Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment

The Magdalene Sisters

C H A P T E R 5 The Magdalene Sisters Film, Fact, and Fiction Peter Mullan’s award-winning film The Magdalene Sisters (2002) tells the stories of four young Irish women incarcerated in a Magdalen asylum.1 The film purports to take place in a convent on the outskirts of Dublin between 1964 and 1968.2 Most Magdalen penitents, like the characters Margaret and Patricia in the film, were institutionalized for that peculiarly Irish sin, perceived sexual immorality; some were single mothers, some were the victims of incest and rape, and some were considered prostitutes (Smith 2004, 208). Other women and young girls were deemed too simple for their own good or too attractive for society ’s liking, such as the screen characters Crispina and Bernadette, and were hastily hidden away, supposedly to safeguard their moral purity. With no official sentence, and thus no mandated release, some of these women lived and died behind the Magdalen’s walls. In the vast majority of cases there was no judge and no jury. Throughout the past two hundred years, thousands of Irish women ostensibly purged their sins by washing society’s dirty laundry: they achieved spiritual renewal through backbreaking labor, endless prayer, and the complete effacement of individual identity.3 Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry, as these institutions came to be known, closed its doors in 1996 (Culliton 1996). In late August 2003, almost one year after Mullan’s film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and within weeks of its release in the United States, the Irish Times revealed disturbing details of the exhumation, cremation, and reburial of 155 Irish women who had lived and died at the High Park Magdalen asylum operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of 136 Smith 05 7/12/07 1:56 PM Page 136 Charity of Refuge in Dublin (Humphreys 2003). Buried between 1858 and 1984 and interred anonymously, these women were denied a proper burial and final resting place. The religious order sought and received the required state license to exhume the bodies in 1993. However, the license listed only 133 sets of remains. Death certificates, legally required in Ireland, were missing in some fifty-eight cases (Raftery 2003). It was not until 2003, ten years later, that Irish society learned about the twentytwo bodies for which the nuns could not account. Although such irregularities should have led to an immediate police investigation, Ireland in the early 1990s, on the cusp of an economic and cultural transformation popularly termed the Celtic Tiger, had little interest in digging up old ghosts. Instead, the state provided the Sisters with a hastily reissued exhumation license, and all the bodies were cremated and reinterred anonymously at Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery. Cremation, of course, destroys all trace of historical evidence, and thus no one will ever know with certainty who is buried at the Glasnevin plot (Raftery 2003). The history of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums is, then, incomplete, and the still-emerging facts are even more disturbing than the fiction of Mullan ’s film. SE C T I O N 1 Ongoing debates within Irish cultural studies are reconsidering how the project of national identity formation in the decades following political independence mobilized the heteropatriarchal family and the Catholic Church’s ideal of sexual morality in ways that were especially oppressive for Irish women (McAvoy 1999; Backus 1999; Smith 2004). Kathryn Conrad identifies the effects of this strategic alliance between church and state: “The effects are most obviously felt by those who do not fit the model and are excluded, silenced, or punished; but all, even those who seem empowered within the system, are held hostage by it, trapped within the family cell” (2003, 4). Contemporary cinema in particular has helped to recover the elided stories of exclusion and punishment from this period in Ireland’s past, and, as Luke Gibbons suggests, “one of the reasons Irish films have looked back more in anger than nostalgia is that for those sections of society whose story has not yet been told, the past is still not over” (2005, 215; see also Gibbons 2002, 95–96). T H E M AG DA L E N E S I S T E R S 137 Smith 05 7/12/07 1:56 PM Page 137 The Magdalene Sisters joins recent films that represent Irish life in the postindependence era emphasizing the repressive aspects of...