A Belfast Woman: Shame, Guilt, and Gender in Mary Beckett’s Short Stories of the 1950s

Mary Beckett, who died in November 2013 at the age of eighty-seven, was, as writer Damian Smyth told the Belfast Telegraph upon her passing, “a new voice from an unexpected place.”¹ Although Beckett’s later work is better known, she first emerged as a powerful female voice in Irish literature during the 1950s. During that decade, she wrote several radio plays for BBC Northern Ireland; she was featured as the lone woman in a symposium called “The Young Writer” in the Dublin literary magazine the Bell in 1951; she was included in a special “Women Writers Issue” of Irish Writing, alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, and Kate O’Brien, in 1954; and she was given pride of place as author of the lead short story in the Belfast journal Threshold when it launched in 1957. By that time she had married and moved to Dublin, as her biography and byline for that issue indicated. After her second story for Threshold, “The Weaker Sex,” appeared in 1958, she would not publish again for twenty-two years until Sean McMahon, then an editor at Poolbeg Press, encouraged her to gather her previous stories and to write a new one that would become the title piece to her 1980 collection A Belfast Woman.

At the time of that anthology’s publication, the marketing campaign for Beckett’s book promoted her as a mother of five children, and she was often interviewed and photographed in her kitchen, with her tile backsplash behind her and flowered curtains at the window, her white hair primly styled, her smile very much resembling stereotypical ideas of what a kind Irish grandmother should look like—although she was only fifty-four-years-old. In 1987, Beckett published her first novel, Give Them Stones, which is often read as a representative work about the “Troubles.”² She wrote a second collection of stories, A Literary Woman (1990).³ Her later work, especially Give Them Stones, has usually and appropriately been considered in the context of the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. For example, Megan Sullivan’s 1999 study of women in the conflict, devotes an entire chapter to nationalist ideology and materialist politics in Beckett’s novel.⁴

Beckett’s status as a writer of the 1950s, however, and as an important voice in the discussion of women’s lives during this pivotal, if liminal, time period, has not fully been appreciated. Alone among Northern Irish writers in the 1950s, Mary Beckett documented and explored women’s domestic lives before the first stirrings of second-wave feminism, and before the violence of the “Troubles” changed the literary terrain of Northern Ireland. Her short stories present unconventional women characters whose lives are nonetheless dominated by concepts of shame and propriety. The paradigm of the “culture of shame,” as theorized by Ruth Benedict in her study of Japanese customs, helps us to understand how societal boundaries are inscribed on the lives of the characters Beckett portrays—sometimes in a show of masculine propriety, but often in a self-perpetuating cycle of shaming that is inflicted upon women by other women.⁵ Beckett’s early work affirms Sullivan’s point that Northern women writers have shown more concern for “day-to-day material conditions” and with their characters’ domestic relationships than with issues related to the sectarian divide.⁶

Beckett’s focus on the Northern Irish culture of shame as it impacted women’s lives is most prominent in five of her early short stories: “The Excursion,” which won a 1949 BBC short story competition; “Ruth,” published as the lead story in the first issue of the Belfast literary magazine Threshold in 1957; “Flags and Emblems,” published in the Cork journal Irish Writing in 1955; “The Master and the Bombs;” and “Theresa,” published in the Bell in 1953. As Clair Wills notes in her discussion of media coverage surrounding both the Anne Lovett case and the “X” case, “In earlier years such tragic personal histories might well have been consigned to oblivion.”⁷ Beckett’s early stories, which predate these...