- Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’ Brien
Ever since the publication of The Country Girls in 1960, Edna O'Brien has endured a love-hate relationship with her critics over her own love-hate relationship with Ireland. Such critics have easily dismissed her work as being too romantic and sensational. This collection of essays on O'Brien's oeuvre demonstrates that this is hardly the case; her work both raises important questions about gender and national identity, and reveals that such questions are not easily answered. The indeterminacy of her writing allows not only for multiple readings of O'Brien's own work, but also of the patriarchy that continues to dominate Irish culture as well. This new collection examines the politics underpinning representations of female sexuality in Ireland, and brings to the fore O'Brien's attempts to negotiate and revise in such a masculinist culture.
It is James Joyce's representations of female sexuality, and O'Brien's parodying of the same through the trope of hysteria, that Helen Thompson examines in her essay "Hysterical Hooliganism: O'Brien, Freud, Joyce." She argues that O'Brien "deauthorizes" Joyce's representations of the female experience by showing how hysterical women are confined and objectified by male perceptions of their sexual and social roles. Thompson points to two narratives in particular, the Irish canon and the Irish Constitution, as being guilty of "overdetermining" the female body by seeking to control it through traditional frames like motherhood. Such texts reduce Irish women to texts themselves—open books laid bare for narration and interpretation by an audience that is wholly male. In reading O'Brien's 1972 novel Night and the Penelope episode from Ulysses side by side, Thompson uncovers the shortcomings of Joyce's vision of those proscribed roles, revealing how Mary Hooligan surpasses Molly Bloom [End Page 157] by refusing to accept the traditional masculine frame of womanhood. In an ambivalent move that is at once reverent and subversive, O'Brien plagiarizes her literary forefather by revising Molly through Mary, only to uncover Joyce's inability to separate himself from his depiction of Molly. Molly is reduced to a hysterical surface text to be interpreted by a (male) reader. Thompson delineates how O'Brien rewrites the hysterical body of psychoanalysis and Joyce's narrative and hystericization of Molly, by hystericizing Mary and her narrative, but with a crucial difference: where Molly is reduced to a disembodied text of bodily symptoms, Mary interrogates and experiments with her sexuality as a path toward a new, multifaceted subjectivity. She challenges the hysterical narrative by blurring the distinction between subject and object, oscillating her role between that of narrator and narrated.
In "Blurring Boundaries, Intersecting Lives: History, Gender, and Violence in Edna O'Brien's House of Splendid Isolation," Danine Farquharson and Bernice Schrank outline how O'Brien's 1994 novel dismantles the conception of a linear narrative of Irish history. Farquharson and Schrank structure the essay around the four narrative lines that underpin the novel: the story of the Big House; the romance; the patriotic melodrama of the Irish gunman on the run; and the story about storytelling that prevents any sort of closure.
For the unfamiliar reader, the authors' discussion of the Big House subgenre associated with the Ascendancy, along with the concomitant anxieties and taboos of writing about the "culture of the oppressor" is most helpful, especially considering how O'Brien works with and then revises that subgenre. O'Brien deconstructs and undermines the traditional masculinist narrative of Irish history that professes a linear progression through her treatment of the political power shift represented in the shift of ownership of the House. The decline of the House and the patristic tendencies of its new Catholic owner reveal that independence resulted in one oppressor replacing another. O'Brien's fragmented narrative shows how language is inadequate in depicting the intricacies of human existence; the novel revises Irish history into one where the past, along with imprisonment and violence, especially toward women, is endlessly...