Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts

‘Becoming animal’ in the novels of Edna O’Brien

The further I went away from the past, the more clearly I returned inwardly picturing meadows, grasses, some animal caught under briars, cuckoo spit, nightfall and the way dogs used to wear paint away off the back door begging with their bodies to be let out. Edna O’Brien, Mother Ireland In 1897, Alice Stopford Green, pioneering feminist, Irish nationalist and historian, whose historiography ‘wrote women back into the narrative’,1 made a now-forgotten contribution to what was then ‘the still young discussion of woman’s place in letters’,2 which begins by addressing the difficulties inherent in her project: Even in her literary ventures woman remains essentially mysterious [. . .] she seeks safety in what is known in Nature as protective mimicry – one recalls the touching forms of beautiful creatures that, dwelling in the arid desert, have shrouded themselves in the dull hue of the soil, or in arctic cold have taken on a snowy whiteness; of live breathing things that have made themselves after the likeness of a dead twig, and harmless beings who in their alarm have donned the gay air of predatory insects and poisonous reptiles.3 The narrator in Edna O’Brien’s 1970 novel, A Pagan Place, when relating a girl’s need to be ‘fervent and more fervent and most fervent’4 in expiation of an imagined sin, similarly evokes nature’s ‘protective mimicry’: ‘You consulted creatures as to what you should do, asked frogs their opinion. Frogs had learned the knack of being stealthy. Frogs had very good camouflage , were the colour of surroundings, a greeny brown.’5 John Berger has suggested that ‘the first metaphor was animal’,6 a tribute to what he 151 ‘Becoming animal’ in the novels of Edna O’Brien Maureen O’Connor characterises as an intimacy, however antagonistic at times, with the natural world that has been lost with the advent of late capitalism, the alienating processes of urbanisation and industrialisation. Woman’s traditional appropriation to nature complicates the spatial relationships of proximity and distance, similarity and difference, implied in such a trajectory . In the excerpts from Green and O’Brien, Irish women writing at opposite ends of the twentieth century, the woman is poised to disappear into the animal, the animal into a curiously abstract, denatured landscape (‘dull hue’, ‘whiteness’, ‘dead twig’, ‘greeny brown’), in both cases an exposure of the deadly abjection usually cloaked in conventional comparisons between woman and nature, an obliteration of independence and subjectivity for both tenor and vehicle. In the passage from O’Brien, this ironic yet poignant retreat enabled by metaphor is all the more diffuse and disorientating due to the use of second person. Laying bare the fictive metaphor of narrative ‘person’, O’Brien undermines the textual conceit’s strategy of ‘naturalization and anthropomorphism which acts to maintain particular normative ideological/discursive structures’,7 one example of the novelist’s interrogation of ‘natural’ structures of dominance even as they occur at the level of language itself, ironically conducted through the figure of the animal. This career-long critique manifests prescient sympathies with many of the tenets of ecocritical theory as well as with the work of Delueze and Guattari on ‘becoming animal’, foundational work that informs recent scholarship on the relationship between humans and animals. Ecofeminism is new to Irish Studies, and it is necessary to sketch some of the cultural, historical and literary context in which Edna O’Brien, a unique product of her time and place, has produced a body of fiction richly responsive to such an approach. The use of second person, a voice neither entirely subjective nor objective, implicates the reader and demands restless self-consciousness as it denies a comfortable, familiar resting place, literally erasing the ‘I/Thou’ distinction that ecocriticism seeks to dismantle when considering the perceived distance between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. This refusal of a stable and privileged phallocentric point of view is the kind of ‘breaching of the subject and object worlds’ at the heart of ecofeminism, according to Gretchen Legler, in her discussion of ecofeminist philosopher Jim Cheney’s ‘contextualist ethic’, which requires that we see ourselves in relation to the land – ‘it must define us and we it.’8 O’Brien also uses second-person narration in some sections of Mother Ireland (1976), a stylised autobiography that is simultaneously a cultural history of her native country, an object lesson in the kind of mutual process of identification advocated by Cheney. It opens with a description of the ‘The Land Itself...