SOURCE: "Julia O'Faolain: The Imaginative Crucible," in Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition, University Press of Kentucky, 1991, pp. 174-90.

[In the following essay, Owens Weekes discusses O'Faolain's deconstruction of ancient Irish myths and tradition.]

Probably all parents influence their children more than the children care to admit. Some of their values are imbibed like milk; others sour mind and heart and are rejected. Occasionally we are mature enough to examine our opinions apart altogether from the emotional moss they have gathered through parental association. Writers, more than other people, mine the source of their own reactions, or maybe they just seem to do so because they write of this activity. Certainly Julia O'Faolain has frequently considered the influences of her writer parents, Sean and Eileen O'Faolain, on her own work. Her father, she believes, is an incurable romantic: indeed both her parents reacted romantically and enthusiastically to the birth of the fledgling Irish state. They Gaelicized their names, spoke the Gaelic language at home, and embraced the original principles of de Valera's republicans. Although he would become as disillusioned with the Republic as with the older empire, Sean attempted to expose his own children to "the romantic Ireland of his youth … which did and didn't exist." Eileen too led her daughter to and, as happens, away from romantic Ireland. A writer of children's stories, Eileen kept the child Julia home from school until she was eight, audience for Eileen's own work. When Julia finally did go to school, the "pookas, leprachauns, magic coaches, fairy forts" of her mother's stories were more real than the "angels and demons" the nuns invoked. Ridiculed after rashly exposing her credulity, O'Faolain notes that she "determined never to be caught out again and started casting a cold eye on the devils and angels too." Neither was the growing girl unaware of her father's conflicts with church and state; indeed a desire to be on his side, whatever that was, probably nurtured her resistance to and criticism of authoritarian control. Summing up her reactions to her parents' commitments, O'Faolain notes: "He and Eileen, a pair of reluctantly disillusioned romantics, made romanticism impossible for me."

The reader of Julia O'Faolain's work readily consents to the truth of this statement. Valuing and employing the detachment of the eighteenth-century writers she admires, O'Faolain is a long way stylistically from her father or indeed from her Gaelic-Irish predecessors Kate O'Brien and Mary Lavin. When I first read her work, I was struck by the acid intelligence that strips away layers of tradition, affection, and affectation, exposing an often grotesque core. O'Faolain's kinship with Swift and Edgeworth … is evident here. It is impossible to remain passive when faced with O'Faolain's vivid and exuberant grotesques: John Mellors, for example, finds "Man in the Cellar," an early short story, "brilliantly disturbing"; Robert Hogan finds the same text "horrific." The no-holds-barred approach to sensitive political topics, to male territory in fact, also seems closer to the Anglo-Irish writers Somerville and Ross than to O'Faolain's Gaelic female predecessors. Finally, O'Faolain's cosmopolitan lifestyle—Irish herself and married to an Italian-American, she lives in London and Los Angeles—along with her nonromantic tendencies allow her to view her various societies with detachment and a cold eye for pretense, the same cold eye Molly Keane turns on the past. Indeed a hilarious bedroom scene in an early O'Faolain story "A Pot of Soothing Herbs" anticipates Keane's equally preposterous, ridiculous, and pathetic scene in Good Behaviour.

But if Sean and Eileen were partially responsible for the substitution of an analytical rather than a romantic perspective, the early romantic deposits were not without effect. Just as the bog of the epigraph swallows, preserves, and transforms the forest, so the mind swallows, preserves, and transforms the deposits of childhood. Indeed the nuns are rightly wary, for the legends of the pagan past dwell as certainly in the imaginative crucible of the collective memory of the nation as does the forest in the bog. All the old Fenian legends, all the old historical fictions, and all the more recent romantic tales (perhaps close to those Eileen and Sean told their children) of "raids, curfews, and dancing in mountain farmhouses with irregular soldiers who were sometimes shot a few hours after the goodnight kiss" collect in, transform, and infect the national consciousness.

This collection and preservation is, short of catastrophic occurrences, as inevitable as the process of nature. But if we accept the myths and legends passively, then they, like the bog, will contain and transform us, making of us mythic fuel with which to warm a future generation. Reacting against such passivity, O'Faolain the nonromantic declares an interest in demystifying, not mystifying. "Myths like lego constructions, can be taken apart: a double bonus for the writer, the magnifying effect of invoking myth in the first place, plus the energy involved in revoking its agreed values. Destruction releases energy." This, then, is often the O'Faolain project, similar to that Alicia Ostriker associates with the revisionist poets, of treating "existing texts as fence posts surrounding the terrain of mythic truth but by no means identical to it." O'Faolain does not limit her deconstruction to ancient or Irish tales but dismembers fictions of history and of contemporary culture alongside those of legend. Indeed one could argue that contemporary myths are more pernicious in an age or country that ignores history; consequently O'Faolain subjects both the macho Italian and the romantic Hollywood images to the same penetrating scrutiny she turns on traditional myths. Aiming to expose the cage "of assumptions," the mythic, national, religious, and familial bonds which too often imprison a people, O'Faolain releases the confined energy, the alternate materials repressed by these central cultural assumptions.

The early story mentioned already, "A Pot of Soothing Herbs," enacts the problems facing the writer who would find her own voice despite restrictive traditional patterns. The protagonist of the story, Sheila, is depicted as attempting to understand both her own and her country's approach to sexuality, to experience. The story is prompted by the mother's anger at Sheila's spending the night with a fast crowd. She little knows that Sheila's detested virgin status was unthreatened when she shared a bed with the homosexual Aiden and the lovers, the Anglo-Irish Rory and the English Claudia. To protect Sheila, Aiden had placed a "barricade" of pillows down the bed; Sheila had lain between pillows and wall, bitterly aware that Aiden's hand, reaching under the pillows to grasp hers, was extended only in a "fraternal" clasp. Neither was her knowledge of the mechanics of love increased: her head prudently covered by Aiden, Sheila intuited the activity of Rory and Claudia only by "the heavings of the mattress." Sheila tries to understand why her mother, who with her peers thrills to tales of remembered romance and adventure "as if sex, in Ireland, were the monopoly of the over-fifties," should upbraid her so. And revealing the scars the national contradiction has cut through her own psyche, she ponders why she has been unable to make love for the experience only as would, she thinks, the rational eighteenth-century fictional figures she admires.

Sheila accurately defines part of her problem as a retreat behind the covers of language. Wanting to explore and to analyze her situation, she immediately, almost instinctively it seems, protects her privacy with a humorous, self-deprecating reference to "the Irish." Abruptly, jerkily, the narrative halts, as the narrator attempts to probe and justify her rhetoric: "It is typical of us to say 'the Irish' instead of 'I': a way of running for tribal camouflage. I am trying to be honest here, but I can't discard our usual rituals. In a way, that would be more dishonest. It would mean trying to talk like someone else: like some of my friends, sheep in monkeys' clothing, who chatter cynically all day in pubs, imitating the tuneful recusancy of a Brendan Behan." Caught between the Scylla of regurgitating the familiar words, the phrases of another time that define and disguise her, and the Charybdis of a new style also alien to her, Sheila stumbles, one moment falling into the romantic traps of her parents' generation, the next into the cynical ones of her peers'. Her identity shaped by styles that seem alien, Sheila's position is similar to though more extreme than that of the diver in the Adrienne Rich poem referred to in chapter 1: the mermaid "whose dark hair / streams black, the merman in his armored body.

It is as if language shapes Sheila, not she it. Considering her refusal to make love with the elegant Robert, she notes, "I only know that I am attracted where I sense tensions and dissatisfactions—I prefer the fat, panting Hamlet to Hotspur." She thus resorts to the abstractions of literature to explain her refusal. Later, feeling sympathy toward the upset party-giver, Edna, Sheila looks back to the solitary figure: "But he was an unappetising sight: mouth caked with the black lees of Guinness, sparse, pale stubble erupting on his chin, and a popped button on his chest revealing the confirmation medal underneath." In this instance Sheila resorts to specific language as if she observes only the negative outward aspect, which apparently marks her as an objective, even cynical, observer. But the rhetoric is deceptive: Sheila is a romantic. The outward appearance and the confirmation medal are potent, not because Sheila is modern, in search only of experience, but because these aspects of Edna effectively neutralize her potentially romantic reactions.

In linking the myth of Cuchulain, the stories of Sheila's parents, and the story of Edna, the text suggests an equivalence in all three situations. As Sheila leaves the party with Aiden and Rory, Edna, the grandson of a 1916 hero, attempts to detain her, brandishing his grandfather's gun and threatening Aiden and Rory. Removing the gun, Rory pushes it barrel-down into a pot of geraniums, admonishing, "Steady, how, fellow, steady! Remember that old Irish hero, Cuchulain, whose weapon used to get out of control and had to be put in a pot of soothing herbs? I think that's what we need here." Ribald weapon jokes pervade the saga of Cuchulain. One story tells how Aife, a woman warrior, defeats Cuchulain and smashes his "weapon." All she leaves him, it concludes, is "a part of his sword no bigger than a first." Another story tells of the king's calming of Cuchulain's war-fever by standing the maidens of Ulster naked between the mad warrior and the city. On seeing the maidens, the saga continues, Cuchulain quivers in shame and is quelled finally when the warriors of King Conor plunge him into three vats of cold water. The warrior Cuchulain, like the warrior Edna who wears the confirmation medal of a soldier of Christ, becomes a figure of comic impotence rather than one of romantic potency.

The Cuchulain/Edna gloss colors the evocative, stirring stories of the parents. When Edna's gun is first mentioned, Sheila wonders whether guns are "dangerous after three generations." The answer is obviously no, as Edna, armed with the weapon of the 1916 warrior, becomes a figure of bathos rather than power, his weapon, like Cuchulain's, immobilized. The tales of the troubles can also be seen as brandished leftover weapons that retain their power only when unquestioned, when not put to the test. O'Faolain's linking of the 1916 heroes and Cuchulain is not simply humorous. A statue of the mythic hero adorns the general post office in Dublin, center of the 1916 resistance—Cuchulain, the warrior, was the inspiration of this resistance.

The tales the parents tell—like those they are based on—belong to the fantasy world of myth. Although Sheila suggests this, she fails to realize it, perhaps because, dreamily confusing life and art, her mental life like that of the young Elizabeth Bowen has been shaped so much by tale. Characters from life are seen as characters from fiction; fictional or historical characters are replaced by those from life. Thus Sheila sees the tortured, insecure Aiden as Hamlet but replaces Yeats's Maud Gonne and Proust's Odette de Crécy with Claudia Rain. Her mother's upbraiding sounds like a "foreign language" because, misreading her parents' tales for reality, Sheila has mistaken their values. Their talk, like that of all the Irish she identifies initially, "is not about activity. It is about talk." Retreating behind the barrier of language, Sheila is concealed but is also unable to pierce the barrier, to uncover the activity hidden by language. Like the barricade that Aiden erected, the language of Irish myth effectively conceals experience, ironically projecting a romantic image rather than the "fraternal" clasp with which Aiden penetrated the pillows.

In No Country for Young Men, O'Faolain uncovers multiple layers of myth—ancient, historical, and contemporary—and, enacting in the development of her novel the preservation and transformation of these deposits, tests the myths. Further, No Country for Young Men suggests that a nation's cultural myths are differently received by men and women. The title revises the Yeatsian myth of an Ireland exuberant with life and rejecting its "aged monuments." The young, not the old, are threatened in O'Faolain's Ireland, a country that, pace Yeats, valorizes history, or a particular version of history, rather than humanity. Indeed by aligning himself in "Sailing to Byzantium" with Oisin, Yeats collaborates with a figure that is negative in both O'Faolain's novel and her personal pantheon. The poet of the Fianna, Oisin, like Yeats, sought a nonhuman land, a land of eternal—static—youth, and released in his poems the myths that would shackle future generations.

Concentrating on the two recent sequences of Troubles, those of the 1920s and 1970s, O'Faolain traces a pattern that reaches back through Irish history into Irish myths and is ultimately destructive. Cuchulain of "A Pot of Soothing Herbs" was merely sterile, a domesticated hero in a particular tribe, but Fionn, whose myth shadows No Country for Young Men, and his warrior Fianna were a group of fighting men, not part of any tribe but lending their services where needed. Grainne O'Malley, the protagonist in O'Faolain's novel, alerts the reader to the myth when she tells the American filmmaker James Duffy that she is named after the central figure in the Diarmuid and Grainne legend. According to legend, Fionn Mac Cumhall, the general of the Fianna warriors, decided to assuage his loneliness by marrying Grainne, the beautiful daughter of King Cormac. But Grainne, reluctant to marry the aged Fionn because she loved Diarmuid, one of Fionn's young warriors, put a geasa (similar to an Arthurian obligation of necessity and of honor) on Diarmuid, and the lovers fled together. Furious, Fionn pursued them with hosts of the Fianna. Years of war ensued; men and land were destroyed before Fionn succeeded through magic in killing Diarmuid. But the Fianna was still demoralized, for its leader remained away wooing the reluctant Grainne. Finally, for the sake of her children, Grainne returned with Fionn to the warriors. Oisin, Fionn's son and Yeats's model, bitter at the destruction, blamed not Fionn for the indulgence, despite honor and duty, of his whim, but Grainne. The myth itself, despising the obvious logic of the events it recounts, thus concludes with an irrational masculinist interpretation.

The restoration of order to the Fianna, then, depends on Grainne—whose name, as Grainne O'Malley notes, means love—forgoing her own desires and accepting the principle of conquest. As a woman, Grainne (of myth and of O'Faolain's novel) is related to Ireland—"Mother Ireland," "the old woman," or "Dark Rosaleen" in much Irish literature. Exemplifying in miniature the intoxicating and addictive power of national myth, O'Faolain has a young warrior sing "Dark Rosaleen" at the Clancy house during the civil war. When "in the last verses, the softer sentiment disappeared and menace pounded on alone," a listener remembers, "the boy had caught the mockers in his cadences. Rapt, they nodded to his beat and even the Da [who loathes the violence] applauded." Jennifer Johnston too, as we shall see, considers this mindless, emotional espousing of war disguised as love to be a form of intoxication. The image of Ireland as injured woman whose wounds call her sons or lovers to war is not unlike the sexual paradigm of territorial conquest that Annette Kolodny "unearths" in American "herstory," and O'Faolain's and Johnston's work suggests a universality in this pattern. The Irish mythmakers, whether lauding mythical or historical Irish leaders, pictured Ireland as a woman constantly in need of male protection and represented woman on her own, Ireland or Grainne without a lord or without the one "righteous" lord, as a source of disorder.

When O'Faolain's novel opens in the 1920s, Ireland and the Irish women have little choice but to submit to the demands of the competing forces of warriors. But within the country, as within women themselves, uncertainty, perhaps the residue of another order, stirs. This potential disruption is configured initially in the person of Judith Clancy, Grainne's great-aunt and the connecting link between each period. We first meet her as a young woman contemplating the untamed aspects of nature from the rigorously ordered garden of her convent school:

This region [the bog] was as active as a compost heap and here the millennial process of matter recycling itself was as disturbing as decay in a carcass. Phosphorescent glowings, said to come from the chemical residue of bones, exhaled from its depths. "Bog" was the Gaelic word for "soft" and this one had places into which a sheep or a man could be sucked without trace.

The bog was pagan and the nuns saw in it an image of fallen nature. It signified mortality, they said, and the sadness of the flesh, for it had once been the hunting ground of pre-Christian warriors, a forest which had fallen, become fossilized and was now dug for fuel.

A natural palimpsest, the bog can be read both as the repository of a nation's culture and as an archetypal feminine place. In the latter context the bog becomes a particularizing of that peripheral area assigned to women "outside and around" male culture and of the "wild" area, the crescent of female culture unknown to men. In its ability to devour men, the bog is also symbolic of the ancient male fear of the female, a fear perhaps of the older matriarchal tradition of the great goddess discussed in chapter 4. Here too Irish myth is relevant: the depiction in Irish legends of the overthrow of female oppressors by male heroes—Queen Maeve, for example, by Cuchulain—can also be read, as are many of the myths of the Near East, as a reenactment of the overthrow of the goddess.

No Country for Young Men presents Owen Roe O'Malley as heir to this militant political tradition. Son of the "hero" Owen O'Malley who fought the British government in the early 1920s and then his own countrymen when they accepted the treaty negotiated with England, Owen Roe is a devious politician. The first Owen arrogantly refused to accept his government's and his people's wishes and, like his mythic ancestor Fionn, insisted on fighting a war that would devastate his country. Carrying on the tradition of the poet Oisin, Michael O'Malley, Owen's grandson and Grainne's husband, writes the revisionist history of the first Owen. Owen Roe also contributes to the glorification of his father, expecting to inherit the mantle of Owen's political office and willing, like his ancestor, to plunge the country into civil war again if this would achieve his goal. Intent, like Oisin, on squashing the potentially disrupting female account, Owen Roe attempts to have Grainne silence Judith—the reservoir of the secrets of 1920.

But Judith and Grainne O'Malley are linked by Grainne's sympathy for her aunt and also referentially to bog images. Grainne, for example, thinks that "dealing with Owen Roe was like walking across a bog. You never knew when the ground might give way under your feet." She worries that Owen Roe takes her son riding on the bog, her concern extending both to the mythological bog of Irish history and the physical bog of Calary. To be pulled into the bog is to accept the myths passively, to be shaped by them; to explore the bog, while still dangerous, is to question the history, the myths, to take control of one's own life. Throughout the text Judith's memory is described and portrayed as having the boglike power of absorbing, concealing for years, and regurgitating. Although James wishes to exploit Judith's memory and Owen Roe wishes to suppress it, it is appropriately Grainne who will explore that female place, crucible of individual and racial memory.

Within the bog of the Irish communal memory O'Faolain traces the patterns of the Diarmuid and Grainne myth in the male and female imaginations. The mythic triangle is represented in the 1920 grouping of Owen O'Malley, founder of the political dynasty; Kathleen Clancy, the woman he marries; and Sparky Driscoll, the American fund-raiser. Kathleen wishes to go away with Sparky, but her young sister Judith, who admires Owen, kills the outsider to prevent his interference with Owen's plans. The young Kathleen has loved Owen, but years in prison have made him, as Kathleen tells Judith, "cold as ice. A machine run on will power," a man who cares for causes rather than people. From the boglike depths of Judith's mind, whence most of the 1922 story comes, we are allowed to see that Kathleen is correct, that Owen is another Fionn. Determined to ignore the treaty that the legitimate representatives of the Irish party have signed, Owen, to advance his own political future, fights on despite the people's desire for peace. Explaining his stance to Sparky, who opposes fighting against the people's wishes, Owen says, "The people are clay. You can do what you like in their name but, as Aristotle said of men and women, the formative idea comes from the male and the clay is female: passive, mere potentiality. The clay here is the people who has no self and no aspiration towards determining anything at all until we infuse it into them. We are their virile soul. We are they." This convenient rationalization allows Owen to act as Fionn, to ignore the resistance of women, people, and country in pursuit of individual desire.

O'Faolain suggests that just as the bog accretes materials through the centuries so too does the history of Ireland. Laid down over mythic layers, Irish history is affected by them. In 1922 we see the young Judith Clancy remembering the history lesson: "the frail morals of a woman were first responsible for bringing the English to Ireland in 1169—so women bore inherited guilt." Irish women thus carry a double load—the fall of "mankind" and the fall of Ireland. Given the placement of this wry reflection in a narrative overtly demonstrating the manipulation and reinterpretation of recent Irish history, the reader naturally reconsiders the events that led to Ireland's "fall," to "her" being "possessed" by an alien warrior. In the 1150s the woman in question, Dervorgilla, was married to the Lord of Brefni whose political rival was Diarmuid MacMurragh, Lord of Leinster. Dervorgilla left Brefni for MacMurragh, and though she did return, Brefni never forgave Diarmuid for the loss of face. In the course of the 1160s' internecine feuding, Brefni took the opportunity to invade Diarmuid's land. Diarmuid was forced to flee to England, where he sought Henry II's help and proffered his daughter, Eve, as gift to Strongbow, leader of the revenge expedition. Thus began the English occupation.

Like Oisin of old, historians, Judith notes, blame Dervorgilla for the devastation wrought by her jealous lovers on country and people. Imaginative patterns, especially those that justify particular courses, change very slowly. The Aristotelian principles that Owen quotes simply justify manipulating human beings in general and women in particular for his own benefit. Control is obviously necessary, the interpretations imply: witness what unfettered women, Grainne and Dervorgilla, wrought. The ascetic Irish Catholic church, Grainne O'Malley realizes, adds its layer to the justification. Considering why neither frigid men like her husband Michael nor virile ones like her former lover Owen Roe can discuss sex, Grainne blames the church. "Monastic tradition described woman as a bag of shit and it followed that sexual release into such a receptacle was a topic about as fit for sober discussion as a bowel movement." The legends of Ireland's ascetic monks—St. Kevin of Glendalough, for example—do indeed suggest the righteousness of the saint's disposing of, killing, woman, the fallen temptress.

The blame assigned, myth-and history-makers write Grainne and Dervorgilla out of their texts. O'Faolain, however, delves into the bog of Judith's memory to uncover the fate of her female characters. A quick learner, the young Judith absorbs all the lessons. She knows woman's duty, a duty reinforced in her school days by the warrior/priest home from World War I who counsels the girls to go forth as inspirations, lamps held up to light men's ways. Virtue, he tells the girls, can only be preserved by ignorance. "Desiring knowledge—Eve's sin—and naming things" are prime threats to their virtue, they (unlike Elizabeth Bowen's Lois) obediently believe.

Inspired by this ideal, Judith admires what she sees as Owen's ascetic purity, what Kathleen sees as death-giving ice. When Kathleen confesses to Judith that she loves the American, Sparky Driscoll, Judith even thinks in Owen's idiom: "Sparky was a spoiler and a giver of bad advice. In Kathleen he had found soil only too receptive." Judith sets the two men up as good and evil, and Sparky "proves" her hypothesis when he kisses her, for her body behaves so wildly she wonders if she is mad. Seeing her own response as wild, Judith sees it as disordered, as the problem of women in fact, the problem of Grainne, of Dervorgilla, and of her sister, Kathleen. Ironically, then, her reaction to Sparky's kiss does not confirm her own and other women's sexuality but the ascetics' lessons, and the experience of her own body is discarded in favor of the authority of the fathers. Whether the early church fathers really believed female sexuality was evil matters little now. They promoted this useful idea and, as Phyllis Chesler shows in Women and Madness, psychiatrists and psychologists have continued to treat female sensuality as unfeminine and deviant, recognizing in it a threat to established institutions. Having adopted the male paradigm of the good woman's asexuality, Judith sees her own reaction as a response to evil. So when Sparky would interfere with Owen's plans for war, Judith is in her own mind justified in killing the evil opponent of good.

Her psyche self-repressed, Judith is forced by Owen into a convent, where electric shock is administered to quiet the dangerous memory. But the recollections surge back, and Judith tells Owen she fears for her sanity, for not even her confessor believes her story. Fearful lest anyone should, Owen, unaware of the irony, calms Judith: the priest, he suggests, "probably thinks it's sex…. Half the women in here are probably suffering from suppressed sex." But although Judith's adoption of the male paradigm with its subsequent repression of forbidden knowledge has driven her to the verge of madness, O'Faolain suggests a triumph. Judith does recover her story, for the bog is a potent preserver, as the "phosphorescent glowings," Judith's story in O'Faolain's work, attest.

If madness threatens Judith for accepting definitions other than those of her own psyche and her own intelligence, then deletion, another kind of madness, is Kathleen's fate, as it was Grainne's. In Judith's memory, in the bog of Irish history, no trace of Kathleen arises after her marriage but those registered by her male relatives. Years after 1922 Owen attempts to prevent Judith's leaving her convent: "What's wrong with being here?… You should see poor Kathleen struggling with the kids. She looks ten years older than you do." Judith asks if Kathleen is "still pretty" and if she is happy. Owen retorts, "Kathleen … is the mother of six children with another on the way." As for her happiness, "she has her children. She knows she is useful." Owen Roe confirms this picture to Grainne many years later. Repressive marriage, then, even more than convent life, effectively negates the independent woman, neutralizes her sense of self, her sensuality, and indeed, from a male perspective, effectively solves the problem of women's disorder. Kathleen's sole purpose, a private one, is to give birth to the clay that O'Malley has infused.

In the final triad of Grainne, Michael, and James, O'Faolain takes her characters to the point of awareness but does not define, finish, or circumscribe their story. Married to Michael when she was little more than a romantic schoolgirl, Grainne has been sacrificed, albeit happily and ignorantly, to protecting the O'Malley name from the scandal her alcoholic, free-living husband might attract. Ensconced by his powerful family in a "safe" job, Michael continues his drinking and offers Grainne only a half life. Weary of this, Grainne turns to Owen Roe, not so much for erotic gratification but for "more through sex." In the tradition of the lusty warriors of myth, however, Owen Roe takes his sexual affairs lightly: "Your trouble," he tells Grainne after the affair, "was scruples. Making mountains out of molehills…. The wrong woman for a politician. Do you know that the Sicilians say 'politics is sweeter than sex'? Yes. Well, no reason not to combine them—until one starts to threaten the other. That happens when the woman—it's always the woman—makes a big production out of going to bed. Bed's simple really." Grainne reflects, "He talked with assurance, driving, mashing up things—love, politics—the way a garbage-disposer mashes them to unrecognizable, recyclable, grey fritters." The bog transforms but does not destroy. Owen Roe destroys. His linguistic destruction is paralleled by his and Owen O'Malley's refusal to recognize sensuousness and their consequent violation and attempted annihilation of women's sexuality—Owen O'Malley by incarcerating Judith in a convent and by treating Kathleen as a "mode of production," and Owen Roe by his exploitation of women's bodies.

With the foreigner, James Duffy, however, Grainne establishes a fulfilling sexual relationship, one which Owen Roe sees as a threat to his political empire. By making this relationship primarily sexual (therefore ultimately limited), O'Faolain stresses the importance of responding to sensual needs so long denied women in Ireland. The warrior figure has not improved through the centuries: Cuchulain, the mythic hero of the 1916 Irish Republican Army, killed his only son rather than risk his own boasting honor; Fionn tricked Grainne into living with him by promising to protect her children; Grainne O'Malley promises to stop seeing James Duffy in return for Owen Roe's promise not to take her son, Cormac, to dangerous republican gatherings. When Owen Roe refuses, Grainne, like her namesake and like Kathleen, decides to escape with James. Once again, as in the case of Judith and Sparky, the irrational interferes on the side of the law. Patsy Flynn, whose madness is evident in his acute sexual suppression, kills James, much as Judith did Sparky, to preserve the O'Malley name and hence dynasty that is threatened equally by the outsider's sensuousness and by his political stance. But indeed sensuousness is political in Ireland. It is not a quality to be associated with mythical, historical, or fictional heroes, neither with Fionn nor Cuchulain, nor with, for example, Cuchulain's symbolic successor, Patrick Pearse, or Fionn's fictional successors, Owen and Owen Roe O'Malley.

Yet Grainne is not absorbed as her physical and mythical ancestors were. As she shares a drink with Michael, who is deeply enmeshed in her life, Grainne feels that he is trying to "web her in." "Fate, he was implying, fatigue, habit, heritage, were stakes planted around her, holding her there, limiting her choices. Poor Michael, she thought, how wrong he was. She could go anytime she like." What Grainne intuits here is the existential freedom Stephen Dedalus achieved when he thrust aside nets of country, religion, and family. But these stakes, though unfairly binding, are powerful, and the sexual relationship with James, like that of a later O'Faolain heroine with her foreign lover in The Obedient Wife, is ultimately a poor thing compared to the deep, twisted relationship Grainne has with her husband. O'Faolain sees no need to supply defining endings: the text leaves Grainne searching for James, whose body has been absorbed in another bog, the river Liffey. She may act on her existential realization, or like Carla in the later work, she may return to Michael. If the latter occurs, the text of Judith's memory awaits her. What seems important, however, is that the writer releases her character, refuses to constrict her as did the myth-and history-makers. The text, as one observer notes, falls from Grainne, not she from the text.

Seeing myth as limiting, O'Faolain naturally offers no alternative tale, no simple equation of current female liberation with mythical and historical incarceration. Indeed she expresses deep fear of "myth-mongers, whether religious or political." Believing that they alone have the answers to the great questions makes them, she thinks, "dangerous, and in the end unlovable." Grainne and Michael's bonds, woven over fifteen years, are elastic enough to take the strain of Grainne's defection. More independent than her ancestors, Grainne O'Malley can seize more freedom than they could. But as mythical and historical patterns cut their own shape in a nation's imagination, so long-standing relationships cut their patterns in individual imaginations. For Julia O'Faolain sees human beings as essentially social creatures.

The bond between Grainne and Michael unites their individual psyches. Returning to her home early in the novel, having left Michael for several months, Grainne feels "bereft" at finding an empty house. "Why wasn't Michael home?" she wonders. "She had a physical illusion that she would be whole again only when she held him in her arms. Did that merely mean that he was to her as routine was to laboratory mice?" Michael too, when he suspects Grainne will leave him, agonizes at the idea of a break in their pattern. Another O'Faolain character, Una of "The Man in the Cellar," tries to explain the "fetid bubble of dependence and rancour" that traps her with the wife-beating Carlo: "Between a man and a woman who are deeply involved sexually—atrocious injuries can be forgiven." (The text does not, of course, suggest that Una should remain trapped; having escaped, she attempts to explain why she remained there so long.) The intimate marital relationship, it appears, carves its pattern as indelibly on individuals as does the mythic pattern on a nation.

Despite the mutual bruising endemic to long-standing relationships, the union itself is usually seen as positive in O'Faolain's work. In The Obedient Wife, O'Faolain depicts an Italian family temporarily residing in Los Angeles. Carla has taken a lover while her husband works and plays in Italy, and she must decide whether to remain with this considerate lover or to return to Italy to her chauvinistic husband. Reluctantly deciding in favor of her husband, when—and because—he hurries from Italy to persuade her, Carla accuses her lover, Leo, of having no real need of her: "You're invulnerable, strong, fenced in. You believing Christians have an enormous ego, massive pride. I imagine it comes from the notion that your first duty is to save your own soul—that's breathtaking egoism, after all, and yet you learn it as a duty, a maxim and foundation-stone to your moral system.

Although the strands are very twisted and although the sacrifice of the individual is rejected, the O'Faolain novel ultimately valorizes communal over individual values. This, I think, separates O'Faolain from those Anglo-Irish ancestors to whom I linked her earlier—Maria Edgeworth, Somerville and Ross, and Molly Keane. This valorization contrasts too, as we shall see, with the heroines in the later Jennifer Johnston novels, heroines who believe that the communal relationship is subordinate to that soul-saving activity of writing or painting. O'Faolain's Carla refuses to stay with Leo because his "giving" does not bring them close: "Fighting and wounding," Carla asserts, do engender a human empathy. "A flowing together takes place. It's not just rational. It's more intimate, almost tangible. I can't explain it in words. Lots of life evades words, Leo, but you live by them." Life, O'Faolain reminds us constantly, cannot be separated into the isolated compartments of logic or art.

Like a crucible, then, the bog melds a nation's myths and history into national imaginative patterns. All elements are preserved within this reservoir, though they are transformed by contact with each other and by time. Thus the top layers of the palimpsest show traces of the earlier writing: the great Danu is not only preserved, but she has acted throughout the centuries so that the comic Maeve, the warrior queen whom Cuchulain fights; the repressed Grainnes and Dervorgillas; and the Judiths, Kathleens, and latter-day Grainnes all bear her mark. Recall Sheila's early plaint: "The depressing thing about our talk is that it is not about activity. It is about talk." Exactly. So the literature, the stories of the historians, the myths—all the shaping material is ultimately not the reality of the past situations but the talk, the words, the literature about the material. And O'Faolain's texts, along with those of other contemporary women writers, add a new reviving, ameliorating, restorative layer to the palimpsest, a layer which not only alters the future but which also restructures the literary past. This is the optimism of O'Faolain's essentially comic image. In the feast that ends comedy, that harmonizes without the domination of any single melody, the contradictory visions of Cuchulain and Emer, Fionn and Grainne, Grainne and Michael coexist and temper each other. As I have noted elsewhere, the unexplained geasas may be nothing more than the harmony of opposites. But what more could we ask? The magic does not simply belong to a golden age. As O'Faolain detects the "phosphorescent glowings," the traces of her characters in the bog of Judith's mind, so we too can uncover our history in the bog of national literature and myth. In a typical O'Faolain irony, Owen Roe, the suppressor and distorter of history, observes: "In memory as in matter, Nothing … is lost. It comes back in another form."