Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room and the Ghosts of Past Futures

Like much of Kate O’Brien’s oeuvre, The Ante-Room (1934) establishes a taboo romance plot in relief against a larger vista of national upheaval and uncertainty. The novel is set during the height of the Land Wars in 1880. With the establishment of the Land League of Mayo in 1879, followed by the Land League of Ireland soon thereafter, tenant farmers and poor townspeople in the Irish countryside began a campaign of coordinated agitations against landlords and officials of the British Empire. Given their position as a wealthy, although Catholic, landowning family, the Mulqueens of Roseholm ought to show some concern for the existential threat looming outside their estate. Yet they mostly ignore the situation. Instead, the melancholic atmosphere of O’Brien’s novel issues forth from more personal concerns; the Mulqueen matriarch, Teresa, lies on her deathbed after a protracted illness. The family have gathered by her bedside for a triduum prayer service that lasts over the course of the three autumnal feast days of the Catholic Church. This gathering stirs up old and forbidden flames that bring about the adulterous romance plot at the center of the novel. Agnes, the youngest of the Mulqueen daughters, harbors a love for her sister’s husband, Vincent. Since Vincent reciprocates these feelings, he spends much of the novel poised to undertake a fantasy of escape from his current wife, Marie-Rose. Torn between happiness and sisterly fidelity, Agnes ultimately chooses the latter, and Vincent, distraught at this rejection, commits suicide at the end of the novel. As he pulls the trigger on his hunting rifle, he gazes backward into the past—“his thoughts far off in boyhood”—because he has been denied a fantasy of escape to a future life.¹

The Ante-Room is a novel rife with anxieties about the future. Each of the Mulqueens feels the impingement of time through the sounds of mass bells that emerge from the town of Mellick as well as the chimes of the grandfather clock in the front hall of Roseholm—a clock that Agnes wishes to silence at several points in the novel. Teresa’s impending death seems a natural locus for such anxiety, but O’Brien also points to another source through Agnes’s romantic entanglements. The two men who court Agnes throughout the novel propose possible futures that require her to relinquish her agency. The first proposal comes from the smug and capricious Dr. William Curran early on in his stay at Roseholm. Curran’s vision of domestic stability appears mundane when compared to Vincent’s subsequent promise of a romantic fantasy of liberation from the judging and prying eyes of Agnes’s family and of prudish Ireland. At the same time, the novel never really presents either man’s envisioned future as an acceptable possibility. Underneath both Curran’s intentions and the moral quandary in which Vincent’s proposal places Agnes lies the expectation for reproduction.

In order to accept either proposal, Agnes must succumb to a vision of the future in which she exists for the express purpose of fulfilling the wishes of her potential husband or lover. As a wealthy doctor looking to cement his place in a changing Ireland, Curran explicitly idealizes Agnes as a wife who will bear him children. In comparison, Vincent asks Agnes to escape with him beyond the stuffy propriety of domestic Irish life; his fantasy offers no direct mention of children or reproduction or motherhood. Nevertheless, O’Brien circulates Vincent’s escapist fantasy around the fact that Marie-Rose has failed to provide him with offspring: “they were . . . still childless, and inclined to an unspoken superstition that that was only a symptom of the predestined misfortune of their union” (A 103). Agnes’s growing anxiety about what happens after her mother’s death is thus inseparable from the fact that the characters who inhabit Roseholm conflate futurity with a patriarchal social order that prioritizes reproduction as the ultimate use value for women.

Reproduction provides a lens through which to view The Ante-Room as part of O’Brien’s contemporary...