. The mother´s pathetic desire to be loved by a man who deserved her respect leads to a watery grave when she drowns together with her lover.
Those who love these people, consequentely, are deprived of the funeral ceremony, their last expression of love. Motherless, the child knows unexpected love from the teenage Molly, a maid in the Brennan household.The veterinarian, Mr Brennan ( Baba´s father ), who invites Caithleen to live with his family, reveals real tenderness for her and defends her against the drunken rampages and physical abuse of her father. Still, another kind of love is that of " Mr Gentleman ", an elderly friend who confines his lovemaking to kisses. His failure to keep an appointment with Caithleen, as well as the failure of many other persons important to Caithleen, only emphasize the empty formalities of spoken affection as opposed to the rarity of actual feeling (Eckley, 1974, pp 11-12 ).




Still, when reading Miss O´Brien´s novels the love between the sexes is the kind of love that strikes the reader the most. This love theme has, thus far, dominated critical reaction and has branded
Edna O´Brien as a Feminist ( which she claims not to be; see Paragraph 5:3 below ). It has also
made her famous for having written books banned in Ireland. That Edna O´Brien has been called a
Feminist is not an idealistic or philosophical posture but rather a realistic appraisal of the female
condition in general and the male-female relationship in particular. The man/woman relation in O`Brien`s works can best be explained by the " Cinderella motif ", rather than in terms of sex. The Cinderella motif is taken from the popular tale where the young and handsome Prince finds Cinderella - the only young maiden in the country with a foot small enough to fit the shoe left behind at the ball. He takes Cinderella away from the vicious stepmother and ugly stepsisters and makes her his Queen, and they allegedly lived happily ever after.
Asked what the Cinderella motif means to her as it appears in August is a Wicked Month , where Ellen wants a certain kind of man who would control and bewitch her, Edna O´Brien said:" I mean the metemorphosis from being outcast to being queen, to being accepted". Miss O´Brien describes this man - this Prince Charming - able to bring about the necessary metamorphosis as follows: " As for the man who would bewitch her (= Ellen ), I think I would use a stronger word now; the man who would possess her. I have a very strong pull and obviously conflicting pull towards God and the Devil, and I used to,anyhow,observe and be drawn towards men who seemed to me to have very strong elements of both, and who would exert power over one - over one´s mind and over one´s body".
( Eckley: Edna O´Brien, p 39 ). These words reveal, perhaps, a vain hope that a woman´s life will, and can, only be fullfilled through a man. Woman herself is not a subject but an object, having no value unless she is coupled to a man. This man is "Prince Charming " who finds his Cinderella, delivers her from her dreary life and makes her his Queen.

In a sense, Edna O´Brien´s Cinderella theme through her novels may be viewed as a process of change from romance to realism - from the innocent view that an alignment with a male means happiness ever after unto a strong realization that such is not possible. In the Trilogy, Prince Charming is Eugene Gaillard, attracted to Caithleen Brady ( Kate ) for her naivite´, but later finding her repulsive for the same quality. Today´s Cinderella must acquire Wisdom. Caithleen´s first experience in this painful process occurs in Country Girls with " Mr Gentleman ", an aged cavalier whose superb manners derive from his French origins, money, friends and position. At their first meeting he wakes in the teenage Caithleen the unfamiliar sensations of sexual response. His appeal is partly to mother instincts; he projects the quality of masculine need, real or imagined. He becomes Caithleen´s " new god, with a face carved out of a pale marble and eyes that made me sad
for every woman who had not known him " ( Country Girls, p 65 ). Finally, in a burst of excuses, he leaves her in the lurch. The man, here represented by Mr Gentleman, cowardly forsakes her. Caithleen realizes she has to create her own life through her own efforts.


In Girl with Green Eyes Caithleen is torn between a budding relationship with Eugene Gaillard and loyalty to her father who - in a fit of paternal jealousy - abducts her from Eugene, the Seducer.
At home she can no longer seek help from either "Mr Gentleman " or Mr Brennan; they no longer love her. She has lost their love. Eugene is still by her side, exhibiting some aspects of Prince Charming through his efforts to improve her in health as well as intellect; he gives her books and introduces her to friends. His greatest gift is that he enables Caithleen to accept her own body and his. But as the mental rift between them increases, she realizes that " it is only with our bodies that we ever really forgive one another; the mind pretends to forgive, but it harbours and re-remembers in moments of blackness"."And in loving him, I remembered our difficulties, the separated, different worlds that each came from" . ( Girl with Green Eyes, p 179 ) Caithleen´s summation of herself reveals her keen awareness of her inadequacies: " Swayed or frightened by every wind, light- hearted, mad in one eye (as he said),bred in ( as he said again ) Stone Age ignorance and religious slavery". Again man (Eugene) proves not to be the tool by which Caithleen can become a queen, a somebody.


By the time of Girls in Their Married Bliss, the scene is London. All opportunities for Eugene to live the role of Prince Charming or for Caithleen to be transferred into his queen, have been shattered. The force that fixes her in his grasp is an unwanted pregnancy, while Eugene´s small meannesses, his authoritative exactness about small things, and his frequent tempers contrast with her guilt-ridden weaknesses and dislike of household duties. In her guilt and feeling of inferiority in every respect, Caithleen escapes for a short while to her friend Duncan and , perhaps, in her general longing to be accepted and loved, goes to bed with him.
Her husband Eugene finds out about her infidelity and condemns her simpelton ways and lectures her. " The things you do count, not your cheap little justifications". Although she is too humanly weak to defend herself, he is not even human.Caithleen observes: "When people failed him he detached himself from them completely. They ceased to exist any more for him", so that her selfishness and
furtiveness are countered by his of another kind, the only difference being his selfrighteousness. To prove his righteousness Eugene admits to having had an affair with their maid, Maura. Their marriage ends in a divorce at this point. Cathleen has to leave her husband, her son and her home.
Eugene keeps the house and lives there with Cash and Maura who has become a " new mother "
to Cash. Rather than being a queen, Caithlen is humiliated and outcast, having lost Eugene´s love and the nearness to her son. Kate lives alone, seeing her son mostly in parks and her ex-husband at railway stations. On one occasion she returns to the house with Cash´s lost glove and observes the new family at dinner, Maura sitting in Kate´s place at the table, a striking picture of loss and loneliness.
After what can be described as a nervous breakdown, she awakes in hospital. Later, after a night with a man, she concludes that sleeping with a man is " A nothing, if nothing in the way of love preceding it". This is her new-found knowledge. And from her unfortunate experiences and increasing Wisdom, she concludes about men: " Some of course were flawed or hollow in there. Many in fact". But with continuing inquiry into the mystery of life, she looks at an Englishman and speculates:
"Was he ?" The cost of seeking an answer is too great, however: "She would have to sleep with him to know. The only way of ever really knowing man " ( Girls in Their Married Bliss, p 122 ).

This last sentence could be thought as derogatory to all men, almost vulgar in its raw and naked conclusion that men can only be reached through their physical bodies, not through their
souls and intellect. Still, Edna O´Brien reverts to this opinion in many of her books to come. The sentence could be described as Feminism at its worst. In the books published in the 1980s,
Miss O´Brien, in her search for wisdom, finally concludes that a functioning relationship between man and woman lies in the happy reunion of souls, not just bodies.

The theme of love, loss of love and loneliness is perhaps more stressed in Girls in Their Married Bliss than in any other of Edna O´Brien´s books. The Cinderella motif persists, however, in August is a Wicked Month, Casualties of Peace and Zee & Co, among others.










Kiera O´Hara, in her article " Love Objects: Love and Obsession in the Stories of Edna O´Brien ", elaborates further on the Cinderella motif and also tries to give a plausible explanation of it:
Edna O`Brien writes: " I am obsessed quite irrationally by the notion of love. It is an obsession and I know it is very limiting. At the same time it`s what I feel truest and most persistently about, and therefore it is the thing that I have to write about ". And write about it she does - the obsession, that is, perhaps more than the love. Obsession for obsession´s own sake. Not for love´s sake. " Love and
obsession are, in a sense, opposites. Obsession feeds on itself, is self-absorbed, while love reaches beyond the self toward authentic contact with another" ( O`Hara, 1993, p 317 ). In many of Edna O´Brien`s stories, there are, no doubt, moments of genuine love and compassion. But these occur only as their protagonists free themselves, or are torn, from the grip of their obsession.


" Irish Revel ", one of O´Brien´s early short stories included in The Love Object , pictures
what might be called the " birth of obsession ". Mary - a country girl - has been invited to a party in town. She dreams that an old lover of hers - John Roland - will magically show up at the party, only to find that he is not there. She takes shelter in daydreaming of John and the things they once did,
imagining what he might have said and done, had he been at the party. At the close of " Irish Revel",
Mary returns home burdened with her fruitless hopes and crushed by the ordinariness of the party. She stops briefly for a view of the countryside - the countryside could be seen as a picture of her own
life - and surveys it in a way that clearly echoes Joyce´s language in " The Dead " ( Eckley, 1974,
p 81 ). Mary witnesses an unforgiving frost:


The poor birds could get no food, as the ground was frozen hard. Frost was general all over
Ireland; frost like a weird blossom on the branches, on the riverbank from which John
Salmon leaped in his great, hairy nakedness, on the plough left out all winter; frost on
stony fields; and on all the slime and ugliness of the world. ( O`Brien: The Love
Object, p113 ).


Despair dominates the whole scene, surrounds Mary on all sides, from the frozen, unyielding land-
scape to the dreary vista of her family´s cottage, evoking a spectre of a dead-end life.
In her response to the despair of the situation Mary represents numerous O`Brien protagonists:
" If only I had a sweetheart, something to hold on to", she thought, as she cracked some ice with her high heel and watched the crazy splintered pattern it made. This clutching of a sweetheart as an escape from a desperate situation forms one strand of a crazy splintered pattern of obsessional drama into which subsequent O`Brien protagonists weave themselves. Obsession seems to be defined as " a persistent or inescapable preoccupation ", as " any process used to avoid or take away in-
tolerable reality" ( O`Hara, 1993, p 318 ). In Mary`s search for relief from intolerable pain, the addiction to a love object is born. And, as with other O`Brien women, the object chosen is one who is both bathed in " a golden haze " and beyond the woman´s reach.


The title of Edna O`Brien´s story The Love Object , seems to suggest awareness on the part of the author that there is something inherently contradictory in the notion of " a love object ",
perhaps an acknowledgement that love objects are more often the objects of obsession than of love.
Once again we see: Obsession for obsession´s sake. But the narrator shows no irony in her account
when she describes the man who will become her lover, could she only find one: " The love object.
He should be elderly. Blue eyes. Khaki hair ......"( O`Brien: The Love Object p 9 ).


In O`Hara´s above analysis of Mary´s situation - seemingly a barren, dead-end life - the man seems to be the only way for a woman to break away from the poor and hopeless life of an Irish Country Girl. Only through the man can a woman leave her dreary, pent-up life and move somewhere in the world; gain acceptation and be recognized as not just anybody but as the Queen she wants to be - , but just as much, or even more, by the possibilities offered by the man -the Cinderella motif rephrased. This explanation appears plausible, especially as this very same explanation is supported not just in Irish Revel but even more in Miss O´Brien´s trilogy. Woman is obsessed by man not just because he is a man, but just as much, or even more, by the possibilities he represents to her, nothing else; - woman does not contemplate the man´s character, nor if the two are compatible as human beings in marriage, sharing the same values and interests. An almost rude example of this is given in O`Brien´s How to Grow a Wisteria ( also included in The Love Object ) . The young woman, - looking back on a disrupted marriage with a man who insisted on exile, - realizes the changed attitudes that experience brings. When asked why she married this man she blankly replies: " his disposition and his face fitted in with some brainless dream of mine ". (Eckley, 1974, p 11 ).

The reasons supporting O`Hara´s opinion are,no doubt, to be found in the very long history of Irish poverty, isolation from the rest of the world and the strong dominance of a stern, unyielding Catholic
Church, - a church that has for centuries been a guarantor for Patriarchy in Ireland.


Keira O`Hara´s explanation , or part of it , may also be found with Edna O`Brien herself:
Critics have been puzzled about why O`Brien´s characters are obsessed with unattainable love objects.
" Why haven´t her women wised up?", asks Richard Woodward ( 1989, p 42 ). In the interview with Nell Dunn ( 1969 , p 95 ) O`Brien speaks of herself as having been very wounded in her life. Perhaps this is a reference to her childhood with an abusive alcoholic father. It seems likely that this is at least one of the wounds to which she refers. It is a sad fact that sometimes the unattainability of love in childhood causes a person to seek, in fact eroticize, the same kind of unattainability in later life. The obsession of the adult is a haunted shadow of that which absorbed the child; that which is most unattainable is most sought.


Writers on addiction have pointed out that a behaviour that turns addictive is initially established as a way to escape pain. The twist is that this behaviour eventually becomes itself the source of pain. The original wound remains unhealed as frantic repetitions on the obsessive treadmill continue. The obsession of Edna O`Brien´s characters with the notion of love fits with this pattern as clearly as
does a substance addiction.
People in the grip of an obsession, an addiction if you choose, seldom wise up. The road away from
obsession ( which is also the road home ) is one on which the wounded child, rather than fleeing her
wounds, begins to accept the great childish gape within her. It is also a road on which the wounded soul comes to believe that infinite resources for her healing are available for the asking. O`Brien´s characters seem unable to discover such a road home; self-love and faith elude them. The cycle of obsession - endless repetitions of yearning and despair - seems bound to continue. ( O´Hara, 1993,
p 324 ).





5:2 Guilt and Religion


Ellen Sage,the main character of August is a Wicked Month shows a record of rejections of men.
She schedules her vacation on the Riviera, longing " to be free and young and naked with all the men in the world making love to her, all at once". ( O`Brien: August is a Wicked Month, p 27 ). On the plane to the Riviera she sits by an attractive young man and speculates: " She could make love to him there and then, lie down and love this total stranger. She had always wanted to. He had intelligent eyes. She was going to make overtures to every good-looking man she met. This trip was her jaunt to
iniquity ..........". But the greatest remaining part of the book is a history of her conscious rejection of various men. During her stay on the Riviera she courts and is courted by several attractive and un-
attractive men, but she always rejects them at the last moment.

The explanation underlying these rejections she explains to herself as a process of selectivity aimed at finding the " certain kind of man ". However, her suffering is a form of masochism derived from guilt religion, childhood memories and her ex-husband´s scorn. Her attitudes towards sex are haunted and
distorted by knowledge of her mother having been forced to submit to her father, but then, she changes her mood and thinks " her mother should not have been mean ". All of a sudden the guilt, the blame is shifted on to the mother. Further, much of her rejection was forced upon her by the ex-
husband who ridiculed her religious beliefs and practices; in spite of which she lives in fear of the church. Although she remembers she never left the priest´s confessional feeling absolved, she had her
son secretly baptised, haunted by the feelings of fear and guilt. Moreover, these complex attitudes to life and religion can be traced to " the great brainwash - begun in childhood. - slipped in between the catechism advocating chastity for women was the secret message that a man and a man´s body was the true and absolute reconciliation with God . Burdened by these contradictory admonitions, verging on hypocrisy, she feels guilty about occasionally having wished for some reprieve from the care of the child, and fears she has never loved anyone totally unselfishly.
She tells her lover: " I want to love someone other than myself "; and only intense discontent with the self can explain her desire: " To cease to be me ". Her feelings of guilt, of not being up to the mark, the mark set by the Church and men, have brought her thoughts to this extreme.( Eckley, 1974, pp 60-61 ).


Edna O´Brien has once declared that her favourite work is A Pagan Place ( Contemporary Novelists, p 703 ), which tells the problems of a young girl very similar to Kate in O`Brien´s first three books. Miss O`Brien herself traces mixed emotions of guilt and rebellion to childhood in this favourite novel of hers. The book is written as a diary a young woman recollecting her childhood and youth in the Irish countryside. The cast is more or less the same as in O`Brien`s trilogy: The dominant father who is an alcoholic, the harassed and beaten mother, two daughters, poverty plus the Catholic Church looming on the horizon.
The reader never gets to know the name of the young girl making a journey through her memories. The book is written throughout in the second person; thus she always refers to herself as "you".
When thinking of her childhood the young girl recalls unwritten rules and restrictions:" Only men
should whistle. The Blessed Virgin blushed when women whistled and likewise when women crossed their legs". Remembering her mother´s defiance of Catholic rules places a strain of guilt on the daughter too: " Your mother was very straightforward and committed a terrible sin once, went to a
Protestant service, to Manny Parker´s mother´s funeral......... ".Later, the Catholic priest gave a whole sermon on the mother´s betrayal. The young girl once again experiences the guilt she felt many years ago over her mother´s sin and the public condemnation of it.


Respectability, enforced by religion and education and pride in the family are the pillars upon which society seems to rest in A Pagan Place. Reality behind the closed doors of the young girl´s home is different, though; the father who prefers to urinate in nightly ritual from the top step at the back door; the parents´ grunting activities behind closed doors; the mother´s tickling and teasing game with the doctor when her husband is not at home - and other unsavoury details - incline the child toward an unvoiced awareness of the physical body. She can´t define all these unsavoury details to herself, but she feels that there is something shameful about them.
At the same time the consciousness of ancient knowledge, pagan knowledge, outside the Catholic faith
and outside the school textbooks has a great influence upon the sensitive child, creating new and different restrictions; restrictions which - when broken - create guilt in her .
Some of these pagan rites and rules date from before Christianity. The fort of dark trees near the child´s home is a pagan place . Druids had their rites there in times of yore. A witch-woman used to live there. Local ruins are reported to be haunted. A black dog appears near by and disturbs a wake. No one dares send the black dog away - not even the priest. A black dog and the Devil were one and same .
Paganism is mingled with religion , which is so often the case with the Catholic Church. An example
of the irrelevance of religion to practice, or the contrast between paganism and true Catholicism occurs when the father, after having beaten the daughter savagely for an escapade with the young curate, is not condemned by the local priest for doing so. The priest, instead, turns to the complaining daughter and scolds her for criticising her father´s drinking. The father had, according to the priest,
made amends by sprinkling holy water on his daughter , an old Druid rite believed to relieve pain.
All these rules , some persons being punished for breaking them, others not, make the girl bewildered and laden with guilt. There are many instances of anomalies like these in A Pagan Place , creating more or less total chaos in the girl´s mind. This caused confusion and guilt, the everpresent guilt, the scourge of the young girl´s life.


Edna O´Brien has called herself " only a guiltridden Irish woman " ( Eckley,1974, p 66 ).Yet, while submission to inherited groundless fears account for many of Caithleen Brady´s ( Kate´s )
inadequacies - and development must be away from these - she has a best friend, an alter-ego
named Baba who points the way for her away from guilt. Although Caithleen dominates the first two
novels of the trilogy, Baba speaks in chapters 1, 6, 7 and 10 of Girls in Their Married Bliss. When asked if there was an original for the character of Baba, Miss O`Brien answered: " I think I
did have school friends who were the opposite of myself, and they were extrovert and mischievous,
more mischievous. I was drawn towards them as I always am towards opposites. But now I think that
it was partly my other person, my alter-ego. I had a sort of streak of submersed rebellion in me always, which I never let out, unfortunately; I was really too frightened, too meek. And I don´t think that the meek should inherit the earth, really, because then I don´t think agriculture or productivity of
any kind will get done " ( Eckley, 1974, p 67 ). The cruel, yet healthy, jeering may be observed in A Pagan Place ; its extension in the character of Baba is here represented in the main character´s sister, Emma, who has the courage and the cheek to dare and defy adult society to the point of unloosening all ties with her parents and become independent.



In The Country Girls , Caithleen has ample opportunity to measure her meekness and inadequacies against others and develop under Baba Brennan´s influence when her mother dies.
With the father away on a drunken binge ( as usual ), the mother gone, Caithleen is thrilled to accompany Baba and her family for an evening at the town hall with its varied programme of tap dancing, banjo playing, singing and clowning. When Caithleen and Baba are asked to sing at an intermission, Baba uses the opportunity to humiliate Caithleen ( who only pretends to sing ) by stopping in the middle of the song:" And there I was ", relates Caithleen, " seen by everyone in the hall with my mouth wide-open as if I had lock-jaw ". The news of the death of Caithleen´s mother, brought during the play ( the mother had drowned together with her lover ) shows the friends in a bright new light, with guilty consciences. Baba´s only expression of sympathy is: " I´m sorry about the
bloody aul´song ". The faked singing, the mother´s death ( shameful in a way ), all this in public, as it were, is too much for young Caithleen to cope with. She is overwhelmed with sorrow and guilt.


The theme of guilt is continued in Girl with Green Eyes . Eugene Gaillard - Kate´s husband-to-be, offers Kate one way to develop independently of Baba; but Caithleen´s aunt has always claimed
that divorce ( Eugene´s chief fault ) is worse than murder, and when Caithleen is returned home by her father from the sinful clutches of Eugene, the school children taunt her as she passes through the village. Her former friend, the seemingly enlightened Mr Brennan ( Baba´s father ) can only say :" I am disappointed with you", and his wife, who had often been seen in Pubs drinking gin with strange men, has now got the " religion " and calls Kate " mad, to think of a man like that ". " Mr Gentleman likewise has turned religious and, obviously ashamed of the times he and Caithleen had kissed and said : " I love you ", now calls her a " very foolish little girl ". Religion - like so many times before accompanied by its comrade-in-arms, Hypocricy, - comes down on Caithleen like a ton of bricks. Caithleen reacts with confusion and strong feelings of guilt. No matter what she does, society points its finger at her.




Kate´s alter-ego, Baba, is used in the trilogy as Kate´s opposite; to mouth the opinions Kate dares not express, to do the things that Kate dares not do. She is in a way Kate´s mouthpiece, saying forbidden things, thinking forbidden thoughts; - a safety - valve to let out Kate´s feelings of guilt. Contrary to Kate, Baba is crass, openly greedy for money, and, removed from pious morals, able to characterize herself and others with profound insight: " I had a brazen, goodlooking face and was afraid of none of them, not even afraid whether people liked me or not, which is what most people are afraid of, anyhow ". ( O`Brien: Girls in Their Married Bliss, p 11 ).
Baba is married to a builder, Frank, who is even more vulgar than she, and thinks his money can buy him status. He has his secretary send ninety-four telegrams to the wedding, with workmen´s names on them because, claims Baba: " He´d die if he didn´t get a bigger number of telegrams than anyone else, or make the wittiest speech ". Her mother favours Frank because he has money, whereas Baba calls herself " bloody, sacrificial lamb " at her wedding party. Far from becoming a victim of anyone, however, she induces Frank to support her unborn child who is not his.

This sneering, jeering, vulgar and most insensitive alter-ego - the strong person , without conscience,
cold and ruthless enough to cope with life - anyhow helps to free Kate from Patriarchy. Kate´s scorn and contempt of her ex-husband ,whose love is perverted into hatred, is yet another road
to personal liberation and maturity for Kate. In O´Brien´s later books , the main characters - all of them women - gradually grow more and more mature, creating their own lives, living by their own standards without paying much heed to general or religious opinion , keeping guilt at bay.



How deeply sexual fears are ingrained, Edna O`Brien revealed in the Nell Dunn interview
when she said: " I don´t think I have any pleasure in any part of my body, because my first and initial body thoughts were blackened by fear of sin " ( p 85 ). The intellect, however, defies these emotions, and Miss O`Brien goes on: " I believe in only one or two sins; cruelty, killing and injustice. These are sins; everything else, lust, sex, adultery, covetousness are venial, you know, they are just little flaws. " Yet, Miss O`Brien also admitted, " I was married once and after four or five years I then became very attracted to somebody else, and the only reason I didn´t sleep with that somebody was my permanent and pervading guilt. I could not come home to my husband and look him in the eye and make tea, I couldn´t. And this was not niceness or anything, it was deep-rooted fear, he might kill me or something if he found out ".

To Miss O`Brien, guilt in itself seems to be a type of fear, derived from excessive consciousness of fault; and a fear of having an incontinent heart combines with the fear of retribution from the wronged party . "Obviously, I am rooted in the idea of original sin ", Edna O`Brien says. Asked what the term means to her, she replies: " It means that one has been marked, if not completely destroyed, by the blemishes of will and flesh. That´s what it means to me " ( Dunn, 1969, p 86 )






5:3 Feminism



All main characters in Edna O`Brien´s novels are women. They represent many types of women; the
sacrificing mother, the obedient young girl, sisters, friends, the betrayed woman and also " the other woman ".The list could be made much longer. This is proof that Miss O`Brien has a wider perspective within her authorship than some critics claim. With her special back-ground from the Irish countryside and lower middle-class, she has every opportunity to describe all layers of society, Her stories about the Irish countryside, mostly in the 1930s and 1940s, give us a remarkable insight into an almost hidden and clandestine world. It is a world that, in some respects, has remained at the stage of self-subsistent household, where the women keep hens, sell eggs, knit and weave to get enough money to support a home almost on the brink of starvation, while the men go on drinking
( "bend their elbows ", O`Brien calls it ), squandering their money and many other other family belongings, even the house and the fields. Alcohol plays an important role in this society, but totally different roles for the men and the women. For the men it had a social function; for the women it meant ever-present insecurity and oppression.


On the whole, men represent power, also physical power, and it is hardly an exaggeration to find
physical violence against women described just as much as sex scenes in O`Brien´s books.
This is particularly evident in A Scandalous Woman. The main character in this book, Eily, spends most of her childhood under the kitchen table out of reach of her inebriated father´s fists, seeing and hearing her mother being maltreated, humiliated and more or less raped by her father. Violence is also to be found in Girl with Green Eyes , when Kate is forcibly reclaimed by her drunken father, at the same time as Eugene gets a sound flogging by the father´s friends. Violence is perhaps most conspicuous in A Pagan Place where the main person´s pregnant ( and unmarried ) sister Emma gets her due from the father. The mother, trying to defend her daughter, gets her share as well.






Edna O`Brien´s negative description of men runs through her books. Young men are rude, uncouth and stupid. Their fathers are decayed drunkards without emotions and intelligence. The mothers have
to suffer through sexual life without any joy, any happiness in it, as if sexual intercourse were an act
of religious penance.
This dark picture of men - fathers, lovers, husbands - has given Miss O`Brien a reputation for hating
or, at least, scorning men. She has been labelled an author for women (women´s writer ) as well as a
female writer ( woman writer ). Some readers see her as a writer of feminist pamphlets with one sole purpose - to nail man down!


In her capacity as a women´s writer she has been accused of making women´s liberty equivalent to
more or less total sexual liberty for women. By advocating sexual liberty to women a certain chaos would be created within society and its smallest nucleus - the family . Sexual liberty was thus thought of as a weapon intended to wring the power out of the hands of the Patriarchy. This was hardly Miss O´Brien´s opinion, as explained in the Dunn interview. Nevertheless, her writing was to some extent considered as sexist. Edna O´Brien´s first three books - the trilogy - did not invite any accusations
of sexism . As from the fourth novel, August is a Wicked Month, the critics started calling Miss O`Brien´s novels pornography, more or less . Miss O`Brien did give intimate details of the human body and sexual intercourse, it´s true. Thirteen out of nineteen reviews were negative ( Björhovde , 1979, pp 219-222 ); One of few positive critics was J.A.Avant of " The Library Journal," who wrote:


"Very few living writers use language so richly and sensously as O`Brien at her best and
some of the sexual passages are worthy of Joyce".



The tune from the choir of critics quickly changes as her following books are being more and more considered as sordid, stifling dirty , nasty, and nauseating. R. Frakes in "The New York Times Book Review" (Febr. 1969) has the following opinion on The Love Object :


"Miss O`Brien thoroughly convinces me that she knows the mazed caverns of the mind
and emotions of women driven by desperate love - the blind alleys, the slimy stalagmites and
phallic formations, the harmless bats and deadly butterflies, the noxious wisps of nonsense
songs, the smells of smoke. And yet, despite the insistence on the slag and the slopjars, the
sewage stench of spring and the blasted wombs, she does not completely avoid the
dripping of treacle......"


There were even worse reviews. "Times Literary Magazine" (Oct 1972) called Night ...." one long
act of public literary masturbation ". J. Euright in a magazine called "The Commentary" describes the same novel as ........." insistently and relentlessly distasteful, sickeningly voyeuristic". Statements like these have given Edna O`Brien a reputation for writing pornography. This negative opinion was even
more emphasized by the fact that her own publisher - Penguin - had naked women ( or selected parts
of them ) adorning the front covers of Miss O`Brien´s books. The fact that O`Brien, in many of her books, writes about sex, sexual intercourse and naked bodies in a most intimate, sometimes seemingly
vulgar way has to be set into a wider perspective - the perspective of womanhood. In the interview with Shusha Guppy (p 48 ) , Miss O´Brien says that " all women writers have written about sex, be-
cause sex is their biological life, their environment and for a woman a sexual encounter is not just the mechanical thing it can be for a man, but" ( and she uses the wonderful phrase ) " a clutch on the
universe".




Edna O´Brien´s books were banned in Ireland on account of her pornographic writings (an honour bestowed upon two or three other Irish writers ). Later on Miss O`Brien has become more known as a female fighter , a feminist rather than a sexist, writing pornography. This alleged alignment with the feminist movement is - to some extent - due to the fact that her growing reputation as a writer coincided with the growth of the feminist movement during the late 1960s and early 70s. In Miss O´Brien´s works, the feminists found much proof and support of their ideas and made references to these books. It is true that Edna O`Brien is very much concerned with women and the position of women in our society. Womanhood is a constant theme in her books. But Miss O´Brien is hardly a feminist writer, writing pamphlets and waging wars to defeat man. In an interview in the New York Times (1973) she demonstrated a sceptical opinion of feminism , the feminist movement as a whole: " I sniff a certain dogmatism about the women´s liberation movement ". She takes a firm stand against every form of dogmatism. The Women`s Liberation Movement is - according to Miss O`Brien - " too strongly based upon aggression and the wrong kind of anger ". ( Dunn, 1969, p 69).


Edna O´Brien´s engagement in the female cause - rather than the feminist movement - is perhaps best described by Raymonde Popot ( pp 279-280 ) :

"Edna O´Brien´s so-called feminism is both the most obvious and the deepest aspect of
her ontological quest. It is the most obvious aspect since she shows women as losers in
a world of solitude, women as victims of their own selfishness and of the selfishness of
men. Her feminism is obvious because her whole work deals with women´s desperate
struggles towards physical, mental and emotional freedom as well as towards a form of
love that they can never reach. Her feminism is obvious since the world of her fiction is
made up of all the misgivings, superstitions, anxieties and illusions that make up a
woman´s daily life........ But she does not appear to me as a feminist in the usual sense,
that is a woman fighting for women´s rights and women´s freedom in every walk and
sphere of life, as a woman proclaiming a fundamental equality between both sexes.
Edna O`Brien is simply a woman, but assuming her reality as a woman so
courageously, so dramatically, is perhaps the most feminine and the most disturbing form
of feminism..... Her protest is not so much a social protest as a despair coming from the depths of her being. She speaks for women not by praising their liberation or by showing
happiness in such a liberation, but because she has the courage to picture the disillusion
and sadness born of some form of sexual freedom and to show women´s unavoidable
emotional dependence on men. She speaks for women not by accusing men, but by showing
that women are often such stuff as guilt is made of, by suggesting that their fear not to love
well enough and to kill the things they love, will always make them weaker than men ".

.

In short, Edna O´Brien´s books reveal a profound involvement in women´s general situation and how they are very much oppressed for social, cultural , religious and psychological reasons. On the whole, the spectrum of Edna O´Brien´s authorship includes much more than sex and branding men. She writes about what she considers as man´s basic feelings and needs, including, among other things, sex as one ingredient. She is the master of describing little things around her, in a clear, descriptive way but with a halo of poetry and beauty around it, which gives an almost new and more aloof dimension to the things described; even her sex passages are many a time a thing of beauty .











5:4 Realism


The Country Girls begins with the following paragraph:


I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I´m anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I re-
membered. He had not come home.


The first display of feeling is that of fear. Significantly enough, the object of this fear is an unidentified "he". The reader will soon discover that "he" actually means a threat, a danger. The reason why "he"has not come home is that he is away on a drinking spree. It is evident that we have been thrown right in the middle of a very realistic description of what might be called "Irish everyday life ".

The next paragraph reads as follows:


Getting out, I rested for a moment at the edge of the bed, smoothing the green satin
bedspread with my hand. We had forgotten to fold it the previous night, Mama and
me. Slowly I slid on to the floor and the linoleum was cold on the soles of my feet.
My toes curled up instinctively. I owned slippers but Mama made me save them for
when I was visiting my aunts and cousins; and we had rugs but they were rolled up
and kept in drawers until visitors came in the summertime from Dublin. I put on my ankle
socks. There was a smell of frying bacon from the kitchen, but it didn´t cheer me. Then I
went to let up the blind. It shot up suddenly and the cord got twisted round it. It was lucky
that Mama had gone upstairs, as she was always lecturing me on how to let up blinds
properly.



The main impression from this paragraph is firstly that of a person who senses her life around her with great intensity - the smooth bedspread, the cold floor, the attractive smell of bacon from the kitchen. The scene gives a clear description of an author having a materialistic approach to life,
a predeliction for realism, coupled with a strong awareness of the beauty of Nature. After fear, Nature is introduced into the novel:


The sun was not up yet, and the lawn was speckled with daisies that were fast asleep.
There was dew everywhere. The grass below my window, the hedge around it, the rusty
paling wire beyond that, and the big outer field were each touched with a delicate, wandering
mist. And the leaves and the trees we...