Gender and Nation

Gender and Nation: McGahern and O’Brien

The role of women as a unifying force in Ireland has been a

constant factor in the country’s history from the short-lived

Poblachta Eireann (1916) to the Republic of Ireland (which was

proclaimed in 1949 and obviously exists to this day. This

role, though central, was never intended to allow for the

emancipation of women or to proclaim their status as being

equal to men. A major reason for this was the strong influence

of the Roman Catholic Church upon the Irish people and

according to that religion, a woman’s only valid role in a

traditional catholic society was Mother.

After Ireland achieved her independence, extreme emphasis was

placed upon enshrining the nuclear family as a sacred Irish

institution. The most powerful weapon used in insuring that

this came about was the Constitution of 1937 in which article

41.1.1.1 read as follows

The State recognizes the Family as the natural primary

and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral

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institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible

rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.

2. The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family

in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis

of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of

the nation and the State (qtd. in Lori Rogers, Feminine

Nation, New York, University Press of America, 1998, pp.

25-26).

Essentially, this article linked the nation and the family

inextricably and essentially made the private realm public and

made the domestic political. In Article 41.2.1, the

constitution made the following proclamation:

The State realizes that by her life within the home,

woman [sic] give to the State a support without which the

common good cannot be achieved…the State shall therefore,

endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by

economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of

their duties in the home (qtd. in Lori Rogers, Feminine

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Nation, New York, University Press of America, 1998, pp.

26).

This document was meant to strike a blow for Irish unity after

the Civil War of nearly twenty years previously had left the

country bitterly divided. The Constitution essentially tries

to present us with an Ireland modelled on the vision of

Ireland as envisaged by William Butler Yeats through the play

Cathleen ni Houlihan. The emphasis on Ireland as Mother is

prevalent throughout the document.

In 1932, Fianna Fail introduced a ban on women from working in

the public service when they got married since it was felt

that any married woman who had a job was not fulfilling her

natural duty as a wife. This law was only repealed in 1973. In

fact, so severe were the Irish laws in relation to women that,

in 1937, the Geneva Convention blacklisted the Free State.

The 1937 Irish Constitution also contains prohibitions against

divorce and abortion which can be regarded as an attempt to

control women’s power over their own bodies, once married,3

their bodies were meant to belong to their husbands and, once

pregnant, their life was meant to become secondary to the life

of the unborn child. In 1983, an Amendment was passed to the

Irish Constitution which banned abortion. To this day,

abortion remains illegal in Ireland except where the life of

the mother is threatened.

In 1946, as part of a St. Patrick’s Day speech, Eamon De

Valera pronounced his vision of Ireland as being both rural

paradise and a land filled with idealised women:

That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people

who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living,

of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted

their leisure to the things of the spirit - a land whose

countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields

and villages would be joyous with sounds of industry, with the

romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths

and the laughter of comely maidens.

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The famous speech encapsulates the value place on Ireland as a rural

idyll and on the purity and virtue of the Irish woman.

How gender roles are depicted in Irish short story fiction,

both male and female, shall be the focus of today’s lecture.

The short story has a long history in the canon of Irish

literature and some of our most famous authors have

contributed to this genre. William Trevor has written this

assessment of the short story form:

The novel had seized upon the heroics that for so long

had distinguished the fiction of the myths, the sagas and

the parables. The modern short story grew out of what

remained, but it was a growth so fruitful that its

emergence as a literary form could not be denied. Its

newness was not dissimilar to the newness of the

Impressionists and the post-Impressionists. Its intensity

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left behind an echo, a distinctive imprint on the mind.

It withheld as much information as it released. It told

as little as it dared, but often it glimpsed into a world

as large and as complicated as anything either the legend

or the novel could provide. Portraiture thrived within

its subtleties (William Trevor, “Introduction”, The Oxford

Book of Irish Short Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1991, pp. xiv).

(Why do you think a short story is so difficult to

write)?

Trevor goes on to examine the thrivance of the short story in

Ireland:

It is occasionally argued that the Irish genius for the

short story is related to the fact that when the novel

reared its head the Irish were not ready for it. This is

certainly true. In England, for instance, the great

Victorian novel had been fed by the architecture of a

rich, stratified society in which complacency and

hypocrisy, accompanied by the ill-treatment of the

unfortunate and the poor, provided both fictional

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material and ground for protest…In Ireland there was

dissatisfaction, repressed religion, the confusion of two

languages, and the spectre of the Famine …Stories, far

more than novels, cast spells, and spells have been

nurtured in Ireland for as long as imperial greed has

been attempting to hammer its people into a subject

class… English fiction writers tend to state that their

short stories are leavings from their novels. In Ireland,

I have heard it put the other way round (William Trevor,

“Introduction”, The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. xiv-xv).

Edna O’Brien and John McGahern are two of the most famous of

our short story writers and both of these works show us their

skill in the short story form.

O’Brien’s “The Irish Revel” begins, as do most short stories,

in the middle of a tale rather than at the beginning of one:

Mary had hoped that the rotted front tyre would not

burst. As it was, the tube had a slow puncture, and twice

she had to stop and use the pump…For as long as she could

remember she had been pumping bicycles, carting turf,

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cleaning outhouses, doing man’s work…Theirs was a

mountainy farm in Ireland, and life was hard (Edna

O’Brien, “The Irish Revel, in The Oxford Book of Irish Short

Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 495).

From the commencement of this story we are given a picture of

Mary as someone who is leading a very unglamourous life. As a

woman she is expected to stay at home and look after the

family and the farm; an existence that she finds less than

satisfying. This is no rural paradise in Ireland and, by the

authors own admission, life is tough. The text inserts a

subtle and powerful allusion in the story to the fact that

Mary is doing “man’s work” at home. This is clever because it

undermines the myth that women can keep their feminine

identity best in the domestic realm. According to Mary, it is

staying at home that is turning her into a manly woman. Thus,

conformity can provide unlooked for opportunities for

subversion.

Mary is plagued with the memory of a man that she met years

ago and her desire to see him again is what is constantly

occupying her mind. How she perceives her own body is bound up

with thinking about how he would view her:

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Now and then, she smiled at the thought of how she would

appear to him—taller and with breasts now, and a dress

that could be worn anywhere. She forgot about the rotted

tyre, got up and cycled (Edna O’Brien, “The Irish Revel,

in The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1991, pp. 497).

The thought of this stranger who she met once dictates her

mood and the reader is left to infer that this encounter means

far more to her than it probably does to the man. The whole

story revolves around ideal perception and the disappointing

reality. Mary is expecting that she is going to be invited to

attend a party and then she find out that she has been invited

for the purpose of being a waitress.

The petty bigotry of Ireland at this time is exposed through

the characters of Doris and Eithne who look down on Mary

because they do not like shy mountainy people. They also are

very quick to label someone a Jew because of the size of his

nose. The snobbery that the town people feel towards the rural

dwellers in this book indicates an Ireland that is divided

rather than united with all its inhabitants regarded as equal.

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Like Joyce’s The Dead, this centres on a party although the

characters at this party (predominantly men) are far less

attractive. Mary is portrayed as an object for these men to

commodify with their leering gazes. The fact that she is from

a rural area seems to lend her a certain exotic quality:

To him [Mr. O’Toole] she looked far prettier than those

good-for nothing towngirls—she was tall and thin like

himself; she had long black hair that some people might

think streelish, but not him, he like long hair and

simple minded girls; maybe later on he’d get her into one

of the other rooms where they could do it. She had funny

eyes when you looked into them, brown and deep, like a

bloody bog-hole (Edna O’Brien, “The Irish Revel, in The

Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1991, pp. 504).

Mary is thus objectified by Mr. O’Toole’s gaze and considered

purely on a superficial level and the contact that Mr. O’Toole

plans to have with her is entirely physical. The comparison

between her eyes and a bog hole shows how her rural identity

is bound up with the attraction that she holds for him. This

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passage perfectly encapsulates how the male gaze can operate

when it is directed at women.

Near the stories conclusion, the girls forget their

differences in an effort to eject Mr. O’Toole from their room.

This moment represents an alliance of women against a male

threat which (although only fleeting) suggests a feminist

allegiance against a masculine threat. Of course, by the next

morning, Doris and Eithne are back to calling her the sneaky

one and the old difference have returned.

The story closes with Mary alone and wishing that she someone

to love her. The image of her on the side of the road is made

all the more bleak by this description:

Frost was general all over Ireland; frost like a weird

blossom on the branches, on the river-bank from which

Long John Salmon leaped in the great, hairy nakedness

(Edna O’Brien, “The Irish Revel, in The Oxford Book of Irish

Short Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp.

514)

The image of frost being general all over Ireland is a re-

wording of the famous description at the end of The Dead of

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snow being general all over Ireland. In contrast, Edna

O’Brien’s vision is much harder and bleaker than Joyce’s

depiction of an Irish landscape united by picturesque snow. We

leave Mary returning to her home and to the domestic realm

that was considered the proper place for Irish women at this

time.

Korea

John McGahern was born on 12 November 1934.

He lived with his mother who was a teacher in Ballinamore,

Country Leitrim until she died in 1945.

Went to live with his father, a Garda sergeant, in a police

barracks in Cootehall, County Roscommon.

Graduates from St. Patrick’s Teacher Training College,

Drumcondra, Dublin in 1954. Begins career as a National School

Teacher in Drogheda.

In 1965 McGahern married Finnish theatrical producer Annikki

Laaksi. That same year his second novel, The Dark, was banned in

Ireland by the Irish Censorship Board due to content which

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portrayed a young boy's dawning sexuality and his conflicting

desire to become a priest.

Divorced Laaksi in 1969 and married Madeline Green in 1973.

Died of cancer in 2006.

“Korea” is one of McGahern’s most accomplished short stories.

As Denis Sampson has observed:

A day in the life of an eel fisherman and his adolescent

son is presented as a brief scene, stripped down to offer

the minimum of narrative momentum or elaboration…The

fiction might be viewed merely as the story of initiation

or disillusionment, but the narrator’s recollection of

the boy’s discovery of his father’s true character and of

his own inheritance is situated so precisely in a

symbolic landscape that the text requires us to read it

as a prose poem (Denis Sampson: Outstaring Nature’s Eye: The

Fiction of John McGahern, (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993),

pp. 94)

The comparison to a prose poem is justified when one considers

how this story is constructed around a single, personal vision

and the lyrical language used to convey that vision.13

As is the case with many of McGahern’s works, the opening

passage of this story tells us a lot about the themes and

concerns of the text.

‘You saw an execution then too didn’t you?’ I asked my

father, and he started to tell as rowed (‘Korea’, Collected

Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 54).

In these two sentences, the reader is introduced to the themes

of violence, father and son relationships, and the nature of

narration: concerns that are the main focus of this short

story. These sentences show McGahern’s skill as a writer of

concise language that nevertheless can encompass a broad

number of topics and issues.

This story offers an image of masculinity that is bound up

with a never-ending cycle of violence and death. From the

opening story of the two executions in 1919, through the

hunting of the eels and the possible plan of the father is

instigate the death of his son, violence and masculinity are

intertwined. They are also portrayed as being necessary for

the preservation of the Irish way of life, whether that be in

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the context of the Civil War are in terms of one Irishman

wanting to keep his livelihood alive.

The existence of another, more natural way of existing is

hinted at early I n the story when the father describes his

day at Strandhill from many years before:

The sea was below, and smell of the sea and furze-bloom

all about, and then I looked down and saw the furze pods

busting, and the way they burst in all directions seemed

shocking, like the buttons when he [the executed soldier]

started to tear at his tunic. I couldn’t get it out of my

mind all day. It destroyed the day (‘Korea’, Collected Stories

(London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp.54-55).

While the father may regard those two moments as being similar

(and the way Gabriel depicts involuntary memory certainly

echoes Gabriel’s recollections of his marriage in The Dead),

the readers can see the huge difference between the natural

process of flowers bursting and the brutal extinction of life

that the father saw during the war and instigated by man.

Like many of the father’s in McGahern’s fiction, the patriarch

in ‘Korea’ fought for Irish freedom but now feels

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disenfranchised by the country that he helped bring into

existence: I fought for this country now they want to take

away my licence to fish. This admission of disillusionment is

very similar to the father in Amongst Women who tells his

girls:

What did we get for it? A country, if you’d believe them.

Some of our own johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few

Englishmen. More than half my own family work in England.

What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod (John

McGahern, Amongst Women, 1991), pp. 5).

The cult of masculinity that these men embodied: that of

survival of the fittest and only the strong survive, turned on

them after the war when other forms of power, such as

capitalism and globalisation, took over and put them to the

wall. Thus, they became victims of their own code. As Siobhan

Holland has asserted:

John McGahern’s novels and short stories reflect on the

moribund patriarchal culture of mid-twentieth century-

century rural Ireland. While several of the novels

feature veterans of the War of Independence, their lives

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seems as cut off from the energy of the revolutionary

period as they are distant from the economic and cultural

transformations that characterized the century’s end

(Siobhan Holland, ‘Hel-lo; Hel-lo; Hel-lo’; The Uncertain

Voice of Patriarchy in John McGahern’s Fictions of the

War of Independence’, in Postcolonial Ireland 3.1, pp. 87).

The father in ”Korea”, in theory at any rate, wishes to

continue the cycle of violence by initiating events that would

lead to his son’s death and, with the compensation paid to him

in the event of such a death, the father would be able to

survive in an ever-changing Ireland that he feels alienated

from.

It must be emphasized that this theory is only the son’s view

of events that he concocted while hearing his father talk with

a cattle-dealer:

He’d scrape the fare, I’d be conscripted there, each

month he’d get so many dollars while I served, and he’d

get ten thousand if I was killed.

In the darkness of the lavatory between the boxes of

crawling worms before we set the night line for the eels

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I knew my youth had ended (‘Korea’, Collected Stories (London:

Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 57).

McGahern refuses to allow a stable, grand-narrative of events

to unfold in this story and instead allows his readers the

scope to interpret these events according to their own

opinions. Like other Irish writers we have looked at, McGahern

is suspicious of any totalising narratives and prefers to

privilege instability and undecidability over fixity and

stasis when dealing with the problem of representing Ireland

and Irishness.

The narrator also offered a telling observation concerning

growing up in Ireland when he said that he knew his youth had

ended with the realization that his father had murder on his

mind. This implies that coming of age in Ireland entails

accepting violence as a part of life.

The conclusion of the story marks the change of roles

between the father and son. At the beginning of the story the

father had rowed the boat, now the son is rowing which

symbolises his emerging dominance in his relationship with his

father. The father’s silence on the subject of the war, which

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the son assumes will now last forever, represents his

paralysis and inability to come to terms with, and move on

from, his past. A very apt metaphor for the crippling effects

of masculinity when rigidly applied in one person.

Now that the son has accepted violence as an integral

part of life, he attains a new understanding of his father and

their relationship begins to change:

As the boat moved through the calm water and the line

slipped through his fingers over the side I’d never felt

so close to him before, not even when he’d carried me on

his shoulders above the laughing crowd to the Final. Each

move he made I watched as closely as if I too had to

prepare myself to murder (‘Korea’, Collected Stories (London:

Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 58.).

This chilling conclusion to ‘Korea’ depicts the son’s

embracing of masculine violence and, by doing so, bonding more

with his father than he ever did through moments of affection.

The son, as the circle of life would dictate, has become a

hard and cold man like his father and is telling us of the

moment when this happened, just as the father told the son of

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the moment when he hardened and became bereft of any tender

emotions. As Denis Sampson has observed:

The experience that is relived in both [the father’s and

the son’s] stories is the traumatic experience of the

loss of love. This loss is recalled as a key to the

father’s silence and also as a key to the way of seeing

that is exemplified in the style of the story itself

[ through the use of pared down language and moments of

silence]. In this way, also, the story exemplifies those

Joycean qualities McGahern has admired, the fusion of

material and form, the union of subject and object (Denis

Sampson: Outstaring Nature’s Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern,

(Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993), pp. 98-99).

The boy’s assertion that he might now be ready to murder can

be read as his recognition that the son must also be ready to

kill the father (either literally or metaphorically) in order

to become an independent subject. This is perhaps the most

powerful moment in the story in terms of its representation of

the masculine code of survival through violence and death. It

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is also consistent with the violent father vs son conflicts

that characterise much of Irish literature.

Gerardine Meaney has argued that a large amount of Irish art

that has been produced since the revival is characterised by

two types of endings: The father killing the son (eg On Baile’s

Strand and the film The Field) or the son achieves the literal or

a symbolic murdering of the father as in The Playboy of the Western

World. Although the son’s victory in such a contest symbolises

a society’s capacity for renewal and growth, it does so

through the maintenance of a cult of violent, masculine

domination. Meaney’s argument concerning the ending the

Synge’s Playboy is equally applicable to the denouement of

Korea:

At the play’s [The Playboy] end the roles of father and son

are reversed, the roles of dominant and dominated

persist. The occupier of the position of power may

change, but power itself remains and its structure is

unaltered (Gerardine Meaney, Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change

(New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 161

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McGahern’s ‘Korea’ concludes with a reaffirmation of the

continuance of this masculine code of dominance, only it is

now been passed onto the next generation.

In conclusion, these stories by Edna O’Brien and John

McGahern interrogate and expose the relationship between

gender and nation in Ireland. They show how the national tale

is bound up with the maintenance of a stable narrative of

masculinity and femininity.

Read Waiting for Godot for our tutorial and thanks for being a

good audience.

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