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EXPOSING IRELAND’S UNSAVOURY PAST
EDNA O’BRIEN’S EXPOSURE OF IRELAND’S UNSAVOURY PAST
WHEN EDNA O’BRIEN’S DEBUT NOVEL, THE COUNTRY GIRLS, WAS PUBLISHED IN 1960, ARCHBISHOP JOHN CHARLES MCQUAID DENOUNCED IT AS A “SMEAR ON IRISH WOMANHOOD”. HER EARLY WORK CAPTURES A TIME WHEN WOMEN WERE BEGINNING TO SHAKE OFF THE SHACKLES OF AN OPPRESSIVE SOCIETY
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BY EAMON MAHER
Born in 1930, Edna O’Brien has outlived all her famous or infamous contemporaries such as her namesake Kate (who was, in fairness, of an older generation), John Broderick, Maeve Brennan, John McGahern, Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney. Like many writers, she suffered at the hands of the Censorship Board and had her work banned. She was vocal about how backward Ireland was during the 1950s and 60s, especially when it came to its treatment of women, and she laid a lot of the blame at the feet of the Catholic Church. In Country Girl: A Memoir (2012), O’Brien shares some of her forthright views on the “arch-druid of Drumcondra”, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, who, in the opinion a friend of hers, “kept Ireland free from paganism and modern aberrations”. She continued: “Dublin was in thrall to him, with his distinctive aura, in red cloak and red biretta, wearing the ‘Borgia ring’ of precious amethyst presented at his inauguration by the Knights of Columbanus.” McQuaid was the person who, on his return from the final gathering of Vatican II, reassured the Irish people that, “No change will worry the tranquillity of your Christian lives.” His reactionary form of Catholicism clearly did not chime with O’Brien’s own more liberal conception of the Council.
THE COMFORT OF RITUAL
Born in Tuamgraney, Co. Clare and educated by the Sisters of Mercy in the 1940s, Edna was the youngest child of a highly Catholic family. Her mother was pious to the point of paranoia, and her father was a chronic alcoholic whose drinking led to the dissipation of most of the family fortune and to the ill health of his wife. Like other Irish writers, most notably the aaforementioned McGahern and Heaney, O’Brien found comfort in Catholic rituals but discovered at a young age that formal religion was not for her. And yet the memories remained, as can be seen in the following description of the priest coming to say a house Mass during the parish mission:
The preparations to celebrate Mass in these mission stations had the thrall and improvisation of travelling theatre. A portable confessional would have been set up for penitents who longed for conversion, while the altar for Mass was a wooden press, above which hung a dark cloth suspended on a bamboo pole.
These lines show the observant eye of the novelist who appreciated the drama of such events and the distraction they provided from the humdrum daily existence the people mostly had to endure. The travails that punctuated O’Brien’s personal life are mirrored in the experiences that confront her characters, as we shall see. Her decision to marry the writer Ernest Gébler against her parents’ wishes in 1954, and her subsequent divorce ten years later, along with the publication of her early work, ensured that she was rarely out of the media spotlight. Gébler, quite a deal older than his wife, was jealous of her success and tried to undermine her confidence and achievements every chance he got, going so far as to claim at one point that it was he who wrote O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, published in 1960 and subsequently expanded into a trilogy. The couple had two children, Carlo (also a wellknown writer) and Sasha, both of whom were born in London, where the couple went to live, rather unhappily as it turned out.
CONTROVERSY
Meanwhile, back at home the publication and swift banning of The Country Girls led to much controversy. Archbishop McQuaid, who had been conducting a purity campaign in Ireland during the 1950s, declared that the novel was a “smear on Irish womanhood”, a view that became commonplace, especially among those who had never read it! So, what was so shocking about the book’s contents? The plot revolves around the friendship of two girls, the first of whom, Caithleen (Cait) Brady, is the main focus of the narrative and a barely fictionalised representation of the author. Cait’s father is a feckless, violent alcoholic whose neglect of the once-prosperous farm has placed the family’s security in jeopardy – the autobiographical elements are clear here. Her mother is a meek woman, unable to stand up to her husband or to find a way to secure a viable future for herself and her children
without his support. Baba Brennan, on the other hand, has a loving mother and a father who is a doctor. Cait loves spending time with the Brennans, as it allows her to escape from the misery and apprehension that mark her life at home. The suicide of her mother throws life into even more turmoil and a lifeline is provided when she manages to secure a scholarship to a girls’ boarding school where she falls under the bad influence of Baba, who is attending the same school. On arrival, they are addressed by Sr Margaret who outlines what is expected in terms of behaviour:
The new girls won’t know this, but our convent has always been proud of its modesty. Our girls, above everything else, are good and wholesome and honest. One expression of modesty is the way a girl dresses or undresses. She should do so with decorum and modesty.
Archbishop McQuaid would have undoubtedly agreed with these sentiments. But Baba in particular is not prepared to toe the line and, coming as she does from a wellto-do family background, she is not that concerned about completing her secondary education. Also, the romantic fantasising that the two friends engage in, their yearning to experience life in the bright lights of Dublin, to meet men and drink in pubs, all make them frustrated at being locked up in a boarding school. Eventually they are expelled for writing obscenities on a holy card about the school chaplain Fr Tom and Sr Mary who dressed the altar and served Mass.
Their actions result in their finding themselves in the capital, where they hope to enjoy more freedom. As she’s heading off, Mr Brady offers the following advice to his daughter: “You’re to behave yourself in Dublin. Live decent. Mind your faith and write to your father. I don’t like the way you turned out at all. Not one bit.” It never occurs to Mr Brennan that he may have had a role to play in the way his daughter has turned out. Cait and Baba believe that Dublin will offer opportunities for sexual adventures. Already, the previous summer, Cait had attracted the attentions of a wealthy local businessman, Mr Gentleman, with whom she has fallen in love. Middle-aged and married, he knows exactly how to flatter Cait’s vanity and exploit her vulnerability. As he drove her to Limerick one day, Cait caught him looking at her:
We smiled at each other and his hand came off the steering-wheel and rested on the lap of my ice-blue dress. My hand was waiting for it. We locked our fingers and for the rest of the journey we drove like that, except going round sharp bends… ‘You’re the sweetest thing that ever happened to me’, he said.
While by today’s standards this might appear timid, in 1960s Ireland an illicit relationship with a married man was a serious misdemeanour. One has only to reflect on the wretched treatment meted out to Joanne Hayes in 1984, when she was wrongfully accused of murdering a baby in Kerry and whose merciless questioning by the State’s legal team about her sexual activity with a married man at a subsequent tribunal led her to believe that it was she, and not the Gardaí who forced her to confess to a crime that she could never have committed, who was on trial.
A COURAGEOUS VOICE
Mr Gentleman, far from being true to his name, knows that Cait is infatuated with him and that he can have her whenever he wishes. True to form, she drops everything when he arrives in Dublin and spends a night with him in his car, watching the sun rise over Dublin Bay, hopelessly in love. When he drops her back to her lodgings, she eats breakfast and goes straight to bed unaware of what day it is: “That was the first Sunday I missed Mass.” It
will not be the last time. There will be no happy ending to this adventure, however. Mr Gentleman had promised he and Cait would spend a week away together, but fails to arrive at the agreed rendezvous. Later a telegram arrives to explain what has happened: “Everything gone wrong. Threats from your father. My wife has another nervous breakdown. Regret enforced silence. Must not see you.”
There is a sense in which The Country Girls captures the zeitgeist of 1960s Ireland, a time when women were beginning to shake off the shackles of an oppressive society where their needs were not treated with the respect they deserved and where they were often vilified for daring to challenge the status quo. Thankfully Edna O’Brien had the courage to say things that most people were unhappy to hear. In some ways, her work unveiled the attitudes that resulted in the horrific treatment of women in the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. Under the circumstances, she might be forgiven for being resentful of religion, but in an interesting interview with Judith Weinraub of the New York Times in 1976, she remarked: “The Catholic religion is the most primitive in the world. One never gets over it.” Reading through O’Brien’s work at an interval of several decades, I believe that she possesses what I would describe as a ‘Catholic sensibility’. She could never quite ‘get over’ the religion of her youth, which is fortunate, as that religion informs her work in an enriching and insightful manner.
