Scandal in the Country
“Our souls, shame-wounded by our sins,
cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover
clinging, the more the more.”
- James Joyce
Male domination and repressive
Catholicism are the stumbling blocks Edna O’Brien’s heroine in The Country Girls must try to cope with
in 1960’s Ireland. Caithleen’s youthful
expectations of others are often crushed and her sense of self worth often
plummets with each disappointment. Her
drunken father is violent and even her closest friend, Baba, can be cruel and
unkind. O’Brien writes in diary-like
style, depicting real people experiencing rural life within the lower middle
class, reflecting her own experiences as a child and young woman. After the publication of The Country Girls, she was celebrated by some and defamed by
many. Her unabashed portrayal of women
and their sexuality, along with a view of men as often drunken or lecherous and
the church as suffocating caused her book to be banned in 1969. Seen as pornographic and obscene for its
blunt revelation of female sexuality, the book flew in the face of the mores
and morals of the time. Through her
writing Edna O’Brien strove to break free from the constrictions of staunch
religious standards placed upon women in the Irish Catholic society of the
1960’s.
The church set forth an impossible
task upon the women of Ireland by asking them to emulate the Virgin Mary while
also imitating Eve in their search for a husband. Women were taught by their mothers to fully
submit to the men in their lives and were taught by the church to be chaste, expectations
that O’Brien’s female characters regularly encounter. Caithleen, naïve and unprepared for life’s
hard lessons and Baba, her sensible and sometimes cruel best friend are the main
female figures found in The Country Girls. From the beginning of the novel,
Caithleen must let go of her mother whom she adored and run from succumbing to
a life with her alcoholic father. After
her mother ran off with another man then drowned, Caithleen is left with an
emotional dependence that never recedes because it was so abruptly cut off. A mother’s love and guidance can no longer
shield her. She places other people in
her life in parental roles, to fill the void.
For example, Baba becomes a mother figure towards her, which is why she
almost robotically does what she tells her to do just as Caithleen obeyed her
mother. This dependence on her mother explains
why Caithleen now follows Baba’s every command, despite it often being the
wrong thing to do. The real scandal that
comes with her dependence on a parental figure is with the arrival of Mr.
Gentleman, an aloof and distinguished Frenchman who encompasses all that is
romantic and mysterious.
When Caithleen is first introduced
to Mr. Gentleman, she visits his house and upon her departure she turns back
and watches as the sun shines on Mr. Gentleman’s windows that “were all on
fire” (O’Brien 13). This foreshadowing
of the passion that develops later on between the two is coupled with the
immediate temptation that leads to their relationship developing with an
appallingly fervent intensity. Mr.
Gentleman begins to represent a father figure and a lover for Caithleen, which breaks
all moral codes in 1960’s Ireland and Irish women’s literature. At one point he even calls her his daughter
with Caithleen responding foolishly, “are you my father?” (O’Brien 101). Her actual abusive and drunken father has
tainted all relationships with men, as she hopelessly searches for a surrogate
father in older men. Before Mr.
Gentleman arrives on the scene, Hickey, a workman at Caithleen’s house, is
another older man whom she looks up to and has some affection towards. The greatest controversy lies with the love
story between Caithleen and Mr. Gentleman who is believed to be about 50 years
of age and she only 14 and later 18.
O’Brien’s critique of Irish society
in The Country Girls was met with
great controversy due to the stifling culture of 1960’s Ireland. She wished for an end to women’s contained
and oppressive lifestyles. O’Brien has
been frequently called Joycean in her comparison to James Joyce and praises his
ability to “ventriloquize a female desire that is reminiscent of male desire”
(O’Connor 35). She wished to dispel the
notion that only sex within marriage would be devoid of sin, a dogma set forth
by the church, and thus purposely endeavors to shock the reader in hopes that
the role of women will begin to change.
In fact just the mere mention of this subject was radical and unheard
of, due to the fact that “for many growing up in Ireland in the 1960’s, sex was
still a taboo subject” (Ferriter 336). A
few years after meeting Mr. Gentleman for the first time, Caithleen begins to
have a secret relationship with this man, 30 years her senior with intent upon
consummating it. Thus O’Brien pushes far
beyond societal norms as the story unfolds.
O’Brien’s plucky determination to
publish a novel she had to have known would be met with controversial criticism
was in her eyes one of the only ways to break free from such a “priest-ridden
race”, a phrase found in Joyce’s Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man. 1960’s
Ireland truly remained as unfalteringly Catholic as ever in the strict
teachings and expectations especially placed upon women. In “The Irish” by Donald Connery a man
describes his wife as “a king size hot water bottle who also cooks his food and
pays his bills and produces his heirs” (Ferriter 336). This portrayal of the stark reality of Irish
Catholic womanhood paints a disrespectful and disparaging light on
femininity. O’Brien proves society and
the church are to blame for such interpretations when she posits, “society and
the environment and the education that comes our way is so decisive in the
forming of us” (Eckley 37). An extremely
repressive religion squeezes any hope for imagination and individuality out of
a person, forcing one’s thoughts and opinions into a box. Everyone is taught to conform to the church’s
teachings or face the punishment of hell and damnation along with
ostracism. When Caithleen and Baba are
sent to the convent for a good Catholic education the severe and oppressive
atmosphere is quickly apparent. Young
girls were expected to act almost as if they were robots, with no feelings or
sentiment or desires permitted.
It is completely understandable why Caithleen and Baba would forge a
plan for an escape by getting in trouble for writing a wicked note, as they
could not bear to stand living and learning with the nuns any longer. If the maggot infested food had not killed
them, they would have died from the harsh lessons beaten into them by the
unmerciful and humorless nuns. O’Brien
sheds a bad light on ultra conservative Catholic schools in another attempt to
illustrate her desire to break free from societal constraints revolving around
a religiously driven lifestyle. O’Brien
admits “I don’t think I have any pleasure in any part of my body because my
first and initial body thoughts were blackened by the fear of sin” (Eckley
71). Thus even reading such literature
as this would have been considered immoral.
Just as women clung to scandalous literature in secret, Caithleen surreptitiously
maintained a relationship with Mr. Gentleman until irreversibly damaging her
psyche. Society and the church have
shaped this behavior and indirectly pushed women to search for an outlet involving
supposed sinful activities.
O’Brien paid homage to Joyce’s
writing by realistically portraying a west Ireland village as he exposed the true
Dublin. They also both viewed Ireland as
a mother figure, “a woman with whom other women can identify indeed must
identify, and always to their sorrow” (O’Connor 8). When Caithleen’s mother passes away she is
left with Baba as an immediate mother figure and Irish society as her
guide. Without a mother in her life,
Caithleen is emotionally stunted and is unable to break free of the cycles in
social patterns that begin to develop in her life. She has multiple encounters with older men
mostly which include Mr. Gentleman, but also the instance in which she was
almost attacked by a lecherous old man while at his house with Baba and her
current love interest. Joyce also wrote
about a Mr. Gentleman type character in Ulysses
where Leopold Bloom also planned to seduce an innocent young girl. Therefore both authors had a penchant for confronting
the dark and inappropriate side of desire, pushing against accepting subjects
for literature.
Baba embodies a spontaneous and
wanton young girl of which Ireland herself was accused of personifying in the
poem, Eire by David O’Bruadair when
Ireland “played the harlot with men you hated And those who loved you dearly”. She also symbolizes many of the strong female
characters found within ancient Irish literature such as Deirdre in Exile of the Sons of Uisliu and The Old Woman of Beare as she does not
care about other people’s judgments and expectations of her. Thus Baba represents the woman Caithleen does
not have the courage to be and exhibits qualities that O’Brien wishes more
Irish Catholic women would openly embrace.
Caithleen represents most of the women in this society with an added air
of youthful uncertainty and curiosity.
Thus the two women of The Country
Girls symbolize the two battling sides of a woman in 1960’s Ireland, one
bound by religious duty and societal norms and the other struggling to express
some level of individuality.
Because the church had such an
overwhelming influence on the role of women, the scandalous themes of O’Brien’s
novel pushed through the edges of permissibility. In fact, about 95% of the Irish population is
Catholic, which created the traditional role of the woman in Irish families
(Fine-Davis 289). This struggle to
express individuality is a direct result of the economic and societal
constraints placed upon Irish middle class families. Women were expected to marry, have children,
and stay out of the affairs of men.
Additionally, the more religious women were, the more likely they were
to perceive their own kind as inferior to men.
It makes perfect sense that O’Brien’s work of fiction would be met with
such opposition, as she attempted to topple society’s limitations placed on
women. The men and women hopelessly
brainwashed by such a religiously driven society would never have accepted
O’Brien’s unapologetic and straightforward portrayal of life in the Irish
countryside.
The feminist movement was just
beginning to emerge in the 1960’s, yet Ireland remained stuck in the past. The Ireland of the 1960’s was not yet ready
for Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, which
defied societal barriers encouraging women to make choices rather than submit
to the rules. The scandalous
relationship between Caithleen and Mr. Gentleman illustrated in the novel was
not a usual occurrence found in literature, especially literature for women’s
eyes. This brought her book to the
censored list and was a decisive factor in O’Brien’s displacement outside her
homeland. This suppression of female
sexuality in literature contributed to the delay of modern views in Ireland
during the 1960’s. In fact the events
that shaped many modern opinions in the United States and other western nations
in the ’60’s did not affect Ireland until the 1970’s. Therefore, when O’Brien’s novel was released
in 1960, the country was nowhere near loosening its strictly conservative
viewpoints. Baba’s corrupt influence on
Caithleen mirrors the influence Edna O’Brien had upon Ireland in her attempt to
free women from their religious and societal bonds. Her book exhorted women to embrace a new
viewpoint, one that would breathe fresh life into their downtrodden,
unfulfilled lives.
Works Cited
Eckley, Grace. Edna
O'Brien. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1974.
Ferriter, Diarmaid. Occasions
of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland. London:
Profile,
2009. PDF e-book.
Fine-Davis, Margret.
"Attitudes Toward the Role of Women as Part of a Larger Belief
System."
JSTOR. Political Psychology, June 1989.
O'Brien, Edna. The
Country Girls Trilogy. New York: Plume, 1960.
O'Connor, Maureen, and
Lisa Colletta, eds. Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O'Brien.
Madison:
University of Wisconsin, 2006.
