SOURCE: "Sacrificial Women in Short Stories by Mary Lavin and Edna O'Brien," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 2, Spring, 1995, pp. 185-97.

Edna O'Brien's "A Scandalous Woman" (1972) ends with the statement that Ireland is "a land of strange, sacrificial women." Like O'Brien, Mary Lavin features sacrificial women in her short stories. The disturbing martyrdoms of the heroines created by both writers stem, in part, from Catholic notions of the Madonna. The two writers criticize their heroines' emulations of the suffering Virgin. Julia Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" (1977) and Marina Warner's Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) scrutinize the impact of the Madonna myth on western European women. Their feminist scholarship illuminates short stories such as Lavin's "A Nun's Mother" (1944) and "Sarah" (1943), as well as O'Brien's "Sister Imelda" (1981) and "A Scandalous Woman." In each story, female martyrdom (en)gendered by the Madonna myth takes different forms, from becoming a nun to becoming a wife, mother, or "fallen woman."

Kristeva comments upon the fluidity of the Madonna, who encompasses diverse female roles, as do the Irish female characters who emulate her. Discussing the dimensions of the Madonna—Virgin, mother, wife—Warner describes the primary effect of the Madonna myth: "By setting up an impossible ideal the cult of the Virgin does drive the adherent into a position of acknowledged and hopeless yearning and inferiority." The heroines of Lavin's and O'Brien's stories fit the pattern of self-hatred that Warner describes. Their varieties of sacrifice stem from self-disgust fostered by failing to reach the standards of the Madonna myth.

In O'Brien's "Sister Imelda," the teenage narrator falls in love with her teacher, the beautiful young nun of the title. The joys of their love are the Foucauldian pleasures of self-denial—a passion never to be realized but fanned by both teacher and student through notes, whispered confidences, devotional gifts, and an occasional hug or kiss. This story fits the pattern of O'Brien's novels that Thomas F. Staley calls [in his book Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, 1982] confessional, "crying out for absolution." Imelda's and the narrator's romance makes life in the cold nunnery tolerable, even enjoyable. The romance stands, in miniature, for the unrealizable passion that Sister Imelda holds for Christ. Thus it becomes an enlistment tool for the nunnery, as Sister Imelda lures the narrator into a permanent sisterhood of sublimated passion. The narrator abandons her plan to become a nun after she leaves the convent, instead taking up the worldly solaces of makeup and nylons to attract the attention of men. Her best friend, Baba, outdoes her at dressing like a mature woman, becoming the narrator's model as Imelda once was. Baba's name suggests trite babytalk among lovers, as well as the magic of the Arabian Nights—here the transformations of puberty that are supposed to lead to marital joy.

The narrator's struggle to sublimate her sexuality into a pure love for Sister Imelda may come from her wish to emulate the Virgin. Warner writes that "the foundations of the ethic of sexual chastity are laid in fear and loathing of the female body's functions in identification of evil with the flesh and flesh with woman." The nuns' routine mortifications, which the schoolgirls are expected to imitate, reveal their sense that the female body is an inherently evil possession for which they must compensate. Sister Imelda gets a sty that suggests both her neglect of her body and her distorted view of it. Meanwhile, "Most girls had sore throats and were told to suffer this inconvenience to mortify themselves…." Sore throats are a metaphor for the voicelessness of the girls and the nuns under the convent's regimen. Both the nuns and the girls are often hungry because the convent habitually underfeeds them. Delicacies, such as the narrator's comically suggestive gift of bananas for Imelda, are saved for visiting bishops. The semi-starvation of both nuns and girls by a wealthy church forces their bodies into thin and spiritualized shapes that avoid the lush fecundity stereotypically associated with woman as sexual body. Weakened from hunger and other mortifications, the women are to look as undesirable and feel as undesiring as possible; however, the story shows that neither goal is actually met.

The narrator feels the loathing for her body that underlies the convent's ascetic practices when, at the end of the story, she wants to jump out of the bus window to escape the gaze of Sister Imelda after two years of living outside of the convent. The narrator now sees Imelda as a judge who might condemn her for adhering to her culture's vision of woman as a sexual commodity. To the narrator, Imelda stands for the virgin identity that the narrator has decided to shun despite its high status when held by nuns. As Warner writes, "Thus the nun's state is a typical Christian conundrum, oppressive and liberating at once, founded in contempt for, yet inspiring respect for, the female sex … But the very conditions which make the Virgin sublime are beyond the powers of women to fulfill unless they deny their sex." That denial of sexuality is not easy for Imelda is suggested by the narrator's describing the nun's lips as those of "a woman who might sing in a cabaret." When Sister Imelda reads Cardinal Newman to her class, "she looked almost profane." Imelda's sensuality surfaced during a fling with a boy on the night before she became a postulant; it reappears during her inappropriate friendship with the narrator. In the convent's context of preserving a nun's or a schoolgirl's virginity, a mental lesbian liaison is more acceptable than a consummated heterosexual relationship. Within the context of current sexual scandals within the Church, the reader may wonder if the narrator's and Imelda's liaison was ever consummated, and if that consummation was beyond representation when the story was written. For the story's purposes, however, the desire itself is what matters. As Kiera O'Hara writes [in "Love Objects: Love and Obsession in the Stories of Edna O'Brien," Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1993] of O'Brien's characters, it is "the possibility of union." however unlikely, that obsesses the narrator of "Sister Imelda." That transcendent union with Imelda would have both spiritual and physical dimensions.

In presenting a lesbian relationship from the point of view of the immature, enraptured narrator, O'Brien shows its appeal in a patriarchal world in which becoming like the hedonistic Baba seems more debased than becoming like the idealistic Imelda. Defying the restrictions of the nunnery, Imelda seems free and daring—"how peerless and how brave"—to the narrator. The narrator is drawn not only to love Imelda, but to want to imitate her. As Imelda the nun emulates the Madonna, the narrator models herself upon her beautiful teacher, suggesting the erotic dimensions that female worship of the Madonna may take. Imelda's erotic dimension includes maternal self-sacrifice, for Imelda enjoys feeding the narrator jam tarts which she herself refuses to eat. The tarts stand for forbidden sexuality that is tied up with the maternal: "Had we been caught, she, no doubt, would have had to make a massive sacrifice." As a sexualized stand-in for both the narrator's mother and the Madonna, Imelda eroticizes stereotypical female selflessness while she models it for the narrator.

The appeal of Imelda's asceticism is its drama: "Each nun, even the Mother Superior—flung herself in total submission, saying prayers in Latin and offering up the moment to God … It was not difficult to imagine Sister Imelda face downward, arms outstretched, prostrate on the tile floor." Imelda's gesture suggests [Julia] Kristeva's jouissance of the mystic and Foucault's notion that repression can be more fun than indulgence. The nuns' pleasure in prostration may come from ceasing to fight their awareness of their inferiority to the ideal wife and mother of God, the Madonna.

The irony is that the narrator does not know that a woman's life outside the convent may also require humiliating renunciations for her children or for a domineering husband; both sides of the Madonna ideal—Virgin and mother—are identically submissive. At the convent, the narrator does not try to grasp her mother's lot, although she visualizes her father darkly as "losing his temper perhaps and stamping on the kitchen floor with nailed boots." Certainly the narrator, like her mother, is a follower—first of Imelda and then of Baba, with the latter's makeup rites becoming so sacred that the narrator never removes her paint. Like Baba, Imelda prepares the narrator to be devoutly feminine; Imelda teaches the narrator a masochistic style of loving that the narrator will be able to use with men: "It was clear to me then that my version of pleasure was inextricable from pain." Kristeva [in "Stabat mater," The Kristeva Reader, 1986] might call this "A suffering lined with jubilation" characteristic of the woman who lives suffused by the image of the sacrificial Madonna. Grace Eckley argues [in Edna O'Brien, 1974] that O'Brien always defines love as sadomasochistic. That seems to be true. However, I believe that in "Sister Imelda" O'Brien is critical of sadomasochism as a feminine style of loving. The nuns' gestures of willing prostration are emblematic of the suffering Irish female condition in general. That the story ends with the narrator's pity for Imelda and her fellow nun suggests the narrator's coming awareness of the commonality of women's lot: "They [the two nuns] looked so cold and lost as they hurried along the pavement that I wanted to run after them." This commonality results from the sacrifices that the Madonna ideal requires of Irish women. It leaves O'Brien labeling herself, according to Eckley, as "only a guilt-ridden Irish woman." The excessive humility of the "only" is what O'Brien challenges her readers to escape through avoiding the self-abnegation that restricts Imelda, the narrator, and herself.

"Sister Imelda" suggests that girls want to become nuns to experience the high drama of religious renunciation rather than the low comedy of becoming a sexual commodity. Lavin's "The Nun's Mother" presents a related explanation for why girls want to become nuns—to avoid male predation. More painfully than O'Brien, Lavin exposes the inescapability of patriarchal power, whether in the home or the convent. The story concerns a nun's mother's meditations after leaving her daughter, Angela, at a convent. Angela's mother, Mrs. Latimer, never dared to ask Angela why she chose such a career, when all of Angela's life she appeared to dislike going to mass. The girl's father, Luke, is horrified that his daughter is renouncing the physical joys of marriage without realizing what they mean. Like Mrs. Latimer he does not dare to question Angela. Mrs. Latimer reflects on her happiness in marriage, noting its rarity. She is both glad that her daughter will not have to risk a marriage failure, and sorry that she won't know intimate love. Although the parents do not realize it, a reason for Angela's choice is given at the end of the story, when the father notices a flasher who has been operating near their home for months.

Angela apparently wishes to escape a world of invasive male sexuality for a sexless world in which wearing a swimsuit into the bathtub will safeguard her. The daughter's acceptance of such prudish defenses can be explained by "the terrible reticence about the body between mothers and daushters, a reticence based on revulsion, and not, as with mothers and sons, upon respect and mystery." Shame over their bodies keeps Angela and Mrs. Latimer emotionally distant. Hence, Mrs. Latimer cannot ask Angela why she is becoming a nun: "She [Mrs. Latimer] was conscious of this revulsion [about the body] every time she was alone with her daughter during the last month." As a result, Mrs. Latimer says nothing to Angela about her decision. Mrs. Latimer pretends to her husband that she has spoken to Angela, for Mrs. Latimer feels humiliated by her inability to be as intimate with her daughter as Luke expects. Mrs. Latimer knows that if Luke had a son, Luke would talk to him easily, since men lack women's shame about sexuality. At the story's end, Mrs. Latimer can't even imagine Angela being disturbed by the flasher near their home, because she never thinks of Angela as a sexual being capable of noticing a nude man. Mrs. Latimer's and Angela's revulsion against their bodies comes from the self-hatred engendered by a religion that regards female sexuality as evil. It is the same self-disgust that causes the narrator of "Sister Imelda" to hide from her once-beloved nun, and that perhaps caused Imelda to join her order. Only by denying her body as a nun can a woman preserve it from becoming that of a temptress.

Angela's fear of violation by the flasher or other men can be linked, through Warner, to the Church's "historical fear of contamination by outside influences, and its repugnance to change" that is symbolized by the Virgin's (and nun's) chastity. It is a fear of contamination that Angela's mother shares. Mrs. Latimer believes that the appeal of becoming a nun is gaining sexual independence from men. "And so, for most women, when they heard that a young girl was entering a convent, there was a strange triumph in their hearts … they felt a temporary hostility to their husbands." However, Mrs. Latimer denies that she herself ever felt the allure of sexual emancipation. She would not give up her memories of passion with Luke for anything. Luke is gentle; both Angela and her mother seem to see him as an exception to typical male aggressiveness. Despite the presence of Luke, the story countenances Angela's fear of men in that the flasher epitomizes all the varieties of perverts who do in fact hurt women; that flashers themselves usually don't rape women physically, however, suggests Angela's naïveté about men. Angela's other naive belief is that nuns are immune from sexual attacks.

The story ends with Mrs. Latimer's fantasy of Angela as a water lily about to be picked by the flasher. That Mrs. Latimer associates Angela with water lilies shows that Mrs. Latimer sees the female experience as a conflict between beautiful nature and a degraded civilization that endangers it. Mrs. Latimer's essentialism appears in her aligning of woman with nature. The danger for the female flower is not just one of being picked, but of withering in a self-protective, ossifying ideology of asceticism that the Irish Catholic Church endorses for women. Angela avoids the physical threat of rape but not the mental one of ossification, choosing her own form of sacrifice. Angela will be a water lily in a bowl on the convent's altar, her life a slow withering. With Angela's sexual independence from men comes intellectual dependence on the male-dominated Church. Angela's payoff will be the high status which Warner and Kristeva agree that emulating the Virgin earns.

Angela's mother will get that high status too. Mrs. Latimer realizes this upon arriving home, when her housekeeper treats her with a new deference. Yet this status is seen satirically by Mrs. Latimer, who abhors the pretentious acts of piety she may be expected to perform now that she is the mother of a nun. Mrs. Latimer fantasizes, "'Meet Mrs. Latimer, who has a daughter in the convent.' She would be quite an exhibit at church bazaars and charity whist drives. She might even have to assume an attitude." The pathetic requests for prayers that Angela receives from her dressmaker, plus the stereotypical gifts of rosary beads, quartz angels, and holy pictures, fill, Mrs. Latimer with dismay. By association, Angela's mother is supposed to be aligned with the Madonna as a holy mother of a sacrificial child. But because the circumstances of Angela entering a convent in twentieth-century Ireland are portrayed with mundane humor, they contradict any glorified image of nuns and their mothers. Such images of transcendence are sold to girls by bestsellers like The White Sister, according to Mrs. Latimer. Transcendence of what? Of being a Mrs. Latimer—the reader knows her only by her married name, as though marriage had consumed her identity. Yet the story portrays Mrs. Latimer's marriage as a happy one in which the husband is the subordinate party if anyone is, whereas Angela's nunnery is seen not as a refuge from male dominance but as a museum.

For any mother, the ultimate price of bearing a nun might be knowing that her line ends with her daughter, as Christ ended Mary's. Mrs. Latimer will not have the pleasure of having grandchildren to love. In her odd relief at this apparent misfortune, her likeness to her daughter appears: both fear contamination above all else. At the birth of Angela, Mrs. Latimer had imagined her descendants falling into lurid varieties of wickedness that she can only observe, but not interrupt. "For the lives they led had suddenly seemed evil in every case. Some were prising open drawers and looking over their shoulders. Some were stealthily crossing the 'ts' of letters that were forged." Mrs. Latimer's relief comes from knowing that her daughter's pure choice will eliminate any responsibility for future generations. Her relief at Angela's chastity vows outweighs her regret that she will no longer need to stay young for Angela.

The story's initial image of Mrs. Latimer is telling: her eyes are closed as she leaves Angela at the nunnery, as though Mrs. Latimer is afraid to face reality. This image reveals Mrs. Latimer's compulsion to control what she knows and experiences, as well as the actions of her descendants. Perhaps Mrs. Latimer chooses not to see the pathetic reason for Angela's vocation, as that vocation allays Mrs. Latimer's anxieties about her posterity. Mrs. Latimer would have been a good mother but for her fear of the future that she unconsciously passed onto her daughter. Mrs. Latimer's obsessive desire to control the future contradicts the healthy side of the Madonna myth that Kristeva describes as its connectedness to past and future through "a flow of unending germinations, an eternal cosmos." Fertility is lost to the paranoid nun and her mother, as the virginal side of the Madonna excludes the maternal side. Whereas Angela imagines herself a victim of male predators, Mrs. Latimer dreams of being their ancestor. This is a dark turn to the story that makes Angela's desire to become a nun seem a result of her mother's pathology, not of an actual vocation.

As if to validate Angela's fear of sexual predation in "A Nun's Mother," O'Brien's "A Scandalous Woman" shows that childbirth may doom a mother rather than being Kristeva's mystic experience. In O'Brien's story, female imprisonment and madness are caused by the fertility that nuns renounce, perhaps wisely given the story's context. Eily—unmarried, pregnant and Catholic—is locked up by her parents after being caught sleeping with a Protestant bank clerk. The clerk is forced to marry Eily, with the enticement of a substantial dowry and with the threat of being murdered by her father if he refuses. Of course the clerk is not a loving husband, and Eily goes mad after bearing several children. Later, her recovery into a mindless contentment despite her husband's affairs is portrayed as even more disturbing than her madness. The story is told by a girlfriend of Eily's who is a few years younger than Eily. The narrator begins by describing events from their childhood and proceeds chronologically.

What is most pertinent to the Madonna myth is Eily's and the female narrator's ambivalence about their pubescent bodies. Their distrust of their womanhood is learned from Eily's elder sister, Nuala. Lavin's Angela learns a similar fear of becoming a nature woman from her mother. When Eily and the narrator are little girls, Nuala pretends that she is a doctor. Every Tuesday Nuala plays that she is cutting out the young narrator's female parts, gesticulating above the narrator's body. As Nuala sharpens the knife with Eily assisting as nurse, Nuata sings "Waltzing Matilda"—Matilda being their code word for female reproductive organs. This ritual operation is accompanied by the narrator's confession, since the "elastic marks [of her underpants are] a sign of debauchery." James M. Haule writes [in "Tough Luck: The Unfortunate Birth of Edna O'Brien," Colby Library Quarterly, December, 1987] that the surgery game "prepares us for the reduction of Eily, and finally of the narrator herself, to a mere shell." The self-hatred of these little girls is already profound; they have been taught, perhaps through proscriptions against masturbation, that woman as a sexual being is a monster needing maiming to correct her inborn flaws. The narrator's guilt over helping Eily conceal her affair leads the narrator to gargle with salt and water, and to reject food: "These were forms of atonement to God." The narrator feels not only her guilt as Eily's accomplice, but anticipatory guilt over her coming womanhood. The child narrator is put in the position of a latent werewolf dreading the full moon that must come no matter whether or not she wants the transformation into womanhood. The hell that descends upon Eily after her romps with the clerk shows a further significance to Nuala's Gothic operation. If only Eily's female parts had never developed, her life would have remained tolerable.

Warner argues that the Magdalen myth suggests that sexual crimes are the only significant ones a woman can commit. Eily's so-called "fall" thus makes her a criminal; whereas if she had stolen something or gambled her savings away, her family might have forgiven her more readily. The mistrust of female sexuality that Warner links to the Madonna myth is seen when Eily's parents jail Eily in their oat room. On the day of her wedding, Eily "kept whitening and re-whitening her buckskin shoes," as though hoping her marriage might restore the virgin purity her parents prize. Eily's relief from pain comes not through wifehood, but through a madness that allows her to express her rage towards the family and friends who were supposed to protect her, not reject her. Finally, her relief comes through a supposed cure, possibly a lobotomy, a numbed sanity that represents oblivion.

Several of Eily's actions pitifully enact the impoverished vision of romance that leads to her liaison. Eily gives the narrator a bottle of cheap perfume in appreciation for her help with hiding Eily's affair. Like Baba's makeup rites, Eily's perfume symbolizes the young woman's obsession with making herself attractive to men; through her gift of perfume, Eily tries to pass on her obsession to the narrator. Eily's passion for her fickle clerk takes her and the narrator to a witch's pub to have Eily's fortune told. The narrator acts as a guard while Eily and her lover make love furtively, outdoors. This is not the sublimated lesbian romance of "Sister Imelda," but a consummated heterosexual affair that the naïve narrator describes in humorous detail. Instead of reading The White Sister mentioned in Lavin's story, Eily seems never to read at all, but merely to gather tabloid notions about romance from her friends. Hence, Eily believes that "the god Cupid was on our side." Eily has replaced Kristeva's jouissance of the mystic who loves God with the passion of heterosexual romance. The pathos of Eily's affair is that it is not worth the price that Eily's family and friends force her to pay for it.

The narrator suggests that the sane Eily at the end of the story has "half-dead eyes," because "along with removing her cares they [her psychiatrists] had taken her spirit away." That Eily has lost her memories alarms the narrator. Yet Eily is apparently content without the past that had driven her mad in the first place. The narrator writes that not only is Ireland "a land of strange, sacrificial women," but it is also "a land of murder." To be happy as an unloved wife, Eily must have her thoughts, memories, and dreams killed. That the narrator may soon share Eily's fate is implied when she meets Eily while pregnant "under not very happy circumstances," and in the company of her mother. When the narrator again meets Eily years later, a husband as resentful as Eily's waits impatiently for the narrator and her son. Is it the narrator who is really the scandalous woman of the story's title? If so, the narrator exorcises her memories not through a nervous breakdown but by transforming her memories into fiction. Was the narrator, like Eily, sacrificed to the Irish ideal of virginity? Through not answering that question, O'Brien suggests that numerous women can be labeled by her story's title. Generation after generation, scandalous women are made to pay for their rebelliousness with a lifetime of submission to their husbands and parents.

As in nineteenth-century British fiction, the "fallen" twentieth-century Irish mother can only redeem herself through dedication to her children. Eily, the modern Magdalen, sacrifices herself for her parents' reputation, as well. As Lavin's Angela and O'Brien's Imelda die one kind of slow death in the convent, Eily dies another kind of slow death as a wife and mother. Eily is so numbed after her lobotomy that she cannot act affectionate toward her children. Each living death represents a different, murdering facet of the Madonna myth—the Virgin and the Magdalen mother.

Whereas a spiritually dead woman is the heroine of O'Brien's "A Scandalous Woman," an actual murder victim is the heroine of Lavin's "Sarah." As a widow who struggled to raise her children and eventually remarried a man who left the priesthood for her, Lavin can confront the paralyzing Irish middle-class conformity that Joyce critiqued. But Lavin presents a female point of view. As Zack Bowen writes, "Given Mary Lavin's lifelong concern with practicalities, money problems, responsibilities, and the effects of death, her vision of reality is harsh and closely circumscribed by an acute awareness of social class, and society's sanctions and rules." "Sarah" is one of Lavin's most hard-hitting pieces of social criticism. In her village, unmarried Sarah is respected for her piety and for her diligence as a cleaning lady. Yet Sarah dies from exposure while bearing her baby in a ditch during a rainstorm. The baby also dies. Sarah's angry brothers had kicked her out of their home, after depending on her cleverly efficient housekeeping for years. Although Sarah was already raising three sons whom she bore out of wedlock, this is apparently the first time Sarah had informed the father of his paternity. Sarah is no longer willing to claim sole responsibility for her children, or to pretend that she was honored by virgin births. As a result, Sarah's brothers can no longer hide behind their previous myth that the men who slept with Sarah were "blackguards" who took advantage of her. Her "fall" thus becomes a public shame that her brothers must acknowledge.

Sarah's brothers' violence is only a step beyond that of Eily's family. Since Sarah's paramour is a married man, her brothers cannot force a marriage as Eily's did. Sarah inflames her eldest brother by reminding him that her lovers are none of his business. What bothers him more than Sarah's affair is her defiance of his authority. But he hides his irritation at not being able to control his sister behind worry over their family's honor that is more socially acceptable. He regards Sarah's adultery as much more dishonorable than her previous affairs with single men, as he tells his younger brother: "No one is going to say I put up with that kind of thing." Concern for their reputation motivates the cruelty of Sarah's brothers and Eily's family. O'Brien and Lavin suggest that Irish families punish scandalous women without compunction. Eily's and Sarah's scandalousness comes from their insubordination to their families as much as from the premarital sex that is the proof of their defiance.

The wife of the man Sarah slept with, Mrs. Kedrigan, writes to Sarah's brothers to protest Sarah's letter to Mr. Kedrigan informing him of her pregnancy. Mrs. Kedrigan is angry in part because her neighbors had warned her not to hire Sarah, but Mrs. Kedrigan had wanted to show them that her husband was entirely trustworthy. Sharing a belief in the double standard with Sarah's brothers. Mrs. Kedrigan does not blame her husband for his affair; nor does she believe his denial of it, or she would have ignored Sarah's letter. The illusion that Sarah is the sole culprit lets Mrs. Kedrigan avoid fighting with her husband about his affair. As Mrs. Kedrigan relies on him for physical and psychological support, it is in her interest to keep the peace. Without a job to support their baby who will soon be born, Mrs. Kedrigan can't leave her husband. But she gets back at him indirectly by telling him the news of Sarah's death with vengeful relish, saying that the ditch is the place where Sarah belongs. Mrs. Kedrigan can be seen as a victim of patriarchal restrictions that are whitewashed by the Madonna myth, to the point that she becomes a caricature of the wronged wife. Warner notes that the Virgin myth's influence is greatest in countries where women are primarily wives and mothers; Ireland would certainly qualify. Janet Egleson Dunleavy says that Lavin's stories from the 1940s focus on "the universal truth of restricted vision"; petty, vindictive vision is clearly Mrs. Kedrigan's flaw, as much as it is Sarah's brothers'. Mrs. Kedrigan condemns Sarah because, as Warner writes of the Madonna myth, "There is no place in the conceptual architecture of Christian society for a single woman who is neither a virgin nor a whore."

Lavin questions the ideology that allows Mrs. Kedrigan and Sarah's brothers to label Sarah a whore, much as O'Brien does in "A Scandalous Woman." As Richard F. Peterson writes, Sarah's tragic death represents "the triumph of the unnatural over the natural." Oliver Kedrigan kindles Sarah's animal attraction to him by complimenting her red cheeks; he laughingly asks her whether she rubs them with sheep-raddle. At the end of the story, when Mrs. Kedrigan tells Oliver of Sarah's death, he yells at her to give him the sheep-raddle, cursing it. Oliver is cursing the instinctive lust which led him to cause Sarah's and his baby's death. He also curses the unnaturalness of those deaths, which were fostered by an unforgiving man-made morality that is supported by Mrs. Kedrigan's jealousy and Sarah's brothers' shame. And Oliver is cursing his cowardice for denying his natural family outside of wedlock. Lavin suggests that Sarah is destined by nature for motherhood by contrasting her healthy pregnancy with that of the sickly Mrs. Kedrigan. The village women had predicted that Mrs. Kedrigan could never become a mother, and had wondered why the earthy farmer had married her. Her hysterical illnesses during pregnancy cause her to rely on her husband's ministrations even though she calls him "a cruel brute" for making her pregnant, whereas Sarah cheerfully works as hard as usual during pregnancy, without the help of any man. Perhaps Sarah's natural fitness for motherhood explains why upright matrons had delivered all of her previous births, and why they continued to hire her to clean their houses. Yet when the protection of her brothers and lover is withdrawn, self-reliant Sarah and her baby die; unnatural patriarchy triumphs over the natural mother.

Trying to show their disgust with Sarah, her brothers exceed her sin of lust with one of violence. Mrs. Kedrigan also tries to prove that her value is beyond Sarah's, but fails for the same reasons that Sarah's brothers do. Lavin exposes how respectable women such as Mrs. Kedrigan reconcile themselves to the low status of their gender by seeing themselves as worthy like the Virgin, whereas "fallen women" are despicable. Kristeva might call this regarding oneself as unique among women like the Virgin herself. For Mrs. Kedrigan, it is a self-delusion of superiority with horrible consequences for Sarah, Sarah's baby, and herself.

Sarah's martyrdom draws attention to the malice and artifice latent within the virginity ideal. However unconsciously, the village priest acts in accord with the cruelty of that ideal by nagging Sarah and her brothers about her affairs. The priest tells Sarah's brothers that their sister should be put into a Home. This idea encourages them to view Sarah as less than human—as criminal trash that should be thrown away. The brothers exile Sarah from their home to prevent their priest from continuing to blame them for Sarah's behavior. The priest also helps to cause Sarah's death through having repeatedly chastised her for not revealing the names of the fathers of her older children. Like Sarah's brothers, the priest hates Sarah's lack of submissiveness as much as her so-called fallenness. For although Sarah is pious, she will not accept the repentant Magdalen role that the priest dictates. Instead, Sarah gets pregnant out of wedlock again and again. To the priest, Sarah is an embarrassment—a rebel against the notions of proper womanhood that the Madonna myth promotes. Writing Kedrigan about his upcoming fatherhood may be Sarah's half-compliant, half-defiant response to the priest's exhortations. The priest's role as an underlying cause of Sarah's death suggests that the Church teaches Irish families to murder their own "fallen women."

For Lavin and O'Brien, the demand for virginity enforces the punishment of the rebellious "fallen woman," whereas it restricts the life experience of the well-disciplined nun. Although critics have noted that the alternatives to marriage for women in Ireland rarely go beyond the brothel or the convent, nuns and "fallen women" in O'Brien's and Lavin's stories don't recognize the economic factors that shape their choices; instead, they act masochistically to pay for the evil they perceive as inherent to their female bodies. The high status of the nun is achieved through the low status of the "fallen woman," through contrasting the hard-bought virtue of one with the so-called sinfulness of the other. The nun's convent may seem imprisoning, but so may the home of the respectable wife or the ditch of the "fallen woman."

Whereas O'Brien's heroines are captivated by two forms of romance—the religious and the sexual—Lavin's heroines seem impervious to both. The Madonna myth may be regarded as a source for both the religious and the sexual romances critiqued by O'Brien's stories. As the central model for the Irish woman, the Virgin fosters the ideal of chastity to which the nun aspires and from which the "fallen woman" falls short. O'Brien's Eily is led to a lobotomy through sexual passion. Lacking Eily's heterosexual fantasies of romance, Imelda and her admirer mingle religious and sexual romance in ways that question the standard formulations of both. In contrast with O'Brien's yearning heroines, Lavin's Angela becomes a nun out of fear of the romantic side of men, Sarah has affairs without expecting courtship, and Mrs. Kedrigan places revenge above both love and religion. Whereas O'Brien deconstructs religious and sexual romance by merging the two, Lavin shows the paucity of experience that lacks any form of romance. Lavin focuses upon the least glamorous effects of the Madonna myth—killing rivalries between women and ossifying chastity. Lavin and O'Brien share an awareness of the unrealistic desires—whether for superiority or sacrifice—that the Madonna myth fosters in Irish women, along with the women's guilt at never reaching their ideal of purity and selflessness.