Pregnancy, Privacy, and Domesticity in the Snapper
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Pregnancy, Privacy, and Domesticity in The Snapper Mary McGlynn New Hibernia Review, Volume 9, Number 1, Earrach/Spring 2005, pp. 141-156 (Article) Published by Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas DOI: 10.1353/nhr.2005.0024 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nhr/summary/v009/9.1mcglynn.html Access provided by City University of New York (19 Sep 2013 15:05 GMT) Mary McGlynn Pregnancy, Privacy, and Domesticity in The Snapper The back cover of the current Penguin paperback edition of The Snapper lauds the novel for its “wit, candor, and surprising authenticity” in its account of an unplanned pregnancy and its effect on family life, and many critics—charmed by Roddy Doyle’s supposed working-class authenticity—emphasize the realism and populism of the novel. Yet, The Snapper is hardly a warm story. A less com- pliant reading of Doyle’s story could characterize the plot thus: the acquaintance rape of Sharon Rabbitte, a young woman who braves neighborhood jibes as she carries her baby, is interwoven with the tale of her father, Jimmy, and his efforts to come to terms with her pregnancy. As she tries to conceal that the baby’s father is a neighbor and the father of a friend, Sharon must allay her own father’s fears of his personal humiliation, which he eventually represses through an intrusive and biologically explicit interest in Sharon’s pregnancy. The text encourages oedipal readings, especially as the two men who force themselves on her body—her father and her rapist—are, demographically, almost identical. Sharon considers naming a boy after Jimmy, who, belatedly aware of his own lack of involvement in the births of his own six children, offers to be in the delivery room with her. Ruth Barton describes the dynamic: “in effect, the pregnancy becomes his and the threat of the single mother bringing up her child in a nonpaternalistic family unit is dispelled.”1 The Snapper effaces the horror of Sharon’s violation at the same time as it minimizes the impact of her pregnancy on her society. Rather than frankness or unsentimen- tality, The Snapper thus constructs a world in which the truth is buried or erad- icated. Rather than a mere heartwarming tale of a gutsy working-class family, Doyle’s story raises uncomfortable questions about public and private space in contemporary Irish society. Doyle shows a working-class family evading the traditional influences of nation and church, offers readers a pleasing view of collective identity, and .Ruth Barton, “Feisty Colleens and Faithful Sons: Gender in Irish cinema,” Cinéaste, , – (Spring–Summer, ), . new hibernia review / iris ireannach nua, 9:1 (spring / earrach, 2005), 141–156 Pregnancy, Privacy, and Domesticity in The Snapper endorses the validity of a variety of linguistic registers—all sentiments in keep- ing with the postnationalist socialism he articulates in interviews.2 But, at the same time, Doyle’s choice of the father as the text’s main focalizer—it is, after all, usually his point of view that orients the text—as well as his portrayal of the pressures that economic stress places on domestic space in contemporary Ire- land, undermine his reputed open-minded collectivism. Indeed, these aspects of the novel effectively sanction the middle-class constructions of privacy and privilege that Doyle is often read as wanting to resist. The Snapper’s incestuous dynamics implicitly propose the behaviors and interactions of Doyle’s working-class urban characters as a metaphor for con- temporary Irish society. The gender and class underpinnings of what is per- ceived to be normative political and social engagement are, therefore, necessar- ily highlighted in a contemporary Irish novel such as this; as Clair Wills notes, “the relation between the public and private spheres, while always complex, is particularly entangled in the case of Ireland.”3 Sharon’s willingness to take charge of her unwanted pregnancy becomes eclipsed, both structurally and narratologically, by Jimmy’s imperative to regain control of his household and his social milieu. Sharon can recapture her authority only through a public dis- play of a simultaneously liberating and repressive social norm: deprecating humor. Only by submitting to public involvement in her private life is Sharon permitted to carry her child successfully to term. The Snapper discloses the logic by which what is private is converted to the public domain, suggesting that, for the working class, the distinction is not as hard and fast as domesticity the- ory would have it. Doyle’s family romance has implications beyond the merely domestic. He reveals contemporary Irish family life to be self-consuming and subject to the very strictures he seeks to deny: the traditional stranglehold of family, the inevitability of gossip and public critique, and the denial of individ- ual will or mobility. Clair Wills describes the cooperation of church and state in Ireland in advocating the adoption of middle-class nuclear family norms in the early decades of the twentieth century. “[W]hat is crucial in the Irish context,” she writes,“is that while the middle class ideals of domesticity were deployed in the service of Catholic nationalist hegemony, the concomitant ideal of privacy within the home was decried.”4 The Rabbitte household exists outside of and is .See in particular James Drewett, “An Interview with Roddy Doyle,” Irish Studies Review, , (December, ), –;Charles Foran, “The Troubles of Roddy Doyle.” Saturday Night, , , (April, ), –; and the interviews cited in Caramine White, Reading Roddy Doyle (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, ). .Clair Wills,“Women, Domesticity and the Family: Recent Feminist Work in Irish Cultural Stud- ies,” Cultural Studies, 15, 1 (January, 2001), . .Wills, p. Pregnancy, Privacy, and Domesticity in The Snapper unfamiliar with bourgeois conceptions of privacy, while at the same time it strives to conform to models of appropriate domestic behavior. Throughout the novel, we see traces of class shame, efforts to better one’s situation, and discus- sions of space in language that accepts the middle-class status quo to which the family has, at best, limited access. Although Ellen-Raissa Jackson argues that “In Doyle’s novels, the family is no longer the inviolate space of freedom and soli- darity which the constitution revered and sought to protect,” external pres- sures do push the Rabbittes towards the appearance of exactly that sort of fam- ily structure.5 Though it depicts a community comfortable with out-of-wedlock pregnancy, The Snapper can be seen as a site for the suppression of non-nor- mative family structures and for anxiety about family dynamics. Doyle’s family stories—from The Commitments to The Woman Who Walked Into Doors—regularly circle around questions of over-intimate relationships, inbreeding, and romance between a child and a parent substitute. Concerns about these sorts of ersatz incestuous families mark a number of Irish novels of the s and s, and in particular, novels about emigration. Underlying the desire for novelty and adventure (often figured through sex with someone of a different race) lurks the need to avoid incest, an anxiety about replicating the existing family and, hence, the status quo. Doyle’s novel represents a variation on the “ersatz incestuous family” that threatens but does not depict incest. Taken as a group, such texts—although individually disengaged from debates in the Irish public forum—may be seen to speak to fears that Ireland’s population, still reduced in the aftermath of famine and mass emigration, offers insufficient opportunity for change or diversity at a time when government and media alike portray the past as wrongheaded and continued progress towards moder- nity as crucial.6 Concerns about modernization and the move to a secular state are fre- quently acted out within domestic scenes in contemporary texts. At times, this tendency can serve to attenuate or deflect the political and structural implica- tions; as Pam Perkins, Nancy Armstriong, and other feminist critics have noted, the tendency to situate events in the home serves as a way to insist on their nat- uralness, their normality. The depoliticized domestic scene can then function as .Ellen Raissa-Jackson,“Gender, Violence and Hybridity: Reading the Postcolonial in Three Irish Novels,” Irish Studies Review, , (August, ), . .Apprehensions about immigration to Ireland were not a concern at the time of the publication of The Snapper,but have become a major issue in Irish political life. Such debate has focused on whether or not Ireland—which in fact has one of the lowest population densities in Europe—has space to accommodate the arrivals. Such interest in the physical, spatial aspects of immigration may be seen as in keeping with historic attention to privacy. Pregnancy, Privacy, and Domesticity in The Snapper a seemingly apolitical site where national conflicts can be resolved or depict a “despairing flight from politics” altogether.7 Historical and political conditions in Irish society require adaptations of the idea of the home as apolitical.8 In the Barrytown trilogy, an inescapable aware- ness of class also affects conceptions of the public and the private. In examining the ways in which Doyle suggests that Irish working-class resistance to traditional constructions of gendered domestic space arises, it is useful to consider both the novel and its film version Unlike the film adaptation of Doyle’s first novel, The Commitments,which substantially altered the themes of the book, Stephen Frears’s movie addresses the same concerns as its source novel even when it adds or deletes scenes or shifts emphasis. The plot and dialogue are largely the same, though—because the producer of The Commitments holds the copyright on the original names of the characters—the film does not use the Rabbitte family name of the book, substituting Curley, and changing Jimmy’s name to Dessie.