Edna O'Brien

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Edna O'Brien World Literature Analysis

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O’Brien’s recurring themes, her stylistic experimentation with received forms and narrative stances in the pronouns used, and her success in communicating that an Irish microcosm has a universal significance are all clearly present in Mother Ireland, the most accessible and instructive work with which to make O’Brien’s literary acquaintance. This personal response to her dear native land is not at all likely to be promoted by the Irish Tourist Board. Her Irishness, however, is something of which O’Brien is proud: “It’s a state of mind,” she claims. She is not, however, blind to Ireland’s faults, appreciating that there must be something “secretly catastrophic” about a country that so many of its people leave. After an iconoclastic opening chapter on Irish history, with its uncanonized patron saint, Saint Patrick, and its paunchy Firbolgs, Mother Ireland continues with six chapters in which O’Brien sketches her dominant themes: loneliness and the search for love; the longing for adventure (often sexual); the repressive Irish Roman Catholic Church and rural society; the constraints of family ties, particularly as they involve a martyred mother and her daughter; and the courageous hopelessness with which life at best must be lived.

It would be a melancholy prospect indeed for her almost-always female protagonists (“Clara,” from her short-story collection A Rose in the Heart, has one of O’Brien’s very rare male narrators) if it were not for O’Brien’s saving graces of irony, sometimes at her own expense, and of humor. At her best, she skillfully roots her observations in the sensual details of an actual Irish world, now quickly vanishing. The late twentieth century proliferation of television antennae on cottage roofs, the problems of widespread unemployment, and other political issues make no inroads on the consciousnesses of her heroines. Problems of a practical nature (the need for grocery money) or of a provincial or national political nature (the Northern Ireland question) impinge not at all on O’Brien’s fictional characters’ search for fulfillment. Instead, her people, and her readers through them, inhabit an Ireland now almost gone. All five of their senses are engaged by a world of wet batteries for radios, ink powder to be reconstituted in school by highly favored students, private estate walls with fragments of bottles embedded in their tops to deter trespassers, Fox’s Glacier Mints, orange-crate furniture, and lice fine-combed from a child’s head onto a newspaper: in other words, the world of the 1940’s and 1950’s.

From the beginning of her literary career, it appeared as if O’Brien had fallen upon, or decided upon, in whatever mysterious way inspiration works, the mechanism of splitting her heroines into two separate, complementary, personalities. In The Country Girls, the shy and sensitive Caithleen tells her story, and she shares the action with her alter ego, the volatile and sometimes malicious Baba. They inhabit a world divided largely into warring camps—male and female, young and old, church and laity, country and town—where Caithleen’s aspirations toward love are doomed to failure. Expelled from their repressive convent school for writing a ribald joke, the girls, in their late teens, come to Dublin. Caithleen’s Mr. Gentleman, the first of a long line of largely unsympathetic men in O’Brien’s work, disappoints her. With the ebullience and resilience of youth, Caithleen is “almost” certain that she will not sleep again. Yet she does, and in The Lonely Girl her education continues. Caithleen’s tutor in this novel is the cultivated snob whom she marries, Eugene Gaillard, whose initials, Grace Eckley noted in her study, Edna O’Brien (1974), are the same as Ernest Gebler’s, O’Brien’s husband at the time. At the novel’s...

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conclusion, Caithleen and Baba are still seeking romantic relationships as they sail on theHibernia for Liverpool and London.

For the first time, in the third part of their saga, Girls in Their Married Bliss, Baba assumes the first-person narration, alternating with an omniscient voice distancing O’Brien and the reader from Kate’s (as Caithleen now wishes to be known) role. The women are now in their mid-twenties, and there is a splendid, blustery, Celtic quality to the scapegrace Baba’s style. The subject is still the female search for love in a healthy relationship with a man. In general it may be said, though, that, with few exceptions, the men whom O’Brien provides for her heroines are very poor risks, being either already married or in some other way unable to give themselves fully to any relationship. It is a doomed search on the evidence in Girls in Their Married Bliss, as readers observe Kate’s failing marriage. Occasionally, as in the story “The Mouth of the Cave,” or in the novels The Love Object and The High Road, O’Brien offers a lesbian connection for her female narrator (not to be confused with the sisterly rapport between Kate and Baba). Still, it remains predominantly in a heterosexual connection that O’Brien’s characters’ hopes for happiness seem to lie.

In subsequent novels, O’Brien, like her characters, learns and develops her skills. Her protagonists shift back and forth between two poles of experience, two responses to life that are represented by the romantic Kate and the realistic Baba of her earliest works. In August Is a Wicked Month, the narrator, Ellen, is a Kate-like figure whose attempts at self-liberation, largely through her sexual activity, bring her great guilt and pain. The balancing continues in Casualties of Peace, where Willa and Patsy are both victims of male violence. Patsy’s love letters are reminiscent of the earliest of those exchanged between James Joyce and his eventual wife, Nora Barnacle, in their correspondence with each other.

After a Pagan Place, in which a young girl is nearly seduced by a priest; in Zee and Co., where Zee is no patsy; and particularly in Night (1972), O’Brien’s optimistic Baba-type character is back and on the offensive. The new attitude is best shown in Night’s Mary Hooligan, whose aggressive, courageous, nightlong monologue forms the entire substance of the work. Family, community, and marriage settings are again explored. Mary, like Joyce’s character Molly Bloom, or indeed Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, is indomitable. Such an optimistic focus, however, does not last for O’Brien. With I Hardly Knew You, the narrator, Nora, takes readers back to the violent world first encountered in the earliest works. “I am proud,” says Nora, “to have killed one of that breed [men] to whom I owe nothing, but cruelty, deceit and the asp’s emission,” contradicting O’Brien’s oft-stated support for “human decency” and kindness among people of whatever sex.

This ambivalence, or offering of choices, continues in Epilogue, which seems to promise a return of Baba, and The High Road, which revives the old Kate figure in O’Brien’s generic, less successful Mediterranean setting. In short, the graph of her fictional split personalities is by no means a straight line. What remains is that O’Brien is a writer from Ireland, whose first thirty years there profoundly influenced her view of the world. The effects are most clearly seen in her depiction of women’s relationships.

Moving beyond a world so intensely female, O’Brien’s later novels deal more broadly with contemporary Irish life. A second trilogy explores three themes that O’Brien considered vital to Ireland and to herself: political consciousness, sexuality, and the importance of the land itself. In the impressive House of Splendid Isolation (1994), she employs a viewpoint alternating between an Irish Republican Army fugitive and a doughty widow, confronting “the essential problem of Irish history . . . English colonialism.” Down by the River (1996) follows a notorious 1992 case in which a young incest victim petitions for an abortion, while Wild Decembers (1999) traces the destructive effects of an ancestral feud over the possession of land. Yet, even though In the Forest (2002) is modeled on an actual murder case in Ireland, The Light of Evening (2006) moves back into familiar territory, probing the uneasy relationship between a daughter and her dying mother who, like O’Brien’s own, once traveled to America to work as a domestic.

At her best, O’Brien’s ability to re-create settings, particularly in Ireland, and her Joycean zest for language and humor reveal through her characters’ poor choices her own support for those who dream of love achieved through kindness and decency and her greater empathy with the human condition.

The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue

First published: 1986; includes The Country Girls, 1960; The Lonely Girl, 1962 (reprinted as Girl with Green Eyes, 1964); Girls in Their Married Bliss, 1964

Type of work: Novel

Two young girls make their escape from the repressions of western Ireland by going to Dublin and eventually find love and marriage in London.

With The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue, Edna O’Brien served notice that there was a new voice on the literary scene. From the detailed, evocative first page, with its shock to the senses of the cold linoleum on bare feet (her bedroom slippers are, on her mother’s orders, to be saved for visits to uncles and aunts), the preteen Caithleen Brady arises to the smell of frying bacon. She is anxious; her father has not come home after his night out. Shy and sensitive, she tells her first-person story, and she shares the action with her friend and alter ego, the volatile and sometimes malicious Bridget Brennan (Baba). O’Brien quickly establishes what will be recurrent themes in her fiction: the dysfunctional family, with the drunken, brutal father and the martyred, overprotective mother, the search of her protagonist for a personal identity with which she can be happy, against the splendidly realized world of Ireland in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

It is a world divided into warring camps, male and female, church and laity, and country and town, where Caithleen’s aspirations toward romantic love are doomed to failure. Her mother having drowned, Caithleen spends her mid-teen years boarding in a strict convent school, with its lingering smell of boiled cabbage, from which she and Baba contrive eventually to be expelled for writing a “dirty” note. In their late teens, joyously, they come to Dublin, Baba to take a business 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 man-friend, Mr. Gentleman (Jacques de Maurier), disappoints her. He is the first in a long line of rotters whom O’Brien’s heroines encounter, such as the ugly father, Eugene Gaillard, Herod, and Dr. Flagger. In O’Brien’s fictions, such unsavory types far outnumber the few good men with decent inclinations, such as Hickey the servant-man, and, in Casualties of Peace, the black man, Auro.

The Lonely Girl continues the girls’ saga; Baba is healthy again. It is, however, largely Caithleen’s story, and she is the narrator. The repressive effects of Caithleen’s family, her village community, and her convent education are again graphically shown. Caithleen becomes romantically involved 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 is often cold in bed and in the salon. He begins the further education of his still naïve, prudish “student.” At the novel’s conclusion, Caithleen, wild and feeling debased “because of some dammed man,” is learning and 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 for England and London. They effect their escape (physically, at least) from the constraints of their home environment. This development occurs despite the blandishments of Caithleen’s suitor from western Ireland, who declares to her, by way of enticement, “I’ve a pump in the yard, a bull and a brother a priest. What more could a woman want?” O’Brien’s humor and ear for the best of conversational exchanges is a saving grace in an otherwise grim situation.

Girls in Their Married Bliss continues the story of the two women in London, where, for the first time, Baba assumes the first-person narration. She alternates with an omniscient voice, distancing both O’Brien and the reader from the role of Kate. (This is a technique that O’Brien will carry even further in A Pagan Place, where her heroine is removed and distanced to the second-person pronoun, “you.”) The women, now about twenty-five years old, have not left all of their Irishness behind with their arrival in England. There is a splendid, Celtic rush to Baba’s style. Kate, too, has her share of one-liners, word associations, epigrams, and zany metaphors. “Self interest,” she observes, “was a common crime.”

In these early novels, as she shows her heroines learning and developing, O’Brien is polishing and improving her writing skills. In Girls in Their Married Bliss, the topic is still the search for a loving connection, though the plot involves a precisely observed and psychologically sharp account of the disintegration of Kate’s marriage to Gaillard. People, in the context of women’s roles in society, are shown to rub exquisitely on one another’s nerves; in the smaller context of bedroom politics, it is noted, “Men are pure fools.” Marriage, at least for the reasons that women enter it in this story, is evidently not a solution to the quest for happiness. Baba makes a calculated move for comfort; Kate sees that her interest in people is generated solely by her own needs. They have both matured to the point where they no longer believe much in romantic plans. In the 1967 Penguin revision, this pessimistic tone is deepened when Kate has herself sterilized. She will not make the same mistake again; she will not have another child who will, in its turn, become a parent.

The 1986 reissue of the complete Country Girls Trilogy contains a brief Epilogue in the form of a monologue delivered by Baba, in which O’Brien takes care of what might have been regarded previously as a split personality. The ebulilient Baba brings readers up to date on past events. The despairing Kate is dead; she drowned, and readers are led to think that she might have committed suicide.

The resolution of the split-heroine narrators in O’Brien’s fictions however, is not final. In the weak The High Road, readers are thrown back once again into the narration of a “Kate” figure, a London-Irish woman who has gone abroad to try to forget a failed love affair in the company of the jet-setters on the Mediterranean, an environment and group with which O’Brien is, as a whole, less successful than she is with the Ireland and Irish, who particularity and universality she feels and captures much more deftly and convincingly.

Night

First published: 1972

Type of work: Novel

In a solo harangue from her bed in England, Irish Mary Hooligan delivers a spirited, courageous account of her life and loves.

Night is O’Brien’s most Joycean of novels, very clearly reminiscent of Molly Bloom’s concluding monologue in Ulysses (1922) in its mature female narrator, who is defiantly, and more optimistically than in James Joyce’s novel, taking stock of her life and loves. It is indeed an exuberant tour de force in the zany realization of its narrator and in its stream-of-consciousness form.

Over the course of one winter night, which gives the novel its title, Mary Hooligan, approaching middle age, divorced, with a grown son, reviews her life and loves. In the character of Mary, O’Brien succeeds, for the moment, in fusing the spontaneous, activist Baba and the doomed dreamer Kate. For most of the work, however, it is the former voice that predominates. Mary is aggressively courageous in her determination to endure and to enjoy without whining whatever life sends her way. Her joy is manifest in her exuberant use of the English language: “I’ve had better times of course—the halcyon days, rings, ringlets, ashes of roses . . . chantilly, high teas, drop scones, serge suits, binding attachments, all that.”

She weaves time back and forth from the present as she remembers significant people and places in her life. The novel has no plot development in any traditional sense. Foremost in importance to Mary are her mother, Lil, whose specialty is the spittled-on mother’s knot; her alcoholic father, Boss; her son, Tutsie, whom she realizes she loves too much; her former husband, the cold, authoritarian Dr. Flaggler, “one of the original princes of darkness”; and her childhood home in the Roman Catholic barony of Coose, in the west of Ireland, rendered in all of its sensory detail of “occidental damp and murk.” The arrival of dawn and a telegram announcing the imminent return of the owners of the house brings Mary’s reverie to an end. “Moriarity, here I come,” she says, projecting a reunion with her stonemason friend, with whom she feels she has a connection rivaling that of any family knot.

All of O’Brien’s perennial themes are evident, bound up in Mary Hooligan. At her best, which is often, Mary is a joy. Iconoclastic and frank, her sense of humor rarely fails to elicit sympathy for her blundering search for an enduring and loving relationship with a decent man. Reflecting on Nick Finney, the crooner back in the west of Ireland with whom she first had sexual intercourse, she says, “It was St. Peter and St. Paul’s day, and hence a holy day of obligation.” Her words and syntax rush along. At her worst—and that side of her personality is but hinted in her exchanges with her pessimistic friend Madge—she, or any woman, or any person, can become depressed and depressing. “Everyone has a grubby fantasy when you get past the bullshit,” Madge says; such a person more often than not is a loser, is willing to settle for the possible. For Mary, “the puny possible has always belonged to others.” Hers is the philosophy of excess. In her eclectic religion, free from the constraint of the Irish Catholic guilt of so many of O’Brien’s heroines, Mary is relatively at peace with herself, her self-image relatively intact.

O’Brien did not easily achieve this positive realization of personality, nor would it last. Yet for the moment and this enduring work, readers can rejoice that her verdict goes to Mary, and her progenitor Baba, of The Country Girls Trilogy. Employing her astonishing, imaginative, dramatic recall of places—particularly Irish places—O’Brien affirms people, their words, and the central importance of genuine self-knowledge and honesty. Such qualities foster hope, which Mary Hooligan only once, very briefly, considers abandoning. She quickly retracts a death wish: “Do I mean it? Apparently not. I am still snooping around, on the lookout for pals . . . cronies of any kind, provided they . . . leave me . . . my winding dirging effluvias.” Connection and involvement with others, in Mary’s view and in O’Brien’s, must be maintained, so that she, and her readers, may carry on.

A Fanatic Heart

First published: 1984

Type of work: Short stories

Drawn largely from her four previously published collections, these stories reveal O’Brien’s perennial themes of love and loss, most often narrated by Irishwomen.

The title of A Fanatic Heart is drawn from William Butler Yeats’s “Remorse for Intemperate Speech,” cited as an epigraph to introduce the volume. Indeed, in these lines are summarized O’Brien’s ongoing, dominant themes of Ireland and the women of Ireland in their “maimed” search for loving relationships.

O’Brien continued to write short stories all of her life, and she began publishing in this genre in the early 1960’s. “Come into the Drawing Room, Doris” (ironically retitled “Irish Revel” in The Love Object and given the same title in A Fanatic Heart) first appeared in The New Yorker on April 25, 1962. Set in Ireland, this story, very clearly after the manner of James Joyce in “The Dead” in his Dubliners (1914), is an indictment of an entire society. Sprinkled with holy water by her overly protective mother, Mary, the heroine, who is observed by the omniscient narrator, sets off from her farm home on her bicycle to the shabby Commercial Hotel in the village and to her first party.

It turns out to be a miserable work-party for her; the married artist with whom Mary had danced two years before, and about whom she had fantasized, is not there. Only eight locals are present for the roast goose and the liquor. Eithne and Doris are there—brash village girls who complement Mary’s innate, refined naïveté; they amuse themselves “wandering from one mirror to the next.” “Doris” is the name that the drunken, truculent O’Toole three times calls Mary, having spiked her orange drink, wanting her to come out of the room with him. Doris is an unlikely identity for the discreet Mary, but her image, O’Brien indicates, is in trouble anyhow: Her mother had already converted into a dustpan the sketch of her drawn by the artist whom she had romanticized. The party is a failure.

As the final paragraph indicates, “Mary could see her own little house, like a little white box at the end of the world, waiting to receive her.” In this story, the family battle lines are not developed. The omniscient narrator leaves it at that, in a well-crafted tale, rich in the evocative minutiae of daily living and balky bicycles in the west of Ireland in the 1940’s. It is a picture rich in its natural descriptions of, for example, the blood-red fuchsia, and rich, too, in its cast of characters, who all have their stories. Some of these characters, such as Hickey, readers have already met (The Country Girls Trilogy), and some will appear later. The themes suggested here—overprotective mothers, the unfortunate search for a companion, and an ignorant, brutal society set among natural beauties—will also recur, as O’Brien increasingly and carefully works and reworks her fictions.

O’Brien’s pessimism about much of the female condition shows little alleviation in her short-story collection, A Rose in the Heart, or in the collection Returning, where the external topography in all nine stories is the familiar west of Ireland and the craggy community there. A young girl is present in all of the stories, either as the ostensible narrator or as the subject for more mature reflection on the part of a now-experienced woman. The American novelist Philip Roth isolates this then-and-now tension between the innocence of childhood and the experience of fifty years of living as the spring for these stories’ “wounded vigor.”

Lantern Slides

First published: 1990

Type of work: Short stories

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, Lantern Slides offers twelve bittersweet glimpses of Irish daily life.

The pages of Lantern Slides are bracketed by two stories that neatly illuminate the book’s title. The “lantern” is an old-fashioned magic lantern, an early kind of slide projector that throws images upon a screen, just as these stories are images of the lives that O’Brien displays. The first, “Oft in the Stilly Night,” takes its title from a song by Thomas Moore, the nineteenth century Irish poet whose lyrics mourn a romanticized past. The story is virtually plotless, a series of vignettes featuring the inhabitants of an Irish village: the music teacher who keeps hens in her house, a defrocked young priest who lives with his mother, a woman who believes she has been attacked by a lily. These sad eccentrics flicker on and off the screen.

Paying homage to James Joyce with unmistakable allusions to “The Dead” and Ulysses, the title story is the true jewel of this collection as it observes a cross section of Dublin society at an elaborate surprise party for Betty, who has been deserted by her husband. Mr. Conroy, a rather pompous fellow (like Gabriel Conroy of “The Dead”), fleetingly remembers a dead lover as he escorts Miss Lawless, who daydreams of her first seducer. Other guests include the crude Mr. Gogarty (recalling Oliver St. John Gogarty, once Joyce’s roommate and the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses), an argumentative young woman, and the requisite drunkards. These partygoers are updated, seemingly more successful and cosmopolitan than Joyce’s, yet they too are emotionally stunted—gossiping, dissatisfied people waiting for something to happen to change their lives. Like Joyce’s characters, they are passive, already “dead,” but the wicked humor is entirely O’Brien’s.

Between these two lie other stories, centered largely on dysfunctional families or unsatisfactory love affairs. One of the best is “A Demon,” the tale of a disaster waiting to happen. Young Meg, the narrator, travels with her parents to fetch her ill sister from her boarding school because the nuns there are worried. They are accompanied by the doctor’s wife, whom Meg’s mother has attempted to befriend without success. Even though the hired car is late, Meg’s quarreling parents become jovial and the doctor’s wife thaws, as the mother struggles to please her guest by secretly procuring gin for her. As Meg’s sister Nancy, coughing and wrapped in a blanket, is taken home, Meg sees that Nancy’s abdomen is swollen and “knew without knowing” that things can only get worse.

In “What a Sky,” a daughter returns to Ireland to visit her elderly father and treat him to a little outing, but mutual anger and bitterness thwart their reconciliation. Vicious village gossip in “The Widow” ultimately destroys a good woman, revealing the cruelty of cramped little lives. A sort of resignation exists in these stories, often laced with a strong dose of irony, as if the worst will happen regardless of what anyone does to prevent it. As one character remarks, “You see, everyone is holding on. Just.”

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Edna O'Brien Long Fiction Analysis