Nuala O'Faolain and the Unwritten Irish Girlhood

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

Nuala O'Faolain and the Unwritten Irish GirlhoodAuthor(s): Jane Elizabeth DoughertySource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer, 2007), pp. 50-65Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20558161 .

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Jane Elizabeth Dougherty

Nuala O'Faolain

and the Unwritten Irish Girlhood

In his 1984 study of the literary childhood, Richard Coe asserts that there is no

"revealing difference" between male and female childhoods.1 Whatever the

truth of this assertion might be when applied to other national literatures,

when speaking of the literature of Ireland it is clearly false. Even casual readers

could probably name an example of an Irish literary boyhood: the Irish boy

hood is canonized, prize-winning, best-selling, and even parodied.2 The Irish

boyhood by now constitutes a well-established literary genre of its own. Frank

McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996) has gone through at least sixty-five printings,

totaling a reported four million copies worldwide.3 The ur-Irish boyhood,

Joyce's Portrait, is foundational not only to the Irish bildungsroman, but to the

childhood genre as a whole; Coe argues that the childhood, no matter where or

by whom it is produced?whether fiction, memoir, or something in between?

is always a "portrait of the artist"4

By contrast, few readers, whether casual or scholarly, can readily name an

example of the Irish literary girlhood?unsurprisingly, as there are not many

from which to choose. Those books that do fall within this category are obscure,

and often formally or stylistically peculiar. This was true when Joyce was writ

ing and it remains true now, despite the enormous changes that have taken place in Irish society since Portrait was published, including the emergence of a gift ed cadre of Irish feminist writers.

One of these writers is Nuala O'Faolain. O'Faolain, who was born in 1940

and spent most of her career as a journalist, has now published three memoirs

and a semi-autobiographical novel that Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt has called a

i. Richard Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p, 276.

2. Frank O'Connors short story ^The Genius," for instance, is partially a parody of Joyce; Flann

O'Brien's The Poor Mouth is a parody of Maurice O'Sullivan's Twenty Years A~Growing and other

Gaelic autobiographies.

3. See www.simonsays.com, the official site of Simon and Schuster Publishing.

4. Coe,pp.8,i5.

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW /IRIS ?IREANNACH NUA, ll?? (SUMMER / SAMHRADH, 3007), 50-65



Nuala O'Faolain and the Unwritten Irish Girlhood

"midlife bildungsroman."5 The first of these was the surprise transatlantic best

seller Are You Somebody? (1996), originally published in Ireland with a selection

of O'Faolain's Irish Times opinion columns and subtitled The Life and Times of Nuala O'Faolain. It appeared in the same year in the United States, but the

American edition omitted the columns, included a modified introduction, and was subtitled The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman.6 O'Faolain followed her first memoir with a roman ? clef, the 2001 novel My Dream of You; with a

2003 sequel to her first memoir, tided Almost There: The Onward Journey of a

Dublin Woman; and with a 2005 "third-person memoir," Chicago May, a fic

tional account of the life of the Irish-born criminal May Duignan. O'Faolain both identifies with, yet remains somewhat uneasy with, the goals

of feminism. Her first memoir in particular presents a life partially reconsidered

through a feminist lens. One thing that Are You Somebody? does not do is pre sent a portrait of the artist as a young girl; it does not recollect, or recreate,

O'Faolain's childhood in an extended or immediate fashion. In this, O'Faolain

continues a tradition, or countertradition, among those authors who have

sought to write Irish women's lives, in fiction or in autobiography by refusing to?or being unable to?write the Irish literary girlhood in terms similar to

those of the Irish literary boyhood.7 In Almost There, her second memoir, O'Faolain rightly notes that in her first

memoir "the way I wrote about myself was more candid than any Irish woman

had yet been, outside of the more oblique forms of fiction and song and poet

ry."8 In her approach to narrating her childhood, however, O'Faolain is entire

ly typical of Irish women life writers as well as novelists. Although she empha sizes experiences of childhood as the wellspring of her adult identity, O'Faolain

tells us little about the child she once was. She is, nonetheless, also well aware of

the silences that attended her childhood; tellingly, she cites the 1996 news story of the trial of the murderer Brendan O'Donnell and the long-buried revelations

about his childhood at that trial as having partially spurred her to write her

"accidental" memoir.9 Still, in O'Faolain's memoir the child seems almost dis

connected from the adult, as if they were separate people.

5- Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt, "Nuala O'Faolain," in Irish Women Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, ed. Alexan

der G. Gonzalez (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006), p. 286.

6. Unless otherwise noted, all references here are to the American editions.

7. This group includes at least two men, Roddy Doyle in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

(1994) and Sebastian Barry in Annie Dunne (2003).

8. Nuala O'Faolain, Almost There: The Onward Journey of a DublinWoman (New York: Riverhead

Books, 2003), p. 59; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (AT 59).

9. O'Faolain writes in Are You Somebody?, "I didn't want to give this account of myself at all. I don't

know why this story insisted on being told. Partly, I think something was dislodged in me by the evi

dence given about his childhood at Brendan O'DonnelTs trial for the murder of Father Walsh and

:- .?*.: .'




In fact, the disconnection of girl and woman is a hallmark of the Irish liter

ary girlhood from Lady Gregory to Eil?s Ni Dhuibhne; as such, O'Faolain's life

writings, rich in themselves, also offer an opportunity to examine the absence

of the Irish literary girlhood from a literary tradition which has produced so

many famous examples of the childhood genre. It is important to note that this

genre includes both autobiography and fiction; indeed, the genre deliberately blurs the distinction between the two categories. O'Faolain herself has written

both, but in none of her literary products has she rendered an account of the

Irish girlhood. The Irish girlhood, unlike the Irish boyhood, remains largely

unwritten, as memory or as creation.

Coe's When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Child

hood remains the only full-length study of the childhood genre. The idea of child

hood as a phase of life distinct from?but exerting great influence over?the adult

self is an eighteenth-century conception, famously summed up by Wordsworth's

assertion that eithe child is father to the man" a dictum later reasserted by Freud

and now a truism of Western culture. Related to the development of this idea was

the development of the bildungsroman, the origin of which is almost always attributed to the publication of Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister (1795-96). As

Coe notes, "so compelling was Goethe's imagination that... the Childhood was

destined to be assimilated into the Bildungsroman" for its early history, as it is in

Joyce's Portrait, but by "the mid-twentieth century... nine Childhoods out often

[were] conceived from the outset as independent narrative forms, complete in

themselves and ending with the adolescence,"10

One such mid-twentieth-century childhood, Elizabeth Bowen's short and sel

dom read Seven Winters (1942), begins by noting that it

could be called a fragment of autobiography. At the same time, I look on it as a

self-contained work, for it is as much of my life story as I intend to write?that

is, to write directly. Through most ?ction is to be traced the thread of the author's own experiences, no doubt. But the early years of childhood contain most oth

ers: as we now know they are in part the cause of, in part the key to, what is to

follow. No years, subsequently, are so acute.11

Imelda Riney and her little boy. His sister told of the brutality Brendan saw... His mother??who was

well until her marriage-?broke down. Mother and son huddled together so close that she went to

school with him, to stand in the corridor until Brendan could let her go...The waters closed over

yet another Irish family. My two brothers in England had their life's chances taken from them in

childhood as surely as Brendan O'Donnell had, Maybe that trial brought me into the presence of

my own sorrow and anger" (AYS 176-7/). 10, ?oe, pp. 39,272.

ii, Elizabeth Bowen Seven Winters: Memories of A Dublin Childhood and Afterthoughts, Pieces on

Writing (New York: Knopf, 1962), p. vii.

.' : SZ '. ' :

-'




Contradicting Coe, Bowen's childhood ends well before the conclusion of ado

lescence, as do quite a few Irish childhoods. Moreover, Bowen makes clear in

introducing Seven Winters that she is responding to an historical develop ment?the development of psychology?in which childhood came to be seen

not only as a separate stage of development, but as the most important stage of

development.

Coe further distinguishes the childhood from the bildungsroman out of

which it developed by noting that "the self-portrait of the artist as a child has to

be one of a being whose significance rests, not in his achievements, but rather

in the unique qualities of his particular and individual insignificance."12 We

need to distinguish between the bildungsroman and the childhood; the former

is a genre of adolescence, in which the individual protagonist seeks a place in his

larger society.13 The childhood is a genre in which the protagonist rejects the

strictures of society, developing instead a nonconforming, unique, and indi

vidual consciousness. Such individualism?with its attendant renunciation of

the world as it is?has been considered the especial provenance of the artist

since at least the time of the Romantics, as Coe reiterates in his argument that

the childhood is always a portrait of the artist

The conception of the differences between the childhood and the bil

dungstrornan makes it possible to account for the importance of the Irish lit

erary boyhood as a genre. Bernice Schrank notes, "The failure of the newly

independent Irish republic to create a political and cultural environment hos

pitable to the dreams and values of its most creative citizens... produced a dis

course of postcolonial disillusionment in which the sectarian and social values

that undergird the Republic [were] rejected and replaced by cosmopolitan and

internationalist commitments"14 That is, postcolonial Irish society was, par

ticularly for artists and their fictional creations and counterparts, not a society conducive to coming of age. Most Irish bildungsromans, in fact, fail: they tend

to end, as does Joyce's, with the protagonist renouncing rather than integrating into Irish society, The Irish childhood, thus, becomes overdetermined as the

source and site of Irish subjectivity. At least, it does for male writers who write

male lives.

12. Coe, p. 15.

13. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland write of the bildungsroman that

"[tlhrough careful nurturing, the hero should be brought to the point where he can accept a

responsible role in a friendly social community. Clearly, successful Bildung requires the existence of

a social context that will facilitate the unfolding of inner capacities, leading the young person from

ignorance and innocence to wisdom and maturity." The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development

(Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983), p. 6.

14. Bernice Schrank, "Studies in the Self: Irish Autobiographical Writing and the Discourses of

Colonialism and Independence " A/B: Autobiography Studies 9,2 (Fall, 1994X 264.

' ' ff '..




For those who seek to write Irish women's lives, the sources of subjectivity lie

elsewhere. In Irish literary tradition, the childhood has become a male genre,

characterized in particular by narrative immediacy?direct access to the child's

consciousness relatively unmediated by the adult perspective?and by narrative

exclusivity that offers the point of view of only one, highly individuated, Irish

boy. True, some Irish literary boyhoods violate the rules of the childhood genre

as Coe defines them by being both recursive and immediate; for instance, Mau

rice O'Sullivan's Twenty Years A-Growing (1933) and Frank O'Connor's An Only Child (1961) contain phrases like "I remember," and Patrick McCabe's The

Butcher Boy (1996) begins "When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty

years ago... "15 Yet even these texts have an immediacy that is almost nowhere

present in the Irish literary girlhood. Irish women life writers have resisted

those standard narrative devices of the Irish literary childhood. But the univer

sal narrative styles of the Irish literary boyhood constitute a master narrative, as

male narratives generally do. Elizabeth Grubgeld notes of Elizabeth Bowen that

for her, childhood "experience... is itself so colored by childhood reading as to

be inaccessible?even to the child who lived it."16 Irish literary boyhoods are

predicated on the seeming accessibility of the childhood experience; the few

Irish literary girlhoods that exist are emphatically not characterized by narra

tive immediacy and narrative exclusivity, Bowen's comment about the impossibility of narrating the childhood points

to a concern for authenticity among Irish women writers. Irish male writers

who have written childhoods, even in memoir, have not been unduly troubled

by this concern. Indeed, a concern for authenticity will hinder the writing of a

literary childhood; most historians would hesitate to treat autobiographies as

primarily historical texts.17 In the writing of childhoods, "the borderline

between autobiography and fiction is... nebulous," as Coe notes.18 He asserts

that the genre

narrates the development of the hero (who specifically is to be identified with the

author) from a point of nonawareness to a point of total awareness of himself as

an individual, particularly as a writer and as zpoet, who will produce, as evidence

of his mature poet-identity, the Childhood which he has written.19

15- Patrick McC?he, The Butcher Boy (New York: Dell, 1994), p.i. 16. Elizabeth Grubgeld, "Cultural Autobiography and the Female Subject The Genre of the Patri

lineal History and The Life Writing of Elizabeth Bowen," Genre, 28 (Fall, 1994), 214. 17. For this reason, I disagree strongly with the historian Diarmaid Ferriter's suggestion that mem oirs of Irish childhood might be considered as primary historical texts. "Suffer Little Children? The

Historical Validity of Memoirs of Irish Childhood," in Childhood and Its Discontents: The First Sea mus Heaney Lectures, ed. Joseph Dunne and James Kelly (Dublin: LifTey Press, 2003), pp. 69-101. 18. Coe,p.4.

19.. Coe,p.9. ;

: m .




Precisely because of the genre's narrative immediacy, readers of childhoods

typically identify the author with the main character. In the Irish case, the first

childhood is also a roman ? clef, and many other fictional accounts of Irish boy

hood?among them Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1994) and Seamus

Deane's Reading in the Dark (1996)?have been interpreted by critics as thinly or thickly veiled autobiographies, while a "recollected" childhood like Angela's Ashes has been accused of being fiction. The Irish literary boyhood is by now

such an established genre that to some extent it has slipped free of the histori

cal conditions that produced it: the Irish artist is hardly an oppressed figure these days, unless media celebrity and special tax exemptions count as oppres sion. Further, some of the texts belonging to the genre are, in fact, wholly fic

tional (certainly, one hopes The Butcher Boy to be fiction). Nevertheless, with

regard to the Irish literary childhood the line between memory and creation

remains a particularly thin one. The achievement of the Irish literary boyhood has been to create a feeling of narrative immediacy even when the writer is an

adult, and whether the childhood being narrated is recollected or wholly fic

tional, or the usual melding of the two. Ironically, this achievement is one that

has been criticized on the grounds of insufficient authenticity, and nowhere

more so than in the critical discussion of Angela's Ashes.

As Bowen indicates, Irish women writers, and particularly those who write

autobiography, have valued authenticity more highly than Irish male writers.

O'Faolain's memoirs function as attempts to create, not just

to narrate, an

authentic self, as the titular question posed in her first memoir indicates; Are You

Somebody? O'Faolain writes in Almost There that writing "has brought me up

from underground. I've been my own Orpheus" (AT 168). Her apparently art

less writing style, with its confessional tone, adds to the feeling of authenticity.

In the "Afterwords" section of the American edition of.Are You Somebody?

O'Faolain reports that after the memoir was published in Ireland she was del

uged by letters from readers who had dealt with the same difficulties.20 For

O'Faolain, then, authenticity in some way takes the place of authorial authori

ty, in the sense that much of the authority she claims inheres in her apparent

authenticity. This militates against the writing of the Irish literary girlhood in two ways.

First, the privileging of authenticity by Irish women writers makes writing the

childhood much more challenging; stylistically speaking, the childhood must

20. The reception of much Irish women's literature suggests that not only everyday readers, but also

literary critics, demand that the work be considered in relation to the authentically lived life. A great

deal of the literary criticism available on Irish women writers consists of interviews and other bio

graphically based articles and books.

-:': :-SiL ' ' -




appear to be a seamless garment, and a preoccupation with authenticity can

only make that task more difficult. Second, the paradox of the childhood, as Coe

notes, is that it takes great authorial authority to write one; one could say that

it takes great authorial hubris?the first book about Stephen Dedalus was, after

all, called Stephen Hero. As Eavan Boland and others have pointed out, the tra

ditional difficulty for Irish women writers has been to command a similar

authorial authority. The gendered nature of the Irish literary childhood can be, superficially at

least, summarized in simple syllogism: Coe argues that those who write child

hoods are always to be identified as poets; Boland notes that in Ireland the

word "poet" and the word "woman" have been opposed to each other; therefore,

Irish women writers do not write childhoods. Irish women writers traditional

ly struggled to claim the identity of the artist, and when they have been able to

claim it, have done so belatedly. O'Faolain's plaintive title suggests that?at

least during the time that she was writing Are You Somebody??she did not con

sider herself an artist. Her self-conception as an artist came after, rather than

prior to, the creation of her art?notably, the exact opposite of the process for

Joyce. Moreover, if Joyce functions as both an enabling and disabling influence

for his successors,21 Irish women writers have lacked literary foremothers. In the

case of the Irish literary girlhood, there have been vanishingly few. Boland

writes that there

were times when I sat down at that table, or came up the stairs, my key in my

hand, to open the door well after midnight, when I missed something. I wanted a

story. I wanted to read or hear the narrative of someone else?a woman and a

poet?who had gone here, and been there.22

Here, Boland repeats the Irish woman writer's concern for authenticity, want

ing the life to meet the work; she repeats as well Carolyn Heilbrun's claim that

"women have been deprived of the narratives, or the texts, plots, or examples,

by which they might assume power over?take control of?their own lives."23

Boland desires an explicitly literary foremother; clearly, Irish women writers do not suffer from the "anxiety of influence," a kind of aesthetic Oedipal struggle. Rather, the mothers with whom many Irish women writers, including O'Faolain, struggle, are their own.

21. Caramine White notes that Doyle "claims that Joyce has had no conscious influence on him what

soever, "

but later notes that Paddy Clarke's "opening sentence... directly echoes the beginning of Por trait." Caramine White, Reading Roddy Doyle (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp. 7,101. 22. Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (New York: Nor

ton, 1995), p. xvi.

23. Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing A Woman's Life (New York Norton and Company, 1988), p. 17.

: >-' ; ^\V;?:. .;::i--':-;v,5#;.:.""




The Wordsworthian dictum needs to be adapted for Irish women writers. For

them, the mother is mother to the woman. Boland writes more about her moth

er's childhood than she does about her own; O'Faolain writes of her mother that

"[m]y own self goes threadbare as her powerful self takes over" (AT 234). The

powerful identification of the female self with that of the mother?often

described by feminist writers?is a reason that Irish women writers have become

such prolific literary matricides. O'Faolain ends Almost There by saying goodbye to her mother, again; she states in the same memoir that she could only begin to

write after she symbolically killed off her mother. It was only after she told the

story of her mother's terrible death, which she produced in response to a writ

ing-class assignment, that O'Faolain found it possible to claim a first-person sin

gular voice. Until that point, it had been impossible for her to

take possession of the first-person voice. I couldn't manage an T if it was going

to be real," which made her doubt whether or not she could actually write her

accidental memoir and which she attributes to the fact that "I was Irish and

female and had had the message drummed into me all my life that female isn't

nearly as interesting and important as male.24

As Christine St, Peter notes, "the mother is killed so that the writer may live";

the death of the mother means the emergence of the individuated adult female

"I," which will write the story of the self.25 Edna O'Brien, in The Country Girls

(i960) and Down By The River (1997), kills off her heroines' mothers early in each

narrative; such midcentury memoirists as Maud Gonne and Mary Colum begin their life narratives with the deaths of their mothers. In her 1999 coming-of-age novel The Dancers Dancing, EiHs Ni Dhuibhne does not kill off the mother of her

heroine, but she separates her character Orla from her mother by sending her to

the Gaeltacht. All of these writers bear out Luce Irigaray's observation that the

"rejection of the mother . . . seems to be a precondition for that process of

'becoming a woman?'26

The loss or rejection of the mother represents the beginning of the individ

uated female self that is essential to life writing, whether in fiction or in mem

oir, but antithetical to the Irish girlhood. Indeed, Ni Dhuibhne writes in The

Dancers Dancing that "

[b] oys were boys or lads or fellas. Girls were just young ones: they did not merit a generic name of their own "27

Similarly, in the novel

24. Nuala O'Faolain, Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (New York:

Henry Holt and Company, 1996), p. 31; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (A?S 31).

25, Christine St. Peter, Changing Ireland: Strategies in Contemporary Women's Fiction (New York: St.

Martin's Press, 2000), p. 26.

26, Luce Irigaray, The Speculum of the Other Woman., trans. Gillian GiU (Ithaca: Cornell Universi

ty Press, 1985)* p. 109.

27. Eilte Ni Dhuibhne, The Dancers Dancing (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, I999)y&79

.' w-. /




Annie Dunne, Sebastian Barry has his titular character say, "It is true that I

don't understand what a girl is, though I was one myself in the long ago " This

echoes Irigarray's claim that unlike boys, who in psychoanalytic terms are gen

dered in the Oedipal stage, girls are not really gendered until puberty. She

writes, "In the beginning... the little girl was (only) a little boy.28 In other words

there never is (or will be) a little girl."29 Thus, unlike male subjectivity, female subjectivity begins at puberty?which is where much Irish women's life

writing also begins.

Moreover, the Irish female literary child appears to lack individuation. One

consequence of this is pronoun instability, which is a crucial feature of almost

all Irish depictions of female childhood. Lady Gregory writes of her childhood

in the third person, explaining that her grandchildren would never believe that

she had been a child: "I think it will be best to tell this part of her life just as if

she were one of the children of fancy they read about in their storybooks."30 Edna O'Brien writes of her childhood in Mother Ireland (1976) in a narrative

voice that shifts with seeming randomness between first-person narration and

use of the second person, the third person, the first person plural, and the gen

der-neutral pronoun "one." O'Brien's novel A Pagan Place (1973) is one of the

very few full-length Irish literary girlhoods, and is the only novel in English written in both the second person and the past tense.31 Even Ni Dhuibhne's

recent The Dancers Dancing (1999), which is very much a meditation on the

Irish experience of girlhood, shifts in its last chapter to a first-person adult

narrator from a third-person narration of its young protagonist's last year of

girlhood. Those narratives that do employ a stable "I" often write of girlhood as

if from a great distance: Bowen's Seven Winters (1942) and Dervla Murphy's Wheels Within Wheels (1979) > for example, are clearly recursive rather than

immediate. Almost universally, the Irish literary girl is unindividuated and the

Irish girlhood presented as largely inaccessible.

28. Interestingly, all nouns which are gendered in English are doubly gendered in Irish?with the

exception of the Irish word for "girl" That is, such words as "priest" (sagart) or "father" (athair) are

masculine nouns, and such words as "mother" (mathair) or "woman" {bean) are feminine, with all the grammatical rules for gendered nouns applying. "Cailin" the Irish word for girl, is the sole

exception to this rule, adhering to the grammatical rules for masculine nouns rather than feminine ones. The "-in" noun ending is generally masculine, the ostensible reason for this linguistic excep tion, but the "girl" exception seems also to have affected me Irish imaginary 29. Irigaray, p. 48.

30. Augusta Gregory, Seventy Years: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory (Gerrards Cross; Colin Smythe Ltd, 1974), p. 1.

31. David Herman, "Textual You and Double Deixis in Edna O'Brien's A Pagan Place" Style, 28,3 (i994)> 378-410.

:':-: :.' :' "?.




O'Faolain's books also display the inaccessibility of the girlhood experience. Coe notes that "the autobiography of childhood is of necessity highly descrip tive."32 but O'Faolain declines to describe her childhood, and instead gives us

striking images of inaccessibility.33 O'Faolain begins her few pages of reminis

cence by writing, "I didn't know much about [my parents], though down on the

floor of the ocean, where I lived in my child world, I could sense disturbances

up above on the surface of the water" (AYS 17), She writes as well that "when I

walked around Dublin as a child I knew nothing, except what I noted with my own eyes, like a spy behind enemy lines" (AYS 19). These images echo Coe's

assertion that in the childhood

there is no common ground of automatically shared preconceptions and pre

suppositions. The former self-as-child is as alien to the adult writer as it is to the

adult reader. The child sees differently, reasons differently, reacts differently. An

alternative world has to be created and made convincing. The experience of

childhood ... is something vastly, qualitatively different from adult experience,

and therefore cannot be reconstituted simply by accurate narration.34

For O'Faolain, the difference between childhood and adulthood is vast; her

memoir begins in earnest at puberty, and is written in her middle age, which

O'Faolain calls "adolescence come again at the end of adulthood" (AYS 28).

Feminist theorists distinguish between male accounts of apprenticeship and

female accounts of awakening.35 Middle age represents for women a final awak

ening and a time of self-creation, which, in Carolyn Heilbrun's words, occurs

later in life when "women can stop being female impersonators."36 Adolescence

represents sexual awakening?the beginning of the erotic plot, often the pri

mary story for women?and it represents, the belated differentiation into

femaleness: "

[a]t the following stage of infantile genital organization... male

ness exists, but not femaleness.... It is not until development has reached its

completion in puberty that the sexual polarity coincides with male and

female'"37 This "sexual polarity" originates in sexual trauma.

O'Faolain writes that "I was never afraid till I went to The Messiah in the The

atre Royal when I was eleven, and a man put his hand up my skirt and hurt me

with his fingers" (AYS 20). The experience of sexual violence represents an

absolute break from O'Faolain's childhood self. A similar scene occurs in the

32. Coe, p. 117.

33. Coe, p. 117,

34. Coe,pa.

35. Abel, Hirsch, and Langland, p. 49. See also Susan Rokowski, "The Novel of Awakening "

Genre,

to (1979)^313-32.

36. Heilbrun, p. 126.

37. Irigaray p. 92.

59




first chapter of Edna O'Brien's novel Down By The River (1997), when the trau

ma essentially brings her character Mary into being; sexual trauma is thus

linked in that novel, as it is in O'Faolain's memoir, with the creation of adult

female subjectivity. In both texts, puberty represents the entrance of the female

protagonist into the universe of patriarchal sexuality, a patriarchal sexuality that

is, as O'Brien's novel shows, upheld and intensified in Ireland by the church and

state sanctioned anti-birth control apparatus. This apparatus long ensured that

the onset of adult female sexuality represented not merely the possibility of

motherhood, but the practical certainty of pregnancy?an equation that has

only recently changed with the availability of contraception. Indeed, in the

Irish Constitution the word "woman" is coterminous with the word "mother,"

and it sometimes seems that only two subjectivities exist in the Irish imaginary:

male child or female mother.38

For O'Faolain, the pubertal entrance into a universe of patriarchal sexuality

represents the beginning of the erotic plot; this too, contributes to the erasure

of the Irish girlhood. That plot is not relevant to an account of childhood, yet

it is also traditionally the primary story available to women.39 Clair Wills has

argued that the centrality of the erotic plot has not, traditionally, been the case

for Irish women?but it is nevertheless true for O'Faolain and for some of her

fellow Irish women writers and their literary works.40 O'Faolain focuses her

energy on the erotic plot despite her great public success as a journalist; indeed,

she frames her first memoir by noting the disjunction between her public role

and her private life, writing that the

38. Article 4i of the Irish Constitution states in part that

i? In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the

State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.

2? The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by eco

nomic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home. (Official site

of D?il ?ireann, http://historical-debates.oireachtas,ie/D/oo85 /D,oo85.i94ii2030o6o.html.)

Richard Haslam argues that the Irish imaginary polarity between male child and female mother is

part of the rhetoric of Irish nationalism dating back to the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Repub

lic in "'A Race Bashed in the Face': Imaging Ireland as a Damaged Ch?W Jouvert: A Journal of Post

colonial Studies, 4,1 (Fall, 1999), paragraph 3- Though ? believe he goes too far in arguing that the

Irish male childhood thus functions as an allegory of nationalism, it is evident that this split is yet

another reason for me gendered nature of the Irish literary childhood.

39. Coe notes that in the eighteenth century "the average reader considered the child or adolescent

uninteresting until he or she was mature enough to react in some degree?-physically or emotion

ally?to the opposite sex." Coe, p, 29. Of course, with Rousseau and later with Freud, childhood

came to be seen as the provenance of sexuality?though, as Irigaray points out, this too is gendered. 40. Clair Wills, "Women, Domesticity, and the Family: Recent Feminist Work in Irish Cultural

Studies," Cultural Studies 15,1 (2001), 34.

6p




very idea of an Irishwoman opinion columnist would have been unthinkable for

most of my life. The columns... weren't personal at all. They used a confident,

public voice. My readers probably thought I was as confident as that all the

time, but I knew the truth. My private life was solitary. My private voice was

apologetic. In terms of national influence I mattered, in Ireland. But I possessed

nothing of what has traditionally mattered to women and what had mattered to

me most of my life. I had no lover, no child. It seemed to me that I had nothing to look on but failure. [AYS 5)

In speaking about "what had mattered to me most of my life," O'Faolain is

speaking of the erotic plot; the only time that that plot had not mattered to her, of course, was when she was a prepubescent girl. Throughout both memoirs, O'Faolain divides her public persona from her private self?much as her par ents, living as the Irish Constitution enjoined them to live, divided the public and private realms between themselves. O'Faolain's father was a journalist who

wrote under the name Terry O'Sullivan, while her mother was a housewife?

employed in the wrong job, according to O'Faolain?who read obsessively (AYS

10). Though O'Faolain follows in her father's professional footsteps (and became a more serious and successful journalist than him) she identifies with

her mother. In this, she implies that her public voice is merely mimetic, because

the public sphere is in every case?and particularly and acutely in the Irish

case?defined as masculine. What authorizes O'Faolain to write her private life as a woman?-a role that her memoirs indicate she values more than her

public role?is her ability to act in the public domain.41 O'Faolain writes in

Almost There that "

[i] t was being an honorary man, as a commentator on pub lic affairs, that had brought a publisher to me" (AT 22).

That O'Faolain must be a man in order to write as a woman is both neces

sary and ironic; Heilbrun notes that in accounts of women's fives, "the public and private lives cannot be linked, as in male narratives."42 Yet, for every female

Irish memoirist of note, it appears that their story can be written only when the

public role makes possible an account of the private life. O'Faolain's memoir

marks the first time that her public and private lives can be linked, while at the

same time it relates the impossibility of doing so. This is yet another factor that

precludes O'Faolain from writing her girlhood. Coe argues that the literary child is "a being whose significance rests, not in his achievements, but rather in

the unique qualities of his particular and individual insignificance,"43 O'Faolain

is authorized to tell her story because of her significant achievements. Those

41. This phenomenon is discussed in Myra Jehlen, "Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Crit

icism ? Signs 6,4 (1984), 575-601.

42. Heilbrun, p. 25.

43. Coe,p..i5.

: ' '

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achievements bring a male publisher to her, but do not authorize her to write

her girlhood.

Despite her success in a predominately male public realm, O'Faolain feels that

she has failed as a woman. Nina Auerbach has noted that in the nineteenth cen

tury, even accomplished women were forced to confront die only story available

to them, the conventional marriage plot, which either trapped them or which they

wasted their energy opposing.44 More than a century later, an accomplished twen

tieth-century woman like O'Faolain could still write that she had "spent my

whole adult life... [in] a search for a man, for love, for the one man to love and

be loved by and have babies with" (AYS 140). O'Faolain, too, is trapped?and par

tially aware that she is trapped?by the primary story available to her, the erotic

plot. This, of course, has traditionally been defined, and is defined by O'Faolain,

in heterosexual terms. In Are You Somebody?, she glosses over the fact that her

most enduring erotic relationship was with a woman, the Irish author and activist

Nell McCafferty, a relationship that was well known in Dublin literary circles.

Only in Almost There is O'Faolain fully candid about the nature of her rela

tionship with McCafferty, and implies that she is clarifying this because some of

her readers?outside of the milieu in which McCafferty and O'Faolain moved?

expressed confusion, and also because some readers, including McCafferty her

self, criticized her earlier reticence (AT 48). Though O'Faolain asserts in Almost

There that she writes "obliquely" about her relationship with McCafferty because

of the pain she felt when that relationship dissolved (AT 48), her careful approach

to depicting the relationship?writing, for example, of a time they spent in a

hotel room reading, but taking care to note that they occupied separate beds

(AYS174)?indicates as well that it was not a relationship which corresponded to

the story O'Faolain wanted to tell, or could tell, about herself.

The specter of the traditional erotic plot haunts the narrative of O'Faolain's

first memoir; O'Faolain spends much of the first chapter discussing the failed

erotic plot of her parents, rather than writing about herself as an Irish girl. In

the later book, she notes that "the ten years of romantic bliss [my mother] had

with my father before things went wrong.., more or less justified her existence"

(AT 145). The failure of her own erotic plot leaves O'Faolain's mother storyless, and it is likely that she reads so excessively for this reason; O'Faolain writes of

her that "[w]hat she was with the rest of her and for the rest of the time was a

nothingness she just had to put with, stoically, escaping into a book or a drunk

en daze as quickly as she could" (AT 145). Her mother's emphasis on romance

also speaks to the class position of the O'Faolains: the ideal of romantic love and

companionate marriage was late to arrive in Ireland, particularly for Catholics.

Clair Wills writes of contemporary Ireland that "expectations of personal

44- Cited in Heilbrun, p, 49.

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fulfillment within marriage have vastly increased since the 1940s and 1950s, when rates of marriage were low compared with Europe, and marriage was

often a matter of social obligation and the preservation of property"45 When

O'Faolain's parents were married, marriage was rarely viewed in romantic

terms, and her mother's obsession with romance was hardly characteristic of

Irish women, though it undoubtedly featured in many of the books O'Faolain's

mother read. Wills argues that the social disapproval of companionate marriage was the result of British colonial oppression and Catholic religious repression, but that companionate marriage is "a crucial ingredient of family life and per sonal identity for the modern individual," and that, following Charles Taylor, "the affectionate family" is "the locus of formation of the modern individ

ual."46 Thus, O'Faolain sees the failure of her parents to establish or sustain a

companionate marriage as the failure of her family to cohere. The failure of the

companionate parental marriage can be read as an additional reason for O'Fao

lain's lack of individuation as a girl. O'Faolain writes of her parents that

" [w]hatever the people they came from

had lived by just fell away in their generation. But they didn't have other values, to replace what they had lost" (AYS 17). When the affectionate family fails, the

younger children in particular are born into more disintegrated circumstances.

American readers of many Irish texts?including O'Faolain's?are frequently

surprised by the minimal attention paid to younger siblings. O'Faolain's sisters

Grainne and Deirdre are the subjects of the most delineated portraits; her other

siblings are often designated simply as "a sister" or "a brother," The inability of

the Irish family to serve as the laboratory for individuation informs the aesthetic

possibilities of the Irish childhood, though it seems to affect the Irish literary

boyhood less severely than the Irish literary girlhood. For male writers of Irish childhoods, who often present protagonists who are

eldest or only children, the story is sometimes an account of how a once-affec

tionate family disintegrates, as it does in, for example, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

For female writers of Irish childhoods, the affectionate family simply never

coheres. Moreover, Irish male children, and their male portrayers, can adopt the

highly individuated?and still highly masculinized?persona of the artist, as

Stephen Dedalus does, or lay claim to the imagined family of Irish nationalism.

For women, on the other hand, neither art nor Irish nationalism serves as a

source of the self; as Taura Napier notes, "the concept of nation tends to limit

severely, rather than complete, women's apprehension of a full identity"47 For

45- Wills, p. 34

46. Wills, pp 46-47.

47. Taura S. Napier, Seeking a Country: literary Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Irishwomen

(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001) ,p, 160.

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O'Faolain, what substitutes for the affectionate family, for the persona of the

artist, and for the imagined family of Irish nationalism, is the educational expe

rience, particularly the boarding school.48

The school experience proves central in many accounts of the Irish girl

hood. Mary Colum's memoir begins with the death of her mother and her

arrival at boarding school; Kate O'Brien's novel The Land of Spices (1942) is set

in an Irish convent school Edna O'Brien sends the heroines of her early novels,

Cait and Baba, to convent school (from which they are expelled), as well as her

later heroine Mary, who is forced to leave the protection of the school when her

mother dies in Down By the River. Ni Duibhne's The Dancers Dancing takes

place at an Irish-language summer school; and even Elizabeth Bowen, who was

educated privately, writes in Seven Winters that "Miss Wallis, being a governess,

stood for the element of intelligence. Her coming tore across some veil and first

made me realize I was I."49 O'Faolain's parents sent her to a convent boarding

school on her thirteenth birthday, in an attempt to preserve her sexual "inno

cence." The convent school turns out to be?as it was in O'Brien's The Land of

Spices?a place of suppressed, though not necessarily misdirected, erotic long

ings. O'Faolain writes that the

emotions we felt as schoolgirls were volatile and exaggerated, and they have

always been despised by the world. But they were not trivial. They were a ground

ing in the affective dimension that was to matter most to us all our lives. They

were not a mere substitute for what we would have been doing with boys if we

weren't in boarding schools, which is what the patriarchy has always arrogantly

presumed. Emotion was an element in the process of our putting ourselves

together?learning appropriateness, learning control, learning to differentiate

ourselves from the other selves around. The satisfaction was the engine that

drove us on, rather than competitiveness or ambition. (AYS 35)

Here O'Faolain identifies the source of self-differentiation not in the affec

tionate family, as Wills and Taylor would have it, but in the experience of the

boarding school, which she presents specifically as an experience of female

adolescence?and, crucially, as the ground of "the affective dimension" that

defines adult female subjectivity. This experience of individuation originates, as

well, in an almost exclusively female environment?the convent school being located somewhere on a lesbian continuum?and generates ideas of selfhood

that differ radically from patriarchal ideals of subjectivity. O'Faolain is careful

to note that the young women with whom she attends school are not driven by

48. Notably, Titanic Town, a roman ? clef set in Irish Catholic Belfast, is one of the few full-length

Irish literary girlhoods, Mary Costello, Titanic Town (London: Mandarin, 1993). For the young hero

ine of this novel, Irish nationalism is very much an available source of subjectivity.

49. Bowen, p.15.

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the patriarchal means of asserting a self, competitiveness, or ambition. Rather,

the experience of female differentiation is also in some way communal. As

Cosslett, Lury, and Summerfield argue, women "have more relational or more

fragmented selves... [and] their stories will take a different shape."50 The authors of Irish literary girlhoods do not tell their stories with the same

individual focus and narrative exclusivity that characterizes the Irish literary

boyhood. The Land of Spices, for instance, includes passages that describe the

development of Anna Murphy, the youngest pupil at a convent boarding school

to which she has been sent partly to protect her from the failure of her family? but it also tells the story of the nun who is her mentor. Likewise, The Dancers

Dancing presents the perspectives of many of the other characters other than

Orla, its main character. It would seem to be less possible to offer multiple per

spectives in a memoir, but Napier argues persuasively that many autobiogra

phies of Irish women are in fact "deflected autobiographies," in which the auto

biographer is "perpetually present yet not apparently central."51 For her part, in

her second memoir O'Faolain presents a number of differing perspectives on

events that she had earlier presented in Are You Somebody? The revisions

include, disturbingly, an account of the man's perspective on what O'Faolain

had described in her first memoir as a rape. Clair Wills cautions readers that Irish "women's negotiation of power and

authority within and through the structure of the family cannot be easily allied

with a simplistic liberal narrative of emancipation from traditional con

straints," an emancipation that the definitive Irish childhood, Joyce's Portrait,

famously concludes by celebrating.52 The writing of O'Faolain and others sug

gests that the master narrative of the Irish literary childhood does not suffice

to represent the Irish literary girlhood. Women autobiographers and novelists

consistently employ relational and multi-perspectival ways of writing that, in

effect, preclude the writing of a childhood, if we accept that it is a genre char

acterized by narrative exclusivity as well as narrative immediacy. That charac

terization, however, may need to be redefined in order to assert the relative

absence of the Irish literary girlhood?not as aesthetic inability but as an aes

thetic refusal and to account for the ways in which the Irish literary girlhood

has, in fact* been written.

c^ SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY, CARBON?ALE

50. Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield, Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories,

Methods ('London: Routledge, 2000), p. 2.

51. Napier, p. 10

52. Wills,, p. 53,

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Nuala O'Faolain and the Unwritten Irish Girlhood

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