SOURCE: Gillespie, Michael Patrick. “(S)he Was Too Scrupulous Always: Edna O'Brien and the Comic Tradition.” In The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, edited by Theresa O'Connor, pp. 108-23. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1996.

Although a desolate, unforgiving atmosphere informs the narrative discourse in much of Edna O'Brien's writings, seeing her fiction as dour and pessimistic imposes a narrow, even reductive, view of her craft.¹ One can, in fact, gain a great deal of interpretive insight into O'Brien's work by remaining attentive to the way that she incorporates into her narratives common features of Irish humor. Indeed, by using the guidelines articulated in Vivian Mercier's classic study The Irish Comic Tradition, one quickly finds that humor—albeit at times quite singular—stands as an integral part in O'Brien's fiction.

Mercier's approach presents the modest proposal that Irish humor draws particular strength from a legacy of sardonic, polemic critiques of society through a commentary that clarifies the complex forces that produce necessarily paradoxical views of Irish culture. His book clearly demonstrates—by tracing the formative influence of a heritage of acerbic chronicles of national foibles and failings that stretches from Jonathan Swift to Brendan Behan—that a significant selection of this humor comes out of a polemic Anglo-Irish² comic tradition antithetical to the amusement produced by ostensibly neutral anecdotal discourse. Such social commentary juxtaposes—through extravagantly distorted descriptions and exuberantly idiosyncratic characterizations—the grotesque and the banal to enforce searing, though generally oblique, critiques of Irish life and mores. Despite the clarity and insight of Vivian Mercier's study, however, a full delineation of Ireland's comic tradition remains elusive, in part because the historical conditions shaping the Irish consciousness have produced a brand of humor that often mixes amusement with the restraining cynicism of a sophisticated satirical consciousness. That paradoxically can create a false sense of verisimilitude because, as Mercier notes, “really subtle irony can be mistaken for the literal truth” (2).

More than any other feature, however, a biting if often dissipated anger frequently interposes itself and obscures the comic spirit of many pieces. Frank O'Connor has offered a particularly mordant view of the way that diffused indignation shapes and misshapes Irish humor: “None of us could ever fashion a story or a play into a stiletto to run into the vitals of some pompous ass. Oliver Gogarty, like Brian O'Nolan of our own time, could make phrases that delighted everybody, but the phrases never concentrated themselves into the shape of a dagger; they were more like fireworks that spluttered and jumped all over the place, as much a danger to his friends as to his enemies. Irish anger is unfocused; malice for its own sweet sake, as in the days of the bards” (quoted in Mercier, 182).³

O'Connor sees the Irish comic tradition as still fighting the influence of centuries of English cultural imperialism—represented in performances by Paddy, the stage Irishman, and characterized in newspaper caricatures of simian versions of Irish men and women—and responding to its slanders with the lacerating indignation of the consciousness aptly noted by W. B. Yeats in “Remorse for Intemperate Speech”: “Out of Ireland have we come; / Great hatred, little room, / Maimed us at the start.”

Edna O'Brien's writings manifest no less anger than any other Irish author. Nonetheless, she brings a distinctive perspective to a previously male-dominated genre.⁴ Without the same cultural resources that men enjoy, O'Brien operates at an additional disadvantage, and consequently one cannot group her manipulation of comic techniques too quickly or too easily within the tradition noted above. Indeed, the organizing premise of this essay (and of the entire volume) rests upon an assumption of the singularity of the experiences and perspectives of Irish women writers like O'Brien.

Primarily, a both/and incorporating impulse rather than an either/or exclusivity stands as the feature distinguishing O'Brien's humor from that of most Irish male writers. Like Swift, she possesses a keen, satiric voice, but her commentary on Irish society generally—though not always—stops short of the enmity one finds in Gulliver's Travels and “A Modest Proposal.” Her invocation of the fantastic and her respectful treatment of superstition recalls At Swim Two Birds, but, unlike Flann O'Brien, she integrates rather than displaces the quotidian with the fabulous. Even her anger retains a sense of proportion and asserts the value of plurality. If her characters take the roles of green fools, they do not voice the all-encompassing anger found in Patrick Kavanagh's works. Instead, they critique Irish society without alienating themselves from it.

Thus, while keenly aware of the achievements and influence of her literary antecedents, O'Brien's comic inclinations draw back from their gender-based methods. Without completely rejecting their system of Cartesian cause and effect linearity, her writing shows a marked partiality for liberating ambiguities. In this disposition she aligns herself—more overtly than many of her male counterparts—with Ireland's foremost (and perhaps most imaginatively androgynous) writer of prose fiction, James Joyce.

At first glance, Joyce and O'Brien may seem to operate under very different aesthetic and artistic dispensations, but important creative convergences illuminate the works of both. While no twentieth-century Irish author could avoid the influence of Joyce's canon, male responses to Joyce's writings have varied greatly. Near contemporaries like Samuel Beckett frankly admired his work. Subsequent writers like Frank O'Connor overtly criticized him. Seamus Heaney evoked his ghost in Station Island in a complicated form of exorcism. All, however, while acknowledging his shaping impact, endeavored to establish their independence.

One sees in O'Brien's canon this anxiety of influence working with both greater and lesser force than in her male counterparts, and she uses such ambivalence to good effect time and again in her novels and short stories. Writing as a minority within a minority—a female Irish writer seeking to establish a reputation among English-speaking readers—O'Brien's rich literary allusiveness sharply acknowledges the competitive presence of her artistic predecessors. At the same time, while pursuing many of the same topics and employing many of the same methods as male writers, in both proportion and exposition her deployment differs. In James Joyce, she finds the guidance of a mentor and not the challenge of a competitor. Joyce's comic inclinations show the rich diversity of a powerful creative imagination, with each manifestation highlighting a particular artistic perspective and specific aesthetic goals. O'Brien's narratives, highlighting multiplicity and ambiguity, resonate with the same understanding of the Irish comic tradition marking Joyce's process of creation.

Such comparisons, of course, require careful qualification. One can find in O'Brien's work echoes of Joyce's entire canon, but generally parallels with Dubliners assert the strongest artistic and aesthetic links to Joyce's social awareness and his comic sense. O'Brien's commitment to conventional realism leads her to imitate the tart, desperate comedy of Dubliners rather than the broad, slapstick humor of Ulysses or the fantastical raillery of Finnegan's Wake.⁵ The implications of such a choice—both for O'Brien and for Joyce—emerge from passages appearing in two letters that Joyce wrote in 1906 to Grant Richards, the eventual publisher of Dubliners: “My intention [in writing Dubliners] was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country, and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis” (2:134); “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass” (1: 63-64).⁶ These sentiments affirm an intention to inculcate a serious social critique within even the most sardonic discourses of the collection. In following these aims, however, Joyce avoided the heavy-handed didacticism of an author like Bernard Shaw by liberally employing an idiosyncratic brand of humor throughout the discourse. O'Brien's writing shows this same inclination to balance censure with raillery.⁷

In fact the short stories examined here neatly fit the aesthetic and polemic paradigm of Dubliners outlined above. Since the Irish comic tradition assumes that irony increases our sensitivity to the Irish consciousness, such critiques rest upon abilities to manipulate and to foreground the complexities and ambiguities of a national character. Consequently, attention to conventions established in Joyce's stories allows one to measure the impact of similar techniques in O'Brien's writing.

Specifically, one can explore how Joyce's writings set up expectations influencing both the composition and the interpretation of O'Brien's works. While such impressions cannot, of course, impose programmatic readings upon her stories, they do increase our tolerance for ambiguity and multiplicity in O'Brien's writing. As a result, because we have read Joyce, we have the capacity for finding greater aesthetic satisfaction in O'Brien; and because O'Brien has read Joyce, she has cultivated the artistic ability to appeal to that capacity. The rural stories by O'Brien considered in this essay—“The Connor Girls,” “Irish Revel,” “A Scandalous Woman,” and “The Small-Town Lovers”—facilitate this perception by easy associations with the Dubliners collection: as in most of Joyce's stories, O'Brien's narrators stand at the periphery of Irish society—children or young women on the brink of becoming adults. All of the stories establish a common ethos through recurring settings and characters. And they all sustain imaginative ambiguity by deferring closure and inviting multiple interpretations.

“The Connor Girls” clearly illustrates the links between O'Brien and Joyce as it represents a village's changing relations with the two women of the title—Miss Amy and Miss Lucy Connor—the adult daughters of a local Protestant landowner. Over the course of the story, the unnamed young girl who acts as narrator contrasts, with a growing perceptiveness, the social aloofness of these two women with a genuine need, felt especially by Miss Amy, for male companionship. (The villagers, with a satirical sense of the situation, have long since nicknamed a frequent male visitor to the Big House the “Stallion.”) After several disappointing love affairs and a prolonged absence, Miss Amy returns to her family home. The narrator, now a grown woman with a husband—“a man who was not of our religion” (14)⁸—and a son, also comes back to the village for a visit. In the story's closing scene she meets the much-changed Connor girls. A measure of charm and graciousness have replaced their thoughtless aloofness, and the narrator finds herself quite taken by their demeanor. Her husband's rudeness, however, forestalls an invitation to tea, a prize that the entire family had at one time sought. Apprised of this, the husband can only respond, “don't think we missed much,” but the narrator's interior monologue gives a far subtler view, tinged with the caustic humor of self-reflexivity: “At that moment I realized that by choosing his world I had said goodbye to my own and to those in it. By such choices we gradually become exiles, until at last we are quite alone” (16).

Despite its rural, Protestant setting, one can gain interpretive insights by comparing “The Connor Girls” with Joyce's “The Sisters”: both works deal with eccentric families set apart from the community. Both have their isolation scrutinized and implicitly judged by a young child who stands simultaneously as an outsider kept apart from their lives and as someone inadvertently exposed to the rhythm of their daily affairs. And both stories show a fascination with the way loneliness and alienation develop within Irish society, be it urban or rural. At the same time, O'Brien softens the picture, making the world of the Connor girls considerably less harsh than that inhabited by Father Flynn and his sisters. In fact, she presents the story with humorous touches—evident in the villagers' grudging awe of the Connor girls and in the superciliousness of the narrator's husband—that mute the tragic overtones so insistent in Joyce's tale.

Further, “The Connor Girls” shows an emphatic shift in perspective from that of “The Sisters,” highlighting O'Brien's achievement in revivifying a topic so common in Irish literature. Father Flynn's sisters—Nannie and Eliza—occupy positions in the discourse so peripheral as to raise questions about the ironic nature of the story's title. Miss Amy and Miss Lucy, on the other hand, stand at the center of the narrative and thus of the social commentary made by the story. In tracing the course of Miss Amy's blighted loves, O'Brien conveys cynical and sentimental views of the lives of Irish women without privileging either, and readers see the pathos and the bathos of this rural society without feeling pushed toward reverence or condescension.

“The Sisters” takes a very different approach, with the title characters highlighting the reader's exposition of the complex personality of their dead brother. For example, at the end of Joyce's story, Eliza explains, as definitively as she can, her brother's degenerative condition: “Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself. … So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him.” (18). These observations, made by an uneducated woman who nonetheless deeply loved her brother, offer the reader a sense of a parochial society's judgment of the behavior of one of its highly sensitive, though deeply troubled, members. A certain defensive regard for communal norms gives a brittleness to Eliza's response to Father Flynn's aberrance, yet one would be mistaken to ignore the deep concern also imbedded in her remarks. Indeed, Eliza's fragmented comprehension captures the tragic features of the story, and we are obligated to fit Father Flynn's actions into our own interpretation.

In the final lines of “The Connor Girls,” quoted above, the story's unnamed narrator provides a more ambivalent impression. Her husband's condescension (unknowingly mimicking the earlier behavior of Miss Amy and Miss Lucy) has invited readers to make amused comparisons with those foolish young women. Now, however, terms like “exiles” and “alone” give the conclusion a poignancy similar to that evoked by the final lines of “The Sisters.” At the same time, a discordant contrast arises between this trivial encounter and the narrator's articulation of such a profound sense of loss. It underscores the hyperbole punctuating all of her impressions and suggests a self-dramatization of the inevitable distancing that comes from growing up and older.

In this context, judging Joyce's story as more profound than O'Brien's has little significance. Instead, the unwillingness of both writers to gloss their characters' lives with glib moral pronouncements comes through as pivotal. In “The Sisters,” the seriousness of the occasion, the priest's wake, overlays with dignity and complexity the embarrassment felt by Father Flynn's sisters over his behavior before he died. In “The Connor Girls,” the youthful foolishness of Miss Amy and Miss Lucy—replicated at the end of the story by the intolerant fatuousness of the narrator's husband—enforces a tolerant but knowing view of human behavior that makes the final lines of the story less chilling and not so ominous. The ambivalence that both refuse to relinquish reflects a profound respect for their central characters and all who inhabit the worlds that they have evoked.

O'Brien's “Irish Revel” tells of Mary, a young country woman who has gone to a party in the local village on a cold November evening with the groundless notion of meeting again an English painter who had briefly stayed in the village two years previously. From the opening lines, the story contrasts Mary's romanticism with hints of her exploitation: “The invitation had come only that morning from Mrs. Rodgers of the Commercial Hotel. The postman brought word that Mrs. Rodgers wanted her down that evening, without fail” (177). At the Commercial Hotel, Mary not only finds no trace of the English painter but, to her shock, also realizes that Mrs. Rodgers expects a great deal of help preparing for the party: “Now, first thing we have to do is to get the parlor upstairs straightened out” (181).

The narrative continues with alternating descriptions of the preparations for the party and Mary's recollections of John Roland, the painter, unself-consciously ironic because of their ingenuous tone. Shortly after leaving the village, for example, Roland had sent “a black-and-white drawing of her”: “[Her family] hung it on a nail in the kitchen for a while, and then one day it fell down and someone (probably her mother) used it to sweep dust onto; ever since it was used for that purpose. Mary had wanted to keep it, to put it away in a trunk, but she was ashamed to. They were hard people, and it was only when someone died that they could give in to sentiments or crying” (185). As the night goes on, Mary reaches an increasingly clear sense of the occasion—“She … thought to herself what a rough and ready party it was” (190)—so that the drunken belligerence and aggressive sexuality at the end of the evening seem to her merely anticlimactic. The story concludes as Mary approaches her family's home: “Walking again, she wondered if and what she would tell her mother and her brothers about it, and if all parties were as bad. She was at the top of the hill now, and could see her own house, like a little white box at the end of the world, waiting to receive her” (198).

“Irish Revel” shows the same general concern with ritual, celebration, sexual frustration, and social alienation that one finds in “The Dead,” but two other pieces in Dubliners illuminate equally significant if less obvious issues examined in O'Brien's story: versions of youthful expectations and awkwardness comparable to those in “Araby” and in “After the Race.” Like the central characters of those stories, Mary finds herself caught up by fanciful illusions that she would disdain in others but that, in the context in which they occur, exert a powerful influence over her. O'Brien also picks up a theme that appears in “Clay,” Joyce's tale of a party that takes place on Hallow's Eve. There, Maria, though older than her namesake in “Irish Revel,” seems driven by a similar mixture of independence and naiveté. In each of these accounts, an individual struggles to sustain a carefully cultivated and generally naive view of the world while uneasily and ultimately unsuccessfully holding at bay its quotidian realities.

Whether these fantasies induce vulnerability or imperviousness remains open to interpretation, for in each story the reader occupies the privileged vantage point. Our distance allows discernment of the illusions conditioning the way the central characters perceive events in the worlds they inhabit, but the narratives of Joyce and O'Brien's stories deflect pessimistic responses and circumvent a single predictable reading. Humor forestalls the inevitability of a bleak assessment of events and inculcates into the discourses the potential for a range of equally valid alternate responses.

Such multiplicity may not seem immediately evident. The final lines of “Araby,” for example, appear to give little doubt as to the unavoidable pain that sentimental idealism produces: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (35). Similarly, Jimmy Doyle's final thoughts in “After the Race” seem an unambiguous acknowledgment of the cost of naiveté: “He knew that he would regret in the morning but at present he was glad of the rest, glad of the dark stupor that would cover up his folly. He leaned his elbows on the table and rested his head between his hands, counting the beats of his temples” (48). Nonetheless, while the consequences of the actions described in these stories remain clear, their impact upon the protagonists does not evince the same certitude.

The sardonic tone and muted self-deprecation of the final lines of “Araby” in fact reflect the mature thoughts of an experienced adult looking back from a much more secure emotional position upon a childhood incident. This retrospection affirms an immediate poignancy while diminishing its significance over the long term. Likewise, Jimmy's ambivalent mixture of incipient guilt and pleasure conveys images of a young man both shamed and protected: able to make mistakes, to take cognizance of their consequences, and yet to escape any permanent effect.

Similarly, Mary's thoughts at the end of “Irish Revel” project both new realizations and continuing security. The loutish behavior of the men and women at the party, though initially shocking, has taken away their power to hurt or menace Mary in any but the most trivial ways. The narrative's gentle parody of Mary's temperament has humanized her, but, like Joyce before her, O'Brien effectively uses humor to forestall the simple-minded conjunction of naiveté with weakness or stupidity. Instead, she can gently lampoon Mary's sentimentality while broadly ridiculing the fatuousness of the putatively more sophisticated villagers.

“A Scandalous Woman,” set in an unidentified portion of rural Ireland, ostensibly follows a conventional plot line, recounting the friendship between two young girls, Eily Hogan and the story's unnamed narrator. Eily becomes infatuated with a young bank clerk, and the narrator helps her devise ways to “walk out” with him unbeknownst to Eily's family. Eventually—perhaps inevitably—Eily becomes pregnant, the couple is forced to marry, and Eily and her husband leave the village. Later, the narrator hears rumors of Eily's declining mental health, and when, after four years, Eily returns to the village for the Christmas holidays, she seems preoccupied and distant. In a clever false ending, the narrator and her mother subsequently see a madwoman on a city street who might be Eily. The close of the story overturns such a possibility, however, when the narrator, now married, visits a shop owned by Eily and her husband. There Eily appears as the cunning merchant, now having little in common with the narrator: “To revive a dead friendship is almost always a risk, and we both knew it but tried to be polite” (264).

Like Joyce's “Eveline,” O'Brien's story plays out themes of claustrophobia and rebellion in the tight-knit society of an Irish household. As with “Eveline,” attention oscillates between the sentimental romanticism of a young girl's daydreams and the starker reality of the consequences of pursuing those dreams. The striking difference, however, between Joyce's treatment of these issues and O'Brien's lies in the skeptical perspective that the latter invites her readers to assume.

For Joyce and for his readers, Eveline's condition remains grave and even tragic. Her indecision about leaving home takes form through an interior monologue that emphasizes how seriously she considers her proposed elopement and, at the same time, confronts readers with her profoundly naive view of the world: “Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home. … Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. … She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? … What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow?” (37). Perceptions of Eily, on the other hand, evolve quite differently through the mediating vision of the narrator, which unconsciously depicts the nature of the narrator as much as the nature of Eily.

From the start of the story, the narrator advances her claim to having a privileged perspective of Eily: “Hers was the face of a madonna. She had brown hair, a great crop of it, fair skin, and eyes that were as big and as soft and as transparent as ripe gooseberries. She was always a little out of breath and gasped when one approached, then embraced and said, “Darling.” That was when we met in secret. In front of her parents and others she was somewhat stubborn and withdrawn, and there was a story that when young she always lived under the table to escape her father's thrashings” (239). The final sentence says a great deal more than the narrator intended about the girls' relationship. It conveys a sense of the duality of Eily's nature, but it also insinuates the idea that much of what the narrator learns about Eily comes from hearsay. (One can also see in these lines dual Joycean resonances: the image of the child under the table evokes both the riveting scene of the second page of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the increasing brutality of Eveline's father.)

In fact, despite the putative closeness of the two girls, the narrator seems to know little of what Eily actually thinks. That distance and the distorting medium of second-hand information lead the highly imaginative narrator to presume the worst: “Eily began to grow odd, began talking to herself, and then her lovely hair began to fall out in clumps. I would hear her mother tell my mother these things. The news came in snatches, first from a family who had gone up there to rent grazing, and then from a private nurse who had to give Eily pills and potions. Eily's own letters were disconnected and she asked about dead people or people she'd hardly known” (262). Though apparently straightforward, the above description relies more on the observations of others than on any personal insight, and the last sentence leaves ambiguous whether the letters to which the narrator refers come to her or to Eily's family. (Also, the hearsay motif links this gesture with Old Cotter's vaguely articulated insinuations about Father Flynn in “The Sisters.”) In any case, in the closing pages of the story, we find evidence of what sort of life may have waited for Joyce's Eveline had she gotten on the boat to Buenos Aires with Frank. Significantly, however, Eily refuses to sustain the part.

Joyce's story ends with Eveline paralyzed with fear, apparently (though not certainly) unable to sever her ties to Dublin society and to board the soon to be departing ship with Frank: “[Frank] rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition” (41). Terror holds Eveline in a form of catatonic mania. Analogously, the narrator of “A Scandalous Woman”—as if recalling Eveline's story and applying it to her friend—mistakenly imagines Eily trapped by fear and derangement in an environment that she lacks the courage to escape. These assumptions produce the false ending alluded to above: “I was pregnant, and walking up a street in a city with my own mother, under not very happy circumstances, when we saw this wild creature coming toward us, talking and debating to herself” (262). Although her mother says “I think that was Eily” (263), the discourse never resolves the matter, and, reading that conjecture as certitude, it overlooks the highly subjective narrative perspective that conditions the story.⁹ In fact, the eminently sane, if somewhat dowdy, Eily that the narrator visits in the final scene gives the lie to the image of the crazed figure driven mad by her society. More to the point, it gently mocks the unvoiced insularity of the narrator and her mother on several levels: they reflexively assume that any woman who had allowed herself to become pregnant before marriage must inevitably come to a bad end, and they shrink from analyzing the full impact of the less melodramatic, more prosaic lives led by Eily and themselves.

While the discourse never dispels the ambiguity surrounding Eily's mental condition, her relatively secure existence at the end of the story balances the potentially comic against the potentially tragic. The possibility for tragedy does not disappear altogether, however, for the story's ending foregrounds the narrator's undisciplined imaginative powers and the disparity that they create between her perceptions and the events that she perceives. Thus, by the final lines, one sees an overt depiction of the misery, anger, and confusion represented implicitly at the close of “Eveline”: “[Eily] kissed me and put a little holy water on my forehead, delving it in deeply, as if I were dough. They waved to us, and my son could not return those waves, encumbered as he was with the various presents that both the children and Eily had showered on him. It was beginning to spot with rain, and what with that and the holy water and the red rowan tree bright and instinct with life, I thought that ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial women” (265).

However one interprets the final sentence of the paragraph, its meaning clearly does not derive logically from those immediately preceding it. In fact, it seems more likely that the narrator's bitter condemnation of Ireland's treatment of women comes out of her own experience and attitudes than from an assessment of Eily's condition. That, of course, does not in itself diminish its accuracy, but it shifts interpretive emphasis. In a deft insinuation of the role of literary antecedents that the narrator evokes—at least for readers familiar with Joyce—the experiences of Eveline offer a way of comprehending both Eily and herself, giving an added dimension to our sense of the precise identity of “A Scandalous Woman.”

“The Small-Town Lovers,” like other O'Brien short stories, stands ostensibly as a straightforward account of pedestrian events in rural Ireland, and again, as in the other stories, one gets a much sharper sense of the interpretive potential of “The Small-Town Lovers” by setting it against the creative expectations established by stories like “The Dead.” “The Small-Town Lovers,” narrated by another of O'Brien's unnamed young girls, traces events surrounding the marriage of the title characters—Hilda and Jack Donnelly. The opening paragraphs make a great deal of their demonstrative affection and public concern for one another. As the story progresses, however, one gets a sense of the isolation and loneliness characterizing their lives. When Hilda dies under mysterious circumstances, Jack's unconcern at the funeral suggests how little he actually cared for his wife. In the final pages the narrator recounts Jack's decline into drunken seclusion, and she closes with a description of his ineffectual efforts at seduction. In her final thoughts, the narrator sums up her lasting impression of Jack and unconsciously offers an overview of the couple's life together: “I still believe he killed her, just as I believe it was clear what he wanted from me that dewy morning, but not being certain of these things, I told no one; yet as the years go by, the certainty of them plagues me. Indeed, it has become a ghost, and the trouble with ghosts is that no one but oneself knows how zealously they stalk the everyday air” (353).

More directly than any of the three stories already considered, “The Small-Town Lovers” confronts concepts of love, both as characters manifest it and as they feel it. Thus, the stark difference between the behavior of Jack and Hilda when walking through town and when in their home gives an aura of hypocrisy to everything they do. At the same time, their lack of introspection raises interesting questions about their level of self-awareness. Finally, the shocking degeneration of Jack after the death of Hilda suggests a dependence upon her for a civilizing, humanizing influence of which even he did not seem aware.

The narrator's distance from the principal characters and her often inaccurate assessment of the events that she observes signal an irony informing the story that invites pluralistic readings of the events: a number of comic interludes playing upon the foibles of country folk punctuate the narrative and, to a degree, stereotype rural life. At the same time, a series of poignant interchanges—like the growing friendship of Hilda for the narrator's mother, and the children's visit to the Donnelly house for tea—forestall reductive conclusions about forces motivating characters.

Joyce's version of enduring love, depicted in “The Dead,” also takes up the issue of how one holds in equilibrium physical desire and emotional commitment. In “The Dead”—in contrast to “The Small-Town Lovers”—it is the urbanity of Gabriel Conroy that works against him. He finds that his love for his wife Gretta cannot match the feeling once expressed by the young Michael Furey, and the final paragraph underscores the significance of this epiphany as it gradually reveals the full effect of Michael Furey's fatal gesture upon Gabriel's consciousness:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. [Gabriel's] soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

(223-24)

One comes away from Joyce's story with no prescription for interpretation but rather with an assurance of the poignancy of its closing lines. Just as “The Dead” moves from the cynicism of previous stories in Dubliners, “The Small-Town Lovers” takes a tone strikingly different from other O'Brien stories considered here. For once, ambiguity does not potentially mitigate pain. Instead, a bitter, rural coda to “The Dead” rebuts Gretta's romantic visions by emphasizing the odious behavior of Jack Donnelly when last seen by the narrator and by revealing the starkness informing the lives of Hilda and Jack.

As I note in my introductory remarks, the Irish comic tradition that I find so apparent and so appealing in all of the stories considered in this essay grows directly out of conventions laid down by social commentary from Swift's satires through Brendan Behan's diatribes. The biting tones and harsh assessments inherent in such views clearly remove them from lighter forms of humor, but they nonetheless reflect the particularly Irish literary inclination to integrate comedy (especially when tinged with elements of ridicule) into the most tragic of topics.

The O'Brien stories to which I have referred gain additional effectiveness from the links that the reader makes with Joyce. Unlike many contemporaneous male Irish writers, O'Brien does not view Joyce's literary legacy as a threat to her own creative efforts. While easy generalizations about male competitiveness—like Alan Alda's theory of “testosterone poisoning”—seem too reductive (and, admittedly, for a male critic, too embarrassing) to serve as an adequate explanation, no clear alternative emerges. At the beginning of this essay, I set O'Brien within the tradition of writers (implicitly male) from Swift to Behan. It may be more instructive, however, to place her in an analogous but separate context. In the narrowly defined, claustrophobic, and still predominantly male artistic society of modern Ireland (very much like the one that Joyce himself rejected when he left his country in 1904), O'Brien has the advantage of being so far outside the structure that she can acknowledge Joyce's achievements without the need for the pugnacious posturing characteristic of so many Irish male writers.

Instead, O'Brien draws inspiration from the model of Joyce's fiction, and she plays upon our expectations created by memories of his to infuse more humor into her own work by subtle contrasts with Joyce's. To say that she draws upon the Irish comic tradition to feminize Joycean themes would in and of itself trivialize the works of both writers. On the other hand, to use that idea as a point of departure for a more detailed examination of both writers acknowledges the interpretive multiplicity inherent in their respective stories.

Notes

1. See, for example, Darcy O'Brien's “Edna O'Brien,” and Peggy O'Brien's “The Silly and the Serious.”

2. My emphasis is on the linguistic, not the political, sense of the term Anglo-Irish. Lyons, however, sees both senses as inseparable.

3. Frank O'Connor, “Is This A Dagger?” Nation 186 (1958): 170. Quoted in Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition, 182.

4. For a commentary on this aspect of O'Brien's fiction, see Hargreaves's “Women's Consciousness.”

5. One can, of course, find analogues between O'Brien's writings and Joyce's later works. Her short story “Over,” for example, evokes the same sense of a powerful, complex female voice as does Molly Bloom's monologue at the close of Ulysses. Admittedly, O'Brien's narrator speaks in a more articulate and sophisticated voice (and thus, paradoxically, stands as a less demanding creation), but both figures, through an unbalanced mixture of cynicism and optimism, enforce for readers their multifarious sense of the conditions that delineate their lives.

6. See Edna O'Brien's analogous remark in Night: “Mirrors are not for seeing by, mirrors are for wondering at, and wondering into” (3).

7. Contextually as well as formally, O'Brien's work follows Joyce's creative trajectory. Although his idea never went beyond an initial proposal, Joyce once planned to write a series of stories set in the country and entitled Provincials as counterparts to the urban chronicles of Dubliners in a volume that surely would have resonated with O'Brien's writings of rural Ireland. Joyce's reference to such a project appears in a 12 July 1905 letter to his brother Stanislaus. Joyce, Letters 2:92.

8. For the sake of simplicity, citations from all of the stories under consideration here will be taken from A Fanatic Heart.

9. For contrasting views of Eily's mental condition, see Haule's “Tough Luck.”

Works Cited

Hargreaves, Tamsin. “Women's Consciousness and Identity in Four Irish Women Novelists.” In Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature, edited by Michael Kenneally, 290-305. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1988.

Haule, James M. “Tough Luck: The Unfortunate Birth of Edna O'Brien.” Colby Library Quarterly 28 (1987): 216-24.

Joyce, James. Dubliners: Text, Criticism and Notes. Edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin Books, 1969.

———. The Letters of James Joyce. 2 vols. Edited by Richard Ellman and Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking Press, 1957-66.

Lyons, F. S. L. Culture and Anarchy in Ireland: 1890-1939. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

Mercier, Vivian. The Irish Comic Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

O'Brien, Darcy. “Edna O'Brien: A Kind of Irish Childhood.” In Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, edited by Thomas Staley, 179-90. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982.

O'Brien, Edna. A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984.

———. Night. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987.

O'Brien, Peggy. “The Silly and the Serious: An Assessment of Edna O'Brien.” Massachusetts Review 28 (Autumn 1987): 474-88.