A Space Between: Transnational Feminism in Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle

The title character of Kate O'Brien's novel Mary Lavelle (1936) seems to have everything an Irish girl could want: not only is she the stunningly beautiful daughter of a distinguished doctor, she is also the fiancée of her hometown's most eligible bachelor. But it soon becomes clear that Mary is not entirely at ease with her supposed good fortune. After hearing of an opportunity abroad, Mary determines to leave these two roles behind for a short while, specifically in order to try on a different identity:

To go to Spain. To be alone for a little space, a tiny hiatus between her life's two accepted phases. To cease being a daughter without immediately becoming a wife. To be a free lance, to belong to no one place or family or person . . . Spain! ¹

These sudden longings for freedom and independence overwhelm Mary as she looks upon the "barren fig tree" in her backyard and realizes that figs "grew and ripened in Spain" (ML 33). Once in Spain, however, Mary does not become a "free lance" as she anticipates. Instead, the relationships that Mary forges with other women there profoundly affect her perception of the world around her. Much like the fig tree in her own backyard, Mary's growth—intellectual, emotional, and sexual—can only come to fruition abroad.

Throughout O'Brien's oeuvre, female development in a foreign landscape is a consistent theme. Nearly all of her novels feature some form of transnational movement, in most cases involving Irish women who leave their homeland. In her first novel, Without My Cloak (1931), the illegitimate peasant Christina is banished to America by the powerful Consadine family after they discover her affair with their heir apparent. Fanny Delahunt in The Flower of May (1953) spends an idyllic summer in Italy with her Belgian friend Lucille; together they plan to study at the Sorbonne. O'Brien's last novel, As Music and Splendour (1958), follows two Irish women, Clare Harvey and Rose Lenahan, through their operatic training and professional careers in France and Italy. In other novels, O'Brien inverts the tale so that Ireland itself becomes a foreign land: in The Last of Summer (1943), Helen Archer, who was born in England and raised in Belgium, spends thirteen years in Ireland as the reverend mother of a convent, and in The Land of Spices (1941), the half-Irish, half-French Angèle travels to Ireland to see the land of her father.

Even in these brief descriptions, a pattern emerges in O'Brien's fiction: each protagonist searches for meaning and independence separate from marriage and family. This process leads O'Brien's heroines to become especially invested in their friendships with other women; as Aibhe Smyth points out, "for Kate O'Brien, women are the 'primary presence' (in Adrienne Rich's phrase) and women's relationships to and with one another are what significantly shape her fiction."² While female relationships form a central part of O'Brien's work, but the critical discussion of these relationships has often overlooked how they are shaped by ethnicity and geography. It is common, for instance, to discuss Clare Harvey's attachment to her lover Luisa in As Music and Splendour, but explorations of how the characters' nationalities—Clare is Irish, Luisa Spanish—and of how the novel's setting in Italy affect this attachment are rare. O'Brien's characters frequently meet other women from different cultural backgrounds who are separated by sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, and other components of identity. Their interactions with these women nearly always produce some radical change within the protagonists.

Inderpal Grewal and Caran Kaplan's concept of "transnational feminism" offers a useful strategy for reading Mary Lavelle. They note that relationships between women "are uneven, often unequal, and complex. They emerge from women's diverse needs and agendas in many cultures and societies."³ This assertion challenges any reductive notion of a universal sisterhood fighting patriarchal oppression in favor of a more nuanced understanding of women's interactions with each other. Grewal and Kaplan...