Eating in Remembrance of Themselves: Mythic Saints and Martyrs in Two Stories by Julia O’Faolain

Woman ought to be able to find herself among other things, through images of herself already deposited in history and the conditions of production of the work of man, and not on the basis of his work, his genealogy.

Luce Irigaray An Ethics of Sexual Difference

Introduction

Like her compatriots Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Johnston, contemporary Irish author Julia O’Faolain has consistently engaged with the dominant myths that have informed Western culture, placing especial focus on detrimental myths of femininity. The bulk of her existing oeuvre was produced between the late 1960s and early 1980s—arguably the most volatile period of the Troubles when the Irish Republican Army waged a guerrilla war against the British government to end some seven hundred years of occupation. Many of O’Faolain’s works focus specifically on the ways in which the Republican myth of a pure and unadulterated Ireland encouraged the strict surveillance of behaviour that was deemed to be non-traditional or deviant. Several critics have noted how such ideals were embodied in the myth of “Mother Ireland,” which, especially through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, prescribed feminine behaviour based on old legends about beautiful, loyal, and passive women who would inspire war and revolution but not actively engage in such activities. “Throughout the history of its colonization,” C.L. Innes has argued, “Ireland has been represented by British imperialists as well as Irish nationalists and artists as female: she is Hibernia, Eire, Mother Ireland, the Poor Old Woman, the Shan Van Vocht, Cathleen ni Houlihan, the Dark Rosaleen” (2). These very distinct manifestations of a mythical feminine Ireland have been subsumed in the rhetoric of andocentric militarism (the ira) and patriarchal religion (the Catholic Church) for the purpose of disseminating feminine passivity and subservience. To be sure, women traditionally served as activists within paramilitary organizations “as symbols of an oppressed nation” and as models of republican morality, yet they were discouraged from participating actively in the actual rebellions (Curtin 133).

The broader focus of O’Faolain’s work, elaborated most prominently in her celebrated novel No Country for Young Men (1980), is the trans-generational impact of such feminine myths, which are transmitted by an older generation and instilled in the minds of the young. Laura B. Vandale argues that such myths generate in the character of Judith, the old convent nun in No Country, “two intertwining and destructive forces—her passion for Ireland and her passion against her sexual awakening and attraction to men” (22). As it turns out, Judith is the aunt of the story’s other female protagonist, Gráinne, who has been catechized by a “monastic tradition” that “had described woman as a bag of shit”; “it [therefore] followed that sexual release into such a receptacle was a topic about as fit for sober discussion as a bowel movement” (O’Faolain, No Country 155). O’Faolain’s typically acerbic humour responds to the combined forces of Irish politics and religion and underscores what Tomas R. Moore calls a “paradigm of control and entrapment of women throughout Irish history” (9). Such a paradigm demanded that women adhere to an established order based on inherited myths about women who willingly sacrifice their bodies for the nourishment of the nation.

As in much of O’Faolain’s longer fiction, her short stories critique the legacy of a paternally endorsed mythology that confines “woman” to the restrictive categories of saint and whore, martyr and malefactor. While her best known work explores how mythological traditions resonate in contemporary Irish society, O’Faolain devotes just as much time to the wider European traditions of Christianity, which helped to shape what became known as “Irish Catholicism.”¹ By focusing on one story from each context (sixth-century Gaul and twentieth-century Ireland), I intend to show how the larger body of O’Faolain’s work contributes to the task of what Judith Butler calls a “feminist genealogy” (9, 165, 188), which uncovers and exposes women’s disfigurement (Cornell, Beyond Accommodation 166) and traces the various ways in...