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“In the Name of the Mother . . .” Reading and Revision in Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue kristine byron Prologar cuentos no leídos aún es tarea casi imposible, ya que exige el análisis de tramas que no conviene anticipar. Prefiero por consiguiente un epílogo. . . . Espero que las notas apresuradas que acabo de dictar no agoten este libro y que sus sueños sigan ramificándose en la hospitalaria imaginación de quienes ahora lo cierran. [To preface still unread stories is an almost impossible task, since it demands the analysis of plots not yet convenient to disclose. I prefer, therefore, an epilogue. . . . I hope that these hasty notes which I have just dictated do not exhaust the meanings of this book; may its visions continue to unfold in the receptive imaginations of those who now close it.] Jorge Luis Borges, El libro de arena [The Book of Sand] Lynette Carpenter has noted that Edna O’Brien “has been criticized for writing the same story over and over, and for not writing the story she writes best. . . . In short, O’Brien’s literary reputation is anything but settled.”1 Carpenter’s observation certainly corresponds to the mixed critical reviews of what are perhaps O’Brien’s best-known works—the 14 novels The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964)—which were republished in 1986 as The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue. Along the way, O’Brien kept making revisions , rewriting, and thereby unsettling the story. In 1971, for instance, she dramatically altered the conclusion of Girls in Their Married Bliss, undercutting the optimism of the first ending. The epilogue to the Trilogy further annihilates any possibility of a stock happy ending by allowing us to see, twenty years later, exactly what has become of her two heroines. If O’Brien’s reputation is unsettled, her treatment of her own works as a narrative in progress demanding revision challenges both the plots she works with and the critical impulse to find closure. O’Brien made a conscious decision to have two heroines in the novels of the Trilogy. She explains: “Realizing that the earlier heroines [of the tradition of Irish writing] were bawdy and the later ones lyrical I decided to have two, one who would conform to both my own and my country’s view of what an Irish woman should be and one who would understand every piece of protocol and religion and hypocrisy that there was.”2 The 1986 epilogue seems to offer a definitive ending to this double plot, one which suggests that women’s position had not changed drastically since 1960, the year in which the first novel of the Trilogy (The Country Girls) was first published. In the epilogue, we learn that Kate has drowned, like her mother before her. Baba suspects Kate committed suicide , but can’t bring herself to think too much about this possibility. As for Baba herself, she has become nurse and mother to her once abusive husband, Durack, who has suffered a stroke that has rendered him completely dependent on her. In spite of Baba’s less-than-happy marriage, she survives, in part because she is the heroine who understands “every piece of protocol and religion and hypocrisy that there ever was.” More than merely showing women’s struggle for self-affirmation in the face of constricting social and legal norms, O’Brien’s Trilogy and Epilogue deconstructs the prescribed roles for women in patriarchal Irish society. Dealing with issues such as motherhood, sexuality, religion, and marriage, the Trilogy exposes the ways feminine gender roles are constructed, offering a radical critique of a capitalist patriarchy that is particularly Irish and Catholic. At the same time, O’Brien’s text offers a commentary on the prescribed roles for women in literature, challenging the adequacy of the female romance plot for representing women’s experience in fiction. In her study of feminist writing, Nancy K. Miller outlines some of the problems women’s writing has faced historically: “The attack on female “In the Name of the Mother . . .” 15 plots and plausibilities assumes that women writers cannot or will not obey the rules of fiction. . . . It does not see that the maxims that pass for the truth of human experience and the encoding of that experience, in literature, are organizations, when they are not fantasies, of the dominant culture. To read women’s literature is to see and hear...

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