Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts

Chapter Two - WORLD-MAKING IN THADDEUS O’SULLIVAN’S THEWOMANWHO MARRIED CLARK GABLE

I Although Irish film has been the subject of over a dozen books and a great many articles, and although The Woman Who Married Clark Gable (1985) was nominated for a BAFTA Film Award for Best Short Film in 1986, this little gem has received almost no commentary apart from the initial responses in the canonical Cinema and Ireland (1988). There, both Kevin Rockett and Luke Gibbons provide economical readings of The Woman Who Married Clark Gable (TWWMCG) and these interpretations have remained, in print at least, unremarked upon over the years. In this essay, I argue that this received interpretation of TWWMCG – a primarily psychoanalytic reading characteristic of the period in which Cinema and Ireland was written – can be usefully supplemented by a reading grounded in the social practices displayed in the film. What is at stake here is the camera’s focalising of a socially embedded way of being. Rockett briefly summarises the narrative content of O’Sullivan’s adaptation of a story by Seán O’Faoláin: [. . .] there is a stylish and witty representation of an Englishman (Bob Hoskins) and his Irish wife (Brenda Fricker). Set in Dublin in the late 1930s the childless couple’s unstated oppression is displaced on to the woman’s fantasy of her husband as Clark Gable in San Francisco. But fantasy is what it remains until the husband shaves off his newly-acquired moustache and they return to their humdrum artisanal class existence. By then her guilt at her inability to have children has been painfully exposed.1 Chapter Two WORLD-MAKING IN THADDEUS O’SULLIVAN’S THE WOMAN WHO MARRIED CLARK GABLE Cheryl Herr 29 Rockett thus places the woman at the centre of the drama and specifies the couple’s problem as fundamentally owned by the wife, whose name is Mary. For Gibbons, the thrust of O’Sullivan’s short film is its depiction of the cinema as a ‘magical world’ that offers the wife, Mary, ‘both the promise and the denial of a release from the constraints of Irish family life’,2 Gibbons explains: Mary’s marriage to George [. . .] an Englishman, has come to a point where a gulf has opened up between them on account of her inability to live up to an idealised self-image of motherhood. [. . .] A night out at the cinema watching Clark Gable in San Francisco provides an outlet for her unfulfilled desires. [. . .] [T]he dividing line between the imaginary and the real becomes [. . .] problematic for Mary when she notices a resemblance between George (who has just grown a moustache) and the famous screen idol. Carried away by this ‘discovery’, the emotional plenitude of life on the screen spills over in her everyday existence, acting, as Christian Metz would have it, as a ‘psychical substitute ’ for her maternal desire.3 Both Gibbons and Rockett, then, construe the trajectory of the storyline as guided by Mary’s failure to have children and by the assumption that the couple’s presumed infertility is Mary’s fault. More recent commentators on Irish cinema and on O’Sullivan – such as Martin McLoone and Lance Pettitt – have mentioned TWWMCG4 but have not in any way disturbed this psychoanalytic interpretation by way of a sceptical feminism. Further, to my knowledge no film critic has returned in print to the source narrative, a short story by Seán O’Faoláin published in 1948.5 This story usefully captures what was then a previous generation’s foibles, and thus creates a screen on and against which O’Sullivan’s vision is projected. While O’Faoláin prompts the reader to take note of the couple’s lack of children, he does not position that circumstance as the rationale for the story or even the central issue in Mary’s life. Instead, O’Faoláin sets out Mary’s overriding desire for romance and excitement, a yearning that Irish culture in the 1930s seemed to her ill-equipped to satisfy. The story reimagines Mary as she would have been had she inhabited Moscow and a Chekhov play: 30 Cheryl Herr She would have said, ‘I do not know whether life is angry with me because I do not live it, or whether I am angry with life because it will not let me live. Ivan Ivanovitch, for God’s sake, meet me tonight by the frog-pond and tell me what is this pain in my heart.’ And...