Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O'Brien

Edna O’Brien’s “Love Objects”

Edna O’Brien’s “Love Objects” rebecca pelan In 1984, Edna O’Brien saw her major theme as being “loss as much as . . . love. Loss is every child’s theme because by necessity the child loses its mother and its bearings . . . so my central theme is loss—loss of love, loss of self, loss of God.”1 What follows is an attempt to show that this conflation of the mother, the self, and God most often manifests itself in O’Brien’s fiction in the figure of an idealized “love object”—occasionally nuns, but more often mothers or godlike men with whom the protagonist hopes for, but rarely achieves, a “pure” and unsullied sexual union—the sexual act itself often being described by O’Brien as an experience akin to religious ecstasy. Whatever form this love object takes, however, as a means of locating or transcending the self, it is consistently shown to be illusory. However, only when O’Brien’s writing is examined within modern but specifically Irish contexts can she be seen to share with many other Irish writers a common, albeit somber, view of life as meaningless unless there is some kind of god at its center. In O’Brien’s case, however, there is a further, consistent interest in inscribing these love objects with eroticism and sexuality as a means of expressing individual and artistic liberty in the face of the conservative socio-political structures imposed on Irish writers of her time. Only, too, when her work is seen within these Irish contexts can we begin to appraise O’Brien’s very significant contribution to a specifically Irish women’s literary tradition. Written at 58 a time when she was largely alienated by and from Ireland, the critical world, and the women’s movement, O’Brien’s early writing— produced between, say, 1960 and 1985—suggests that she has rarely veered from her iconoclastic mission to expose the brutality of various insidious forms of oppression, best seen in her undermining of the conventional patriarchal family and in her portrayal of how women are affected by being kept apart from themselves and each other. Underpinning so much of O’Brien’s work is a re/presentation of the effects on women of their having internalized aspects of Catholic dogma as a feature of Irish social policy, none more so—certainly in O’Brien’s case—than the cult of the Virgin Mary. Although only augmented as official dogma in 1854, the Immaculate Conception, which exonerated Mary from any carnal implications, heralded the final achievement of patriarchy and Catholicism, its vehicle in Ireland. In Catholic countries where church and state remained largely autonomous , Mariolatry remained in the realm of theology. In O’Brien’s postrevolutionary Ireland, however, where church and state became virtually indivisible, Mariolatry imposed on women a dilemma that is unsolvable: to follow Mary and remain pure, which involves a renunciation not only of sex but of motherhood, or to marry and bear children and, thus, be reduced to the sensuality and baseness of Eve. The church’s answer to this dilemma has been to teach purity and chastity until marriage, at which time sex, for purposes of procreation only, becomes a duty devoid of sin, but a duty nonetheless. This interpretation of sex as a purely functional feature of the relationship between men and women exacerbated the dilemma confronting Irish women who, taught from birth to aspire to the purity of Mary, found themselves unwittingly playing the role of Eve in order to secure a husband in a society that viewed spinsterhood as the most dreadful of fates. While the Cult of Mary may have suited the romantic vision of a pure and wholesome Ireland, it has been extremely damaging for Irish women, since not only is it a totally unattainable ideal, but, in Simone de Beauvoir’s terms, represents “the supreme masculine victory”: “For the first time in human history the mother kneels before her son; she freely accepts her inferiority . . . it is the rehabilitation of woman through the accomplishment of her defeat.”2 The traditional Irish Catholic mother becomes, then, a sacrificial figure in the image of Mary: “As a mother, she [Mary/mother] provides a human face in the Church [home]. She is a source of comfort, and protects sinners from the wrath Edna O’Brien’s “Love Objects” 59 of God [the father]. Yet hers was an essentially submissive motherhood. The power to conceive was not hers to control.”3 In...