Edna O'Brien

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Edna O'Brien Long Fiction Analysis

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Edna O’Brien’s early years in Ireland profoundly affected her view of the world, and particularly of women’s relationships and their place in society. Being Irish, she says in Mother Ireland, gives one a unique view of pleasure and punishment, life and death. O’Brien’s work is lyrical and lively. Her memory for people and places, for the minutiae of daily living, is prodigious; her zest for language is Joycean. She is frequently on the attack, but at her best, which is often, she transcends her immediate cause to encourage, with a grain of humor, those who still dream of love achieved through kindness and decency—common virtues still no more common than they ever were.

O’Brien’s concerns are most readily accessible in her very eccentric travel/autobiography Mother Ireland. Her Irishness is something of which O’Brien is proud: “It’s a state of mind.” She is not, however, blind to Ireland’s faults, appreciating that there must be something “secretly catastrophic” about a country that so many people leave. After an iconoclastic opening chapter on Irish history, with its uncanonized patron saint and its paunchy Firbogs, follow six chapters in which are sketched O’Brien’s dominant themes: loneliness, the longing for adventure (often sexual), the repressive Irish Roman Catholic Church, family ties (the martyred mother and the rollicking father), and the courageous hopelessness with which life at best must be lived.

It would be a melancholy picture if it were not for O’Brien’s saving, ironic sense of humor and the skill with which she roots her observations in the sensual details of the actual world. Her readers share vividly with her a world of wet batteries for radios, ink powder, walls with fragments of bottles embedded in their tops, Fox’s (Glacier) Mints, orange-boxes, and lice combed from a child’s head onto a newspaper. O’Brien’s recurring themes, her experiments with form, and the feeling she succeeds in communicating that this Irish microcosm has its universal significance are all clearly present in Mother Ireland.

The Country Girls

From its detailed, evocative opening page, redolent of genteel poverty, The Country Girls, O’Brien’s first novel, serves notice of an unusual voice. The shy and sensitive Caithleen tells her first-person story and shares the action with her alter ego, the volatile and malicious Baba. It is a world divided into two warring camps, male and female, where Caithleen’s aspirations toward romantic love are doomed to failure. Mr. Gentleman is the first in a long line of rotters (the drunken, brutal father; Eugene Gaillard; Herod; Dr. Flaggler), far outnumbering the few men with decent inclinations (Hickey, Auro); in such a world women stand little chance, single, married in the usual sense, or brides of Christ.

The repressive effects of poverty and a patriarchal society are hardly alleviated by the Church and its proscriptions. Her mother drowned, Caithleen spends her mid-teen years boarding in a strict convent school from which Baba contrives their expulsion for writing a ribald note. In their late teens, joyously, they come up to Dublin, Baba to take a commercial course, Caithleen to work as a grocer’s assistant until she can take the civil service examinations. Loneliness, however, follows them: Baba contracts tuberculosis; Caithleen’s Mr. Gentleman lets her down. With the resilience of youth, however, her last line in this novel is, “I was almost certain that I wouldn’t sleep that night.”

The Lonely Girl

The Lonely Girl continues the saga two years later, with Baba healthy again. It is, however, largely Caithleen’s story; again she is the narrator. The repressive effects of her family, her village community, and her convent education are again in...

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evidence. O’Brien has her heroine involved romantically with Eugene Gaillard, whose face reminds her of a saint and who is about the same height as her father; he is a cultivated snob, and in an often cold fashion he begins the further education of his naïve, prudish “student,” both in bed and in the salon. (As Grace Eckley has pointed out, Caithleen’s stiff tutor and O’Brien’s former husband, Ernest Gebler, share the same initials.) At the novel’s conclusion, Caithleen, wild and debased “because of some damned man,” is learning, is changing; she is, as she says, finding her feet, “and when I’m able to talk I imagine that I won’t be alone.” Still seeking their connection, she and Baba sail on theHibernia from Dublin to Liverpool and London.

Girls in Their Married Bliss

Girls in Their Married Bliss continues the story of the two in London, where, for the first time, Baba assumes the first-person narration, alternating with an omniscient voice distancing O’Brien and the reader from Caithleen’s role—a process O’Brien will carry even further with herprotagonist in A Pagan Place. The women, now about twenty-five years old, have not left their Irish baggage behind in Dublin; there is a splendid, blustery Celtic quality to the scapegrace Baba’s style. Kate (as Caithleen is called), too, has her share of one-liners, word associations, epigrams, and zany metaphors: “Self-interest,” she observes on one occasion, “was a common crime”; on another, at a party, she is amused by a girl wearing a strawberry punnet on her head to make herself taller.

In these early novels, O’Brien, like her leading characters, is learning and developing her skills. In Girls in Their Married Bliss, the topic is still the female search for love and connection. The novel is a precisely observed account of a marriage failing. People rub exquisitely on one another’s nerves in the larger context of women’s role in society; in the smaller context of bedroom politics, “Men are pure fools.” Marriage, at least on the grounds on which the women enter it here, is evidently no end to the quest. Baba makes a calculated move for comfort; Kate sees that her interest in people is generated solely by her own needs. They have matured to the point where they no longer believe much in romantic plans. Kate’s answer to the biological unfairness of God’s scheme for women, as Baba sees it, is to have herself sterilized; she will not make the same mistake again: No other child of hers will be abducted by its father; no further child of hers will in its turn become a parent.

In the edition of the complete trilogy that was published in one volume in 1986, O’Brien includes a brief Epilogue in the form of a monologue delivered by Baba. Here the ebullient Baba brings the reader up to date: The despairing Kate is dead; she drowned, perhaps deliberately.

August Is a Wicked Month

In O’Brien’s next novel, August Is a Wicked Month, an omniscient narrator describes the protagonist’s abortive attempts at self-liberation, largely through sexual activity. Ellen is something like Kate of the earlier trilogy—a superstitious, convent-bred, twenty-eight-year-old Irish magazine writer, formerly a nurse, living in London when the novel begins. She takes a trip to France when the husband from whom she is separated and their eight-year-old son, Mark, who lives with her, go on a camping holiday together. Her “pathetic struggles towards wickedness” involve rejecting the first sexual invitations she encounters. Eventually, however, when Ellen does become intimately involved with a high-living group, O’Brien subjects her to two catastrophic accidents: She receives a call from her husband, who tells her that her son has been killed by a car in a roadside accident, and she fears, wrongly as it turns out, that she has contracted a venereal disease. The guilt and the judgment are clear; perhaps they are too clear to make this novel an artistic success. Ellen finally finds an uneasy autumnal peace, unlike the women in O’Brien’s next novel, who have a genuine joy ripped away from them.

Casualties of Peace

In Casualties of Peace, Willa McCord, artist in glass, and her earthy domestic, Patsy Wiley, are the protagonists, exemplary victims of male violence. An omniscient narrator views the two unhappy women—Willa having escaped from a nightmarish marriage to the sadistic Herod, Patsy currently suffering her husband Tom’s blows. Both have their dreams of happiness outside marriage shattered. There was a chance for peace for them, but accidents prevented them from knowing joy. Patsy blabs to Willa about leaving Tom rather than doing it immediately, as planned, and her lover, Ron, believes she has let him down. Willa, just when a loving connection with Auro seems possible, is murdered by Tom, who mistakes her for Patsy.

Casualties of Peace is second only to Night, which it anticipates to some extent, among O’Brien’s most Joycean novels. Patsy’s love letters to Ron are reminiscent of the earthiest of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle’s correspondence; Patsy indeed is a kind of Molly Bloom figure (more clearly developed in Night). Willa’s letters to Auro, delivered posthumously, share the same stream-of-consciousness qualities: Words pile up into lists; associations trigger other more graphic associations; “memory is the bugger.” At times lyrical, at times humorous, O’Brien develops here the Celtic flair with words that is associated with Joyce or Dylan Thomas. Her theme is loneliness and its myriad causes; her characters search to alleviate their pain, to make connections, to overcome their feelings of guilt for being themselves.

A Pagan Place

A Pagan Place is a very odd novel; it is largely a sophisticated rewrite of The Country Girls, as O’Brien perhaps would have written that work had she had ten more years of reading, writing, and living behind her at the time. Baba is dropped in favor of one unnamed, preadolescent girl whose sexual arousal when her father beats her accomplishes her move toward adolescence. Getting away from her Irish family and Irish community, with their hereditary guilt, will, it is suggested, take her yet a stage further. At the end of the novel she leaves to the accompaniment of an eerie Hibernian howl.

Throughout the work an omniscient narrator, who sometimes uses dialect forms and sometimes very erudite words, and who is clearly unreliable in matters of fact (putting an English “general” on Nelson’s pillar), places the reader at the center of the action by using the second-person narrative. No one but “you,” then, is at the center of the action; the narrator and the writer are similarly distanced from the action.

Perhaps in this novel O’Brien exorcised the worst of her Irishness; certainly, very violent feelings surface, all in the consciousness of a young girl. O’Brien, in contrast to her contemporaries among Irish writers of fiction, such as Brian Friel or Benedict Kiely, really seems to dislike her Celtic community. Here is a very bitter indictment of the Church, and perhaps its ultimate rejection in the priest’s attempt to seduce “you,” masturbating and ejaculating on “you.” Here, too, is a savage, repressive, guilt-ridden world of so-called Christians where unwed mothers receive no caritas, and where legally wed mothers and fathers show no love either. It is a world where holy water is sprinkled on thoroughbred foals, where a black dog, chasing a frog that jumps out of the ashes at Della’s wake, is seen as one and the same with the devil. All in all, it is, with few exceptions, a nightmarish community, especially for a child. For “you” as a child at the center of this world, deserted even by “your” mother at one period, a thing “you” thought would never happen, the only certainty is that “you” want to escape, whatever the burden of guilt “you” carry.

Zee and Co.

The theme of escape is continued in Zee and Co., where O’Brien’s heroines are back in London, and again a pair. Zee moves increasingly aggressively and ruthlessly to hold her man, Robert, while dominating Stella, her rival. She succeeds in both endeavors. As the war of the sexes heats up, Zee refuses to be a victim; she is no patsy. O’Brien’s long preoccupation with the defensive role of women in society appears to be shifting to the offensive in her later works as her heroines themselves become less fragmented. A person needs to be integrated psychically to withstand not only sexual partners and spouses but also all manifestations of phantoms, prejudice, repression, guilt, and loneliness. This new positive attitude is well illustrated in the rambunctious Mary Hooligan, whose nightlong monologue forms O’Brien’s next work, Night.

Night

In form and style, Night is O’Brien’s most Joycean novel. In a harangue from her bed in England, Mary Hooligan—Irish, abused, divorced—delivers herself of an aggressive, courageous, independent, first-person autobiographical statement. Beginning with an Anglo-Saxon monosyllable in the opening paragraph, the nonconciliatory tone of her monologue is established. “I am a woman,” Mary affirms, and proceeds to weave, in time and place, the story of her connection with her father and mother, her former husband—“the original Prince of Darkness”—and her son. It is an exuberant linguistic spree: From a “trepidation” of gelatin-like dessert to the welcome “tap o’ the mornin’,” metaphors and apt words are savored and invented. The pervasive humor is wry; the aggressive tone and confident technique perfectly match the content of a work whose burden is rebellion against loveless unions and ignorance.

Mary Hooligan is another in O’Brien’s procession of outsiders, an Irish woman in England, merely house-sitting, so even less important in the community. O’Brien, however, establishes Mary as a force on her own: Mary rejects her friend Madge—Mary needs no Kate figure to complement her being; she is complete on her own. The theme under review remains the eternal search for love in its myriad manifestations; what is new here is the heroine’s joyful attack as she continues her pilgrimage to “the higher shores of love.” Family, community, and marriage settings are again explored. Many of the details are familiar: the vicious father, the ignoramuses who could not tell cheese from soap, the cold-fish husband. Constant and familiar in O’Brien’s work is the warm regard for children, particularly mothers’ regard for their sons. This aspect of love leads O’Brien to flirt with incest in her most violent work, I Hardly Knew You, in which the narrator has an affair with and then murders her son’s friend.

I Hardly Knew You

Nora, the protagonist of I Hardly Knew You, tells her story in yet another night monologue, from her prison cell, as she awaits trial for the murder of Hart, her young lover. Again, O’Brien’s narrator is an Irish exile in England, divorced from an overly frugal husband, with a son, and literally in prison, isolated from all society. Loneliness is at the core of her existence, as it is, she remarks, at the core of Celtic songs. Her monologue shuffles time and space more formally than Mary Hooligan’s in Night and reveals a world of increasing violence. Details and incidents from O’Brien’s previous works, as far back even as The Country Girls, show up: the drunken father taking the cure, the child-abduction threat, the child scraping the toilet-seat paint, the kicking match engaged in by brutish relatives.

The world has become an increasingly violent place, and the response of O’Brien’s narrator matches it. Like Mary’s, Nora’s personality is integrated, but toward the Kate side. She engages in an explicitly lesbian encounter, but she needs no other woman to complement her. Indeed, she acts increasingly like the worst stereotype of the sadistic male predator, who uses and abuses other people, particularly women and especially wives. This is a chilling picture of a person driven to violence, to kill without regret. Here is a woman who has lost her balance and whose sweeping indictment of men must surely be viewed as just as reprehensible as male chauvinism. “I am proudto have killed one of the breed to whom I owe nothing but cruelty, deceit, and the asp’s emission,” she avers, ignoring absolutely O’Brien’s often-stated support for “human decency” and kindness among people of whatever sex.

The High Road

The graph of O’Brien’s fictional split personalities is by no means a straight line. A clearly differentiated pair in the early trilogy, each “Kate” and “Baba” is subsequently given an alternating fictional forum. The Epilogue may have seemed to clear the way for Baba and zesty Baba types, but The High Road, published two years later, has readers once again seeing a sophisticated society through the moist eyes of a Kate type.

Anna, the narrator of The High Road, like many of the women in O’Brien’s short stories as well, has come on Easter Sunday to a Mediterranean paradise to get over a London love doomed from its inception. In this exotic setting, she encounters eccentric members of the international set: the superannuated debutante, Portia; the grotesques who make up a German fashion-magazine staff on location; the fading jet-setter, Iris; the itinerant Irish painter, D’Arcy, with the Joycean language flair; and Catalina, the hotel chambermaid, with whom she has an affair. It all ends in murder; D’Arcy, to buy some time, paints “Lesbos” on a multitude of walls, not merely on Catalina’s gable, where the word first appeared, but to no avail. Clutching a scarf full of Catalina’s blood-soaked hair, in what in its accumulation of similes seems at times a parody of the gothic romance, Anna sets out, she says, for the last time, for home. Whether she has left behind her the purgatory of motherhood, in its various manifestations, remains to be read.

Time and Tide

O’Brien continues her focus on Irish women’s lives and social roles in Time and Tide. The title of the work refers to linear progression and cyclical repetition, devices that she incorporates not only thematically (the changeability and sameness of women’s lives) but stylistically. The story develops episodically, providing vignettes from the narrator’s life. The protagonist, Nell, following a failed marriage to an abusive spouse, has raised two sons independently. Early in the novel it is revealed that her eldest son, Paddy, is enmeshed in drug use. Ironically, it is not an overdose but a boating accident that claims his life. The novel then reverses time to recount earlier family events, contributory tragedies that lead up to and culminate in the loss of Nell’s firstborn son.

A powerful image in the novel is that of a barge colliding with a tourist boat on the Thames. That Paddy should be aboard the latter and this random accident claims his life not only reveals the unpredictability of events but also highlights the young man’s chosen and quick route through life. Rejecting the misery he associates with his long-suffering mother, he embraces the thrills of drugs and holidays, but his pleasure-seeking life, prematurely ended, only intensifies his family’s despair. For O’Brien’s characters, there is no respite from the barges of life, from the inevitable hardships that destroy any illusion of happiness.

Despite the desolate events recounted—Nell herself has indulged in narcotics and sexual liaisons, finding solace in neither—the novel ends with a measure of optimism. When her surviving son, Tristan, leaves home to join Paddy’s girlfriend (who is pregnant with Paddy’s child), Nell is dejected at first by his departure. Eventually, she finds respite in her now quiet home. Having borne the worst, the death of a child, she must accept what is to come, life in all its myriad sorrows and momentary pleasures.

House of Splendid Isolation

O’Brien returns to her native territory with a trilogy of novels set in modern Ireland. The first, House of Splendid Isolation, is a stunning book, quite different from her previous work. It reveals a microcosm of divided Ireland, embodied by the patriot-terrorist McGreevy and the widow Josie O’Meara. McGreevy, seeking to free Northern Ireland from British rule, has been sent to the complacent South to murder a prominent English visitor. He plans to hide in Josie’s decaying mansion, which he believes is empty. Feared as a coldly efficient terrorist, McGreevy emerges as a surprisingly kind, ordinary man who has been honed to a thin edge by violence.

Josie, ill with pneumonia and high blood pressure, has just been released from a nursing home to her house of isolation. She seems pluckier than most O’Brien heroines, perhaps because she is elderly, although flashbacks illuminate the early life that formed her. The collision of the revolutionary and the antiterrorist, and their gradual sympathy and understanding, defines the conflict of the novel and the hunt that follows. Josie can be seen as the Shan Van Vocht, the Poor Old Woman, a historical symbol of Ireland, exemplifying the domestic life of her people. McGreevy represents the bitter fruit of the country’s troubled political history. The inevitable conclusion proceeds as well-meaning, patriotic volunteers from both factions struggle with duty, guilt, and grief.

Surprisingly, O’Brien avoids her usual male stereotypes in this novel; she presents imperfect men, both law-abiding and lawless, who are racked by ambivalence. She remains neutral, revealing with rueful detachment the human damage caused by centuries of conflict. House of Splendid Isolation offers a portrait of Ireland in all its complexity, with its intense people and its bloody and heartbreaking history.

Down by the River

The second installment in the trilogy, Down by the River, is a less objective book than House of Splendid Isolation. The novel was inspired by a controversial incident that took place in Ireland in 1992, when a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl fled to England for an abortion but was brought back and made a ward of the court. O’Brien has changed some details of the case; in her version, Mary MacNamara is impulsively raped by her father as they are picking berries. Mary’s dying mother and a female doctor suspect the truth, as do others, but no one acts.

Here again is the world familiar to O’Brien’s readers, a world of repression and guilt, in which people do not look directly at each other or say what needs to be said. In a tacit conspiracy of avoidance, everyone knows that Mary is pregnant as a result of the rape, but no one will confront the problem. Worse is the hypocrisy of those quick to judge without mercy. Self-righteous adulterers preen in antiabortion meetings while a shrill speaker waves bloody photographs, even as a retired midwife recalls the dead babies she has found stuffed in drawers and toilets. Other folks are genuinely troubled, torn between religious conviction and pity for the girl. Although a sympathetic neighbor finally agrees to help Mary escape to London to obtain an abortion, the plan is thwarted. People on both sides of the issue exploit Mary for their own purposes, and the novel’s ending is tense and melodramatic, though not entirely convincing.

Wild Decembers

Wild Decembers completes the political trilogy begun with House of Splendid Isolation. Each of the three novels explores a social issue that has plagued Ireland in its recent history but the origins of which stretch back in time. Whereas the first novel in the series focuses on sectarian violence and the second on abortion rights, the third and final work tills Ireland’s very soil. Set in the fictional rural parish of Cloontha, Wild Decembers chronicles a series of seemingly petty land disagreements between two farmers: longtime resident Joseph Brennan and his immigrant neighbor, Michael Bugler. Further complications arise from Bugler’s growing interest in Brennan’s younger sister, Breege, and the unexpected arrival of Bugler’s Australian fiancé. By novel’s end, one farmer is dead and the other in prison, the land and the women who remain behind abandoned by the men. O’Brien layers the text with numerous references, Irish (the Great Famine), mythological (stories of Greek gods and mortals), and biblical (the struggle between Cain and Abel), thus expanding the significance of this tale of two Irish farmers who feud over territory.

In the Forest

In the Forest explores the childhood trauma and mental frailty that eventually lead a deranged young Irishman to take the lives of three innocent people, including a single mother and her child. As she has in previous novels, notably House of Splendid Isolation and Wild Decembers, O’Brien incorporates elements of Irish and Greek mythology to imbue her story with universal qualities. Michael O’Kane, whose name (literally “of Cain”) carries biblical import, is either a monster or an emotionally disturbed young man. His victims try to relate to him as the latter in a failed attempt to avoid their fates and in an effort to understand the source of his psychosis. As they learn from their captor, O’Kane’s childhood was marked by abuse, abandonment, and confinement.

In his youth, Michael O’Kane was identified by his community as an individual capable of great cruelty. His adolescent nickname, Kinderschreck (German for “one who scares children”), connotes his designation by society as a monster. Institutionalized and drugged for much of his life, including a final stint in an English facility, Michael is allowed by British authorities to return to Ireland. The multiple murders he commits on his home soil verify that his release was premature and imprudent. In this portrait of a serial killer, O’Brien raises disturbing questions that remain with readers. To what extent does society contribute to the making of its monsters, its sociopaths and violent criminals? Once these dangerous outsiders have been identified, where should society place them? Most pointedly, after such individuals have been labeled Kinderschrecken, how should society expect them to behave?

The Light of Evening

In The Light of Evening, O’Brien returns to the subject matter of earlier novels: an examination of the troubled and changing lives of Irish women. She also mines biographical material as she depicts the tense relationship between a traditional Irish mother and her less traditional daughter, an emerging writer. Perhaps as a sign of her own maturity as an author and a woman, O’Brien allows the aged Dilly to reminisce about the past from her hospital bed as she awaits the arrival of her adult daughter Eleanora. Recalled in Dilly’s mind are events from her life that are similar to episodes in O’Brien’s mother’s life, including an emigration to America that is followed by a return to Ireland and marriage. Most revealing of their troubled relationship is Dilly’s maternal disappointment when Eleanora marries a foreigner, an act that for a time severs familial and national ties. When Eleanora finally arrives at her bedside, Dilly’s anticipated encounter with her daughter proves disappointing; the two women remain estranged. Left behind as counterevidence to Dilly’s more positive remembrances is Eleanora’s personal journal, which houses a far different and darker perspective on the events of the women’s lives.

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