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Representations of Femininity in the Novels of Edna 0 'Brien, 1960-1996

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Representations of Femininity in the Novels of Edna 0 'Brien, 1960-1996 Representations of Femininity in the Novels of Edna 0 'Brien, 1960-1996 being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by Amanda Greenwood, BA, MLitt (University of Bristol) April 1999 Acknowledgements My greatest debts are to Dr Jane Thomas (University of Hull) and Professor Marion Shaw (Loughborough University) for their unfailing inspiration and support throughout their supervision of this thesis. I am grateful for financial assistance in the forms of a part time studentship from Loughborough University followed by a full time graduate teaching assistantship from the University of Hull. I would also like to thank Dr Katharine Cockin and Professor Angela Leighton of the University of Hull for reading draft versions of this thesis and advising me on revisions. Finally I am indebted to Edna O'Brien's publicity officer, Nick MacDowell of the Orion Publishing Group Limited, for supplying extensive copies of reviews of House of Splendid Isolation. Contents Introduction 1-30 Chapter 1, Negative Romance: The Country Girls trilogy (1960-1964) 31-80 Chapter 2, 'Glacial Nihilism': August is a Wicked Month (1965) and Casualties of Peace (1966) 81-124 Chapter 3, 'Woman must write herself': A Pagan Place(1970) and Night (1972) 125-175 Chapter 4, 'Ireland has always been a woman': Mother Ireland (1976) 176-219 Chapter 5, 'An Other Landscape': The High Road (1988) 220-275 Chapter 6, 'Might before Right': House of Splendid Isolation (1994) and Down by the River (1996) 276-343 Conclusion 344-347 Bibliography 348-363 11 Introduction In the National Portrait Gallery Bill Brandt's black and white photograph of Edna O'Brien (1980) is exhibited alongside portraits of Doris Lessing and Germaine Greer.' The Gallery's implicit recognition of O'Brien as a contemporary woman writer of significance is reinforced by the portrait's caption, which reads: 'Since her first novel The Country Girls (1960), O'Brien has addressed the subject [sic] of women in society, of solitude and sexual repression'. Assessors of O'Brien have tended largely to ignore the 'women in society' element of her work, concentrating rather upon 'solitude and sexual repression' and upon O'Brien's Irishness. It is interesting that for the National Portrait Gallery O'Brien's status as a writer seems to transcend the category of 'Irish writer', to which she is all too frequently relegated despite having spent her entire career in London. Yet O'Brien's perceived status is easily undermined. In the 1960s chapter of A Century of Women Sheila Rowbotham echoes the National Portrait Gallery's suggested link between O'Brien and Lessing. Rowbotham's tone is, however, somewhat more reductive of O'Brien; she refers to 'novels [of the 1960s] which explored how to be women, from Doris Lessing's lust and autonomy to Edna O'Brien's romance and abandonment' (Rowbotham, 1997, 338). 'Romance and abandonment' implies, as the more dignified 'solitude and sexual repression' does not, a lightweight and uncontrolled literary output in contrast to the 1 The date is significant, since it indicates O'Brien's ongoing importance as a literary figure; many of the Gallery's exhibits are transient. 1 implicitly valorised Lessmg.• 2 Rowbotham's 'from ... to' does encourage comparison in terms of a perceived literary hierarchy. Before going on to outline the theoretical methodologies of this thesis, I shall examine critical responses to O'Brien's persona and writing, focussing initially on media coverage and moving on to literary criticism. Throughout my analysis of media coverage I shall concentrate specifically on responses to House of Splendid Isolation (1994) since O'Brien's publishers were helpful in supplying a wide range of reviews of this particular text. In her article 'Edna O'Brien's "Stage-Irish" Persona: An "Act" of Resistance' Rebecca Pelan addresses the issue of O'Brien's standing as a writer, arguing that it is her public 'persona' which has led to 'the relegation of [her] writing to the realm of popular fiction, a ... category which allows the content of her writing to go virtually unnoticed' (Pelan, 1993, 75). Critical responses to O'Brien suggest that she may well have been taken more seriously as a writer were it not for her appearance which has been focussed on by reviewers and even by literary critics to an obsessive degree, often precluding any objective analysis of her work. Time has failed to modify this mixed blessing -- Claudia Pattison, reviewing House of Splendid Isolation for the Western Mail, affirms that 'with her flame-red hair, milky skin and mesmerising green-flecked eyes, [O'Brien] is a bewitching Celtic beauty, even in her sixties' (Pattison, 1994, 8). O'Brien herself is not unaware of this problem; interviewed by Andrew Duncan for the Radio Times, she says: 2 I take 'abandonment' to refer to women being abandoned by men (a recurrent element of O'Brien's plots) rather than to sexual abandon. In these terms, 'abandonment' does not contradict the NPG caption's 'sexual repression.' 2 'I'm a serious writer. Take more notice of the books than how I look. There's a notion that if one is photogenic, to put it jokingly, one is not serious' (Duncan, 1994, 26). Yet Duncan's article begins: 'Her red hair is tousled immaculately, her pale, powdered skin is flawless. She puts her small-boned hands in her lap, opens wide her clear, green eyes and awaits the first question ... Here she is, a veritable flame-haired temptress'. Ann Chisholm concentrates likewise on O'Brien's 'natural good looks -- long greenish eyes, tumbled auburn hair, delicate bone structure [and] slender figure', though she can't resist adding that these 'have lasted well, possibly with a bit of help' (Chisholm, 1994, 10). Denis Staunton defines her 'public image' as 'somewhere between Maude Gonne and Mata Hari' (Staunton, 1996, 6). An entertaining, though less recent example of this genre is Terry Coleman's interview for The Guardian. This begins: 'You decide", she said with that red hair, giving me my choice of the room' (Coleman, 1994, 5). As if talking hair were not prodigious enough, O'Brien, 'gazing at [Coleman] with green eyes', proves adept at countering his sensationalism: Hadn't her first novel, back in 1960, been burned in her native village? 'Have a ginger biscuit', she said, and agreed the book was burned. Holding a copy of her new book, I said there were some lovely sinful bits in that. 'Have some more coffee', she said. 'You look for the sin. I'll look for the coffee'. O'Brien has often been accused of capitalising on both her appearance and her Irishness. Mn Chisholm comments upon O'Brien's perceived tendency to play up to the gallery: 3 Edna O'Brien has a dramatic streak; in manner she is more like an actress than a writer, given to sudden vivid changes of expression and big gestures, flinging her arms wide and her head back to show exhiZration, hunching into herself and shrinking to express grief (Chisholm, 1994, 10). Chisholm clearly entertains rigid notions of the kind of mannerisms appropriate to 'actress' and 'writer'. It is difficult to establish the extent to which O'Brien undermines her own position as a 'serious' writer, and how much it is undermined for her. She has advertised shampoo -- Wella's `Crisan' in the 1970s -- and she has appeared on television chat shows, whilst claiming somewhat improbably in an interview with Claudia Pattison that 'the first book I ever read was Introducing James Joyce by TS Eliot' (Pattison, 1994, 8). Elsewhere she cites the formative influence of novels such as Rebecca, but also of Tolstoy and Chekhov. O'Brien clearly sees her own work as enduring -- in the interview with Terry Coleman she explains her reluctance to refer to the IRA by name in House of Splendid Isolation, arguing that 'a book isn't just for the week or year it's published'. Whilst wanting -- and apparently expecting -- her works to become an established part of the literary canon, O'Brien's attitude towards academics, literary critics and journalists is defensive. In an article called 'It's a Bad Time Out There for Emotion' she argues that: ...the prevailing ethos of literary criticism, especially in England, inclines to the scalping, where the clever bow to the clever, where the merest manifestation of 4 feeling is pilloried, and where consideration of language itself is zero (O'Brien, 1993, 20). Given the conflicting nature of perceptions of O'Brien's intellectual and literary status, this is an understandable response. The media has a somewhat precarious sense of O'Brien's place within contemporary fiction. Clare Boylan argues that 'pioneers in the field of sexual science are women over 40 such as Margaret Atwood, Edna O'Brien, Fay Weldon, the late Angela Carter and Marilyn French' (Boylan, 1995, 4). Along with the National Portrait Gallery, Boylan acknowledges O'Brien's significance as a contemporary woman writer. Seamus Heaney posits O'Brien as a pillar at least of the Irish literary canon, referring to the manifestation of 'Irish place invoked under two different systems of naming' in writers 'from Oliver Goldsmith to Edna O'Brien' (Heaney, 1995, 1). (Heaney's 'from ...to' seems, unlike Rowbotham's, chronological rather than hierarchical). Yet Mick Brown seems irritated at O'Brien's own familiarity with Irish and other literatures: 'There is a certain theatricality in her manner, in the effusive literary allusions (it is hard for her to navigate a conversation without referring to Yeats, Camus and Gogol, and "Samuel Beckett always used to say ...")' (Brown, 1994, 21).
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