UNIVERZITA KARLOVA – FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
ÚSTAV ANGLOFONNÍCH LITERATUR A KULTUR
Shame and Belonging in the Fiction of Maeve Brennan
DIPLOMOVÁ PRÁCE
Vedoucí diplomové práce (supervisor):
doc. Clare Wallace, PhD. M.A.
Zpracovala (author):
Klára Hutková, MA (Hons)
Studijní obor (subject):
Anglofonní literatury a kultury
Praha, 7. května 2021
Declaration
Prohlašuji, že jsem tuto diplomovou práci vypracovala samostatně, že jsem řádně citovala všechny použité prameny a literaturu a že práce nebyla využita v rámci jiného vysokoškolského studia či k získání jiného či stejného titulu.
I declare that the following MA thesis is my own work for which I used only the sources and literature mentioned, and that this thesis has not been used in the course of other university studies or in order to acquire the same or another type of diploma.
V Praze dne 7. května 2021 Klára Hutková
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Permission
Souhlasím se zapůjčením diplomové práce ke studijním účelům.
I have no objections to the MA thesis being borrowed and used to study purposes.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my supervisor, Doc. Clare Wallace, for her supervision and valuable suggestions. I am grateful to the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University for being a supportive and motivating environment. Spending my final year at Trinity College Dublin also further inspired me in my research. Finally, I want to thank my partner and family for their patience and support.
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List of Abbreviations
Works by Maeve Brennan
LWL The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker. Dublin: The Stinging Fly, 2017. RG The Rose Garden. Washington, DC: Counterpoint Press, 2000.
SA The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin. London: Flamingo, 2000.
V The Visitor. Dublin: New Island, 2019.
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Table of Contents
Declaration ...... 2 Permission ...... 3 Acknowledgements ...... 4 List of Abbreviations ...... 5 Table of Contents ...... 6 1. Introduction ...... 7 1.1 About the author and the topic ...... 7 1.2 Shame: The self, others, and the link between ...... 9 1.3 Rethinking shame (and guilt)...... 11 1.4 “Underground” shame ...... 12 1.4 Shame in literature ...... 15 1.5 Brennan’s double identity I: From Ireland to America ...... 17 1.6 Brennan’s double identity II: A woman writer ...... 23 1.7 Thesis layout...... 28 2. Laughing off shame ...... 30 2.1 Notes from The New Yorker ...... 30 2.2 Inventing female flânerie ...... 33 2.3 The narrator who appears ...... 39 2.4 Shifting perspectives: Common shame and guilt ...... 47 2.5 The view from the window ...... 51 2.6 Belonging by shaming: In-groups and out-groups ...... 59 3. Retracing steps...... 66 3.1 (Not) returning home: The Visitor ...... 66 3.2 Apples of shame ...... 72 3.3 Failed couples: The Derdons and the Bagots ...... 75 3.4 The oppressiveness of home ...... 81 3.5 The falls of affection ...... 85 4. Deep-rooted shame ...... 98 4.1 Carmine, crimson, blush, rose, scarlet, wine, purple, pink, and blood ...... 98 4.2 Generations of shame ...... 101 4.3 Women inhabiting patriarchy ...... 105 4.4 Ireland and motherhood ...... 110 4.5 Old shame ...... 115 4.6 Belonging ...... 120 5. Conclusion ...... 127 Works Cited ...... 132 Thesis Abstract ...... 136 Abstrakt práce...... 138 Key Words / Klíčová slova ...... 140
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1. Introduction
1.1 About the author and the topic
Maeve Brennan was born in Dublin in 1917, where she grew up, and spent her adult life in New York, writing for The New Yorker. She contributed to the “Talk of the Town” section of the magazine under the pseudonym “the long-winded lady”. A collection of these short texts was published in 1969 under the title The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker, identifying Maeve Brennan as their author. This part of her work serves as a unique probe into life in New York around the 1960s as a young, independent woman would have experienced it.
Brennan also wrote short stories, a few of which take place at an exclusive residential area called Herbert’s Retreat, where women compete for dominance. It seems that all the families employ Irish maids, whose contempt for the American homeowners shapes the narratives. Brennan, the daughter of the Irish ambassador to the United States, moved in high social circles, but on the other hand she had been raised in traditional Irish settings with values closer to those of the maids. This ambiguity made her an excellent observer of New York society, as well as an outsider both in the USA and in Ireland.
The majority of Brennan’s stories are set in Dublin and built around the themes of rejection and severed family relationships. Some were collected in another 1969 publication titled In and Out of Never-Never Land and others in the 1974 Christmas Eve.1 Brennan’s last contribution appeared in The New Yorker in 1981, at which time she had been suffering from mental breakdowns and had disappeared from public eye. As Angela Bourke notes, her “work began to be rediscovered at about the same time as new mental-health legislation allowed others to intervene on her behalf and find accommodation for her in a nursing home.”2 Brennan died in New York in 1993 and left no children behind. Her lifelong friend and editor William Maxwell wrote in her obituary: “She was a small, charming, effortlessly witty, generous woman with green eyes, hugely oversized horn-rimmed glasses, and chestnut hair worn in a vast beehive.”3
1 These were “long out of print” by 1997 when new collections of Brennan’s work started to appear. {William Maxwell, “Introduction by William Maxwell,” Maeve Brennan. The Springs of Affection, Stories of Dublin (Boston and New York: A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998) 3.} 2 Angela Bourke, Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy: an Irish Writer in New York (London: Pimlico, 2005) 274. 3 Maxwell 1. 7
Maeve Brennan, image source:
The renewed interest in Brennan’s work was marked by a republication of her short stories under the titles The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin (1997) and The Rose Garden (2000). After a discovery of a previously unknown manuscript, Brennan’s only novella The Visitor was also published in 2000, as well as a new edition of The Long-Winded Lady. In 2004 Bourke published her detailed biography titled Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy: an Irish Writer in New York.4 In 2013 a play about the author called Maeve’s House was staged by Eamon Morrissey at the Abbey Theatre. These new books, including Bourke’s biography, have been since republished – some several times.
The topic of this MA thesis is the relationship between shame and belonging in Brennan’s work. A lack of a sense of truly belonging somewhere and an anxiety over shame are two themes that run through all her writing. Shame takes many shapes and forms, from the trivial and humorous that is visible on the surface, to being a subconscious undercurrent tied to issues of identity and acceptance, which manifests itself with a variety of symptoms. Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady pieces, as well as her Herbert Retreat’s stories are mostly entertaining. On the other hand, her Dublin-based fiction is heavy and sombre. The judging eye is always there in her writing, even in the seemingly safe environment of the family house, and the characters need to constantly negotiate with it. It produces emotional anxiety, where self-determination is at odds with family and social expectations, which are often tied to gender.
4 Bourke’s biography is also available under the title Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker. 8
Brennan’s writing has been important as an example of a female voice in mid-twentieth- century New York. It reflects both her Irish upbringing during the formative years of the new Irish Republic, and her life and career in America. Despite her descriptions of beautiful houses, gardens and garments, there is always “apprehension that has no known cause,” which is worth exploring through the lenses of psychology, history, and gender.5
1.2 Shame: The self, others, and the link between
Shame is understood either as an emotion or an affect. Elspeth Probyn explains that the choice of terminology tends to be shaped by our perspective, as “the humanities and social sciences lean toward emotion,” while the sciences, including psychology “tend to privilege affect.”6 Defining shame is not straightforward, as Katharina Metz points out:
Do we talk about being embarrassed for greeting a stranger we mistook for somebody we know? Or do we talk about the feeling of not being loved by the one who means everything to us? Do we talk about your reaction one morning when a painter was watching through the window as we stepped out of the shower? Do we talk about how it feels to be humiliated in front of our colleagues at work, or do we talk about our colleagues’ feelings when our boss humiliates us in front of them?7
Shame is the “premier social emotion” according to Thomas J. Scheff, which is clear in all these common examples of shame presupposing the gaze of others, as well as immediate judgement.8 Suzanne M. Retzinger emphasises the importance of emotions mapping social bonds, which are in both cases social, as well as psychological phenomena. She adds that “[e]motions are a way to monitor relationships between self and other, separateness as well as togetherness.”9 Nathan Harris puts forward two common ways of defining shame. One “describes shame as a response to social threat, which is precipitated by the individual’s perception that they have been rejected or disapproved of in some way.”10 Due to our natural need to be accepted, shame is necessarily linked to the issue of self-worth.11 In this view, the emotion is a warning sign that
5 Maxwell 4. 6 Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) xv, 11. 7 Katharina Metz, Shame as Narrative Strategy - Prose by Scottish Writers Laura Hird, Jackie Kay, A.L. Kennedy and Ali Smith. University of Konstanz, doctoral dissertation (2009): 7,
Alternatively, shame can be seen as related to one’s identity, occurring “when an individual perceives that they have failed to live up to an ideal or standard that they uphold,” according to Harris.12 Kaye Mitchell sees this in similar terms: “the question of shame is utterly imbricated with questions of identity and selfhood – particularly, but not only, flawed selfhood.13 Due to its inwardness, where the self is judged by the individual in question, such shame is similar to guilt. However, guilt is felt about a specific action or “a transient part of the self,” while shame always concerns the whole self.14 Harris emphasizes that while each of the definitions has some merit, neither is sufficient on its own:
A critique of both the social threat and the personal failure accounts of shame is that they fail to adequately explain the complex relationship between the individual and the social contexts in which shame occurs, either conceptualising shame as a response to values that are extrinsic to the person (social threat conception) or having little to say about the social context at all (personal failure conception).15
Shame encompasses the evaluation of both the self, and its relation to society. Furthermore, the judge is never only society or the self, separated from each other, as the individual’s values stem from their cultural background. When viewed as an emotion that is equally tied to one’s social status and identity, shame also concerns issues of self-determination. Gal Katz points out that shame was an important topic for philosophers of the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, who linked the emotion to human rationality, as “[t]o be rational is to be conscious of oneself as separate.“16 In a circular manner, humanity’s natural tendency to avoid shame, demonstrated in the story of Adam and Eve by their decision to hide behind the fig leaf, is also linked to rationality.17 Viewed as such, shame is “an existential affect, pointing to the burden, unique to human beings, of coming to terms with being externally determined in ways that contradict our spiritual drive for self-determination.”18
12 Harris 65. 13 Kaye Mitchell, Writing Shame: Contemporary Literature, Gender and Negative Affect (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) 2. 14 Harris 65. 15 Harris 66. 16 Gal Katz, “Alleviating love’s rage: Hegel on shame and sexual recognition,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28.4 (2020): 760, Taylor and Francis Online
1.3 Rethinking shame (and guilt)
Scholars focusing on the theory of shame today tend to agree that until recently, shame was largely avoided in academia. According to the psychoanalyst Andrew Morrison, for a long time shame was mentioned only in passing in his field, with the exception of Helen Block Lewis’s book Shame and Guilt in Neurosis, published in 1971.19 Alfred Adler placed it into a category of affects accompanying “a presentiment of a defeat”, yet he listed it, along with anxiety and bashfulness, among “primitive expedients for gaining security,” as opposed to what he considered more complex emotions: modesty, conscientiousness and nervous attacks.20 Scheff shows that even though Sigmund Freud noticed suppressed shame in some of his patients, he labelled it as an emotion experienced by children, women and “savages”, while those that ticked the box of civilised men were deemed to experience guilt instead.21
Along similar lines, early anthropologists coined the term “shame cultures” for pre- modern societies that they were studying, thus linking the affect with an idea of social under- development.22 These cultures came to be understood as “relying for social control on the sensitivity of individuals to negative perceptions of others, which was juxtaposed to a development of conscience.”23 Twentieth-century philosophy seems to at least partly copy this trend. Examining Martin Heidegger’s concept of existential guilt, Robert D. Stolorow argues for “a move toward greater authenticity, toward a taking ownership of one’s existing […] often accompanied by an emotional shift from being dominated by shame to an embracing of existential guilt and anxiety.”24
Outside of academia, Ruth Leys documents existence of the shame-guilt dichotomy in instruction materials of American secret services from the 1960s. In a form of “watered-down Freudianism“, their interrogation techniques focused on eliciting feelings of guilt in the detainee, believing it to be key to facilitating compliance.25 The process, which was meant to establish the interrogator as a father figure, was believed to be thwarted by shame.26 The
19 Andrew Morrison, Shame: The Underside of Narcissism (New York: Routledge, 1989) ix-x. 20 Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001) 48. 21 Scheff 251. 22 Harris 64; Scheff 251; Edward W. Said also illustrates a similar emphasis on shame in the Western conceptualisation of the Orient as fundamentally different, and more primitive, than the Occident. (Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin Random House UK, 2019): 48-9. 23 Harris 64. 24 Robert D. Stolorow, “Toward Greater Authenticity: From Shame to Existential Guilt, Anxiety, and Grief,” International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 6.2 (2011): 286, Taylor and Francis Online
Jacques Lacan’s series of lectures Seminar XII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, delivered in May 1969 in Paris, stands out as another exception next to Lewis’s work. According to Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg, the psychoanalyst was “also deliberating on the contemporary social order” in his lectures, delivered in a period of social upheaval and protests in France.27 As Jacques-Alain Miller observes, “[w]hen he wanted to locate the analytic discourse in the context of a current moment of contemporary civilization, Lacan chose to conclude his seminar with the term shame and not guilt,” emphasizing its existential importance.28
Leys argues that the last several decades have seen a general shift from “a discourse of guilt to a discourse of shame.”29 This usually means widening our understanding of the emotion by pushing forwards the concept of supressed shame, as well as reclaiming what has previously been defined as guilt. As Herman A. Witkin notes in 1971 in his foreword to Lewis’s book, “it is not uncommon to find that one theoretician’s guilt is another’s shame.”30
1.4 “Underground” shame
Scheff points out to shame’s tendency to hide and remain hidden: “[b]ecause people usually feel ashamed about shame, one risks offense by referring to it.”31 Furthermore, Probyn questions the common belief that shame needs to be replaced by its positive counterparts:
National pride, black pride, gay pride, and now fat pride are all projects premised on the eradication of shame. As political projects, they clearly, and often with very good reasons, denounce shame.32
In contrast, scholars emphasize the importance of acknowledging shame, arguing that otherwise “it goes underground.”33 Efforts to push shame aside don’t take into account the tendency of
27 Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg, “Introduction,” eds Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg, Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections of Seminar XVII (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006) 2. 28 Jacques-Alain, Miller, “On Shame,” eds Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg, Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections of Seminar XVII (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006) 12. 29 Leys 3-4. 30 Herman A. Witkin, “Foreword,” Helen Block Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1971) 2. 31 Scheff 240. 32 Probyn 2. 33 Scheff 255. 12 shame to remain in place, only hidden. Harris explains this by pointing out to “a sense of dissonance that is uncomfortable and that motivates us to make sense of what has occurred.”34 Some individuals tend to respond by fighting the uncomfortable feeling, which can mean looking for excuses for one’s behaviour or seeking proofs that justify it.35 However, “scholars from a number of theoretical perspectives have also observed that, in some cases, individuals struggle to resolve shame, often with negative consequences.”36 This means either succumbing to shame and internalising the negative experience, or deflecting it through aggression. Lewis observed the former in her patients, and offers this as an explanation for her interest in shame and its connection to guilt.
One influence impelling me to an inquiry into these psychological states was the small, but nevertheless disturbing, group of patients who had terminated a successful analysis and then surprised me by returning after a few years in even worse psychic condition than when they had originally applied for treatment. Specifically, the insights they had gained during previous treatment were now being used by them against themselves, and with the addition of a vocabulary which had been increased by analysis.37
Lewis seems to have women in mind: ‘All of these cases had been characterised by traumatic childhood events which could have been expected to reassert themselves with a disturbance in life circumstances, and in each instance of relapse there was a life circumstance (childbirth, menopause) which could have been rationalised as the “explanation” for the therapeutic failure.’38 Her observation that the relapses are connected with a heightened self-criticism is relevant when analysing Brennan’s female characters, who often respond to shame by deepened insecurity. On the other hand, her male characters, as well as the female to an extent, also deflect shame. Harris, who focuses on shame in the context of criminal offences, argues that “by- passed” shame can manifest itself as confusion and guilt, which the individual struggles to resolve and expresses as anger and hostility towards others.39 He adds that
unresolved or unacknowledged shame can appear very much like an absence of shame, and there is evidence that this form of shame has the potential to be a destructive emotion that is associated with anger and defiance.40
34 Harris 68. 35 Harris 68. 36 Harris 68. 37 Helen Block Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1971) 12. 38 Lewis 12. 39 Harris 69. 40 Harris 71. 13
Sara Ahmed illustrates the benefits of acknowledging shame within a context of national healing. While belonging to a minority can bring about feelings of shame to its members when that minority is seen as falling short of the national ideal, this can be turned around when the state starts to see itself as having discriminated against the minority. Ahmed argues that when the individuals participating in a reparative dialogue are not personally responsible, because the acts of discrimination had taken place before they were born, they don’t feel guilt in the process of reconciliation. On the other hand, shame is unavoidable, as they become associated with the part of the nation deemed as having fallen short of its current ideal.
Shame is shared in such a scenario; it is felt on an individual basis, but only insofar as it relates to an individual’s membership in the state that is historically responsible, and where some members still carry the pain of the past. Witnessing such pain experienced by those that are only historically responsible can result in healing past wounds, which eventually brings about national pride, as showing shame is also an endorsement of the new ideals.41 Amanda Holmes argues along similar lines, also focusing on the victims of discrimination.
In the wake of a political project spanning three decades that was committed to a rhetoric of gay pride, a few queer theorists turned to the affect of shame to rethink queer politics in the twenty-first century. […] a politics of shame presents an interesting paradox: shame, in one of its most important senses, seems to dissipate when it is made public or when it is shared. That is, the negative and isolating qualities that are constitutive of the affect of shame are negated when it is confessed. To confess one’s shame is to destroy it.42
Shame means a fear of losing one’s right to belong with others, but it is made possible by the existence of a connection to them. Ahmed and Probyn argue that shame implies interest and love, as “shame both confirms and negates the love that sticks us together.”43 Shame shows that there is a possibility of loving and being loved, while simultaneously marking a boundary where such love could disappear.44 Probyn deems that
shame promises a return of interest, joy, and connection. This is why shame matters to individuals. And it is why studies of shame are important.45
41 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2004) 102-9. 42 Amanda Holmes, “That Which Cannot Be Shared: On the Politics of Shame,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29.3 (2015): 415, JSTOR
1.4 Shame in literature
Understood in these terms, as something hidden and almost subconscious, yet immensely powerful, shame is valuable both for the artist and for the critic. Metz observes that shame’s “undesirability and the inherent tendency to hide (oneself, the feeling itself, or the cause of that feeling) […] would seem ideally suited to literary representations—and thus to literary interpretation.”46 She adds rather poetically that “[i]t would be a shame indeed to ignore this aspect [of shame], especially since there are almost as many different possible shame readings as there are shame feelings.”47
As a literary example of the central role of shame “in motivating and regulating people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors,“ Jessica L. Tracy et al. mention Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, which, due to the protagonist’s unresolved shame about “failing to achieve the American dream” ends with his suicide.48 Examining the work of Albert Camus, Daniel Just argues that “[f]or Camus, shame always raises the question of who one is as related to the others.”49 Shame tries to suppress, Just observes, as well as reaffirming one’s identity, and as such has more potential than guilt to deal with conflict situations.50 According to Probyn, “[t]o consider shame is not to wallow in self-pity or in the resentment that accompanies guilt.” 51
Udaya Kumar shows how literary depictions of victims’ shame can bring attention to the injustice that has been committed. This is possible if shame is presented as an acceptable emotional vehicle. Comparing Ghandi’s autobiography to those of some Dalit authors, she suggests that by inserting moments of shame into his narrative, Ghandi made it possible for the members of the lowest class of Indian society to flag their social dislocation by depicting their own humiliation.52 Holmes speaks about “a structural aspect of the relational and political life of the subject” with respect to shame.53 Working in a male-dominated intellectual environment, as well as possessing a complex national and social identity, Brennan was able to draw on personal experience to expose issues that outsiders faced. She saw shifts in political, social and religious thinking in Ireland, perhaps most importantly with respect to the social construct of
46 Metz 9. 47 Metz 9. 48 Jessica L. Tracy et al., The Self-conscious Emotions: Theory and Research (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 2007) xiii. 49 Daniel Just, ”From Guilt to Shame: Albert Camus and Literature's Ethical Response to Politics,” MLN 125. 4 (2010): 911, JSTOR
Whether it is mentioned directly or implied, shame brings forth a variety of issues. Brennan uses shame to postulate different problems in her stories, including those of social status, gender, nationality, close relationships and self-determination. Merrilles Roberts argues that
[i]n being a gatekeeper for the self, shame can be both a destructive assertion of autonomy and a means of opening up the self to being shaped by others. It is this kind of self-reflexive, but also inter-subjective affective energy that I suggest modern affect theory can open up for literary studies.54
Shame marks a line that has been crossed, setting an individual in opposition to whomever is associated with the normativity that is evoked in that instance. The psychologists Ronda L. Dearing and June Price Tangney mention unacknowledged shame as the primary source of miscommunication between couples in 1990s bestsellers focusing on conflicts between men and women, which they have reviewed.55 They also offer psychological explanations based on links between behavioral tendencies stemming from gender and shame experiences, arguing that women and men tend to react differently to each other’s problems. While women offer sympathy, men suggest problem-solving, which leads to misunderstandings and conflicts, as well as feelings of failure and shame.56
The prevalence of shame in conflicts and misunderstandings between partners that Dearing and Tangney argue for is relevant for Brennan’s stories focused on marital relationships, where personal conflicts also represent the state of society, as they are connected to inherited values and hurts. Examining shame offers two paths, depending on whether the focus is on the social aspect of shame, or personal values and identity. While these two spheres necessarily co-interact, emphasis can be laid on the former or the latter. This thesis links shame and belonging, which is dictated by the nature of Brennan’s work. It conveys experiences of isolation and dislocation, or in other words a lack of belonging. This doesn’t mean that the issue of identity and personal values is not there, yet belonging is clearly the starting point, as well as the dominant theme due to the author’s emphasis on loneliness.
54 Merrilles Roberts, “Shame, Affect and the Literary Self,” The History of Emotions Blog, Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, 9 Nov 2020
1.5 Brennan’s double identity I: From Ireland to America
Maeve Brennan’s parents Robert Brennan (bottom, second from the left) and Una Brennan (standing, first from the left), image source:
Maeve Brennan was born to parents who were nationalists and intellectuals, and who participated in the fight for Irish independence. Her father, Robert Brennan, was born in 1881 and grew up in the town of Wexford.57 Her mother, born Anastasia Bolger in 1888, came from Coolnaboy near Wexford, where she grew up in “a large farmhouse among the fields […] the best in the townland.”58 This is often evoked in Maeve’s fiction.
Bourke explains that Robert’s “gradual immersion in cultural and political nationalism is a paradigm of early-twentieth-century life in Ireland.”59 She adds that “the ‘gay’ nineties were a light-hearted time,” when “trains brought audiences to music hall and light opera, and carried crowds to the seaside, while the spread of newspapers and magazines put jokes and humorous writing into brisk circulation.”60 Aged eighteen, Robert helped welcome Douglas Hyde to Wexford, and when a Gaelic League branch was established there, he became one of the first members, as well as its first Irish teacher.61 He also became County Secretary of Sinn Féin.62 Bourke explains that
57 Bourke 21-2. 58 Bourke 11. 59 Bourke 25. 60 Bourke 25. 61 Bourke 26-7. 62 Bourke 31. 17
Irish Ireland stood for a whole new way of life as the twentieth century began and Bob and Anastasia Bolger came to adulthood. The Gaelic League gave its young members co-educational language classes, dances, songs and music. The first generation of ordinary people to own bicycles, they roamed the countryside to attend local festivals and meetings. Their programme of cultural renewal was part of an international movement towards physical and social mobility, for women as well as men, and marked a significant departure from the colonised acquiescence of the older generation.63
Bourke emphasises that “[w]omen’s issues were part of the new rhetoric of freedom at the beginning of the twentieth century.”64 Before meeting Robert, Anastasia became a member of the Inghinidhe, a non-sectarian feminist organisation, and the secretary of the Wexford branch, aged nineteen.65 On the 4th of July 1908, a new column, entitled “Women Ways”, appeared in the newspaper Echo, speaking in a humorous yet confident voice to Irish women. Signed as “Una”, the monthly contributions are “overwhelmingly likely” to have been written by Maeve’s mother, according to Bourke, who started using this name as a nationalist substitution for Anastasia, officially adopting it at her and Bob’s wedding in 1909.66
Bourke explains that Una Brennan’s feminism did not conflict with “[t]he domestic arts at which she excelled,” as “her generation of emancipated women cultivated gardening and needlework as powerful weapons against one of the greatest social problems of the day: the mass emigration of young women from rural Ireland.”67 The couple took part in the Easter Rising in 1916, each as a member of a different organisation. Bob consequently spent a year in British prison, during which time Una gave birth to Meave on the 6th of January 1917.68 In one of her biographical stories, Maeve describes this period as “good many years of anxiety and trouble” for her mother. (SA 26)
All the first years of her marriage were dominated by the preparations for the Rebellion of Easter, 1916, and she had seen my father captured and condemned first to death and then to penal servitude for life. At the time that I was born, he was in jail in England and she was alone in Dublin, not knowing when, if ever, she would see him again. (SA 26)
The absence of the father and the mother’s anxiety will become major themes in Brennan’s writing. Bourke believes that “[t]he first four years of Maeve’s life were at once a time of
63 Bourke 31. 64 Bourke 17. 65 Bourke 17-8. 66 Bourke 11, 18-20. 67 Bourke 33. 68 Bourke 39-44. 18 displacement and danger.”69 Growing up, Maeve experienced raids in her family home, while her father was hiding due to his continuing engagement in republican activities, primarily as a journalist.70 On the 7th of April 1920, the writer Erskine Childers published an article titled “What It Means to Women” where he illustrated the brutality of anti-republican raids on an incident in Brennan’s home.
“In they rush” in the middle of the night, he writes, “bayonets at the charge” and pushing aside Una who is alone in the house with the children.71 “One soldier is drunk, and uses foul language,” writes Erskine about the infamous Black and Tans.72 “In spite of passionate supplications” Una is not allowed to be with her children during the search.73 Brennan describes these events in less dramatic terms, but Bourke points out that remnants of traumatic memories emerge in her fiction as well, such as when Mary Ann, one of the personas representing the author, automatically associates fire engines with armoured cars.74
She was putting the screen back when she heard the first of the engines come lurching and rumbling past the house, and she thought, What a big oil truck. But then came more rumbling and grinding, and she thought, Armored cars. (RG 297)
On the 21st of November of the same year, known as the first Bloody Sunday in Ireland, the Brennans were taking the children out for a walk. In his memoir Allegiance, Bob describes how he and his family saw people, “some of them bleeding from head and face,” running away from the stadium where the British forces had opened fire on civilians.75 After the incident, the family moved out of their house on 10 Belgrave Road in Rathmines and split; while the children were sent to Una’s relatives in Coolnaboy, Maeve’s parents moved to smaller rooms in Dublin under a false identity.76
At Christmas 1920 Éamon de Valera returned from the United States and, as the president of the Dáil Éireann asked Bob to become the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Forced to operate as a clandestine organisation, his office was rented out by Una as premises for an insurance company.77 In October 1921, the Brennans bought a house on 48 Cherryfield Avenue in Ranelagh, not far from Belgrave Road, which later became the setting of the majority
69 Bourke 44. 70 Bourke 41-59. 71 From a quotation in Bourke 55. 72 Bourke 55. 73 Bourke 55. 74 Bourke 55. 75 From a quotation in Bourke 55-6. 76 Bourke 45, 58. 77 Bourke 58. 19 of Maeve’s Irish stories. It is also “the linking motif” in The Springs of Affection collection.78 When on the 7th of January 1922 the Anglo-Irish treaty was signed by the Dáil, a day after Maeve’s fifth birthday, “[s]uddenly de Valera and his supporters were out in the cold, rejecting the newly established Irish Free State and excluded from its administration.”79 While Bob continued gathering support for the republican cause, Una worked on “re-establishing a normal life.”80
Maeve started attending a primary school at a Dominican convent nearby, while her father continued hiding. Consequently, the family was not rid of the experience of house searches, this time conducted by representatives of the Free State, which appear in Brennan’s biographical stories.81 When the Civil War ended on the 24th of May 1923, republicans “experienced serious difficulty in earning a living and supporting a family.”82 Bob and Una struggled to cope, and as one of the measures Maeve’s older sister Emer, aged thirteen, was sent to live with friends in Paris.83 This becomes the city from which Maeve’s first major literary heroine returns in the novella The Visitor.
When Maeve and her younger sister Derry had almost reached teenage years themselves, they started attending a boarding school in County Kildare, called the Cross and Passion College.84 Two of Brennan’s stories refer to this place, where the nuns in charge evoke great feelings of shame and guilt in the children. “The school laid great emphasis on religion and on sin, but so did the rest of Irish society at the time,” argues Bourke.”85 At that time, both the state and the Catholic Church also attempted to impose what they claimed to be greater morality on society.86 In her second year, Maeve instead started attending the newly open Scoil Bhríghde, where she became proficient in the Irish language.87
In a slowly changing political environment, the Brennans’ situation started to improve and Bob eventually became Ireland’s first ambassador to the USA in 1933.88 Moving to Washington was “by far the biggest upheaval” in Maeve’s live, Bourke argues, “and somewhere
78 Bourke 60. 79 Bourke 65. 80 Bourke 67. 81 Bourke 67. 82 Bourke 70. 83 Bourke 70. 84 Bourke 96-7. 85 Bourke 97. 86 Bourke 97. 87 Bourke 104-6. 88 Bourke 114. 20 within it must be the hinge between the self she was as a child in Ireland and the woman she became.”89 She also comments on the cultural differences:
Maeve may have been experiencing culture shock, as she realised that in America, all women, and not just a minority, expected – or were expected – to be ‘beautiful’. Her bluestocking mentors and wholesome friends in Dublin would have been embarrassed to show so much concern about their appearance, and would have found wearing make-up ‘common’. American women and girls used make-up enthusiastically, however, and one of the world’s leading fashion magazines, Harper’s Bazaar, based in New York […] had recently began to devote the whole of each August’s issue to ‘college fashion’ […]. The same magazine published excellent new fiction – a hint that beauty and brains did not have to be mutually exclusive.90
Maeve eventually started working for Harper’s Bazaar, but before that she finished her high school studies in Washington, and then competed a Bachelor’s degree in Arts at the American University.91 Bourke draws attention to her strife for independence, as well as taste for adventure.
Maeve had always been more like Bob than Una in personality: where Emer and Derry were quiet, she was volatile. Popular, witty and wickedly clever, when her parents seemed set to remain in Washington, she had decided to continue in full- time education. Emer and Derry moved steadily forward into the kind of domesticity at which their mother had always excelled, but Maeve fell in love recklessly and had her heart broken more than once.92
Maeve did not finish her second degree and started working as a librarian, and in winter 1941- 2 she moved to New York.93 “In that sense Maeve was,” claims the Irish writer Brian Lynch in his introduction to a 2005 abbreviated publication of The Springs of Affection: Selected Stories, “a spark thrown up by the 1916 Rising which fizzled out in Manhattan.”94 She soon started her writing career as a magazine contributor, and when her parents were recalled back to Ireland in 1947, she stayed in America; both of her sisters were married with children then, and her younger brother was studying in Dublin.95 Bourke highlights Maeve’s startling observation in her biographical story “The Clever One” that although she used to be “the elder, the taller, the cleverer, the more grown-up” in comparison to her younger sister, “as a mother and
89 Bourke 115. 90 Bourke 128. 91 Bourke 128. 92 Bourke 133. 93 Bourke 136, 138. 94 Brian Lynch, “Introduction,” Maeve Brennan, The Springs of Affection (Papaerview Ltd. in association with the Irish Independent, by arrangement with New York: Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., 2005) 5. 95 Bourke 140, 155. 21 householder, Derry has become an adult, according to the customs of their tribe, while Maeve has somehow not.”96
“After holding back from marrying anyone, for a long time, in 1954 Maeve became the fourth wife of St. Clair McKelway,” remembers Maxwell.97 She married The New Yorker’s “alcoholic managing editor” at the height of her career, and the couple moved to the exclusive retreat Sneden’s Landing on the Hudson river, the inspiration for Herbert’s Retreat.98 “It may not have been the worst of all possible marriages,” claims Maxwell, “but it wasn’t something you could be hopeful about.”99 He draws attention to McKelway’s drinking problems, as well as inability to manage money, which Brennan herself struggled with. The marriage didn’t last, and in her foreword to The Visitor, Clare Boylan draws attention to Brennan’s consequent feeling of isolation and a sense of homelessness, adding to her earlier uprooting when the family had left Ireland for the USA.100 Lynch is less delicate: “They separated, her writing dried up, she became paranoid, and somehow also drifted into sleeping in the [New Yorker] magazine’s lavatory.”101
Although Brennan returned to writing, and her most exquisite work comes from this difficult period, she suffered continuous mental breakdowns resulting in several hospitalisations, and she died virtually alone.102 She had many devoted friends, as well as animal companions throughout her life, but she never remarried or had any children. Her difficult life translated into her writing, and she also enjoyed combining humour with tragedy. According to Bourke, the author “inherited from her father a lifelong interest in detective stories and a finely tuned sense of the ridiculous.”103 In reaction to a letter addressed to The New Yorker, where a reader expressed interest in more pieces by the author, Brennan wrote a comic reply announcing her death. This is a short excerpt from the letter which Maxwell quotes in full (and which Brennan signed in his name).
We have her head here in the office, at the top of the stairs, where she was always to be found smiling right and left and drinking water out of her own little paper cup. She shot herself in the back with the aid of a small hand mirror at the foot of the main altar of St Patrick’s Cathedral on Shrove Tuesday. Frank O’Connor was where he usually is on Thursday afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a
96 Bourke 164. 97 Maxwell 4. 98 Clare Boylan, “Foreword,” Maeve Brennan, The Visitor (Dublin: New Island, 2019) vii; Lynch 5. 99 Maxwell 4. 100 Cayton viii. 101 Lynch 5. 102 Boylan ix. 103 Bourke 25. 22
priest and giving penance to some poor old woman and he heard the shot and he ran out and saw our poor late author stretched out flat and he picked her up and fearing a scandal ran up to the front of the church and slipped her in the poor box. She was very small. He said she went in easy. […] We will never know why she did what she did (shooting herself) but we think it was because she was drunk and heartsick. She was a very fine person, two feet, hands, everything. But it’s too late to do much about that now. […] As for her, I’m afraid she would only spit in your eye. She was ever ungrateful. One might say of her that nothing in her life became her.104
“This may be funny,” writes Lynch,
but, like Brennan’s work, it is rooted in desperation. If the New Yorker’s [sic] staff writers had one thing in common, it was a sense of fragility. Life, like the cartoons which set the magazine’s tone, was snap-witted, stylish and, underneath it all, as brittle as a cornflake.105
In this sense, Brennan’s complicated cultural heritage facilitated, rather than problematized, fitting with The New Yorker crew. Her loneliness translated into her work, as even “at the height of her fame she was always solitary,” Boylan observes, her “stark and pure vision of the world “a frightening one”.106 As I will show, both the lonely and the frightening in her work also ties into experiences of shame – they partly come from shame, generate more of it, and are often expressed through shame. Shame is just as omnipresent in the life that didn’t “become her” as isolation is.
1.6 Brennan’s double identity II: A woman writer
Robert Brennan spent his whole life writing, and Maeve saw his short stories and books published, as well as plays of his staged. For instance, when she was nine, Bob’s detective novel The Toledo Dagger was published, which “she must have certainly read,” according to Bourke.107 She also saw the immense success of his play Bystander, which opened at the Abbey Theatre on the 19th of May 1930.108 When she had been established in New York as a contributor to Harper’s Bazaar, Maeve also put effort into finding a publisher for her father’s autobiography.109
In terms of crafting characters, all of Maeve’s close relatives were crucial, as she “planted personalities of her own creation in settings and circumstances that are recognisably those of
104 Maxwell 5-6. 105 Lynch 5. 106 Boylan xiii. 107 Bourke 84. 108 Bourke 103. 109 Bourke 158. 23 her family.”110 She explored difficult and complex cultural, social, and political issues which can all be tied to her family and personal experience. “The liberties she took with the detail of other people’s lives,” Bourke argues, “provide her stories with unassailable emotional authority.”111 Most of her work has the home as the main stage, although her Long-Winded Lady pieces are the exact opposite. Both her Herbert’s Retreat stories and the Dublin-based fiction are an exploration of domestic settings, which come across as oppressive and lonely.
This is not surprising given that both as a child and as a grown Irish woman, Brennan would have been expected to spend most of her time at home – at least in the Ireland she remembered from her childhood. While the dangerous period of fighting for independence eventually rewarded Bob Brennan with a distinguished political position, Una remained in charge of the house and their children. This is how we find her in Brennan’s biographical stories, which show Maeve as a small child. Furthermore, before and after the family had moved to the USA, de Valera’s new legislation sealed, step by step, the fate of Irish feminism.112 Abigail L. Palko argues that
a complex set of external pressures, including those of the Catholic Church and the fomenting European tensions that would soon launch World War II, were exerted upon the Irish government. The government responded with a series of measures that were ever-increasingly oppressive, in particular to Irish women. [...] In 1932 married women were forbidden to work as teachers; in 1935 the Criminal Law Amendment Act made contraceptives illegal; and with the 1936 Conditions of Employment Act, section 16, the minister for employment was empowered to limit the number of women working in any branch of industry.113
With these steps, women were ushered out of public life, where Una had been active despite her motherhood during the Civil War. According to Palko, women were “qua mothers enshrined in the fabric of Irish society, without any consideration of women’s needs, and as a result, the feminine voice was disvalued and silenced.”114 Such silencing is thematised in Brennan’s Irish writing, marked by the women’s inability to speak their minds, while their inferiority status can be mapped through their experience of shame.
Brennan was not a freedom fighter in the sense that her parents were. Yet her work depicts injustice towards the weak and marginalised, and as such is an accusation against social
110 Bourke 24. 111 Bourke 24. 112 Abigail L. Palko, “From The Uninvited to The Visitor: The Post-Independence Dilemma Faced by Irish Women Writers,” A Journal of Women Studies 31.2 (2010): 2-3. JSTOR
Choosing a writer’s career meant entering into a male-dominated territory, whether this was to be done in Ireland or in the USA. Brennan started writing as a fashion contributor to the Harper’s Bazaar magazine, but in 1949 The New Yorker headhunted her “as a social diarist,” according to Lynch, while Maxwell remembers her first task as “to write about women’s fashions.”115 “She then moved on to doing short notices of novels and whodunits and an occasional lead review,” he adds.116 Except for the posthumously published novella The Visitor, Brennan’s main medium was the short story, and she is perhaps one of the few authors who cannot be included in Elke D’hoker’s complaint regarding “the longstanding practice of neglecting a writer’s short fiction in favour of his or her longer works.”117
The pieces written under the pseudonym “the long-winded lady” for The New Yorker were the opposite of long-winded, and, only a few paragraphs long (at first), are Brennan’s shortest literary pieces. The magazine’s subscribers were also the first to read her short stories, and the collections of her work published during and after her lifetime first appeared in the USA. Yet, as she became progressively known outside of this audience, Ireland claimed Brennan as its author. Despite her life-long career in the United States, Brennan’s work resonates with D’hoker’s description of the Irish short story at that time:
Indeed, in the 1960s and 70s critics and writers, emboldened by the – national and international – success of mid-century realist short fiction of Frank O’Connor, Séan O’Faoláin and Liam O’Flaherty, sought to define the Irish short story and to delineate it as a uniquely ‘national’ genre against its neighbours – the novel and British fiction, in particular. The result was a rather confining image of the Irish short story as a realist form used to depict particular truths about Ireland and Irish identity, a form which revolved around the outsider in his or her struggle against social constraints and in which loneliness was the privileged emotion. The success of the Irish short story, further, was explained by virtue of its closeness to the oral storytelling tradition and its embeddedness within what O’Connor called a ‘submerged population group’, or society that lacked the stable structure conducive to the novel.118
115 Lynch 5; Maxwell 1. 116 Maxwell 1. 117 Elke D’hoker, “Complicating the Irish Short Story”, eds Elke D’hoker and Stephanie Eggermont, The Irish Short Story: Traditions and Trends (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015) 3. 118 D’hoker 3-4. 25
It is remarkable how well this overview fits Brennan’s writing, except the fact that her work conveys a woman’s experience, which is crucial. All the features listed as typical for the Irish short story at that time – realism, Ireland and the Irish identity, isolation, social struggle, loneliness, storytelling and unstable society are all key aspects of Brennan’s writing. Not that we would encounter all these elements every time, but they are typical of her writing as a whole. Realism is the one characteristic that can be traced down in perhaps every story, as most of them take place at home or in everyday places such as New York streets, cafés, and hotels, and there is nothing ostentatiously unusual about any of Brennan’s characters. It is rather other elements, such as the overpowering feeling of loneliness, so often present in Brennan’s writing, that betray a work of fiction. And while many of the characters are modelled based on people that Brennan knew, many minor or even major details about them have been altered for artistic purposes.
Strong emotions and a focus on less, rather than more characters, is another typical characteristic of the Irish short story.119 Brennan certainly favoured featuring only a few people in her work, and she often returned to them in her other pieces. Interestingly, D’hoker takes issue with these views about the Irish short story at least partly on behalf of female authors, including Maeve Brennan:
This rather narrow identification of the Irish short story with the experience of the outsider has arguably been a factor in the marginalization of women’s short fiction in particular. Surely, the explorations of family life in the short stories of Maeve Brennan and Mary Lavin do not fit very well with this definition.120
One can probably argue that short stories taking place mostly in domestic settings, as Brennan’s do, will not lead people to expect a dramatic depiction of tension, isolation and conflict. Yet this is exactly what her work brings forward. This is not to say that D’hoker is wrong in claiming that defining Irish short fiction in this narrow manner is good; instead I am arguing that Brennan’s work is not among those that should be quoted as not fitting into this category. But it is true that I might be twisting her words a little as well, because there is a strong feminine angle in Brennan’s writing, and her depictions of isolation tend to focus on female characters. It is mostly women, rather than Irish nationals, who represent the “submerged group” unable to express itself through a robust medium.
119 D’hoker 6. 120 D’hoker 7. 26
Brennan’s writing is certainly women-centric, and tension often manifests itself as the result of clashes between a husband and a wife or a mother and her daughter. Mother-son relationships, for instance, are to a large extent explored through the experience of another woman, such the man’s sister or wife. Even the part of Brennan’s fiction that is set outside of domestic settings is unique in this way. Feminine and glamorous, the Long-Winded Lady is far from the stereotypical “rebels and exiles” reserved, by convention, for male heroes.121 Brennan herself seems to fit the bill a bit better. Although she was a very different kind of an outsider than she would have been as a man, her life trajectory did make her uniquely different wherever she went, including her position of writer in the male-dominated office of The New Yorker.
In that specific context, it was her overtly feminine voice that turned her into a sort of rebel, just as her Irishness made her an exile. Surprisingly, she was also known for swearing, which embarrassed and confused her more traditional colleagues.122 Maxwell also remembers how he, Brendan Gill and Brennan used to slip notes under each other’s office door until the chief editor decided that “it wasn’t good for the office morale” and Brennan was moved into a new location.123 Bourke describes the new office as follows:
Maeve worked with her door open, and instead of the dingy cells the men tolerated, her little office became a bright and fragrant space, where she would sit behind her typewriter, wearing enormous reading glasses. She smoked constantly, but so did everybody else, and Maeve wore Russian Leather perfume that wafted along the corridors and gathered in her room. She brought in potted plants, and had the walls painted white, the ceiling Wedgewood blue […]124
Many of these choices were likely inspired by Harper’s Bazaar, the first magazine that Brennan worked for, which was full of empowered and career-oriented young women (as well as privileged).125 When Brennan started working for the prestigious The New Yorker in 1949, she was removed from this environment of fashion and female talent in offices filled with fresh flowers.126 The New Yorker magazine was twenty-five years old and had around a quarter of a million subscribers, and “[u]nlike Harper’s Bazaar, its subscribers and editors were mostly men, although women read it and wrote for it.”127 All the while the new environment did not
121 D’hoker 8. 122 Bourke 166. 123 Maxwell 5. 124 Bourke 167. 125 Bourke 140. 126 Bourke 162. 127 Bourke 163. 27 shelter Brennan and her few female colleagues at The New Yorker from accusations of superficiality.
Tom Wolfe and Ben Yagoda complained that the magazine had started catering to suburban middle-class women, focusing on trivial issues. Some of their examples, such as reminiscing about one’s childhood or writing about pets, are indeed typical features of Brennan’s work.128 Bourke also points out that the name of her persona, the Long-Winded Lady, could have been a self-mocking gesture referring to the stereotype that women talked too much.129 Ann Peters counters Wolfe’s and Yagoda’s accusation by providing a picture of urban American women as empowered and engaging in social activism, rather than only flicking through fashion magazines and gossiping.
Her [Brennan’s] work also reflects a tradition at mid-century of women fighting to save the city. It was often middle-class women, in the years following the destruction of Penn Station, who would be some of the most vocal opponents of the policies of Robert Moses: armed with baby carriages, the women of the Upper West Side march to save the playgrounds of Central Park, for instance, or join together, under the leadership of urban activist Jane Jacobs, to oppose Moses's plans to build a highway through the West Village.130
While this certainly builds a good case for American women against the accusation that their interests are of no consequence, Brennan was not such an activist. Rather than a direct call to arms, her work is a eulogy to New York as she knew the city, a melancholy lament over its continuous destruction and rebuilding, as well as the injustices its inhabitants experience. Maxwell remembers a sentence of Yeats which Brennan one day wrote on the wall in his office: “Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.”131 Despite all this, the author’s artistic exposition of a variety of issues can still be seen as a form of activism.
1.7 Thesis layout
This thesis treats the topic in four steps. Coming after the introductory chapter, Chapter 2 focuses on Brennan’s USA-based work, where shame appears on the surface mostly in a light and entertaining form. This is most prominent in her Long-Winded Lady pieces and in the short stories about the American suburban community of Herbert’s Retreat. Chapter 3 is a discussion
128 Ann Peters, “A Traveler in Residence: Maeve Brennan and the Last Days of New York,” Women's Studies Quarterly 33. 3/4 (2005): 66-7, JSTOR
In Chapter 4, the power of deep-rooted shame is explored in Brennan’s depictions of cross-generation relationships. Woman’s experience is the focus of the pieces which are discussed in this section, where the individual is trapped inside an oppressive matrix. Their identity is shaped by social expectations in processes which are communicated through experiences of shame. There is little room for negotiations, and shame can serve both to oppress and to isolate the woman, depending on the choices she makes. At the end of the chapter, and the thesis as a whole, Brennan’s stories oriented on the experience of pets, both as companions and as narrators, will be discussed as an exploration of the possibility of alleviating shame.
Maeve Brennan, image source: < http://itmarchive.ie/web/Features/Current/The-Talk-of-the-Town--Emma- Donoghue--Annabelle-Com.html>, 11 Feb 2021.
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2. Laughing off shame
2.1 Notes from The New Yorker
Until the publication of the collection The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker in 1969, the real identity of the regular contributor to “The Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker was unknown. It was published by William Morrow and comprised of Brennan’s own selection of forty-seven contributions to The New Yorker. It included a short Author’s Note and was dedicated to William Shawn, the magazine’s editor. Shawn was allegedly honoured by this, and the collection was praised in a review by the American author John Updike for the Atlantic Monthly.1 The persona of the Long-Winded Lady took her first breath with the publication of the first “Talk of the Town” contribution in 1954, and was last heard from in 1981.2 Maxwell speaks about only fifteen years when referring to the Long-Winded Lady pieces, alluding to a break in communication that occurred before the publication of the last contribution.3
The persona of the Lady shares many similarities with the author, but her identity is mostly an enigma. Should one think of her as a journalist, or rather someone who contributes to the magazine in her spare time? Is she a professional woman, or a middle-class housewife? The stories are too personal and too artistic to be pure journalism. She can also clearly afford to enjoy what New York has to offer on a regular basis, yet a source of income in never mentioned, and it is unclear whether she works or is supported by someone else. Although a New Yorker, the Lady is a loner, completely detached from the preoccupations with which Brennan endowed her Herbert’s Retreat characters. There is never a mention of a house in her possession, a husband or children.
The Lady seems to exist, with some exceptions, only in the context of New York, and her activity consists of observing the city and its people. The text of the Long-Windeds is as difficult to define as the narrator, but her attention is always on people and the small, everyday things that they do. It is a form of reporting, yet the (self-)mocking tone of the Lady and the perspective and style are artistic, as well as gendered and female, and as such quite untraditional. Female perspective and irony are also very clear in what Bourke believes were, in all probability, Brennan mother’s newspaper contributions. Una’s first piece, posted in Echo in 1908, opens
1 Bourke 249. 2 Belinda McKeon, “Introduction,” Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (Dublin: The Stinging Fly, 2017) xi. 3 Maxwell 3. 30 with an ironic tone. ‘I think every important paper should have a column devoted to the special interests of women,’ its author writes, ‘I said that some time ago to the editor of “The Echo”, but being a mere man he did not seem to agree with me.’4 As Una announces, her pieces are written for women. They “included recipes, ways of removing ink stains from linen, and other useful advice,” while being openly feminist.5
We women have to do half the brain work in everyday life and in many cases half the servile work too, and more than half. But when it comes to making laws for the two sexes, Man says ‘I can do this by myself, thank you. You go home and mind the house.’ And sometimes it happens that the man who sneers at the woman has not brains enough to keep the cat from the milk.6
In many other aspects, the Long-Winded Lady is the opposite of Una. She lacks her fierce confidence, as well as interest in sharing tips on removing any kind of stains, be they real or metaphorical. Instead of forging an openly feminist path, the Lady tries to inhabit the man’s world seemingly without causing too much of a disturbance. She is not an activist or a politician, but an artist with her own experience of the city and its people, which she tries to relate to the reader. In the Author’s Note from the original 1969 edition of the Long-Windeds, Brennan writes:
Now when I read through this book I seem to be looking at snapshots. It is as though the long-winded lady were showing snapshots taken during a long, slow journey not through but in the most cumbersome, most reckless, most ambitious, most confused, most comical, the saddest and coldest and most human of cities.7
There is almost an (unequal) partner relationship between the narrative persona and the highly personified city. Many contributions are also a personal eulogy for “the city you have arrived too late to know, and even for the city as it would be without you,” which Belinda McKeon argues was “the generic inheritance of becoming a New Yorker.”8 Some sections are primarily visual, as the opening of the story “A Snowy Night on West Forty-ninth Street”. As John Berger et al. explain with respect to the history of visual arts:
Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked – and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record. An image became a
4 Bourke 18. 5 Bourke 18. 6 Bourke 18. 7 Maeve Brennan, “Author’s Note,” Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (Dublin: The Stinging Fly, 2017) 3. 8 McKeon xi. 31
record of how X had seen Y. This was the result of and increasing consciousness of individuality, accompanying an increasing awareness of history.9
By painting a mental image, Brennan’s writing captures how she experienced New York around the middle of the twentieth century. In the process, it sheds light both on the objects of her experience, and at herself and her personal connections to the place, including her sense of dislocation. The purpose of many passages in the Long-Windeds seems to be to remember streets and buildings that will, in all likelihood, be soon demolished to make space for new, taller houses, and to which the Lady feels a specific connection.
Personal ties, as well as the passage of time, shape our idea of what things are. Images are “a direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times,” according to Berger et al., and “more precise and richer than literature” as objective evidence.10 Literature allows the transmission of all that is subjective about the representation, as “the more imaginative the work, the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist’s experience of the visible.”11 As a writer, Brennan had the choice to zoom in on and out of her surroundings, to linger on something and to completely omit something else. The Long-Winded Lady’s contributions allow the reader to imagine New York and its people using the specific set of prompts that she provides. Yet she also foretells that our own reading of her writing in turn tells something about us and the contemporary context.
The bewildering snow gave the shabby street an air of melancholy that made it ageless, as it will someday appear in an old photograph. But it will have to be a very old photograph. The inquisitive and sympathetic eyes that will see this street again as I saw it tonight have not yet opened to look at anything in this world. It will have to be a very old photograph, deepened by time and by a regret that will have its source in the loss of New York as we know it now. Many trial cities, facsimiles of cities, will have been raised and torn down on Manhattan island [sic] before anybody begins to regret this version of West Forty-ninth Street, and perhaps the photograph will never be taken. (LWL 183)
In her introduction to a 2017 republication of The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker, McKeon describes her own impression from the passage:
One night in 1967, Maeve Brennan stood in the snow on West Forty-ninth Street and saw the past, present and future of that block spliced together: the ghost of its heyday, the garishness and shabbiness of the present, and the inevitability of some time, years off, when a photograph of the street would induce a dreamy nostalgia in
9 John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing: based on the BBC television series with John Berger (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990) 10. 10 Berger et al. 10. 11 Berger et al. 10. 32
some viewer who would have, in their own version of the city a new kind of shabbiness or garishness to abhor.12
The implication that there is immense value in the past, almost as if there was a hidden secret whose uncovering is crucial for our present being, is intrinsic to Brennan’s writing as a whole. Her Long-Windeds, more specifically, lay in front of the reader the city as experienced when one was “three things in mid-century New York: female, alone, and an outsider.”13 The next section will focus on the link between these three attributes, and in what sense they reinforce each other in this part of Brennan’s fiction through the experience of shame and a lack of belonging.
2.2 Inventing female flânerie
As a woman, the Lady is almost a purposeful violation of de Valera’s traditional concept equating womanhood with motherhood. Posing as a journalist-artist, rather than a wife and mother with a house and children to take care of, might serve to draw attention away from the prescribed conservative social role of woman-mother. On the other hand, the fact that she doesn’t identify herself as a wife and mother can itself be a source of shame, as the Lady has failed as a woman in the narrow definition that Ireland of Brennan’s childhood and youth insisted on. I will return to the shame implied by the Lady’s loneliness in the next section.
The narrator mostly appears to be American, and she has a specific kind of a female voice, which implies materialism as well as education, as I will show. “All right, if you must have a definition, I am a Socialist who is interested in lust,” she overhears a man say to his female companion.” (LWL 86) “I was fascinated,” the Lady shares, but the man didn’t say anything more ‘until their lunch had been served, and then he said, in a loud voice, as though he were astonished, “The potatoes are very good here.”’ (LWL 86) “Another disappointing man,” concludes the narrator. (LWL 86)
Not only how, by also what the Lady sees betrays a middle-, or perhaps upper-class woman’s upbringing, as she is commenting with a skilled eye on the outfits of the passers-by. In these sections, Brennan is putting to use her earlier experience as a fashion contributor to Harper’s Bazaar. The first job the author had was at the New York Public Library, and it is likely that her connections as the daughter of the Irish ambassador helped her find a position at
12 McKeon xi. 13 McKeon xii. 33 the glamorous Harper’s Bazaar.14 The magazine was very different from The New Yorker, which headhunted Brennan later. It was written by women and for women, carrying “essential technical information for the women everywhere who sewed and altered their own clothes, or who instructed dressmakers on what they wanted,” according to Bourke.15
Maeve Brennan looking at a model at Harper’s Bazaar, image source:
Although Brennan didn’t sew, she “had seen it done and heard it talked about all her life,” and she had observed the activity closely in her aunt’s Wexford workroom.16 However, the magazine soon became the cradle of female talent in general, and “[h]eiresses with famous last names took the bus to 572 Madison Avenue to work long hours for low wages” there.17 It was, in a way, World War II that helped Brennan find, or rather expose her talent.
By the time Maeve went to work at the magazine in 1943, the occupation of Paris meant that there were no longer any couture collections to report, while wartime restrictions curbed its extravagance by limiting the amount of fabric that could be used in clothing. Even so, increased advertising meant more pages to fill, and talent continued to flow towards Harper’s Bazaar, throughout its 1940s heyday. […] Wartime shortages meant that the only way to be allocated more paper was to start a new magazine, so the Hearst organisation gave over the seventh floor of the Madison Avenue building to a new venture.18
14 Bourke 138-40. 15 Bourke 140. 16 Bourke 140. 17 Bourke 140. 18 Bourke 141. 34
Thus Junior Bazaar was founded, a new opportunity for young talented people such as Brennan, who was “already at work on some of her powerful fiction.”19 She completed her novella The Visitor in 1944 or 1945 while working at the magazine.20 Although Brennan’s tendency to return to Ireland of her childhood is thus attested very early on in her writing career, she started “at the heart of fashion,” which is another heritage that she carried with her.21 “My favourite avenue,” the Lady writes in 1961, “is Madson. Whenever I walk along Madison Avenue, I think of fine clothes and gaiety and of the possibility of having both at once.” (LWL 102)
The Long-Winded Lady notices clothes and decorations in a way that male authors typically don’t, while also drawing attention to her gender in more direct ways, commenting on people from the position of a woman. In the 1966 story “A Young Lady with a Lap,” she describes a crowd mesmerised by a young woman walking by.
As I came near the Latin Quarter, a girl appeared in the crowd, walking alone. She wore a tight white crepe dress, much whiter than flesh, and she had a small, fluffy white mink stole around her shoulders and bosom. She was very slim, and she walked like two snakes, while her hemline slithered about her knees. She was much too clever to wear a very short dress. She showed her knees, and left the rest to her audience, to us – to all of us. We all looked. Her dress was more than very tight. It was extremely tight. Nobody looked at her knees. Everybody looked at her lap. Her hair was gold and it glittered, and so did her slippers, which were of transparent plastic edged with gold. She carried a small handbag, also of transparent plastic edged with gold, but it contained nothing except a gold lipstick, which rolled around like dice. I thought at first that she must have some money tucked away in the tops of her stockings somewhere, but as far as I could make out she had nothing at all under her dress. We all stared at her, in our different ways, and from the attention she drew the air of indifference that made her a star. (LWL 66)
Everyone is watching the girl in her extravagant outfit, but everybody watches differently. The girl appears naked in her tight outfit with nothing underneath, and she seems to have no money with her, the insides of her handbag containing only make-up. In symbolic terms, the girl is a symbol of beauty for sale, no matter in what exact sense. As a woman who puts effort into the way she dresses, the Lady notices various details, as well as the overall impression of the outfit. She also analyses its function, guessing the girl’s thinking behind.
Moreover, the Lady puts herself in the other woman’s shoes as someone who inhabits the same city and culture. There is no money in the transparent handbag, and the Lady wonders how the girl is going to be able to enjoy the night out without any money, implying that she
19 Bourke 141. 20 Bourke 150. 21 Bourke 158. 35 would pay for herself just as the Lady does. She can also sympathise with becoming the object of everyone’s attention. The girl’s outfit was, in a way, a revolt against those watching, a statement saying that if this is the way, then be it. The scene was a scene of battle, and the Lady points out that the girl “cast swift glances right and left to show us how she despised us all.” (LWL 66) When the girl is gone, the crowd gets a small taste of its medicine, as it is left in slight embarrassment “with nothing to look at except ourselves.” (LWL 66)
The Long-Winded Lady, drifting about the city, is reminiscent of the traditionally male literary figure of the flâneur, wondering aimlessly in urban space. While the female version of this word, flâneuse, exists, a common equivalent to the flâneur is the passante. The linguistics is confusing in this case – flâneur comes from the French word for strolling or wandering, while passante should be the feminine form of somebody who passes by, a passer-by. This implies that it is much more traditional for a man to just float about, while the female narrator does the observing as she is going somewhere. The Lady is somewhere in between, but she certainly finds it difficult to be seen in the city with an obvious lack of purpose. “Then I took out the book I generally carry with me in my handbag,” the Lady shares her secret in the 1960 piece “The Cheating of Philippe”, “because it diverts me when there is nothing to listen to and camouflages my eavesdropping when there is something to listen to […]” (LWL 153) Although she never works, she does errands, buying shoes and bags, and when she sits in a café it is usually to eat or read books, as she makes clear.
On the other hand, passante as a literary trope seems to imply the object of vision, rather than a spectator in any form. According to Melinda Harvey
[o]ne would be hard-pressed to find a more dominant narrative in the literature of modernity than the story of the flâneur and the passante. It would, of course, come as no surprise to the social theorist that the fleeting encounter between these two quintessential urban types customarily acts as a cornerstone to the city-tale. Literary accounts of modern life—from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—have been inevitably organized around the peripatetic meeting of the one who walks (most often a male writer figure) and the one who is passed (most often a woman) because it is this mode of public interaction that is sanctioned and perpetuated by the very materiality of modern urban space itself.22
The French verb passer, to pass, is read in its passive form in the term passante; it refers to the act of being passed by. In this context, the tradition is even more circumscribed for women;
22 Melinda Harvey, “From Passante to Flâneuse: Encountering the Prostitute in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage,” Journal of Urban History 27.6 (2001): 746, SAGE Journals
In the short time since I left them, the two raincoats had not merely reached the greeting-card shop but usurped the girls’ place in the doorway, and now they stood side by side in the lighted recess, still grinning while they watched the girls, who had moved off and were conferring together before scattering up and down the street. I was a bit puzzled. Those girls are not meek, yet they seemed to give in very easily. […] I suppose there is a chance that the two flirts were in charge of the girls, but somehow I think that they were just a pair of show-offs, and that they drove the girls away. The last I saw of them all, the boys were still standing in the doorway, their round blond heads turning right, left, right, left as they enjoyed the view, and the girls were in full flight, hurrying along the wet pavement to their new stations. (LWL 206)
Despite such experiences, the Long-Winded Lady was answering the question of the possibility of the flâneuse that modernity opened, according to Rudrani Gangopadhyay:
Modernist literature is rife with figures of the flâneur, strolling down the city. When Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘The Man of the Crowd’, arguably one of the best depictions of this spectator figure, he names this figure the ‘man’ of the crowd, leaving one to wonder if there ever was a woman of the crowd? Or if at all there could be such a figure - a female flâneur in a man’s world.24
The Lady moves in a world that is a man’s world historically, and where a man-and-woman’s (or a woman’s) world is not a reality, but can be contemplated as a possibility. McKeon asserts that the ever-changing nature of New York was hard for Brennan to love, but perhaps this is also what inspired her to forge a new identity, her initial absence of a relationship with the city facilitating negotiations with it.25
The Lady walks a narrow path where she is projecting an identity in a strategical sense. She dresses as a woman, which is evident from the interest she expresses in clothes, as well as mentions or errands that are connected with women’s outfits, and in this sense her flânerie is often camouflaged as female shopping. The nineteenth-century had seen a surge in
23 Harvey. 24 Rudrani Gangopadhyay, “The ‘Woman’ of the Crowd: Exploring Female Flânerie,” Rupkatha Journal: On Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 7.3 (2015): 91, Rupkatha Journal
The Lady seems to build on this tradition, but she also needs to avoid overemphasising this connection, as a middle-class shopper is not a flâneuse, and the accusations of The New Yorker’s female staff mentioned in the first chapter show the real danger of female writing being branded superficial and consumerist. 27 The Lady’s strategy is designed to allow her not only to penetrate into the urban sphere of New York, but also to be heard and taken seriously as a reporter. With her often-mentioned love for books, which she always carries with her to read (and to be seen reading), along with newspapers, in the public spaces that she visits, the persona has another essential cultural layer. In a time period where women from families that could afford it received university education, the Lady belongs to a new generation of middle- class women who are no longer only consumers of material goods.
As the Lady’s approach is not to explicitly oppose the status quo, but rather invent an appropriate camouflage, she needs to combine both of these identities to explain and legitimise her flânerie, which is an energy-consuming activity. Although the Harper’s Bazaar, as mentioned in the first chapter, worked towards merging the concepts of female fashion and education, these two elements of the Lady’s identity essentially pull in opposing directions, and can easily create tensions. Balancing them requires constant watchfulness and evaluation of the self, as well as of the reactions of others. Therefore, the Lady is highly shame-prone, and also unsure of her belonging where she is, as it seems to be conditional on her ability to successfully perform her complex identity.
26 Elizabeth Carlson, “Dazzling and Deceiving: Reflections in the nineteenth-century department store,” Visual Resources 28. 2 (2012): 126-33, Francis & Taylor Online
2.3 The narrator who appears
I was sitting at the front, in one of three half-moon-shaped booths near the street door. I faced the bar, and in the mirror behind the shelves I saw the reflection of grapes and apples in the rich still life on the wall behind me and above my head. And through the glass panels of the doorway I could see the street, where the rose-red Adano awning cast a curious shadow on the burning sidewalk. Very few people passed. (LWL 81)
The Lady is not somebody that we are meant to think about, at least not directly. Although she sometimes reports on regulars in a place that she often visits, which allows her to offer some background on the people that she is discussing, she never speaks about her friends or acquaintances. “Yesterday afternoon – I was in a taxi – I watched a very tall old man walking North on Seventh Avenue,” one story starts. (LWL 11) The Lady knows that he lives in that area, and that “[y]esterday he had left his jacket at home, and he wore no tie.” (LWL 11-2) But he is “a man”, one of the many that can be seen around the city.
Her reports are also always set in public surroundings. The stories, told in the past tense, sometimes start by information about where the Lady is going. This can be a café, restaurant, hotel or a shop. Other times, she begins her narrative already seated somewhere, in any of the places just mentioned, or perhaps in a rented flat. Even when she is seemingly at home, the impression is non-private. She is talking to her readers from a place that she is temporarily inhabiting, and there is nothing personal about it that could betray too much information about her.
The 1962 story “Faraway Places near Here” consists of plunges into the past, where the Lady remembers the various flats and rooms that she has rented in New York. Apart from that, brief mentions of various places are scattered throughout the stories. In 1965 she writes “I have temporary residence in one of those small old houses on Tenth Street, just off Fifth Avenue.” (LWL 59) She is “back in the Village again, spending a few days in the apartment of a friend who is in London,” in 1967. (LWL 166) In 1968, she is “living at the moment on Washington Place, between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square Park.” (LWL 45) “At present I have two big rooms in a Forty-ninth street hotel that is sixty years old this year,” the Lady mentions in 1969. (LWL 12)
Despite this sense of displacement, McKeon also comments on her “refusal to share any personal background which might place her, even momentarily, at a distance from her identity
39 as a New Yorker, as Manhattanite through and through.”28 Although this sense of constantly moving around is a biographical feature, as Brennan too was never able to permanently settle down in one place, it has a special function in the Long-Windeds. It makes the Lady similarly “of the streets” as the male flâneur, while avoiding any shameful connotations with women belonging on the streets. Furthermore, it takes much attention away from the narrator, who becomes somewhat unreal, if not even artificial, and seems to fit well within the ever-changing landscape of New York. As evident in Brennan’s own comment of her contributions to “The Talk of the Town” mentioned earlier, her impression of the city is highly personified. In turn, her persona is reminiscent of the city.
Finally, when the Lady divulges information about herself, it is always carefully administered, and it is reasonable to assume that there is a reason behind the choice to do so. These mentions very often involve the experience of public shame on the part of the narrator. Sometimes, she chooses to include herself among those who are under scrutiny, mentioning enough about herself that seemingly leaves her as vulnerable to the reader’s judgement as those that she is reporting on. At other times, the Lady singles herself out, and in doing so also her experience of shame. “There were not seats to be had on the A train last night, but I had a good grip on the pole,” starts one Long-Winded. (LWL 15) Suddenly, a man taps on her arm and offers his seat, which she refuses, explaining that she is getting off at the next station.
He sat back and that was that, but I felt all set up and I thought what a nice man he must be and I wondered what his wife was like and I thought how lucky she was to have such a polite husband, and then all of a sudden I realised that I wasn’t getting out at the next station at all but the one after that, and I felt perfectly terrible. I decided to get out at the next station anyway, but then I thought, If I get out at the next station and wait around for the next train I’ll miss my bus and they only go every hour and that will be silly. So I decided to brazen it our as best I could, and when the train was slowing up at the next station I stared at the man until I caught his eye and then I said. “I just remembered this isn’t my station after all.” Then I thought he would think I was asking him to stand up and give me his seat, so I said. “But I still don’t want to sit down, because I’m getting off at the next station.” I showed him by my expression that I thought it was all rather funny, and he smiled, more or less, and nodded, and lifted his hat and put it back on his head again and looked away. (LWL 15)
Unfortunately, the first of the two stops turns out to actually be the right one, and the Lady first screams out, then does more explaining, and finally rushes out – and still misses her bus.
28 McKeon xv. 40
“Sometimes it is very hard to know the right thing to do,” the story closes as she is waiting in a nearby bar, sipping martini. (LWL 17)
It is rather curious to read such a detailed account of a minor embarrassment, as well as the thoughts going through the narrator’s head at that moment. But it also depicts a very common source of awkwardness for women, who are sometimes offered a seat in an act of chivalry in a world where gender roles are slowly changing. The Lady carefully shows how the man’s gesture has pleased her, as well as the practical issues connected with responding to it to everyone’s satisfaction, and the problems that can arise. She is also showing the burden of public attention that is on her at the moment, where she feels that she has to answer respectfully, yet also coherently, while at the same time she would like to simply disappear into her own world to think her thoughts or perhaps read a magazine, as she sometime does.
If the Lady finds herself in an uncomfortable position, she still gets to frame the story. “One Saturday night, I spent about two hours making myself presentable,” the Lady remembers another, very hot day, “and when I was ready to leave I was late and I ran down the six flights [of stairs] and did very well till I reached the top of the last flight, and there I tripped and tumbled head over heels down to the bottom.” (LWL 93)
My arms were dirty and my white gloves were ruined and my hair was down and I thought of myself living in that hot, dirty house, and I sat on the floor in the hall and cried with rage. (LWL 93)
By inviting the reader to judge her own behaviour, as well as her situation, the Lady gives up any ambition to pose as the omniscient narrator, or an objective journalist, and instead becomes another subject in her reports. She feels shame for what others might see, or might have seen, happen to her, but also for seeing others in the wrong moment, such as when she crosses the street to give some money to a homeless person, and witnesses his stealing. “I crept back to my own side of the street with my quarter in my hand, feeling terribly embarrassed,” she notes. (LWL 95)
The Lady’s proneness to shame suggests vulnerability, and she sometimes finds herself pushed away by those who are, in contrast to her, shameless, as in “The New Girls on the West Forty-ninth Street” from 1967. The Lady finds herself moving with the crowds towards “an adults-only movie house that advertises itself with a frenzied blast of lights and signs,” and “five big young girls” standing close by. (LWL 131) Although the girls aren’t standing in a group, according to the Lady, but each alone, they have a powerful aura.
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The crowd was so thick up to that point that I didn’t see the girls until I reached them. Nobody around me saw them, either, and although we were moving along and they were standing still, before we knew it they were upon us. It was like that, as though they had pounced, just as the lights seem to pounce, causing shame, or distress, or embarrassment, or curiosity, or derision, or excitement, or disgust, according to the nature of the person who sees them. This was one of those times of surprise when we cannot tell the difference between memory and instinct, between reminders and threats, and all was confusion, except that it was obviously important to avoid the eyes of the girls, because they were the eyes of satisfied furies, or of unsatisfied prison wardresses. The five never moved. They stood still, and the crowd broke up and detoured unsteadily around them. (LWL 131-2)
On this occasion, the Lady finds herself part of the unsteady, confused crowd defeated by its own embarrassment as it encounters the “powerful group of young women,” with “heavy hair dyed different shades of bronze and yellow and platinum” and legs that “made them look colossal.” (LWL 132) The Lady, unnoticed, observes others in the group of passers-by, who “hurried past them, glancing at them with the furtive attention most of us give to the solemnly erotic photographs in the big glass-covered case that stands outside the movie house.” (LWL 132) Then she notices one observer who stands out in the crowd.
In front of me there was a diminutive old lady with thickly crimped hair dyed to a rich dark red, who kept turning to stare back at the girls. She wore an imitation- leopard pillbox hat, and she was grinning, almost laughing. She spoke to a woman walking next to her. “Did you see those bums?” (LWL 132)
The mortified woman scurries off after her friends without a word, and the shameless old lady turns to the narrator.
“Did you see those bums?” she said delightedly to me. “Did you see those bums?” She looked about ninety years old. It was my turn to hurry on ahead, in order to get away from her, and I almost caught up with the first woman to be addressed, who had joined two other women, as quietly dressed, in suits and hats and gloves, as she was herself. The three women reached the corner and disappeared up Seventh Avenue, going as fast as they could – home to their hotel, I think. I had a short wait on the corner for a taxi. I didn’t like to turn around for another look at Forty-ninth Street, for fear of finding the imitation-leopard pillbox bobbing about behind me.” (LWL 132-3)
This amazing episode, amusing in its ability to cut clean through pretensions and expectations, shows the mysterious working of shame. By the unwillingness of the prostitutes to look ashamed, the weight shifts on the passers-by, including the narrator, who is chased off from the scene. It also shows the importance of clothes and public behaviour, which determines whether one is an embarrassing element (if not to oneself, then at least to others). Even if the old woman didn’t say a word, the “imitation-leopard pillbox hat” and her hair dyed red automatically put
42 her in opposition to the neatly dressed young women in suits and gloves, running away in such despair.
In the 1969 piece “The Morning After” the Lady is in a crowd that is looking at a destroyed haberdashery, burnt the night before. A man walks by, asking where Broadway is. “I almost looked up, to tell him he was practically standing on Broadway, but then I took a good look at him,” the narrator says. (LWL 70)
He was a big man, and he stooped a little, and he wore no jacket and no tie and the cuffs of his shirt were flapping up. His large pink face, which he had not shaved, wore an expression that was benign, but that might turn sardonic, and I looked quickly back to the fire. There is no telling what a man with that expression on his face might say next. (LWL 70)
The Lady, always elegantly dressed and diligently polite, will not interact with the unpredictable man walking about, confused and with no hat on. The narrator’s presence in the stories should be also read in the context of the evolution of art in general, which has historically been produced primarily by men. As the tradition of the flâneur/passante suggests, art tends to voice male experience of the world. This makes seeing and being seen gendered, as women inhabit a culture where art repeats the premise that “men act and women appear,” as Berger et al. put it, and where “[m]en look at women.”29
Maeve Brennan, image source:
While her educated language and artistic tone allow the Lady’s voice to sound neutral and, if accompanied by nothing else, authoritative as a narrator, her gender turns around the
29 Berger et al. 47. 43 tradition of men watching women and women being watched. Whenever the Lady is reporting on her own actions, she is doing so within a cultural context informed by this tradition. Watching a parade “that went unwitnessed and unadmired except by two policemen” and the narrator, she exchanges some words with one of them and continues thinking – about the parade and the policeman – until she is interrupted.
I was wondering about the policeman. Then he asked. “Are you thinking of going after them?” and I said no, and turned back down the avenue and decided on the Baltimore and went over and had coffee. The reason I had to make that choice between the Algonquin and the Baltimore is that Schrafft’s is closed on Sundays. (LWL 11)
At the beginning of the story, the Lady announces the intention to have a coffee, which she eventually does have. The fact that she doesn’t follow the parade is thus seemingly explained, as well as is her standing in the street in the morning alone and with nothing obvious to do. The structure of the narrative suggests that the story called “A Mysterious Parade of Men” is at least as much about the parade as it is about going out for a coffee, as the parade is framed by the weighing of options (in terms of coffee places) at the beginning, and making the decision at the end. But it is rather odd in a narrative sense, as it begs the question why we are told more about the coffee errand than the parade. A possible answer is that the Lady’s experience of, or rather attempt at flânerie in this case, is more important to convey than the proceeding of the parade. It is also this narrative structure that leaves the parade mysterious, as the title promises, while ending on a more quotidian and personal note.
McKeon speaks of a “pressure she must have felt, so often, to appear as someone other than herself, as other than the wilfully solitary, beadily watchful, book-loving, martini-drinking, single woman (and, eventually divorcee) that she was.”30 “I wished I could turn myself into a transatlantic traveller,” the Lady notes in “The Traveller”. (LWL 97)
And my excuse and explanation for being wherever I found myself would always stand by me – my suitcase, recognisable in any language. My suitcase would translate me to everybody’s satisfaction and especially to my own satisfaction. (LWL 97)
The Lady describes others as seen by her, but she also often describes herself as she assumes she is seen by those around her. Most importantly, she tends to assume that she is seen. This is most obvious when she ends her narrative with an explanation that she cannot tell her readers
30 McKeon xvii. 44 more about what happened, as she had finished her meal or drink and had to leave the place of action.
Unfortunately, I had already paid my check and put on my gloves, and I hadn’t the nerve to just sit there watching, so I had to leave without hearing the rest of the repartee. (LWL 76)
It is certainly not uncommon that a story ends because the narrator has to catch a train or is disturbed. But the Lady leaves because she worries that she cannot stay in a public place when it is obvious that she is there only to watch - even when it is detrimental to the narrative. Yet the Lady loves to gape and stare, thinking her elaborate thoughts, and sometimes she is caught up, such as when she is looking at an actress eating her lunch.
Her tight short dress seemed to be made of crystal and light, and she was wearing a crystal headband for crown; she looked like Titania. The chair was much too big and too high for her, and to balance herself and her lunch she had put her knees together, and her feet, balanced on the tips of her toes, were far apart. She was very hungry. All her attention was on her sandwich, which she picked up with both hands, and she was just about to take a bite out of it when she raised her eyes and saw me standing and staring at her. I immediately stopped thinking of Titania and began thinking of Lady MacBeth. At the sight of me, Julie Andrews froze in fury. Behind her sandwich, she was at bay, her hungry face glazed with anger. (LWL 137)
The Lady often finds herself in the actress’s position, including an embarrassing moment when she is confused with a film star and asked for a photograph. She expects to be seen and judged, making choices under the assumption that her actions are noted and evaluated. First of all, there is the reality that a woman, elegant, beautiful and, in the older pieces, very young, might feel less comfortable sitting alone than a man, fearing that she might be approached. “I had worked my way through Time, back to front, and I was starting in on Newsweek when someone came and stood beside me,” remembers the Lady one evening in Le Steak de Paris. (LWL 76)
I looked up, and it was a very tall, solemn, scholarly-looking young man who had made a good deal of fuss over his briefcase when he came into the restaurant. […] Now he stood by my table and looked gloomily at me and said, “I don’t want to insult you.” Then he said. “I want to know if you will have a drink with me.” I said. “No, thank you. I am waiting for somebody.” I was sitting at a table for one. (LWL 76)
Sitting at a table for one is impractical, and the Lady adopts a better strategy, admitting that it didn’t initially come easy to her. In 1960, the narrator is describing a battle fought and won.
There was a time when I used to feel uneasy about taking up a table all to myself in a restaurant, but I have improved since then, and so I quickly informed the waiters
45
that I was only what I appeared to be, one person, and then I refused the table they offered me, and sat down at another one, just as good. Two waiters, who may or may not have been aware of my small triumph, hurried over, and one of them handed me an enormous menu and the other poured a great deal of water into my water goblet. (LWL 153)
The Lady certainly fights her inhibitions to enjoy the city as she likes, all the while reporting about it in her typical unassuming, slightly satirical manner. But gender also translates into how Brennan’s female narrator tells her story. There is a general vulnerability in her voice, and there is the clash of her gaze with another’s. As a woman, the observer in the Long-Windeds is the one who is traditionally observed, which is a notion that she cannot escape. Gender disrupts her role of the narrator, as she cannot distance herself from the impression that she is constantly both the subject and the object of seeing, observing while being observed, judging while being judged. “I like seeing movie stars as I go on my way around the city,” the Lady admits. (LWL 88) “I like recognising them and knowing who they are and knowing that just by being where I am they make me invisible – a face in the crowd, another pair of staring eyes.” (LWL 88)
On the other hand, Brennan’s writing about women is an effort to subvert the traditional male gaze, as she returns agency to the bodies that she describes. At the end of the story “A Young Lady with a Lap”, the narrator returns to the girl that she saw earlier and muses.
I kept thinking about the girl in the mink stole. She must have had a pocket in the stole, where she kept her money. In that case, why not put the lipstick in the pocket and leave the handbag at home? She must have had a very well considered [sic] reason for carrying the handbag, and it would have to be a better reason than that the handbag matched the shoes. I wish I knew what her reason was. And then, of course, there may not have been a pocket in the stole. (LWL 68)
By returning to the girl at the end of the story, Brennan suggests that there is more to her than just her decorated body that is seen, and then forgotten. By closing her narrative in this way, the author humanises the object of attention, reminding the reader that the girl is a person whose existence is not limited to the time that she is seen in public. Elaborate outfits come with elaborate decisions - was there a pocket in the sole, allowing the girl to display her lipstick in the bag, while hiding her money somewhere else? While the lipstick can be read as a symbolic gesture, suggesting that there is nothing more than superficial beauty to the girl, the practical repercussions of the fact that her bag is transparent is that if money was inside, it would be there for everyone to see. Not a sound choice for a woman walking alone at night.
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2.4 Shifting perspectives: Common shame and guilt
It is in the inclusion of small-scale practical details, as well abstract notions which come attached, that the true power of the Long-Windeds emerges. As McKeon points out
Maeve Brennan’s act of rebellion, as the long-winded lady, was to write New York as the city of a woman with ordinary things to do in the morning and with a love, in the mid-afternoon, of sitting by herself in little restaurants, staring at people, eavesdropping on conversations while pretending to be absorbed in a book. She made no apologies for the nosiness, and she made no apologies for the defiantly quotidian detail of her errands, of her routes on foot, of the random thoughts and wonderings and memories which popped into her head and back out again.31
Yes, one additional aspect of Brennan’s “Talk of the Town” contributions is the fact that she listens to private conversations. While we can sympathise with her as a woman alone in town, she does also cross the boundary between the private and the public when others are concerned. Even though it is anonymous gossip, as the people aren’t named, it should be remarked that in terms of shame, the Lady’s work does inherently utilise the humiliation of others for artistic purposes. Even though she does so quite innocently, much of what is interesting about the people that she describes has to do with exposure of the private that would be experienced as embarrassing by the people who are observed, or heard. This is one very specific aspect of the Lady’s contributions which concerns shame. Those who appear in her reports are there because they have suddenly become interesting, and this, in many cases, involves public experience of shame.
Furthermore, what the Lady is reporting can often seem mundane to the point that some might see it as embarrassing for the author of the contributions. What makes the writing any different from brute gossip, or silly mundane details blown out of proportion and shared as something of importance? These are notions that shame the Lady in different ways, and which she has to fend off. As I am attempting to show in this chapter, the ends justify the means, to put this crudely. What might seem as utterly mundane contains what was unique to a woman’s experience of New York at the time. As Ahmed points out with respect to feminist activism, the biggest statement that one can make is to live one’s life independently of the oppressive structures that are in place, and the Lady’s accounts of shame and a sense of not belonging as a flâneuse can possibly be read as a variation on this concept.32 Although the Long-Winded Lady is a persona, her determination to inhabit a traditionally male role and space, where each
31 McKeon xiii. 32 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) 253-5. 47 transgression of social norms manifests as shame, is based on the author’s own life-long efforts to do so.
Besides this gendered aspect, the Long-Windeds also draw attention to the shame and alienation of other marginalised groups and individuals. She presumes to understand the shameful dimension of their separateness and, in some cases, failing in the socio-economic sense. As the narrator watches a handicapped man from her window one day, she notices his seeming indifference for those around him. All of a sudden, he approaches a parking lot, taking special interest in it. “Maybe he was only doing what we often do when we are alone in public: hide our faces by pretending an interest in whatever presents itself – anything, as long as it cannot stare back,” the Lady notes, adding, “I don’t know.” (LWL 107-8) Next to pity, there is a sense of togetherness in the implication that no one is immune to experiences of shame. This gives rise to another theme in the Long-Windeds, which is an exposition of New York’s shame.
While the city is physically changing, many are left behind, not benefiting from the modern rebuilding. By extension, the society itself seems to be stuck in a sense, rather than moving forward through the inclusion of all its members in its welfare. In some stories, there is then an undertone of blame, as well as guilt. In the 1964 story “The Two Protesters”, the Lady hears the voice of a man “howling in the street outside.” (LWL 72)
It wasn’t a desperate howling, as though he were crying for help, and it wasn’t a silly, playful howling; it was a determined, controlled sound, spaced out, as though he were saying words. At the same time, there was a good deal of laughter going on – such unrepressed, jolly laughter that I thought there must be a party of revellers out there and that one of them had found a way to amuse the rest and keep their attention. (LWL 72)
When the Lady approaches, she sees “an astonishingly tall, thin man in a blue suit” and with only one leg, “face turned up to the sky” and his body, barely supported by crutches, leaning back “at a dangerous angle.” (LWL 73)
The people near him, all scattered, were smiling, but across the street a group of men and women were convulsed with laughter as they watched him. He paid no attention to anyone. All those about him seemed to be standing on solid ground while he was at the Edge, but although he was making no sense, he seemed to be making a good deal more sense than those who were laughing at him, and they, of normal height and standing on two legs, seemed more grotesque than he. I suppose some of the people were laughing because they were uneasy; certainly the crowd across the street thought it was being entertained, but there must have been a few who wished, as I did, that he would vanish. I don’t know. (LWL 73)
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As the Lady walks away from the scene that makes her feel uncomfortable, she is remembering another incident, where a silent, thinking, slightly sad crowd watched a different man break a restaurant’s window, without any apparent reason, nor anger nor shame over doing so. “The only thing I have to say about the two protesters,” the Lady concludes her story, “or protestants, is that one of the men was black and one was white.” (LWL 74) Although the remark about “protestants” sets her, as a Catholic, apart from both men, the Lady feels compassion for others who are disadvantaged and lonely.33
Yet she also experiences a different form of shame, as she is not an object of attention in this case, but only a face in the crowd seeing someone else in shame. Although she leaves the scene, as a white well-to-do New Yorker she can also be understood as belonging in the group of those that are laughing, rather than being another social outcast. In the 1958 piece “A Chinese Fortune,” the Lady is on the bus, reading an article in the Life magazine about a successful female manager, whose motto is: “Once you’ve found the right people and set them free, you can’t lose.” (LWL 31) The narrator first entertains the reader with her mocking musing:
Does she take them up on the roof at Henri Bendel? Or out into Central Park? Does she set them free all at once, in a flock, or one by one? At dawn, or when? If by some mischance a wrong one starts out of a coop, how is he or she got back in again? A hand on each shoulder? Both hands together on top of the head? Net? What if a wrong one gets clear away? (LWL 31)
The Lady also admits that she worries that the successful manager might not be able to find all the right people: “Myself, for instance.” (LWL 31) Eventually, she realises why the sentence has stuck with her:
This friend of mine told me about a friend of hers who had dinner at this wonderful Chinese restaurant, and after dinner she ordered fortune cookies and the waiter brought four and she broke them all open and read the little messages that were inside. Well, the first three fortune cookies said, “A letter is on its way and will arrive” and “When you are versatile, it will give you confidence” and “Yes, you will be lucky,” but the fourth fortune cookie said, “Help. I am a prisoner in a Chinese bakery.” Well, I was really pleased with myself. “Once you’ve found the right people and set them free, you can’t lose – help, I am a prisoner in a Chinese bakery.” And that is all I was trying to remember all this time, but I am so glad to have the whole matter cleared up. (LWL 32)
The Lady is troubled by the idea of prisons and cages. In “Little Birds in Torture” she cannot shake a memory of caged finches, which she has come across in a shop when buying an orange
33 The Lady’s Catholicism is revealed in a story which will be discussed in the last chapter. 49 squeezer. Although she is bothered by social constraints as a flâneuse, such stories place the Lady in opposition to those who are suffering, rather than on the same boat as them. That is not to say that she cannot identify with them, on the contrary, but she also feels guilty for being able to walk away free. These contributions bring attention the fact that while there are people and animals currently suffering somewhere in the world, the free and wealthy part of the Western world has learnt to live with the notion. This is suggested by the juxtaposition of the two kinds of messages in the story about fortune cookies, but also by the framing of the last one. “The next time I want an orange squeezer,” the Lady reflects on the encounter with the unhappy finches,
I will do my best to remember where the nearest hardware store is. A short walk out of my way seems a small price to pay for the privilege of avoiding reality.” (LWL 65)
In these stories, the Lady is depicting the developed part of the world as shamefully complacent to the suffering of others, while overly focusing on material comfort of its more privileged members. The narrator is one of the New Yorkers who can afford to regularly dine in style, spend afternoons in cafés reading books and newspapers, and keep up with the latest fashion. Her guilt can be seen as manifested in her diligence over money donations. In “Giving Money in the Street,” the Lady argues against those who withhold money for fear of being deceived.
I know people who say that to give money to someone in the street is to submit to blackmail and that most of the people who ask on the street are frauds. I say that I would rather give the quarter and walk on free than not give it and pay out the rest of the day, or even an hour or ten minutes of the day, in doubt: should I have given it after all, the chances are surely fifty percent against the person’s being a fraud, and so on. (LWL 142)
In a material sense, the Lady sees herself as belonging into the group of financially secured citizens of the First World which she inhabits, and this, along with her sense of a relative freedom in comparison to those in prisons and cages, makes her feel obligated to give money to those who ask, or seem to need it. Her anxiousness over failing to do so is quite striking, and suggests inner tension. This might be linked to the Lady’s confusion over her social status, as the she fluidly moves between experiences of marginalisation and oppression on the one hand as a flâneuse, and privilege on the other owing to her socio-economic status.
There is also a political dimension. After the Lady spends the whole night of August 20, 1968 in a frenzy, listening to a radio report of an ongoing communist invasion of Czechoslovakia, her ability to run around New York with a newspaper in her hand the following morning is a contrasting statement of her own freedom. Moreover, although the Lady rarely
50 admits to her Irish identity (an exception will be discussed in the last chapter), Brennan’s personal memory of political and military oppression can be read in her persona’s strong reaction to the events described in this piece, titled “Ludvík Vaculík.” Another example of such confusion and mixing of labels and identities takes place in the 1964 piece “The Man Who Combed his Hair”. The Lady first describes a man who
is always combing his hair. Once I saw him borrow a comb from a very small shoeshine boy. Then, while he combed his hair, combing it with one hand and smoothing it with the other, he bent and looked into the child’s face as though the little face were a mirror – only a mirror, and nothing more than that. (LWL 77)
The story depicts the man’s vanity and superficiality in a way that also links him to traditionally female stereotypes of careful attention to outward appearance and mirrors. “I know we are only reminders of one another,” the story concludes,
but I don’t want him to walk up to me and look into my face as though I were a mirror. What I would like even less would be to look into his face and see myself hiding there. (LWL 80)
Although the suggestion of becoming a mirror places the narrator into a similar position of objectification as the child on one level, it also emphasizes the man’s and the Lady’s shared humanity. The individual and the general often overlap in the Long-Windeds, as one person can stand for a larger group, as well as for the city or humanity as a whole, and vice versa. The Lady’s accounts add a female voice to the canon dominated by the works of men, and she sympathises with other women navigating the traditionally male urban space. At the same time, she also sees herself as one of the New Yorkers in an economic, and to an extent political sense, sympathising with the weak while feeling, besides shame, also guilt over their inferior status and unsatisfactory conditions. The next section will continue the analysis of representations of shame and a lack of belonging in Brennan’s American fiction, shifting emphasis from gender to national identity.
2.5 The view from the window
Thirty miles above New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River, there is a green, shadowy, densely wooded glade know as Herbert’s Retreat. […] A single narrow road, capricious, twisting, and unpredictable, meanders through the dark labyrinth of trees to make the only visible link between the houses, which are isolated and almost hidden, each one from the next. The road is strictly private, in keeping with the spirit of the Retreat, which is solemn, exclusive, and shaped by restrictions that are as steely as
51
they are vague. The most important, not vague at all, about Herbert’s Retreat is that only the right people live there. (RG 94)
In 1967, the Lady is looking down from her window as “a thin mother cat, a stray, leads her family of kittens, who do not know yet that they are strays, in an out of the garbage cans.” (LWL 106) In the stories set in the exclusive suburban area close to New York, called Herbert’s Retreat and modelled on Sneden’s Landing where Brennan lived for a while before divorcing her husband, labels are everything. The Herbert’s Retreat fiction is collected in The Rose Garden, which was published in 2000 with a photo of Brennan on the cover, taken by Karl Bissinger in the flat of the Irish-American theatre critic Thomas Quinn Curtiss in 1948.34 The seven stories come first in the collection, followed by thirteen rather miscellaneous pieces, some of which seem to be Long-Winded contributions. It opens with the story aptly named “The View from the Kitchen,” and the title foreshadows the style of the Herbert’s Retreat pieces.
The narrative begins with two servants preparing “a splendid dinner for three.” (RG 5) One of them is Bridie, described as “belong[ing] to the house,” while the other one, Agnes, has recently moved into the neighbourhood to work for a family up the road, and has only come for the night to help out. (RG 5) The owners of the house appear in the story only as seen from the kitchen window. At the beginning, Agnes is eager to have a look at Mr and Mrs Harkey, the owners of the house, and their guest, as she can hear their voices from the outside. But “the balance of amiability was still uncertain between her and Bridie, and she feared to put herself in a position that might prove embarrassing if Bridie chose to make it so.” (RG 5) Realising that her uncertain lingering is itself awkward, Agnes eventually makes a nonchalant move towards the window.
The background information about the three people observed through the window starts coming together as pieces in a puzzle during a conversation between the two maids. Three different forms of narrative can be identified in the story, primary of which is the exchange of gossip between Agnes and Bridie. The second is the overheard conversation between the Harkeys and their guest. The two forms of communication capture the difference in social status, as well as cultural identity, of the speakers. Agnes and Bridie use informal language, which is also clearly meant to evoke their Irishness. The three people in the garden try to give an impression of elegance and cultural capital, which only makes them seem ridiculous. Finally, the third voice provides descriptions – of space as well as setting the first scene. This is the
34 Bourke 159-60. 52 narrator, and the tone of the voice is as condescending as that of Bridie and Agnes as regards the three Americans, all the while achieving the sophistication and style that the Harkeys and their guest fail to evoke themselves.
Most of the textual space is occupied by exchanges between Agnes and Bridie, who are standing unobserved by the window, discussing the three people outside. Piling one humiliating story about Bridie’s employers after another proves to be a powerful bonding experience for the two maids, and the whole story ends with them still standing by the window. In the last sentences,
[e]mboldened, Agnes thumbed her nose at the window, and immediately collapsed on the table in a heap of shuddering, feeble giggles, with her hands covering her face. After a second, she moved one finger aside and peered up to see how Bridie was taking this demonstration. Bridie winked at her. (RG 15)
This ritual is repeated in different shapes and forms throughout the Herbert’s Retreat fiction. The maids are certainly far from perfect. Their gossiping and lurking makes them seem petty, but they also appear more real, and human, than the women they serve, who are only amusing characters in the stories of their employees as caricatures of wealthy superficiality. By their ability to unite, mostly to exchange information, the foreign servants, who all seem to be female and Irish, give the impression of being more native to this exclusive American residence, as well as more grounded in it, than those who own the houses there. The composition that Brennan uses, where the maids are the main observers and narrators, allows her to write a poignant satire against women who were partly like her due to their wealth, but still much different socially and culturally.
As Palko observes, while Brennan’s accent always ascribed to her an Irish identity, she was also “popular and glamorous, and she enjoyed material American successes through her writing,” and so her fiction means looking “in from the outside while also looking out from the inside.”35 Yet although Brennan grew up in a middle-class environment, as an ambassador’s daughter and a member of The New Yorker’s staff, she would have found it difficult to fit in among suburban housewives. In fact, when she and McKelway moved to Sneden’s Landing, Brennan felt as an outsider among the “shallow-minded snobbery,” according to Boylan. Moreover, her accent would always make Brennan an outsider among Americans. Bourke
35 Abigail L. Palko, “Out of Home in the Kitchen: Maeve Brennan's Herbert's Retreat Stories,” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua 11. 4 (2007): 73. JSTOR
At the same time, Brennan had little in common with the maids beside the shared nationality. Her parents employed a maid when she was little, which allowed them to “go out walking in the evening,” and when living in Washington, the family had three.38 In this way, her own sense of identity seems closest to the narrator’s voice, which is even more abstract and unanchored than the Long-Winded Lady. Rather than belonging into both groups, among the middle-class housewives and the Irish maids, Brennan seems fall outside both. Bourke argues for a strong sense of not belonging in the Herbert’s Retreat fiction.
Maeve was a woman without a kitchen: an Irish immigrant in America who had ended up paradoxically not just outside the drudgery of kitchens, but excluded from all their warmth and comfort. The stories she wrote about Herbert’s Retreat honour the work and perception of less privileged Irish women, but they also lament and rail against her own exclusion.39
It is also no surprise that the Herbert’s Retreat fiction does not denounce wealth or good life at all, but rather pretentions, criticising both from below, through the maids, and from above as the narrator, with an almost aristocratic prerogative. While Brennan was addressing her own experience with Sneden’s Landing, Palko notices that she also “exposes the latent stereotypes promulgated by the [sic] New Yorker.”40 She argues that the Herbert’s Retreat stories dismantle the prevalent view of Irish maids at the time, to whom Americans grew accustomed simply as a common type of domestic workforce, “by developing appearances, personalities, and agency for them.”41
Gershen Kaufman explains that “[b]elonging to any minority group within a larger, dominant culture creates a conflict of identity. Members of minority groups inevitably experience conflicting identifications: pressures to embrace their particular group versus
36 Bourke 183. 37 Bourke 175. 38 Bourke 45, 132. 39 Bourke 187. 40 Palko, Out of Home 90. 41 Palko Out of Home 90. 54 pressures to assimilate into the wider culture.“42 Although the Irish maids are a minority in the United Sates as a whole, the fact that they are so often employed as servants in Herbert’s Retreat offers them unique opportunities for redefinition. As both sides, the Irish help and the American employers, are women that understand the house as the locus of their experience, the world outside Herbert’s Retreat becomes a mere echo. For these two groups, the suburban residence provides most of the context for social interactions that are of consequence. And so while the Irish maids’ position is significantly lower in an economic sense, they are a numerous group that, unlike their American employers, forms a close community.
This is not to say that the outside world has no role in shaping the identities of the maids. They are aware of their minority status as economic migrants to the USA. Kaufman argues that members of minorities “are made poignantly aware of being different from others in various critical scenes around which shame accrues,“ and that “[i]n every instance there is a lasting impression of one's essential differentness from others, a difference that translates immediately into deficiency, into shame.”43 Given the lasting effect of such experiences, the maids would have brought their shame into Herbert’s Retreat. Furthermore, their status of servants remains a constant reminder of their inferiority even in the new settings. Kaufman explains that
[i]n their desperate search for pride, minorities all too often resort to contempt as a strategy against shame. […] By its very nature, contempt is an affect that partitions any social group into two distinct classes: the superior and the inferior. Whoever becomes the target of contempt is thereby rendered lesser, and the minority group employing contempt as a strategy feels superior.44
It is my argument that this is the strategy that the Irish maids in Herbert’s Retreat have opted for. In order to alleviate their shame, they pose as the better group in comparison with their wealthy American employers, thus creating an in-group and an out-group. These terms have been coined in social psychology based on observations that members of a given group (in- group) naturally suffer from bias against those in other groups (out-groups). Establishing their own group as superior through shaming also creates a heightened sense of community. At the same time, the owners of houses in Herbert’s Retreat are dismissed as helpless and absurd creatures, unable to form meaningful relationships with each other.
42 Gershen Kaufman, The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-Based Symptoms, Second Edition (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1996) 273. 43 Kaufman 274. 44 Kaufman 276. 55
Brennan’s maids find their source of empowerment in storytelling. As Jessica Senehi observes, “[t]he medium of storytelling is potentially available to everyone because everyone is able to tell a story and no equipment is required,“ which makes it a convenient subversive tool.45 Yet storytelling is also traditionally associated with Ireland. The utility of this tool is most obvious in “The Divine Fireplace,” where a visit turns into a disaster ending with a destroyed kitchen. The whole story is told by Stasia, a servant who has witnessed the whole evening, on a bus that collects all the maids in Herbert’s Retreat each Sunday morning to take them to church.
The maids looked forward to these Sunday morning rides, which gave them the chance of a great gossip. And the ride gave them a chance to escape from the monotony of their uniforms. Their positive, coaxing voices rose and fell, but rose, mostly, in an orgy of sympathy, astonishment, indignation, furious satisfaction, and derision. Not one of them was calm, or thinking about saying her prayers, and every time the bus stopped they all peered eagerly through the streaming windows to see who was getting in next, as if they didn’t know. (RG 95)
The ride is a performance, and a ritual. The maids refuse to unite under anything that comes from above, be it uniforms normally imposed on them by their American employers, or the Church that would have them sitting quietly and thoughtfully during the Sunday morning ride. The story opens with Stasia waiting for the bus, dressed for church and impatient to tell the story of her employers’ absolute humiliation. “She wanted to be in her seat telling the girls about all that had gone on in her house last night, and at the same time she hated to leave, for fear something further would happen while she was away.” (RG 95) Information is priceless cultural capital.
For the purposes of the ride, the house is treated as if belonging to Stasia, and she is slightly reminiscent of a mother going out with female friends to discuss the children and the husband. But this is a power move against the employers, as this is the day “they pay the price.” (RG 95) Temporarily confined in the small space of the bus, the maids listen to Stasia as she is relating the events of the night before, where everyone tried to impress everyone else until all were utterly humiliated. As with the story previously discussed, the narrator steps aside after having set the scene, and Stasia has the spotlight. Enjoying the attention, she laments when she realises that she has forgotten to tell several crucial parts of her story.
45Jessica Senehi, “Constructive Storytelling: A Peace Process,” Peace and Conflict Studies 9.2. (2002): 44, NSUWORKS, NSU Florida: Nova Southeastern University
“Aw, Lord, I forgot to tell you about the steak on the rug!” Stasia cried, seeing that the bus was stopping in front of the church. “And Mrs. Tillbright hiding the car keys, and Mr. Tillbright trying to sneak out this morning.” “We’re late,” Delia said. “The bell has stopped ringing. We’ll hear it all on the way back, Stasia.” “And Miss Carter on the sofa,” Stasia wailed. “I forgot all the best parts.” (RG 110)
Stasia is sad to give up the supreme position of the narrator, temporarily bestowed upon her. The triumph of her story is slightly diminished as she realises that “[s]he would never get their attention all the way back again.” (RG 110) She will need another story for that, as this one has been taken out of her hands and become public property. “They’d be crowding and chattering and interrupting her, getting the story all wrong.” (RG 110)
While constant gossiping is the most common source of resistance and unification, sometimes events go much further, most obviously in the story “The Servants’ Dance.” It opens with a feeling of hangover on a morning involving a series of minor conflicts between Leona Harkey’s guests. The atmosphere radically improves when the party realises that the servants’ annual ball takes place that night, and the group begins to praise their own dance skills.
“There’s no secret about their [the maids] collective passion for Charles,” Leona said. “Charles maintains that only servants can dance the waltz really well, Edward. Female servants, that is. He says their souls are clad in caps and streamers. They hold their heads up to keep the caps on, whirl to make the streamers flutter, and so they achieve the perfect posture for the waltz. You see, Charles, how well I remember what you say?” (RG 123-4)
This passage illustrates the fact that both parties engage in shaming each other, but the plot of the story shows the maids victorious. Some of the servants, angry about the condescension that their employers express about the ball in front of them, fabricate and spread the news that the employers, who traditionally attend the event, do not wish to be asked for dances this year. Consequently, Leona’s company sits bitterly at their table the whole evening, mean-spirited and angry. They are unable to enjoy the ball, as keeping up appearances means that they are forbidden to start dancing unless asked. Instead, they argue and put each other down.
The night ends in utter mortification, as it transpires that recorders have been placed around the room to capture the music of the life band playing, and that one of them was right next to Leona’s table. This is discovered when Bridie, her maid, who is at first distressed because she has herself been caught on another tape gossiping, realises the whole scale of events. She and a member of Leona’s party, Charles Runyon, make the discovery together.
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“[…] Oh, Mr. Runyon, the things I said. Things I wouldn’t want repeated. I won’t have a friend in the place when it gets out. I don’t know where to go or what to do. I’m nearly mad, thinking about it all night long, and praying to God the records would be broke by the time they get back to town.” “What records, Bridie?” […] “Bridie, please pay attention. Tell me, did they put recorders anywhere except behind your chair?” […] “Yes,” she said, “that’s right. There was one under where you were sitting, too, Mr. Runyon.” Staring greedily into his eyes, she saw and recognized what she had never hoped to see again – a chagrin as hot and as bitter as her own. (RG 148-9)
While the similarity of the experience between Bridie and Charles proves that both groups exhibit signs of discord, they are much different, as those who own the houses in the neighbourhood are not a community - despite contrary claims about the neighbourhood. This discrepancy is reflected in the physical space of Herbert’s Retreat as well. Although it is introduced as “a snug community of forty or so houses that cluster on the east bank of the Hudson,” it becomes clear that with a closer look, the illusion disappears. (RG 3)
Some of the houses are small and some are middle-sized. Not two are alike, and because they are separated by trees, hedges, wooden fences, or untidy vestiges of ancient woods, and because of the vagaries of the terrain, they all seem to be on different levels. Some of the houses certainly reach much higher into the air than others, because a few roofs can be glimpsed from the highway, and in wintertime, when the trees are bare, an occasional stretch of wall is disclosed to passing motorists, but otherwise the community is secluded. One characteristic all the houses have in common: They all eye the river. (RG 3)
The houses are separated from each other just as the members of the community are, and they compete in size and height. Yet they all gaze at the river, just as the women who own them are united in their competing with each other for dominance. Not everyone actually has a river view, but “in every house the residents have contrived and plotted and schemed and paid to bring the river as intimately as possible into their lives.” (RG 3)
Brennan’s Herbert’s Retreat stories constitute a specific phase in her writing, and she seems to have written them primarily to make sense of her life in Sneden’s Landing. Linking them to the period of the author’s unhappy marriage, Maxwell argues that they are “heavy- handed and lack the breath of life.”46 This might be true about the time that Brennan herself
46 Maxwell 5. 58 spent in such an environment, but despite their simplicity in comparison to the stories in The Springs of Affection, they are witty, as well as covertly subversive. Bourke observes that
Maeve’s fluency in the language of America’s most privileged people would have led her readers unconsciously to locate the stories’ point of view among the homeowners she wrote about, much as Jonathan Swift’s English readers at first saw nothing unreasonable in his 1729 pamphlet A Modest Proposal, which suggested a solution to Ireland’s ills would be the fattening of Irish children for use as food. Another of the writers Maeve most admired, Oliver Goldsmith, was similarly misunderstood in eighteenth-century England, by people who did not realise that, as an Irishman, he had a different perspective from theirs.47
Brennan’s Herbert’s Retreat stories are satirical and amusing, told in such a way that the reader finds shame entertaining. Yet when examined more closely, it is the shame of the American residents that is most amusing, as the writing invites to laugh with the narrator and the maids. Their viewpoints, as shown, are too close for this to be a coincidence. One can laugh at the maids from time to time, but their behaviour seems human and understandable, while it is difficult to sympathise with the embarrassed caricatures of American suburban homeowners who populate the pages of these pieces.
Maeve Brennan photographed by Karl Bissinger, image source:
2.6 Belonging by shaming: In-groups and out-groups
Gestures of power are tied with the humiliation of the opponent in the Herbert’s Retreat stories, and the tables can turn at almost any moment, which is a common feature of their narrative
47 Bourke 182-3. 59 structure. For instance, Mrs Conroy’s plot to outshine her neighbours in “The Anachronism” instead results in her losing a previously achieved position of dominance over her mother. Similarly, Mrs Tillbright ends up humiliated in an effort to embarrass her guest in “The Divine Fireplace.” Leona Harkey and her new husband, whom she married only for his small piece of land providing a better view of the Hudson River, inhabit a much different world than the traditional Irish couples of Brennan’s Dublin. Yet shaming in order to defeat an enemy appears throughout her work.
As already partially illustrated, moments of shaming others are connected with a sense of belonging in Brennan’s writing – by humiliating others, members of the in-group are united by their temporary victory over the members of the out-group. This straightforward process is then problematized in some of her Irish work. The persona of little Maeve, who appears as narrator in Brennan’s biographical fiction going back to her childhood, experiences shaming others in two different ways, which I will illustrate on two stories. While “The Day We Got Our Own Back” depicts a moment of justified revenge, “The Lie” shows the intricacies of shaming others. The first story takes place in Dublin in 1922, when “some unfriendly men dressed in civilian clothes and carrying revolvers came to our [little Maeve’s] house searching for my father, or for information about him.” (SA 25) Quite unusually, she gives a precise overview of the political situation at the time, relating the effects it had on her family.
The treaty with England, turning Ireland into the Irish Free State, had just been signed. Those Irish who were in favour of the treaty, the Free Staters, were governing the country. Those who had held out for the republic, like my father, were in revolt. My father was wanted by the new government, and so he had gone into hiding. He was on the run, sleeping one night in one house and the next night in another and sometimes stealing home to see us. I suppose my mother must have taken us to see him several times, but I only remember visiting him once, and I know I found it very odd to meet him sitting in a strange person’s house and to leave him there when we were ready to go home. Anyway, these men had been sent to find him. They crowded into our narrow little hall and tramped around the house, upstairs and downstairs, looking everywhere and asking questions. (SA 25)
The intrusion takes place as Brennan’s older sister Emer, her mother’s “chief prop,” is out on errands, and so the men invade the house when only Maeve, aged five, her mother, and the youngest daughter Derry are present. (SA 25) As the men come, Derry is upstairs in bed with a cold, while Maeve is “settled comfortably on a low chair in our front sitting room, threading a necklace.” (SA 25) As I will discuss in the next chapter, little Maeve exhibits confidence that adult female characters profoundly lack in her Irish fiction, and she is clearly eager to see what is going to happen. Her mother, on the other hand, is utterly distressed. As Bourke explains,
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Maeve’s father “would have been arrested and court-martialled,” if he happened to return home at that moment.48 “Judging from the fate suffered by so many of his comrades,” she adds, “he might easily have been shot.”49
They camped around the room, talking idly among themselves and waiting. My mother stood against the wall farthest from the windows, watching them. She was very tense. She feared that my father would risk a visit home and that he would be trapped, and that we would see him trapped. One of the men came and stood over me. He pointed to a blue glass bead for me to add to my necklace, but I explained to him that the bead was too small to slip over my needle and that I had already discarded it. This exchange with this strange man made me feel very clever. He leaned closer to me then. “Tell us do you know where your Daddy is,” he whispered. I stopped threading and began to think, but my mother flew across the room at him. She is a very small, thin woman with a pointed face and straight brown hair that she has always worn in a bun at the back of her head. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” she cried. “Asking the child questions.” The man drew away from me, and she went back to her place against the wall. (SA 26)
Appealing to a general sense of decency, the mother manages to stop the man’s interrogation. By invoking a social norm that both parties can relate to, she shames the intruder into a retreat. A temporary retreat, as the men immediately assert their superior position by forbidding the mother to go upstairs and check on Derry. Once more, Maeve’s experience of the raid comes as if from another world. When the men have left and Emer returns, the mother tells her what has happened. “Listening to her,” Maeve says, “I was once again spellbound with gratitude, excitement, and astonishment that the strange man had included me in the raid.” (SA 27)
A satisfaction comes to the mother after another, much more aggressive search. “There was not an inch of the house they did not touch,” says little Maeve. (SA 28) Coming in the morning, they catch the mother in her apron, who, having shined the brass rods on the staircase carpet, is polishing the dining room floor. She is once more alone with her two younger daughters, and the men take their revenge by humiliating the family, and especially the woman responsible for all the cleaning.
The newly polished oil-cloth was scarred by their impatient feet, and the bedrooms upstairs were torn apart, with sheets and blankets on the floor, and the mattresses all humped up on the bare beds. In the end, they went to the kitchen, and they took down the tins of flour and tea and sugar and salt and whatever else there was, and
48 Bourke 67. 49 Bourke 67. 61
plunged their hands into them, and emptied them on the table and on the floor. (SA 28)
As the men were preparing to leave with their hands bare, “one of them, a very keen fellow, rushed over to the fireplace in the front sitting room and put his hands up the chimney and shoved his face as far into the grate as it would go, trying to look up and see what might be there.” (SA 28) What inevitably follows is a shower of soot, which falls on the man as everyone is watching. After he looks at himself, and then at others, the intruders leave the house. Then the mother starts to laugh.
We had seldom heard my mother’s voice raised in laughter. She has a very quiet, almost secret manner in amusement. Now, however, she began to tremble and to smile. “Oh,” she cried, “to see the look on his face when he came back out of the chimney!” My little sister and I began to jump around, cackling. “Oh,” cried my mother, “what warned me not to have the chimney cleaned? Oh, thanks God I forgot to have the chimney cleaned!” And with us chattering a delighted, incredulous accompaniment, she laughed as though her heart might break. (SA 29)
In the very last section, God is shown as imposing shame on those who harm and do wrong. Although it would be otherwise a source of shame to a diligent housewife to forget to have the chimney cleaned, her mistake becomes an act inspired by providence.
Yet shame is an unpredictable weapon, which is complexly exposed in “The Lie,” another biographical story. “There was a joke between my mother and me about the first time I went to confession,” says little Maeve. (SA 30) She and her mother arrive at the church late, but the priest makes his appearance even later and, seeing the child, takes her by the arm and allows her to skip a whole queue of women. “Didn’t he give that crowd the surprise of their lives!” the mother later laughs. “Some of them must have been kneeling there an hour or more.” (SA 31) Maeve receives the penance of three Hail Marys, which she continues being given since then. Each time she tells her mother that she has been asked to say three Hail Marys, the mother “would laugh again, thinking of the angry faces of the women the first time.” (SA 31)
When examined, the “joke” is not that different from the Herbert’s Retreat humour illustrated above, as it is based on a public humiliation of others. As the mother and little Maeve arrive late, their victory consists in skipping a queue of women on their knees. The reader learns nothing about them except for the mother’s comment that “she could tell by the expression on
62 their faces that they all had a great deal to confess.” (SA 30) Then one day, little Maeve confesses that she has broken her sister’s favourite toy on purpose, and the penance suddenly becomes higher. Feeling “very free and glad it was over, and full of love and contrition and good resolutions,” she shares the scope of her penance with her father, who replies in a joking manner – unlike the mother. (SA 34) “I hardly heard him,” Maeve says,
[t]he minute the words were out of my mouth, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. Burning with guilt and shame, I stared at my mother. She was looking back at me in a way that confounded me still further, because although her expression was serious, I knew she was not angry. I was very sorry and very sad. I was ready to yell with anguish. “Oh, Maeve,” she said at last, “my poor child, why couldn’t you have kept your mouth shut?” “What’s going on around here now?” my father asked, bewildered. He got no answer. (SA 34)
Although little Maeve initially believes that her biggest crime is the breaking of her sister’s cherished toy, she discovers a more complex system of right and wrong. At that moment, her upbringing is not at the forefront; instead, it is the special bond between her, her mother, and the priest, as well as the memory of the exceptional victory over all the other women that were in church on that one special day. By doing what society claims to be right, Maeve finds out that she has stolen the three Hail Marys from her mother, and all that they meant to her.
Shame is a weapon that can be used to gain victories at the expense of others. The Irish maids in the Herbert’s Retreat fiction, as well as the mother in “The Day We Got Our Own Back” seem to be at such a disadvantage that humiliating the out-group appears justifiable, and therefore amusing to the reader. Similarly, there is a sense of a deserved retribution in Long- Windeds such as “The Sorry Joker,” where a man making everyone at a restaurant uncomfortable, especially a young woman who is on her own, is eventually humiliated and laughed at by everyone, including his companions. The Long-Winded Lady’s gleeful report that she “had the satisfaction of seeing a practical-joker type smacked down, and in such a way that he could do absolutely nothing to save his face,” seems fair given the context. (LWL 138) Similarly, the American homeowners in the Herbert’s Retreat stories tend to be punished for their efforts to bring down others for no good reason.
However, there is no such a clear dichotomy in “The Lie.” The mother’s attitude towards the other women in church doesn’t seem justified, but it is the child who suffers from shame and guilt at the end of the story. While the girl’s confession has just allowed her to expiate the
63 guilt felt over a clearly stated transgression, the final situation is more complicated. A part of this is due to the fact that the mother is imposing slightly different rules than the Church at that moment. But more importantly, the whole incident stems from a variety of shame experiences, which those involved are only partly willing to admit. Therefore, there is no immediate antidote to the shame that the child feels at the end of the story. There is nothing to confess in order to feel better, as it is unclear what has actually happened. In this context, the most important difference between guilt and shame is that shame is more difficult to make sense of, to address, and to work off.
The trend of redefining guilt as shame, which I have mentioned in the first chapter, clearly has its limits. Experiences of guilt co-exist with those of shame and a lack of belonging, feeding into each other. This has already been discussed in reference to social camouflage, as the Lady’s identity of a wealthy New Yorker is linked to guilt. Bourke also argues for something similar with respect to the Herbert’s Retreat stories, identifying the character of Charles Runyon as another of the author’s personas.
She may have been describing herself when she wrote of Charles Runyon that he ‘edited himself carefully, because the truth of his background was too crowded and hearty to suit the slender, witty, cynical being he had become.’50
Bourke suggests that “the ‘Herbert’s Retreat’ stories speak of guilt and self-disgust,” as Brennan enjoyed “luxuries and status symbols, achieved through the exploitation of Irish women […]”51
Brennan’s American fiction shows the ambivalence of being an outsider, as well as of weaponised shame. While the social dislocation of the flâneuse invites the reader to pity her, any sort of camouflage can be the source of guilt, as being accepted among the more powerful means sharing the burden of responsibility over the groups’ actions. Irish maids or a mother whose home is invaded by strange men are victims who can justly fight off their marginalisation by shaming those who are stronger. However, the same people can become guilty of offense once they shame others in less clear circumstances. While unjustified shaming is sometimes punished, such as in the case of the American homeowners, guilt and responsibility can also be passed onto the weakest party in other cases, such as in “The Lie.” This is a major theme, which keeps coming up in Brennan’s Irish fiction and will be discussed in the remaining two chapters.
50 Bourke 186. 51 Bourke 186. 64
Finally, shame is always present, and it can help connect the dots between the experience of marginalisation on the one hand, and guilt on the other.
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3. Retracing steps
3.1 (Not) returning home: The Visitor
Brennan forged her own destiny in New York, and much of the Lady’s independence and nonchalance seems to be the author’s own preferred way of being. In a sense, the literary persona represents a new leaf in Brennan’s life, a hope of a new stage of development perhaps as well. Yet as mentioned, Brennan’s life in New York as a whole was far from easy, and she very likely shared her persona’s feeling that she could not let her guard down in many areas of her life, which created a sense of artificiality. McKeon points out that if the Lady’s intention was to become one with the horizon of the city, as she deduces from her contributions, then of course one faces the problem that “a horizon can never be a home.”52 In other words, if all one is doing is escaping or trying to pass unnoticed, it is hard to find a sense of belonging. “Where the long-winded columns become devastating is in the search for home that they enact almost in spite of themselves,” McKeon argues.53
Much of Brennan’s fiction looks back to her Irish childhood home, and her stories are often set in the Dublin house on Cherryfield Avenue where she grew up. These consist in a plunge into the past, as if in search of something that has been left behind and left unfinished. This idea of incompleteness of the past, and ensuing anxiety, is attributed in her fiction to both of her major Dublin heroines. While Rose Derdon and Delia Bagot mourn their dead relatives, Brennan’s search through her childhood memories leaves it unsaid what it is that she is missing and cannot let go of, but her search seems to stem from homesickness. While her American stories are no less artistically valuable than the Irish fiction, the latter constitutes a profound and genuine search for understanding – of early childhood experiences, and especially of events that took place in the house that she remembers so well.
Her writing also consists of different layers of more recent past, as Brennan worked on some of her stories for years, in some cases even decades. By returning to the past from her current vantage point, she thematises and exposes difficult aspects of life that her American fiction skips, glazes over, or laughs about. The author returned to Ireland several times during her adult life, either on holidays, or, when older, for extended periods of time. But her Dublin stories are explorations of the city as it existed in her memory, and if real visits to Ireland proved difficult, her fiction stands for an even challenging effort to retrace her steps. The author once
52 McKeon xv. 53 McKeon xv. 66 wrote in a letter to Maxwell: “All we have to face in the future is what happened in the past. It is unbearable.”54
Brennan’s Dublin-based fiction is mostly collected in The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin, first published in the US by Houghton Mifflin, with an introduction by Maxwell, in 1997.55 All the stories had first appeared in The New Yorker, except for “The Poor Men and Women,” published in Harper’s Bazaar.56 It is organised into three parts: Brennan’s biographical stories where she appears as a child, stories about the Derdons, and stories about the Bagots. The Derdons and the Bagots are fictional characters, inspired by people that Brennan knew, as well as by herself. The first seven childhood pieces were published in The New Yorker between 1953 and 1955. Bourke points out to the tendency at the time to print stories “often indistinguishable from memoir.”57 She also draws attention to “the stories’ trusting simplicity: the lack of artifice that allowed the woman who ate all her meals in restaurants and never went out without make-up to reveal the child she had been.”58
The inspiration for the Derdons’ and the Bagots’ house: 48 Cherryfied Avenue in Dublin today (light pink, in the middle), photo taken by the author.
The house on Cherryfield Avenue where Brennan lived from the age of four until seventeen, is “the linking motif” of the collection, as all the stories are set there.59 It is quite a small house surrounded by many of the same kind on both sides, as well as across the street, located in a calm and nice part of south Dublin – a perfect home to Brennan’s middle-class
54 Maxwell 12. 55 Bourke 275. 56 “Note,” Maeve Brennan: The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin (London: Flamingo, 2000) 345. 57 Bourke 47. 58 Bourke 192. 59 Bourke 60. 67 families with children and a love for gardening. As Erin McGraw observes, Dublin is not used to serve as a realistic geographical landscape, but rather as the reflection of Brennan’s own memories of the houses she inhabited in Ireland as a child.
Even among densely woven books, Maeve Brennan’s The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin is startling. It is, without question, the most-place centered collection I've ever read. The stories are not only set almost exclusively in Dublin (one piece out of twenty-one begins in Washington, DC, then quickly flashes back to Ireland), they also take place in the same neighborhood (called Ranelagh), on the same street in the same house. And yet the book is not saturated with a sense of this particular city, its landmarks and rhythms. Brennan reveals her enclosed territory in such astonishing detail that mentions of Grafton Street and Stephen’s Green feel incidental to our sense of locale. The city isn’t important; the house is.60
Another piece of fiction, which is explicitly about a return to Dublin, is the novella The Visitor. It was written in the 1940s, yet found only after Brennan’s death as an eighty-page typescript and published in 2000.61 Most of the action in The Visitor takes place in a house inspired by Brennan’s first home on Belgrave Road, which her family left during the Irish War of Independence.62 It is a taller building than the one in Cherryfield Avenue, with steps that need to be climbed up to reach the entrance door. This too makes it perfect for the story that is set in it – a failed attempt to reach home.
10 Belgrave Road in Dublin today, photo taken by the author
60 Erin McGraw, “Review: In Place. Reviewed Work(s): The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin by Maeve Brennan: Under the Red Flag by Ha Jin: She Loved me Once and Other Stories by Lester Goran: Quake by Nance Van Winckel,” The Georgia Review 52.2 (1998): 377, JSTOR
Young Anastasia returns from Paris, where her mother has recently died, to her childhood home in Ireland, a house inhabited by her grandmother Mrs King.63 As with other stories, there is some inspiration with real people. Maeve’s mother’s name was Anastasia, before she officially changed it to Una at her wedding, and a part of her family continued referring to her as “Anty” even afterwards.64 Bourke describes young Anastasia Bolger as “smaller and slighter than her severe, black-clad mother,” as well as “[n]ever talkative […] pretty, with a shy smile, cloudy green eyes and long, thick, brown hair.”65 This juxtaposition of a small and fragile girl next to a larger and bitter older woman is enacted by Anastasia and her grandmother, and it is also repeated in the relationships between Rose and Delia and their mothers. On the other hand, Brennan’s mother devoted herself to domestic work, loved gardening and “excelled at needlework,” while the novella’s heroine acts more like Maeve at the time when she was writing – she is gentle too, but also uprooted and out of the house, rather than inside.66
Anastasia has come to Dublin in search of comfort and help, assuming that this is the place where she will always be welcomed – where she unconditionally belongs. Yet she immediately finds herself tangled up in issues she did not anticipate. Anastasia’s life has been shaped by the separation of her parents, and the fact that she chose to follow her mother, rather than stay with her father, has sealed her fate in the eyes of Mrs King, her paternal grandmother. Encountering quiet and eerily polite hostility from the first moment, Anastasia also soon learns that it was Mrs King who drove her mother out of the house, and out of Ireland. Yet Anastasia’s longing to be accepted is too powerful, and she persists in trying to please her grandmother and to be forgiven. Closing her eyes in the hope that the situation will somehow turn around, she waits around, ignoring her grandmother’s nudging to pack and leave.
Boylan comments on Anastasia’s “lack of awareness and her monumental lack of judgement,” underlying the theme of an impending defeat that cannot be avoided.67 In the style of a Greek tragedy, her fate was sealed before the story started, and the quest to find home where there isn’t any is heartbreakingly futile. The prevailing theme of Brennan’s novella is quiet rejection, and the anxiety it creates; “[t]he painful self-consciousness of her characters […] reflected in a constant feeling of watchfulness.”68 Anastasia is pushed to the brink of
63 Boylan viii. 64 Bourke 34. 65 Bourke 15. 66 Bourke 15. 67 Boylan x. 68 Boylan ix. 69 endurance, and she eventually packs her belongings. It is only when she gives up and leaves the house that she realises the full scope of her emotions, feeling “a sudden urge of anger” and then “shaking with spite.” (V 95) “Oh, shame on her!” she finally thinks, “Shame on her! I have no one to stand up for me.” (V 95)
She thought of how she had allowed herself to be thrust from her house without a single protest, without one angry word. How easy she had made it for them. She thought, I am not very clever. People can get away in anything. (V 96-7)
With an air of newly gained confidence, she walks back to her grandmother’s house. In a hopeful gesture showing that she no longer cares what Dubliners think of her, Anastasia sings a victorious song standing in front of her grandmother’s house.
There is a happy land Far far away Where we have eggs and ham Three times a day Oh it’s a happy land Yes it is… (V 99)
The song, which Anastasia “learned by heart one time, at school,” (V 99) doesn’t fit the context of leaving Ireland for France, as she is supposedly doing, while it would be very aptly chosen by someone going to the USA, as Maeve did. Anastasia’s inability to see that she needs to let go of the past that she cannot fix, as well as the future that she cannot have, and to stand up for herself, become manifest in these last moments of the book. Despite her brave gesture of independence, she is unable to leave in the end, standing in the street and looking up towards the window of the house where the grandmother and Katherine, the maid, are looking down at her in a symbolic gesture of power.
Then there were the two faces, both of them at the window, looking out at her and waving as thought they were the ones sailing away, while she called up to them. “Goodbye, Grandmother. Goodbye, Katherine. You see, I haven’t gone yet …” (V 99-100)
In her desperate clinging to the remnants of the childhood home, Anastasia is willing to humiliate herself over and over, without admitting the fact to anybody, especially herself. She bypasses the indignation and conviction that it is her grandmother who should be ashamed, taking the fall instead.
Boylan refers to Brennan as an “enigma”, asking “How could this superb manuscript have lain unpublished until after her death?”69 Why was this “poignant short work,” one of the
69 Boylan vii. 70 first that the author ever wrote, never offered to her readers – not even when she had become a valued member of The New Yorker staff, and a published author?70 As Brennan worked on some of her manuscripts for a long time, especially those which will be covered in this and the next chapter, the fact that The Visitor was never published could suggests that the author never deemed it ready for publication. If the tale of rejection and homelessness is largely inspired by Brennan’s own experience, as I suggest, then she perhaps expected to be adding more details in the manuscript as her life went on.
If she were hoping for a sense of closure, this would have been problematic. Just as Anastasia, Brennan directed much of her gaze towards the Ireland in which she had grown up, while violating its social norms by her simple being who she was. As an American writer, childless and later divorced, Brennan went against crucial social norms that the Irish culture of her childhood tied to her gender. Furthermore, given the complex nature of shame and its tendency to hide itself, its source, and the self that feels it, if Brennan felt shame over not belonging to her own culture, it would manifest itself by such acts as not publishing an account of the experience. This is, of course, only a speculation, yet she certainly continued exploring the manifestations of unacknowledged shame with painful sincerity throughout The Springs of Affection by way of characters who are less reminiscent of the author herself.
Cover page of the Atlantic Books publication of The Visitor, image source:
70 Boylan vii-viii. 71
3.2 Apples of shame
Brennan’s earliest memories of shame appear in her biographical fiction, most prominently in “The Old Man of the Sea” about her mother’s interaction with an apple seller. The title, as the story states, refers to the old tale of Sindbad the sailor, who took pity on an old and frail man and decided to carry him on his shoulders. But the old man “grew heavier and heavier and stronger and stronger, until, when it was too late, Sindbad began to hate him.” (SA 11) Brennan’s story is told by her childhood self, and it opens with her setting the scene.
On thursday [sic] afternoon, an ancient man selling apples knocked at the door of our house in Dublin. He appeared to me to be about ninety. His hair was thin and white. His back was stooped, his expression was vague and humble, and he held his hat in one of his hands. His other hand rested on the handle of an enormous basket of apples that stood beside him. (SA 9)
The question of how the frail man managed to carry all the apples seems to preoccupy both little Maeve and her mother, but he immediately starts praising and offering his goods, so it remains a mystery. The mother buys two dozen apples and the man leaves, after which Maeve runs to the window and sees him try, without success, neighbouring houses. She reports this to her mother and uncle, who are in the kitchen discussing whether by taking pity on the man, the mother did or did not let him take advantage on her. “I suppose you took every apple he had in the basket,” the uncle says mockingly. (SA 10)
“Oh, no,” I said quickly. “He had most of them left, and he didn’t sell any more. We must have been the only people who bought any.” “What did I tell you?” my mother said, not taking her eyes from the apples. “God help him, it would break your heart to see him standing there with his old hat in his hand.” “A half a dozen would have been enough,” my uncle said amiably. “Now you’ve encouraged him, he’ll be on your back the rest of your life. Isn’t that so, Maeve?” “Like the Old Man of the Sea,” I said, but they paid no attention to me. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” my mother said to my uncle, “always thinking the worst of everybody. This is the first time I ever laid eyes on him, and I’d be very much surprised if he ever turns up here again. It’s not worth to him, dragging that big basket around from door to door.” (SA 10-1)
The whole incident is belittling to the mother, and the fact that she is the only one that has bought any apples sets her apart from the rest of the seemingly more sensible housewives. And she is proved wrong, as the old man starts to come every week, forcing two bags with a dozen apples in each into her hands as soon as she opens the door. Maeve also discovers, by looking out of the window again, that the man has stopped trying the other houses. This doesn’t help
72 the mother’s case, and the fact that the man seems far too weak to carry his basket around the neighbourhood all day further supports the assumption that she is being set up. The mother seems to agree, and she confesses to Maeve that the situation is becoming a nuisance. “And I didn’t want to say it the other day with your Uncle Matt here, but he charges more than McRory’s,” she adds. (SA 12) The following week, she tries to insist on buying only one dozen, but finds herself unable to carry through with her decision, seeing how small and sad the old man looks. “Oh, it isn’t that I mind the apples so much,” she explains to Maeve, “but I don’t like feeling I have to buy them.” (SA 13)
Two kinds of shame keep the ritual alive. In the first phase, the mother cannot bring herself to be stern with the man, because it would be shameful to close the door on such a pitiful creature. This idea of being “uncivil” resurfaces many times in the Dublin fiction. On the other hand, she confides only in her daughter, who cannot really help her resolve the situation, in order to avoid admitting her humiliating defeat to others. Finally, to avoid any of the two confrontations, the mother decides to pretend that she isn’t home. Maeve divulges that this was a trick which she had the habit of employing “when unwanted callers came.” (SA 13) However, the old man proves unexpectedly determined, as well as somewhat shameless, and starts peering into the house through a slot in the front door for inserting letters, forcing the mother and her two daughters into the back garden.
But even the garden isn’t a permanent refuge, as in no time the next-door neighbour shouts across the wall that there is a man with apples for Mrs. Brennan. The two women exchange a few sentences, and it is agreed that the mother will tell the seller to go away. Her resolution once more immediately resolves, and she ends up apologetically buying two bags of apples as usual, but this time also missing four pence in order to pay the full price. She and her daughters watch the old man through the sitting room window as he leaves their house.
He didn’t close our gate, and he scuttled slowly off down the street as though he couldn’t get away from us fast enough. “First, he thought we were making fun of him,” my mother said, “and now he thinks I was trying to bargain with him. He might have known I’d make it up to him next time.” She, who never tried to bargain with anybody in her life, was filled with shame. (SA 16)
The situation is embarrassing for everyone, and the man never returns again. But the mother’s defeat lasts longer, as those around her know the story. Maeve’s uncle also adds to her
73 humiliation, as he insists that the man is a fraud and has been seen around the town, nicely dressed and carefree. The story, framed by shame and observers watching out of their windows, depicts a clash of two realities. Maeve’s mother’s ideals force her to take pity on the poor man, and so as not to act in contradiction to them, she complies with his wishes. The mother would be ashamed if she stopped buying the man’s apples, because it would show her as uncharitable – to others, but also to herself. On the other hand, when she is with other people, she also experiences shame from being portrayed as week and gullible. The mother bends backwards and forwards to avoid both forms of shame, but inevitably fails.
While the story is clearly a tale of humiliation, it also thematises seeing – of course, the two are inevitably inter-linked. As with the Herbert’s Retreat pieces, the window offers the power to see, while sheltering the observer, which both the maids and little Maeve use to their advantage. While they are seemingly the weaker party, they are able to observe the humiliation of others without the immediate danger of reciprocity. Berger et al. describe the process of learning to understand vision.
Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world. If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen. The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue. And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this – an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things’, and an attempt to discover how ‘he sees things’.71
“The Old Man and the Sea” depicts the possibility of the child to escape this reciprocity, as little Maeve can watch and report, while never becoming the focus of attention herself. Coming of age, as Anastasia finds, places one in a different position. A child’s experience differs radically from that of the mother, and the story suggests that growing up means entering a demanding world which one will never successfully learn to navigate. Brennan’s child personas also sometimes experience shame, but they are much freer, and also more confident than adult female characters, who seem to be weighed down by social expectations, anxious and weary of the necessity to please and negotiate with the public eye. Adult women also rarely find the time to watch around, as little Maeve does in this story.
Their mind is on matters close to home: the house, family members, pets and plants, and their loneliness among all this. One way to reduce shame is to engage in domesticity, which is
71 Berger et al. 9. 74 condoned by society and keeps the mind busy. Just as the beggar that the Long-Winded Lady observes and who pretends to be looking at something just to save face, Brennan’s women’s gaze is directed at domestic activity. Just as in the short biographical story, the conduct of her female characters in general tends to be guided by the desire to avoid shame. Delia Bagot, a young middle-class Dublin wife and mother, who will be discussed in following chapters, is a good illustration of the way in which Brennan’s women fear and avoid acting with the excitement and unreservedness of a child. If they slip, they immediately feel ashamed.
For instance, when Delia runs over to a car that has delivered a new sofa that she has been eagerly anticipating, she notices one of the men “grinning cheerfully at her” in response. (SA 249) She immediately runs off to the front door, feeling “she had made a fool of herself and shown herself to have no dignity, and she thought the men must be laughing at her for her eagerness.” (SA 249) Delia’s subsequent decision to “look severely” in order to regain her sense of dignity is a typical response of Brennan’s characters, and will be analysed in this and the next chapter. (SA 249) This watchfulness is made necessary also by the fact that the home cannot ever be relied on as a fully private space, and Delia voices this on another occasion when she decides to have a nap in the middle of the day. “Oh, I hope nobody comes to the door,” she tells her children, “[t]hey will think I am a madwoman, with my hair down in the middle of the day.” (SA 227) “Maybe nobody will come,” replies her confident little daughter Lily, who seems to be inhabiting a much different world than her mother. (SA 227)
3.3 Failed couples: The Derdons and the Bagots
According to McGraw, “disappointment in marriage and life make up the bulk of the collection” The Springs of Affection.72
As soon as the reader moves beyond the book's easygoing opening, the sunny, charming, affectionate pieces give way to stories that are longer, more carefully composed, and almost desperately sad. The house, which had seemed such a haven, comes to feel like a gravitational center for two great Irish themes: hopes disappointed and grudges cherished.73
She also comments on the careful editorial arrangement of the stories in this posthumous publication:
The pieces are not arranged chronologically; we are introduced to the deteriorated marriages, in which even the most commonplace greeting or silence is perceived as
72 McGraw 377. 73 McGraw 377. 75
spiteful, before we see whatever could have driven these poorly matched people together. Such a placement of material creates a sense of fate, even doom, as the reader proceeds. Once we know how utterly Rose and Hubert are bound to crash against the shoals of misunderstanding and resentment, how can we take pleasure in the brief joy of their courtship? And once we see how far short Delia and Martin fall from pleasing each other, how can we rejoice at the shimmering description of their wedding day?74
Brennan’s work can be split into comedy and tragedy in the true Aristotelian sense. While her depiction of American suburban snobbery in the Herbert’s Retreat pieces introduces comic caricatures, whose vices are too unreal to elicit nothing else than a laugh, the Dublin couples are noble in their inability to escape the foretold catastrophe. This is not made easier on the reader by the fact that some of the narratives start as if they were going to be humorous. In the first Derdon story in The Springs of Affection, Hubert pities himself thinking about the injustice he is going to suffer on that day - his wife is not going to be there to serve him his breakfast.
If this were an ordinary morning, she would have finished her breakfast by this time. Already, on an ordinary morning, she would have begun on her housework, and when he arrived downstairs she would leave whatever it was that she was doing and go back to the kitchen to wait on him while he had his breakfast. But this was not an ordinary morning. (SA 51)
Unfortunately, the reasons for his complaint stem from much darker circumstances than one is used to in the American fiction.
Today was the forty-third anniversary of Mrs. Derdon’s father’s death. She was having a Mass said for the repose of his soul, as she did every year, and, as she did every year on this day, she was going to attend the Mass, which meant that Mr. Derdon’s morning was going to be upset – he had awakened annoyed, thinking about it – because she was not going to be on hand to give him his breakfast and see him off to work. (SA 51-2)
Hubert is merciless in his expectations, and shows a shocking lack of consideration for Rose’s feelings. That whole day is, in his eyes, one petty war between the spouses. Hubert lingers on, convinced that seeing him eating his breakfast alone would be a victory for his wife. When he eventually goes down to the kitchen, after hearing the front door close, Hubert finds Rose still indoors. “I had to come back. I forgot something,” she explains. (SA 53) “Each of them had tried to play a trick on the other,” he thinks to himself, “and she had won.” (SA 53) Hubert continues analysing his defeat, as well as what he sees as a generally undesirable situation.
She had known all the last ten minutes what he was up to, delaying up there. She wouldn’t call up to him, or come up, as another woman would have done. She would have called that “bothering” him. Doing the direct thing was “bothering” him. For
74 McGraw 377. 76
some reason, she had been just as determined to see him as he had been not to see her. (SA 53)
Hubert has a very precise idea of how things are supposed to be, as well as who Rose should be, as he compares her behaviour to what he considers to be the norm. Yet Rose is far from waging war on Hubert that morning, as her mind is on her father and his untimely death all these years ago.
He had died two days before her tenth birthday. Every year, when his anniversary came around, she was reminded that in two days it would be her birthday, and then, on her birthday, she would be reminded that on her tenth birthday he had been only two days dead. […] The feeling of apprehension that she had, as she thought of the incompleteness of those two days, was terribly painful, and she could never get over the idea that something had been left undone in connection with her father’s death – that he had failed to see somebody he might have very much wanted to see once again, or that there had been a carelessness about his wake or his funeral, or a lack of respect in the handling of his coffin or at his grave. She had been too small to see that everything was done the right way. (SA 54-5)
Rose’s relationship with her father was warm and playful, and his death also meant that he would not be there to shelter her from her mother’s bullying. As she returns in her mind into the past, Rose’s thoughts also betray a startling sense of responsibility over things out of her reach – now, as well as then. Expecting that “she had forgotten to do something important and was going to be found out,” Rose is determined to serve Hubert his breakfast before she leaves for church. (SA 54-5) “It was her knowledge of the power of the accident, and her natural, confused apprehension, as much as the desire to see that he got something to eat, that had caused her to trick Hubert into coming downstairs this morning, when she knew perfectly well that he was enjoying his sulk.” (SA 59)
In this juxtaposition of experiences and views, Hubert’s selfishness, which comes across as entertaining at first, appears horrific in contrast to Rose’s pain and need of support on that day. Furthermore, the whole interaction foreshadows the inability of the spouses to understand each other, or to even try, as well as Rose’ unwillingness to say what she wants, clearly and out loud. Rather than mentioning her father’s death and asking for support, she hints at her upcoming birthday. But knowing how the birthday is connected with her father’s death, it seems likely that it is the latter that Rose wants to draw Hubert’s attention to. Yet neither of the Derdons shows any generosity in interpreting each other’s behaviour, ever.
Unhappy marriages are a fact of history, when preservation of land was the major deciding factor in forming unions. This remained the case in Ireland, especially in its rural parts,
77 for a long time.75 Such marriages must have inescapably fall short of the idealised version portrayed in folklore and fiction, as well as in the humanities. G. W. F. Hegel’s reasoning is of special interest, as he links marital love with alleviation of shame. According to Katz, Hegel saw shame as resulting from the contradiction between our natural and spiritual needs, insisting that the tension was inevitable and that shame could not be alleviated by suppressing one of the needs.76
Furthermore, he defines two spheres, the public and the private, which work in complementary ways. The public sphere forces people, through the threat of shame, to behave in a way that conforms to outside expectations based on one’s professional role. What makes it easier to conform to the ensuing expectations is that a significant sphere of one’s life remains private. On the other hand, embarrassing moments still occur. Furthermore, the fear of shame is so strong, that even if one is lucky enough that a moment of shame isn’t witnessed by anyone, he/she still often imagines an outside observer, which too brings about certain experience of shame. According to Katz, “even the hypothetical ‘if they knew, they would feel contempt for me’ can cause a measure of shame.”77 Katz explains that
[s]ome determinations are relegated to the private and inner sphere because they are denied recognition in the public sphere. For Hegel, it means that they should be recognized and affirmed in private. This serves to highlight a key function of intimate relationships, namely, to affirm shameful determinations of the individual produced in her activity in civil society.78
In other words, marriage is a sort of antidote to the pressure of society to supress one’s true self, which is reaffirmed by the loved one. In his Early Theological Writings, Hegel argues with respect to those who are in love that
[t]here is a sort of antagonism between complete surrender or the only possible cancellation of opposition (i.e., its cancellation in complete union) and a still subsisting independence. Union feels the latter as a hindrance; love is indignant if part of the individual is severed and held back as a private property. This raging of love against [exclusive] individuality is shame.79
This is a much-quoted passage in current discussions of shame.80 Hegel argues that exposing the self does not lead to shame in the private sphere, and on the contrary holding part of oneself
75 Bourke 12-15. 76 Katz 760. 77 Katz 762. 78 Katz 762. 79 G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, translated by T.M. Knox and Richard Kroner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988) 306. 80 E.g. Probyn 2-3; Roberts. 78 back brings it about. If one is to avoid feeling ashamed in a relationship, he/she has to surrender their whole selfhood: “A pure heart is not ashamed of love; but it is ashamed if its love is incomplete.”81 Katz shows how this amounts to a simple dichotomy.
If we respond to shame within a love relationship the way we respond to it in civil society, namely, by asserting our individuality vis-à-vis another individual – including hiding features that do not conform to our desired status – shame would be reinforced. We would now feel shame for feeling ashamed, as it were, in the face of someone we are supposed to love.82
In other words, while the civil sphere requires us to conform to outside expectations, altering or hiding one’s behaviour so as to avoid a transgression, marriage requires the exact opposite. Lewis mentions a similar ideal of absolute disclosure in the client-therapist relationship. “Both parties agree to suspend or put aside their spontaneous superego affects in order to provide an accepting atmosphere in which unconscious, trouble-making impulses may dare to reassert themselves.”83 Yet she also points to the difficulty of creating and maintaining such a relationship.
The technical difficulties for both parties in keeping to their sides of the analytic agreement are well known; the patient, even though he has granted himself permission to say anything, nonetheless finds that permission is powerless against his defences, which keep operating. The analyst has difficulty maintaining the benevolent neutrality of his feelings, and finds himself in a spontaneous negative “countertransference” to his patient’s revelations.84
While one would be tempted to generalise Hegel’s thesis of full disclosure and acceptance to apply to all cases where there are good intentions and/or mutual affection, he insists that such a relationship can exist only between a wife and husband – which rules out Lewis’ example.
Yet one striking aspect of his distinction between the public and private sphere is that the latter consists only of marital union. For instance, children and parents cannot have such a relationship of pure acceptance, as parents have to instruct their children. As opposed to a marital relationship, which aims to eliminate shame by mutual sharing of the self, Hegelian philosophy insists that since parents prepare children for their life in the public sphere, a degree of shame has to exist in the relationship.85 Therefore, only love between partners can alleviate shame by mutual sharing of the self.
81 Hegel 306. 82 Katz 763. 83 Lewis 15. 84 Lewis 15. 85 Katz 765. 79
Hegel’s concept seems to rely on an almost magical ability of love to cancel shame, which one certainly does not find in the marriages that Brennan depicts. The idea that withdrawal causes shame is certainly present in her fiction, especially in the Bagot stories. Yet, as Bourke observes, “these stories are about love.”86 Furthermore, Hegel insists that love between partners is only one of two necessary ingredients, as only a sanctified marital union is able to alleviate shame in the way he describes.87According to Katz, a marital union is in Hegel’s view
sufficiently reliable because it is grounded in the stability of an ancient institution, recognized by the state and fellow citizens. In the absence of such a reliable unity, the exposure of potentially shameful features – inherent to sex – would not alleviate shame but intensify it. In such circumstances, the subject is likely to experience the presence of the other as a stranger, a mere member of civil society – if not during the sexual act itself then later – thereby feeling ashamed of exposing vulnerable aspects. By contrast, some formalities in marriage – specifically the marriage ceremony – are necessary in order to set a clear distinction between how we relate to fellow members of civil society, on the one hand, and how we relate to our intimate partners, on the other.88
This, of course, raises questions in the modern context. Can Hegel’s concept of shame alleviation be applied without this insistence on marriage? There is no clear answer, as it is impossible to draw the line stating where a relationship is serious enough to count as Hegel’s marriage union. Most importantly, the dichotomy in Hegel’s view of shame, where marital union provides an ailment to our failure to avoid feelings of shame in the public sphere, becomes problematic when we focus on the inherent normativity. While love should reaffirm the partners’ uniqueness and allow them to be truly themselves, their union also needs to be formally condoned by others.
As Ahmed points out, untraditional forms of love can be the source of shame, which both the public and one’s family can enforce and perpetuate. “One may be shamed,” she argues, “for example, by queer desires, which depart from the ‘form’ of the loving nuclear family.”89 It seems logical that such shame can be alleviated between two homosexual partners who agree on rejecting those social norms that discriminate against them. Hegel’s thinking shows two things with respect to shame. One is that a strict dichotomy between the public and the private is an illusion, as society is a necessary pre-condition in the creation of his private sphere. His
86 Bourke 78. 87 Katz 772-3. 88 Katz 772. 89 Ahmed, Cultural Politics 107. 80 views are also a reminder of the prevalence of the ideal of a perfect marital union throughout history, which Brennan challenges as unattainable in her fiction.
3.4 The oppressiveness of home
Both Rose Derdon and Delia Bagot adopt a similar approach to tensions that they feel in their marriage, as they focus their attention on domestic work and childcare. Delia finds solace in the company of her children, pets, garden, and private thoughts, although the inability to understand the distance between her and her husband Martin constantly nags at her. Her confusion and insecurity guide her conduct at home, as thoughts and feelings, including supressed anger, guilt, and insecurity surface as she is busy with chores. The family house represents the relationships between the inhabitants. Whether it is too small or too big, it stands for isolation, as Delia finds out when she is thinking about Martin’s study, where he tends to disappear after arriving home after work late at night. His small study, where he also sleeps, represents the empty space that is between the spouses, almost acting as a third person standing between them.
Delia remembers that her husband first started sleeping in the room so as not to wake her and the children up when he arrived home late from work, nor be disturbed by them in the morning. “It had seemed natural enough at the start,” she thinks back,
when he first said he’d like to be able to be down in the little room when he came in very late, and she remembered the pleasure it had given her to arrange the room for him and put some of his shirts and things in here to make it more convenient for him. Now he was beginning to collect his books here. And yet she was certain that at the beginning he had not known any more than she had that he would prefer this room to the big front room where she slept, or that what he really wanted was to be alone. She was certain now that if she had raised some objection at the beginning he would have thought no more about the little room. Or if the little room had never existed, he would never have had the idea of shutting himself away from her. (SA 208)
Like Rose, Delia tends to focus on small things that are right in front of her, thus blaming the symptoms, rather than the causes of her unhappiness. In an illusion of the possibility of having control over Martin’s behaviour, she imagines that her marital problems could have been prevented if she had only asked her husband not to lie down in another room one day. Finally, it is the house most of all that seems responsible, as Delia concludes: “What an alarming truth it was that if they had had a smaller house they might have been happier. And yet, the house was quite small.” (SA 208)
Unlike Delia, who the reader tends to find in the garden with her little girls, dog and cats and, of course, plants and flowers, Rose is more often in the kitchen. Both women’s minds are
81 occupied with thoughts about their unhappiness, as well as about those who have left them. There are no pets in the Derdons’ house, and Rose’s only companion, her and Hubert’s son John, has moved out, so
[t]here was no need now to set the table for more than two people. The third place was empty, and the third face was missing. (SA 136)
Glass wall between the spouses partly manifest themselves within a dichotomy of public and private. While Delia and Rose feel safest at home, Hubert and Martin seek to escape its oppressiveness. They leave the house to gain physical distance from their wives, and Martin also works at night, which makes it almost impossible for him to see Delia – although he seems to find some time for their children. While Delia hates the idea of Martin drawing away from her and escaping into his private room, he finds the whole house disagreeable.
Lately he had the feeling of putting things off. He only had that feeling when he was at home or when he was on his way home, and he would have liked to put off coming home indefinitely. […] When he was in the house he was hateful to himself. The feeling of being hateful to himself grew worse every day. […] He wanted a chance to separate the hateful picture he had of himself from his real self, so that he could stand back and decide what to do. There was a phrase that kept coming into his mind that filled his eyes with tears of shame: “a wife and a family around his neck.” (SA 213)
At the same time, such unresolved issues tied to the home prove impossible to outrun, and as they are associated with shame, shame follows wherever one goes. Just as the Long-Winded Lady feels observed even in her capacity of narrator, so does Hubert in the street. When he buys a hyacinth to make his wife feel better after John has moved away, he walks along the street paralysed with shame, carrying the plant “they have wrapped […] around with pink paper.” (SA 76) “Indeed,” observes Niamh NicGhabhann, “the frameworks of psychogeography and of flânerie often imply uninhibited freedom of movement, whereas Brennan’s choreographies often take place within restricted and highly surveilled environments.”90
Leaving the house doesn’t mean freedom, especially not form shame. Hubert’s confusion and supressed emotions catch up with him even as he is taking a walk and a begging woman becomes mistakenly convinced that he is teasing her about a money donation. Hubert feels embarrassed, which translates into anger towards the woman, as he projects his relationship with Rose and his son into the encounter:
90 Niamh NicGhabhann, "Choreographies of Place: Gender and the Negotiation of Urban and Suburban Landscapes in Maeve Brennan's Fiction," Irish University Review 48.2 (2018): 220, Edinburgh University Press Journals
To pass her by and not give her anything, all right, but to turn back to look at her and still give her nothing. It must have seemed he was mocking her or that he had something worse in mind. How could she have thought that of him? She held the child as if it was threatened. She had both arms around the child the way Rose used to hold John, as if there was nothing in the world but that one baby. […] Women like that were impossible to deal with. […] There was no reasoning with them. (SA 81)
While Brennan’s female characters are inspired not only by a variety of women that she knew, but also herself, there seems to be a great deal of her in her male characters as well. Their tendency to escape problems by gaining distance is evident in Brennan’s own life, and even specific moments such as Hubert’s encounter with the beggar are probably inspired by her own experience. In the 1960 piece “Giving Money in the Street,” the Long-Winded Lady gets tangled up in a misunderstanding with a beggar, who doesn’t want to accept a full dollar, and, as she is in an immense hurry, the Lady eventually decides to keep her money and hurries off. “I decided that a person who invites money on the street and then wants to limit or set the amount to be given is a fraud,” she announces as the shame over the encounter catches up with her. (LWL 143) “I feel I have not finished with the matter yet, and I have an uneasy suspicion that the decision I make is going to go against me,” she concludes with more insight than Hubert tends to show. (LWL 143)
Leaving home is a battle for Rose, and she has adopted her mother’s tactic in overcoming the hostility that she expects from others by putting on a variation on a brave face. Going to the Mass, “her face wore a self-conscious, almost disdainful look, the look of one who has found nothing to criticize so far but who fears that at any moment she may find herself among people who are beneath her and who will try to be too familiar with her.” (SA 60) Hubert observes that Rose turns “into a different person” in public (SA 139):
In the presence of strangers, she sometimes took to smiling. One minute she would produce a smile of trembling timidity, as though she had been told she would be beaten unless she looked pleasant, and then again, a minute later, there would be a grimace of absurd condescension on her face. And before anyone knew it, she would be standing or sitting in stony silence, without a word to say, causing everybody to look at her and wonder about her. And if she did speak, she would try to cover her country accent with a genteel enunciation, very precise and thin, which he knew to be vulgar. He felt it was better to leave her where she felt at ease, at home. (SA 139)
Rose’s behaviour, by which she masks her insecurity in public, shames Hubert, who then tries to distance himself from his wife, and also hide her at home. He then also tries to justify this by arguing that it is in Rose’s best interest.
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Similarly, when Martin is away, he can forget the walls within his marriage, convincing himself that Delia is happy because she is at home: “After all, she had the house and the children, and what more did she want. She had a life of her own.” (SA 214) Returning home means facing the lie that domestic activity is necessarily fulfilling, and that marriage can become a simple agreement over division of labour. “But the minute he got home,” Martin is aware, “he felt harassed and pursued, as though the house were full of people waiting for him to say the one word that would make them all happy.” (SA 214) Everyone wishes to escape from the house, and Rose loves to do so by observing the sky. She thrives on getting lost in its light and clouds, but she is also weary.
As long as the light of day lasted, she kept looking up as often as she got the chance. She was ashamed to be seen standing in her garden or in the street looking up. She thought the others might think her queer. (SA 119)
Similarly, beating and brushing a carpet in the garden, Delia contemplates her daughter Lily’s plan to sit on the carpet and go on an adventure.
The carpet was in the garden to be beaten, not to be sat on or made into playground. But to sit on the carpet and go away somewhere – Mrs. Bagot would have liked that, although she did not admit to Lily that she agreed with her. To get the two children and Bennie, the dog, settled on the carpet and then to vanish and go away somewhere, even if it was only for the afternoon, or part of the afternoon. To disappear for a little while would do no harm to anyone, and it would be very restful to get away from the house without having to go out by the front door and endure the ceremony of walking down the street, where everybody could see you. (SA 221)
The internalised public eye is always there to keep order in things, and Delia’s stern voice echoes an imaginary one of the neighbours. Trips and playing are to be secretly dreamt about while doing the chores, but even that is perhaps too much, as “all this dreaming was not getting the work done.” (SA 221) The house and domesticity can serve as a form of escaping reality for a while, but it is inherently oppressive because there is no other alternative. Home provides distractions that Rose and Delia can focus on, but it is also the only space where they can truly imagine their existence.
“There was no hope for her inside the house,” the narrator remarks about Rose, yet “[h]er entire life was in the house.” (SA 138) Because there is no other place of refuge than the house she shares with Hubert, Rose feels trapped in it and in her routine. When she storms out after a fight with her husband over why their adult son has left home, she eventually returns. “I’ll forgive you,” she tells Hubert, “because that’s what John would want me to do.” (SA 157) “But I didn’t come back for his sake. I came back because it’s my duty to stay here and keep
84 your house.” (SA 157) Rose offers reasons that are meant to explain why she has returned, but the simple fact is that she has nowhere else to go.
3.5 The falls of affection
The Springs of Affection, called after one of the stories in the collection, shows the couples defeated. Both the Derdons and the Bagots are happy only around the time of their wedding, before they settle down into their routines. Hubert remembers the blissful first weeks of their marriage as he is walking past the Stephen’s Green park in Dublin:
She loved the park. She was always wanting to go in there. She used to like to feed the ducks, and she never finished exclaiming over the ingenious arrangements of the flower beds, and over the convenience of the benches and chairs that were placed along the edges of the paths for people to sit on […]. She was always in the park during those first weeks – months, it had been – before they found the house they could afford and moved out to Ranelagh. (SA 63)
As in a presentiment of defeat, Rose cannot stop crying about moving into their permanent home. She also doesn’t say why, which makes Hubert grow frustrated.
She had seemed all pleased and contented with the house, and he could not understand what had suddenly overcome her. He had been worried himself, worried about money, wondering if they were going to too much expense, and her tears had unnerved him. Then, their first Sunday in the house, they were at their dinner when she suddenly put her head down into her hand and began to cry again: “Oh, I wish we had stayed where we were. It was so nice there. I wish we could have stayed there.” He had lost his temper. He had said to her that there had been nothing but mistakes ever since their marriage and that maybe everything had been a mistake, the marriage, too, the marriage most of all, and what did she mean by saying that she wished they had stayed there, what was going on in her mind, she was better off now than she had ever been in her life before. (SA 63-4)
Rose and Hubert start off on the wrong foot, and they never recover. While Rose expects him to behave in the same harsh and belittling manner towards her as her mother used to, Hubert wants to be a good husband. Yet both his actions, in which he establishes himself as superior to Rose, and her reactions to his behaviour let them slip into the exact pattern that they both wish to avoid. In these first stages of their marriage, Rose makes Hubert feel as if he was the only adult in the relationship with any power and responsibility, as well as someone cruel, which makes him lash out at her, fulfilling her expectations.
But the worst thing Hubert remembered about that unhappy day was the look of terror that had crossed Rose’s face when he had spoken roughly to her. He had been shocked by the terror and hurt on her face. He had only struck out at her in natural
85
annoyance and impatience – that was what he told himself – but the effect on her had been that she was trampled. […] Her plate was full in front of her, but she ate only a little of it, bowed toward it all the time like a punished child or a punished, furtive dog. (SA 64)
While Hubert is harsh to Rose, there are moments where one can sympathise with him. As in The Visitor or “The Rose Garden,” which will be discussed in the next chapter, the circularity of misunderstanding, disappointment, and shame is suggested in the Derdon stories well. During dinner soon after they got married, Hubert asks Rose if she has mended his socks.
They were two months married to the day, and Rose had bought a slice of dark fruit cake to celebrate the anniversary. She had cut the cake into fingers, and they had eaten it all except for one small peace, which lay on the place between them. Hubert knew she wanted the cake but that she also wanted him to have it. He intended to give it to her, but he wanted to tease her. When he asked about the socks he was grinning. He still thought it absurd that Rose should do his mending. […] When she heard his question she looked at him in astonishment, as though he had deliberately said something he knew would hurt her. “I forgot them,” she said. “I forgot to do your socks. Isn’t that just like me, to forget the one thing you asked me to do.” “It’s not that important,” Hubert said. He was still smiling, but he was hurt. (SA 173-4)
Although Hubert’s behaviour towards Rose is awkward and often directly shaming even at the beginning of their marriage, he is also wounded by what he sees as extreme reactions. Similarly, Martin is hurt by Delia’s reaction to his efforts to console her after the death of their child.
She struggled so fiercely against him that he had to let her go, and he stood up and stepped away from her. […] He could not understand her. It was his loss as much as hers, but she behaved as though it had to do only with her. (SA 256)
Yet next to feeling hurt, the husbands also cannot help but belittle their wives, thus keeping them from speaking up. Hubert makes sure that Rose knows her place by forcing her to ask for housekeeping money every Friday. “She would waylay him as he came down the stairs buttoning his waistcoat, ready to leave for the office, and ask him for the money.” (SA 116-7) There is nothing dignified about the idea itself, as Hubert forces Rose to act as if he was doing her a favour by providing the finances, but the staging is even worse. “She would hurry up the three steps from the kitchen, where the dirty breakfast things were, to catch him on the way out.” (SA 117) And Hubert seems set on keeping things this way.
One morning she closed the kitchen door and waited behind it to see what he would do. He put on his hat and took his umbrella and went out of the house without a pause. She thought he might have left the money on the hall table, but he had not done that, and she had to ask him for it point-blank in the evening. He smiled
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pleasantly and took it out of an inner pocket where he had it all folded and ready. (SA 117)
A part of the problems that the spouses face are not their fault. While Rose was raised in difficult circumstances, Delia never recovers from the loss of her child. The lingering presence of the tragedy is suggested in “The Twelfth Wedding Anniversary.” In one simple sentence, Delia is described as “the mother of three children, one of them dead.” (SA 204) The tragedy becomes a lasting fracture in the marriage, petrified by a lack of acceptance and trust between the partners, as I will show. Yet at the very beginning of their marriage, Martin also exhibits dismissiveness of Delia’s feelings which are just as belittling as Hubert’s tight grip on family finances.
In the beginning, at the beginning of their marriage, Martin had warned her often enough against thinking, because thinking led to self-pity and there was enough of that in the world. What he had really told her was that she must stop forcing herself, stop trying to think, because her intelligence was not high and she must not put too much of a strain on it or she would make herself unhappy. “I don’t want you to make yourself unhappy,’ he has said and she remembered the nice tone his voice used to have when he spoke to her. (SA 232-3)
Although the period of courtship, as well as the early stages of marriage are moments of happiness for the Bagots and Derdons, both husbands seem to capitalise on it by establishing themselves as superior to their wives. “How did you ever get along before you met me?” Hubert keeps asking Rose then. (SA 173) This family hierarchy confuses the attribution of blame, which in a very murky line of reasoning tends to fall on the women, rather than the men. This includes the way in which Delia and Martin mourned their dead child.
Jimmy would have been ten now – nearly three years older than Lily. Poor little mite, he had lived only three days, and she had not been herself for a long time afterward, and perhaps she had said things she shouldn’t have said. She was sorry now for the things she shouldn’t have said and that she couldn’t clearly remember saying, but when she thought of that time, her mind turned to ether and she got all sleepy, and she knew it was unhealthy, not the right frame of mind for her to be in, and when the children were at home she was so busy with them that she had no time to let her thoughts go back. And she must always remember that Martin was very nice with Lily and Margaret, a very good father. (SA 233)
Rose was discouraged and humiliated by her mother her whole childhood, and Hubert’s actions seem to be a continuation of that. She believes that “[f]rom the time they were married, Hubert had shown that he distrusted her with money – he said she had no head for money – and as the years went by he had to come to distrust her presence everywhere except inside the house.” (SA 138-9) His attitude towards his wife also includes a juxtaposition of the city and the country.
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Her pretentions, the pitiful air she wore of being a certain sort of person, irritated him so much that he could hardly bear to look at her on the rare occasions – rare these days, anyway – when they went out together. They had been living in Dublin for over thirty years and she was still the same simple girl from her simple country town, and that was all right, in its way, if she would be content with that, but the minute she got out of the house she started imagining things about herself, as though by imagining, and pretending, she could deceive people into thinking that she was the sort of woman she was not. (SA 60)
Both husbands come from the city, and Delia as well as Rose move there after the wedding from the countryside. While this might simply reflect the backgrounds of Brennan’s parents, it also resonates with the traditional dichotomy that has, since antiquity, associated women with nature and men with civilisation. According to Hubert’s logic, Rose should humbly admit to her social shortcomings, as hiding such a defect makes it only more visible, and makes Hubert more ashamed of her. This applies more generally, besides things pertaining to Rose’s place of origin.
Hubert and Martin seem uninterested in a sincere discussion, but they are also bothered by their wives’ unhappiness, feeling entitled to both – their unconditional agreement, as well as contentment. Rose will neither ever confront her husband, as she “had never made her mind about anything.” (SA 136) Numbed, she finds herself trapped in the cycle of perpetuating the status quo: “Her decisions, the decisions she made about the food she put on the table and about various matters about the house, were dictated by habit and by the amount of housekeeping money Hubert allowed her.” (SA 136-7) There is no thought of any larger decisions. This is also embedded into a mirror metaphor, as
she could hardly bear to look in the mirror, because the face she saw there was not the one that was sympathetic to her [her son John’s] but her own face, her own defenceless face, the face of one whose courage has long ago been petrified into mere endurance in the anguish of truly hopeless self-pity. There was no hope for her. That is what she said to herself. (SA 138)
Delia keeps silent too, and she accepts her defeat: “She couldn’t bear to think about it, because what had started out as a simple arrangement for Martin’s comfort had gone all out of hand, and now there seemed to be no way of putting an end to it.” (SA 209) Moreover, “Martin knew Delia was no more anxious for a scene than he was, and in any case they both had the children to consider.” (SA 219) When Margaret and Lily are away for some time, Delia finds herself hoping
that he would say something to her that would give them both a chance of a talk, but he said nothing. She knew things were not as they should be between them, but while the children were at home she did not want to say anything for fear of a row
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that might frighten the children, and now the children were away she found she was afraid to speak for fear of disturbing a silence that might, if broken, reveal any number of things that she did not want to see and that she was sure he did not want to see. Or perhaps he saw them and kept silent out of charity, or out of despair, or out of a hope that they would vanish if no one paid any attention to them. (SA 236- 7)
The presence of another person serves as another obstacle in resolving tensions. When Delia breaks down after the death of their baby, Martin contemplates leaving her alone, until “her anger and grief was spent,” but he eventually decides to call the woman that has been helping around the house to come up into the room. (SA 257)
He felt ashamed and lonely and impatient, and he longed to say to her, “Delia, stop all his nonsense and let me talk to you.” He wanted to appear masterful and kind and understanding, but she drowned him out with her wails, and he made up his mind that she was acting, because if she was not acting, and if the grief she felt was real, then it was excessive grief, and perhaps incurable. (SA 257)
Fearing that he might fall short of solving the situation, Martin tries to do away with the whole problem by reframing it. Both couples struggle to comprehend each other, as well as the social matrix in which they find themselves. And the judging eye of society makes matters worse. When Delia says something that inspires Martin to go to her and try talking to her, the presence of the strange woman in the room detains him, and he goes downstairs instead.
It is moments like these that scar the spouses. Although Delia later learns to blame Martin’s study for the distance between them, she is right in thinking that there is something standing in the way of them being the couple they used to be. Martin too realises that the memory of the incident will remain, “standing like an enemy between them and making enemies out of them.” (SA 259) And shame keeps the issue unresolved, keeping Delia from speaking about what bothers her. Thinking it strange that everyone acted as if they had got over the baby’s death, she starts to doubt herself: “perhaps it was herself who was strange, delirious, or even a bit unbalanced.” (SA 252) “If she was unbalanced she wasn’t going to let them know about it – not even Martin […],” she decides. (SA 252-3)
Brennan may have been trying to make sense of some private memories in these stories, possibly involving her marriage, as well as other members of her family. Bourke, for instance, draws attention to similarities between Delia and Martin and Brennan’s parents.
That Maeve observed and was troubled by what she interpreted as a fracture in her parents’ relationship cannot be doubted. That Bob sometimes slept alone in the tiny boxroom is registered also in ‘The Morning after the Big Fire’ […] Bob had
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suffered some sort of breakdown over a period of months in 1921, and he had been ill again in September 1922.91
According to Bourke, “[t]he stories Maeve wrote about her family are not so much a true account of what happened in the past as an expression of what she needed or wanted to say at the time she wrote.”92 Maxwell, whose “searching eye” and “gently probing editorial pencil” came into contact with Brennan’s writing for twenty years,” himself focused on childhood and family as a writer.93 Bourke quotes a very insightful observation of his on storytelling.
What we, or at any rate I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.94
Yet these two marriages, as well as what comes across from Brennan’s biographical stories, should also be analysed with the broader historical and cultural context in mind. It is easy for Martin and Hubert to be the clever ones in a patriarchal society that delegates women to the sphere of domesticity. Rose’s hands, which are in a bad shape because of the menial labour that she does around the house are a symbol of this division:
She wore herself out cleaning the house, going over her rooms and rubbing the walls and floors and furniture, and stopping in the middle to clench her fingers tight, tight, tight, but not tight enough, never enough for her, there was no tightness hard and fast enough to satisfy her. […] Her hands were large and hard, like a boy’s. By comparison her husband’s hands seemed small, because although about the same size they were narrower and better shaped, with soft scrubbed tips. He, Hubert, worked in a men’s outfitting shop and wore a hard black hat to work. (SA 116)
This passage illustrates both the division of labour, where Hubert ranks higher in the social order, as well as Rose’s inability to push through the glass ceiling. The voices of the women don’t carry as much as those of the men, and so the perspective of the weaker becomes pushed to the margins or distorted. “You shouldn’t worry about things that don’t matter,” Hubert tells Rose when she starts crying, as she is sick and for a moment the one who is waited on. (SA 121) “The things that matter to me might not be the things that matter to you. Has that ever crossed you mind?” she replies in an emotional outburst that serves Hubert as a reason to
91 Bourke 82 92 Bourke 92. 93 Bourke 92. 94 Bourke 92. 90 dismiss her. (SA 121) In this pattern, Rose never manages to say what she is quietly thinking with enough authority. Yet she has things to say: “Sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t spent her whole life giving away the things she valued the most, and never getting any thanks for them.” (SA 132)
“Words did no good,” thinks Delia about how she was “anxious to explain how she felt” when her son has died. (SA 253) “Either they did not want to hear or they were not able to hear her.” (SA 253) “All she wanted to say was how she felt, but they mentioned God’s will as though they were slamming a door between her and some territory that was forbidden to her.” (SA 253)
But only to her; everybody else knew all about it. She alone must lie quiet and silent under this semblance of ignorance that they wrapped around her like a shroud. They wanted her to be silent and not to speak of this knowledge she had now, the knowledge that made her afraid. It was the same knowledge they had, of course, but they did not want it spoken of. Everything about her seemed false, and Mrs. Bagot was tired of everything. She was tired of being told that she must do this for her own good and that she must do that for her own good, and it annoyed her when they said she was being brave – she was being what she had to be, she had no alternative. She felt very uncomfortable and out of place, as though she had failed, but she did not know whether to push her failure away or confront it, and in any case it seemed to have drifted out of reach. (SA 253-4)
The unresolved shame between the spouses creates some feelings of guilt, but shame is the most dominant emotion, as it accrues around the walls that these conflicts give rise to. This fact brings on further shame. Rose naturally sticks to her routine of accepting whatever comes, convincing herself that there is nothing that she could, or should, contribute to Hubert’s decision-making process, while her husband resents her passivity. This is odd at first glance, because when she erupts in anger, Hubert only takes it as more proof that there is no point in trying to speak to each other. But they both know at some level that Rose’s position in the relationship is embarrassing, and it only needs to be decided whose fault it is. One of the most obvious symptoms of her subordinate position, Rose’s silence, thus makes Hubert feel ashamed.
Martin is generally grateful for Delia’s silence, as “[h]e was always afraid she would say something that would bring the house down around his ears before he had time to decide what he was going to do.” (SA 214) Yet he too feels shame about it. Both husbands then attribute the shame that they feel to their wives, as something intrinsic to them. “She seemed to have no resources of her own,” thinks Martin. “When she looked at him, the expression in her eyes put him on edge.” (SA 214) Hubert becomes convinced that there is simply something inherently wrong about Rose, and even pities himself for it.
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Hubert thought it was very hard for a man in his position to have to be ashamed of his wife, but there it was, he was ashamed of her. And he was sorry for her, because her failure was not her fault. She had been born the way she was. There was nothing to be done about it. (SA 139)
Finally, both Hubert and Rose are ashamed of her.
She told herself that she had the hands of a servant. Hubert’s hands were soft and neat, but hers were big and rough, as though she were a person who worked with her hands. She had often caught Hubert looking at her hands when she was dealing with the food on her plate and looking at her when she put food into her mouth. She always ate a lot of bread, and she thought he must sometimes wonder how she could eat so much bread or why she ate it so fast. She couldn’t help it – she felt there was something shameful about eating so much of bread or of any food, but she wanted it and she ate it quickly and there were times when she felt her face getting red with defiance and longing when she reached for the loaf to cut another slice. (SA 141)
Rose’s defiance of shame by eating bread summarises the futility of her approach to marriage and life in general, as she avoids facing the bigger truths. But her hands are also a reminder of her inferiority. These emotions prevail because confrontation would mean entering into shame, which everyone wishes to avoid. At the same time, the status quo is frustrating, and some of the suppressed shame takes the shape of anger. This can be often explained in terms of a cognitive dissonance, where a given situation isn’t in accordance with the ideals that those involved hold. This is especially striking in situations when the party that is responsible is unwilling to admit so.
Hubert disliked having the order of his day disturbed. He didn’t like to have his breakfast all topsy-turvy, and he didn’t like seeing his wife running around the house at that early hour of a weekday morning with her hat and gloves on, and her big bulging prayer book in her hand, and what he disliked most of all was to see her go out to face the world wearing the face that she showed to the world, the face that she imagined impressed people – as if anybody ever notices her. (SA 60)
Hubert wishes for his wife to wait on him, and he is unwilling to excuse her even on the day that she is grieving her father and going to the Mass. When he is confronted with his selfishness, watching her try to do both – leave for the Mass on time and complete her morning tasks, he transfers whatever shame he feels about his behaviour to her. It is Rose’s fault that there is disorder on that morning, her fault that he feels confused. Similarly, the ritual of giving Rose housekeeping money every Friday morning “without a comment” is another source of frustration to Hubert, who is angry that she always duly accepts with a similar lack of reaction. (SA 137) In general, Hubert tends to feel ashamed of Rose, as well as angry with her for the fact.
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The anger was dreadful because there seemed to be no way of working it off. It was an anger that called for pushing over high walls, or kicking over great towering, valuable things that would go down with a shocking crash. The thing he really wanted to smash was out of his reach and he did not even know what it was, but when he thought of things that were out of his reach but that he could smash if he could reach them, he felt better. But there was no way of talking to her, he only ended up feeling ashamed of himself and sick of himself and sick of her. (SA 66-7)
Martin’s attitude towards Delia is similar, as he erupts in anger when he is reminded of the distance that he is putting between him and his wife. When he pretends to have forgotten his wedding anniversary, he feels ashamed, as he
knew perfectly well it was his wedding anniversary, and the thought of it embarrassed and irritated him. Things were going well enough, and he wanted no sentimental reminders. He wanted no reminders of any kind. He wanted to be left alone. When Delia hesitated after putting down the breakfast tray, he thought he knew what she was going to say, and he felt panic-stricken. Then when she left the room without speaking he was glad – ashamed of himself but glad anyway. (SA 213)
The outlet of Martin’s anger and shame too becomes Delia, and on that specific day also a vase of flowers which she leaves for her husband in his study. Not only doesn’t she complain that Martin seems to have forgotten their anniversary, but her silent gesture where she gives him flowers, as opposed to expecting them, further shames and irritates Martin. As he decides to get rid of them, convincing himself that Delia’s gift is an act of impertinence in which she breached the silent agreement that the study is Martin’s private space, he drops them on the floor, glass shattering.
Brennan depicts two patterns of shame experience, where the women feel a degree of anger and guilt, but they mostly tend to internalise shame and respond with self-apprehension and anxiety, while the men feel mostly angry and guilty. According to James Gilligan, patriarchal societies make it easier for men to work off their shame.
Those who are socialized into the gender role of women under conditions of patriarchy […] are more likely to be shamed and considered "unfeminine" if they attempt to assume the male prerogative-and duty and obligation-to engage in violent behavior, whether on the football field or the field of combat. That is why for men violence can diminish feelings of shame, temporarily if not permanently, whereas for women it is, with rare exceptions, only likely to increase them.95
In Brennan’s fiction, neither men nor women find pathways towards releasing shame through such straightforward aggression. Yet Martin and Hubert do seem to be more comfortable with
95 James Gilligan, “Shame, Guilt, and Violence,” Narcissistic Abuse Rehab (2003): 13,
The guilt that Hubert, and especially Martin feel is interesting from a historical perspective. The traditional aisling poetry, written at a time when English colonial power was the first to blame for the state of Irish society, insisted that a ruler’s power is validated by the happiness of his spouse, representing Ireland. “The Gaelic poets usually imagined their monarch wedded to the land, which was emblematised by a beautiful woman: if she was happy and fertile, his rule was righteous, but if she grew sad and sorrowful, that must have been because of some unworthiness in the ruler.”96 If the same logic was applied to Brennan’s Ireland, her unhappy couples, and especially the lonely and anxious wives, would stand as a metaphor denouncing the patriarchal political establishment of the time. If we zoom away from the one house in Ranelagh where all this fiction takes place, this distinction fits very well with the larger context of the period, where men wrote legislation that circumscribed the rights of women, as well as formalising their inferiority.97
Brennan also shows that there is nothing to gain from the current state of affairs for neither of the two genders. The Derdons and the Bagots are trapped in every sense – spatially, temporally (as they are supposed to remain married no matter what the state of their relationships), as well as within themselves and their patterns of behaviour. “There is no way out,” writes Maxwell about the Bagots.98 A profound sense of entrapment and inability to speak out loud and to confront each other, as well as face the self, is what holds the glass walls between them up. The divisions result from shame, as no one wishes to acknowledge their personal shortcomings, as well as hurt that they experience as the result of the actions of others.
96 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, (London: Vintage Books, 1996) 18. 97 One may also wonder whether the twentieth-century dichotomy of women in shame and men experiencing guilt actually did not reflect something real about the state of society at that time, but that is a speculation whose addressing is beyond the scope of this thesis. 98 Maxwell 9. 94
The walls between the partners are themselves a source of pain, as they stand for rejection, as well as lack of effort and courage, which causes further shame. They are a reminder of the failure of the two people to be the couple that they hoped and promised each other (as well as others) to be. “They both want it to appear that nothing is amiss,” observes Maxwell with respect to the Derdons.99 There are no walls in the traditional concept of ideal marriage, such as it is presented by the Church, in popular fiction and folklore, or philosophy such as Hegel’s. This makes even the most innocent incidents cause a storm. When Hubert comes home one day in a good mood, “smiling as he stepped into the hall,” he sees Rose quickly close the kitchen door. (SA 160) The moment becomes burnt into Hubert’s consciousness.
He might as well not have seen Rose at all, but he had seen her, and he wondered if it could possibly have been intentional – to shut the door in his face like that. He considered going down to the kitchen and asking some question, saying something, anything at all, but instead he went along the hall and into the back sitting-room and walked over to the window, and turned at once from the window and began to stare at the doorway. (SA 160)
As always, Hubert reacts to his inability to take action by deflecting: ‘By this time Rose should have opened the kitchen door and called up, “Is that you, Hubert?”’ he decides. (SA 160) He is on a fence, wishing that someone would advise him on what to do, as “he wanted to go straight down to the kitchen, or else not to go down there but to sit down at once and ignore the whole matter.” (SA 161) Hubert longs to have “someone to talk to” as he is stuck in his decision- making process, “too angry to sit down.” (SA 161)
The lack of support is another striking feature of the marriages in The Springs of Affection. They are never seen confessing to others or seeking help in private matters, not even having a meaningful discussion with a friend or relative. This too is linked with fear of shame, as Rose’s unfulfilled longing to have a talk with a beggar that regularly comes to her door, and who reminds her of home, shows.
She often thought of asking him in for a cup of tea, but she had not the courage. Besides, if by an odd chance he accepted, and came down into the kitchen, what would they talk about? Of course she could give him the tea and leave him to drink it, there were plenty of little jobs that she could find to do to keep busy, but that would be uncivil, and in any case she knew very well that what she wanted was to talk to him. What she did not know, and could not imagine, was what in the name of God they would talk about. She could not be sure of more than a yes or a no out of him, and the idea of asking him in for a cup of tea and then firing a list of
99 Maxwell 8. 95
questions at him was even more uncivil that to keep herself silent and busy while he drank it. And she wanted to hear what he had to say. (SA 124)
The importance of support when combatting shame is underlined by Howard A. Bacal, who illustrates this on an example of trying to bridge the gap between how one wishes to complete a task and how one believes themselves to be capable of it. 100 Once more contradicting himself, Hubert does sit down, thinking the whole incident through and further deliberating.
Rose had closed the door at the exact moment when she had every right to expect him home, and something in her attitude as she closed the door told him that she had seen him letting himself into the house. The more he thought back, the more he was sure he was right.” (SA 161)
Rose participates in the narrative, unable to deflect in the way that Hubert does. “The tea is ready,” she comes to announce. (SA 162) “I don’t want any tea,” Hubert replies. (SA 162) “She was standing stiffly and her face was pink,” he observes, “[i]t was clear that she knew she was in the wrong.” (SA 162) Rose’s approach is to hide within the fabric of her domesticity, as an alternative strategy to lessen the shame that she feels about the state of their marriage.
“I don’t want any tea,” Hubert said. “That’s simple enough, isn’t it? And I can guarantee you this – the next time you shut a door in my face like that I’m going to walk out of this house and I won’t come back. I mean what I say.” “Hubert, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. Hubert said nothing. “Will you let me bring you up a tray?” she asked. (SA 162)
The spouses, both trapped in their respective domains, use them as an escape, further embracing their divisions. When Rose leaves, Hubert is thinking.
He wished he had had sense enough to go down to the kitchen and have it out with her the minute he saw the door close. He felt he was walking along a path that was separated from another identical path by a glass wall so high that it went out of sight. The path he was following was full of mistakes that he recognized, because they were his own, but while every mistake was familiar to him, every mistake came as a shock, because of the different intervals of time that elapsed between one mistake and the next. […] Nothing in his life made sense. (SA 163-4)
What stands out most clearly is that Brennan’s Dubliners are stuck in a state of defeat. The social and personal paralysis is of a similarly frightening scope as that of James Joyce’s Dubliners, yet it is depicted from a much different angle. Instead of the voice of a small boy or
100 Howard A. Bacal, “Shame – The Affect of Discrepancy: Commentary on Chapters 1, 2, and 3,” eds Melvin R. Lansky and Andrew P. Morrison, The Widening Scope of Shame (New York and London: Psychology Press, 1997) 98. 96 an adult man, the reader is confronted with a woman’s experience which is complemented by male – as Brennan constructed it.
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4. Deep-rooted shame
4.1 Carmine, crimson, blush, rose, scarlet, wine, purple, pink, and blood
Both Delia and Rose are associated with flowers. They are from the countryside, and they love to garden. Rose enjoys
her little back garden, keeping the grass bright and whole, and growing lupine, London pride, wallflowers, freesia, snowdrops, lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots, pansies, nasturtiums, marigolds, and roses. (SA 122)
Rose’s name is also a reference to her mother’s secret passion, revealed in the 1959 story “The Rose Garden.” It features Rose’s mother, Mary Lambert, who owns a small shop inspired by that of Brennan’s paternal grandmother.1 She is “big, with a narrow nose, and a narrow-lipped mouth too small for the width of her face.” (RG 185). Mary is extremely fat, her legs are “crooked” and one is also “crippled”. (RG 185, 186). Her appearance is tied to her family home, as she believes that “the crookedness in her legs came from climbing up and down the twisted stairs of this house, in which she was born.” (RG 185)
Mary is “well-aware” that she is “ugly and awkward, especially from the back.” (RG 185) This betrays an assumption that she is watched and judged, her appearance noted and assessed by others looking at her. Mary’s mother died at her birth, and she grew up with her father, helping him in his shop and often missing school “[b]ecause of her crippled leg.” (RG 186) Mary’s body separated her from society in two ways from an early age – her appearance was judged falling far short of an ideal, and her leg forced her, or rather gave her an excuse, to spend time in seclusion. Mary embraced isolation as a solution to the shame she felt over her body, assuming that everyone is an enemy.
She developed a habit, in the street, of whirling around suddenly to discover who was looking at her ungainly back, and often she stood and stared angrily at people until they looked away, or turned away. Her rancor was all in her harsh, lurching walk, in her eyes, and in the pitch of her voice. She seldom upbraided anybody, but her voice was so ugly that she sounded rough no matter what she said. She was silent from having no one to talk to, but she was very noisy in her ways. (RG 186- 7)
While little Maeve’s mother chooses to try to conform to social norms, an easier path in her situation, Mary finds isolation more convenient. By attacking before she can be attacked, and pretending not to care about others’ opinions, she suppresses her shame. Unfortunately, her
1 Bourke 23. 98 seclusion also makes her disagreeable and harsh, as is suggested by the description of her voice. This extends to her comportment in general, and explains why she is such a terrible mother to Rose.
Mary tries to hide herself by wearing “long skirts, and tall black boots laced tightly in but leaving her knees free.” (RG 185) She is tough on the surface, just as her “laced boots were very solid and hard-looking, as though the feet inside them were made of wood.” (RG 185) Yet the more she braces herself, the more vulnerable Mary becomes on the inside by comparison, as she “had a great feeling” in the legs covered by her boots, “and in all parts of her body.” (RG 185) As discussed in the first chapter, shame can manifest itself as a lack of shame, and anger can be one of the accompanying signs. In Mary’s case, her shame over her appearance has led her to hide herself, her personality, as well as her shame. This, she believes, is the only way to keep her dignity.
She had known from a child that if she asked she would get, because of her deformity. She had always seen people getting ready to be nice to her because they pitied her and looked down on her. Everyone was inclined to pity her. How could they help themselves? She was an object of pity. […] She was always afraid people might think she was asking for something. She always tried to get away from people as quickly as she could, before they got it into their heads that she was waiting for something. What smile could she give that wouldn’t be interpreted as a smile for help? (RG 196)
Identity in society is construed through interaction. Mary’s starting point was that of deformity, of being seen as lesser than the average other, which meant that any help would become hurt, an act reinforcing her position as not fully equal to others. At the beginning of her book, Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings, J. Brooks Bouson adds to the chorus of scholars who argue that shame is a challenging topic: “Because there is shame about shame and because we tend to look away from the other’s shame, telling the story of the female body-in-shame can be a difficult, and even risky, business.2 She explains that within the traditional mind/body dualism, it is women that have been associated with the body.3
Brennan’s choices as an author support this; her male characters tend to feel shame about their actions, and none of them experiences bodily shame and its consequences to the extent that Mary does. Female bodies, according to Bouson, are subjected to external judgement
2 J. Brooks Bouson, Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010) ix. 3 Bouson 3. 99 imposing regulations, to which women traditionally respond by an effort to comply. She claims that ‘[w]hat in part lies behind this desire for self-improvement and the drive to achieve the idealized body image is the fear of the “out-of-control” body to which the docile body serves as an antidote.’4 In other words, normativity towards the female body becomes a means of subjection, which Mary rejects. She refuses to act as she is expected both in the sphere of the body, and in her social role of woman and later also mother.
Sitting by her dead husband’s bedside, she keeps asking Father Mathews: “What about me?” (RG 202) It is a question that the priest doesn’t expect, and more importantly doesn’t approve of, and which he avoids answering directly, forcing Mary to repeat it. Mary also annoys him by her unwillingness to leave the room, which means that he feels obliged to stay as well. He has his public image in mind, and her presence forces him to stay despite his fatigue, as it “seemed un-Christian” to leave her there alone. (RG 202) He is there to keep up appearances, not as company for Mary, and the whole situation only makes him more hostile. When the priest has eventually left
he couldn’t help rehearsing a question that he knew he would never ask, because it would seem uncharitable. The question was what sort of a woman is it could sit beside her husband’s body, with her unfortunate children in the next room, and think only about herself? (RG 203)
Although Father Matthews keeps his thoughts to himself in a further effort not to seem un- Christian, he passes judgement on the freshly widowed woman, seeing her as selfish for thinking of herself and her own needs. His attitude reflects the position of women in Irish society at the time, and Mary breeches the norm. By asking her question, she shows that her emotions and thinking go beyond the socially acceptable sorrow for her husband and her children. She is concerned for herself.
It is as at this moment, by her husband’s deathbed, that Mary is asking the priest to pity her. Not to pity her as a woman, or as a deformed person, but as an individual who has suffered a great loss. She has refused pity when it would be bestowed on her in a humiliating manner, designating her as lesser than others. Similarly, she refuses to be lesser now by not complying with the expectation that she will not feel for herself. Father Mathews would have been willing to pity her on his own terms, but he refuses in this case, thus denying Mary her right to exist as an individual human being, extending beyond social roles. Mary’s failure to be a socially acceptable woman, through her body and her refusal to fulfil certain roles, is shameful in the
4 Bouson 4. 100 traditional context of Dublin that Brennan depicts. Mary’s situation, in turn, seems shameful to today’s reader, just as Mrs King’s behaviour towards Anastasia does.
Mary is fully aware that she is breeching social norms, and she has suppressed the shame about it, replacing it with hostility. Her treasured place, a rose garden which nuns open to the public only once a year, could be a metaphor of her wish to confront her shame. Redness of skin, most often visible to others as a blush, is the bodily manifestation of shame that every human understands – just as tears are of sadness and a smile of happiness. And it is the redness of the roses that attracts Mary to the garden. She is passionate about it as she is about nothing else in her life. She longs for the garden as the roses arrive in June
in their hundreds and thousands, some so rich and red that they were called black, depths between - carmine, crimson, blush, rose, scarlet, wine, purple, pink, and blood – and they opened themselves and spread themselves out, arching and dancing. (RG 189)
The rarely accessible garden full of red roses can be read as a metaphor for Mary’s suppressed shame, representing her natural human need to open herself up to others. The latter she admits to when holding her husband when he was still alive.
Holding him, she felt herself filled with strength. Now if she took her arms from him and stretched herself out, she would touch not the bed, and not even the floor or the walls of the room, but the roofs of the houses surrounding her, and other roofs beyond them, far out to the outer reaches of the town. She felt strong and able enough to encircle the whole town, a hundred men and women. She could feel their foreheads and their shoulders under her hands, and she could even imagine that she saw their hands reaching out for her, as though they wanted her. (RG 201)
Shame inspires hiding – the self as well as the experience of shame itself, which is what Mary does. Yet, as it has been argued in the first chapter, shame is felt only when people are interested in each other, and presuppose the existence of a connection. On a subconscious level, Mary is aware of this and the rose garden could stand as a symbolic key to restoring that connection. In reality, of course, the only alternative is to acquiesce and accept society’s judgement debasing Mary on account of her body.
4.2 Generations of shame
Brennan’s very first published story, “The Holy Terror,” concerns a character very similar to Mary, including her first name. This terrifying woman, Mary Ramsay, works in a hotel lavatory
101 and is considered a legend for her reputation of ruthless treatment of visitors. Christopher Carduff notices the recurrence of “the spirit that animates her” throughout Brennan’s work.5
It is there in Mary Lambert, who in “A Young Girl Can Spoil Her Chances” attempts to “talk sense” to her daughter’s suitor, to discourage him from marrying the foolish child who has so often embarrassed her and who now enrages her with the prospect of leaving home. It is there in Min Bagot, who in “The Springs of Affection” takes revenge on her beautiful, despised sister-in-law by surviving her and appropriating her many fine things.6
The power of “The Rose Garden” is in intimating the process of how these terrifying women are created, allowing the reader to see behind their bitterness and cruelty. If one meets Mary through the Derdon stories, she will be a hostile and unaccepting mother, who selfishly chooses to paint her daughter in the worst light possible in front of the man who is courting her.
In Mary’s account of her daughter’s public humiliations, which she gives Hubert while warning him not to spoil his chances with her daughter, young Rose is reminiscent of little Maeve’s mother in “The Old Man of the Sea”. She is good, altruistic and shy, as well as extremely naïve and vulnerable, which makes Mary angry and disdainful. “The Rose Garden” adds a crucial dimension, in which the reader finds out that by trying to please others, Rose and her father are leaving Mary alone in her seclusion from public. Their openness to the world only heightens the isolation of Mary, which is something that she is aware of, but cannot explain to them. Such a character explanation is inserted into the Bagot stories as well, where Min, Martin’s sister is concerned.
“The Springs of Affection” is about the death of Martin and Delia, from old age, and Min’s victory in outliving the union that she hated so much. According to Maxwell, Min is “[d]ominated by false pride, ungenerous, unreachable, unkind, […] the embodiment of that side of the Irish temperament that delights in mockery and rejoices in the downfall of those whom life has smiled on.”7 Yet the story does make Min reachable, as least to the reader. As she is thinking back to the wedding, where Martin’s mother cried because he was leaving her and his sisters behind, Min’s pain becomes clear. By getting married, Martin breaks the family unit that relies on him staying, as the father is deemed too silly to be properly counted in as a male figure of any significance. Martin’s departure carries with it not only a sense of abandonment for his female relatives, but it also spells a humiliating rejection.
5 Christopher Carduff, “Editor’s Note,” Maeve Brennan, The Visitor (Dublin: New Island, 2019) 102. 6 Carduff 102. 7 Maxwell 10. 102
Marrying a girl from a seemingly perfect, well-to do family of farmers, Martin leaves Wexford for Dublin, where he and Delia furnish their new home with new and beautiful objects, turning down a wedding present from Martin’s mother as unfit for their new home. Symbolically righting what is wrong in her eyes, decades after the wedding and when the couple has died, Min takes some of Delia’s and Martin’s possessions and displays them in her flat in Wexford. “The room looked very distinguished,” Min observes. (SA 342) Her behaviour initially reminds one of a vulture, as “she sat in Delia’s chair, and sometimes for a change sat propped up with pillows in Martin’s big chair.” (SA 342) She also seems cheap, as she is “glad now that she had never spent money on books; these had been waiting for her.” (SA 342) The idea that by destroying the new order, Min is recreating the old one becomes clear as she is imagining her mother and siblings in the room with her.
She wished they could all see it. There was room for them, and a welcome. There was even a deep, dim corner there between the end wall and the far window where her father could steal in and sit down and listen to them with his silence, as he used to do. There was a place here for all of them – a place for Polly, a place for poor Clare. A place in the middle for Bridget. A place for Martin in his own chair. They could come in anytime and feel right at home although the room was warmer and the furniture a bit better than anything they had been used to in the old days. (SA 342-3)
Bourke observes that like Martin Bagot, Maeve’s father “had curly black hair and blue eyes, a devoted mother and three sisters, a lively interest in books, people and amateur theatre, and a comfortable clerical job in the County Surveyor’s office.”8 All this appears in some shape or form in the description of Martin’s youth. The character’s childhood is also located in a house that Bourke identifies as the one where Bob grew up in Wexford, where his mother too “was the main breadwinner and the dominant personality.”9 Similarly, Delia’s family was inspired by that of Maeve’s mother’s, including their family home in the countryside.10 According to Bourke, “The Springs of Affection” depicts the
incomprehensions that could divide town-dwellers from their rural neighbours in the early twentieth century. It traces the cultural differences that grew like a thick hedge between families like the Brennans in Wexford and the Bolgers of Coolnaboy, seven miles away in a very different house.11
8 Bourke 25. 9 Bourke 22. 10 Bourke 24. 11 Bourke 24. 103
Bourke believes that this is represented through Min, who “remembers her brother’s wedding as a gladiatorial battle, with her own family grotesque in defeat.”12 Min’s lifelong spite of Delia comes from “a life lived in the shadow of Martin and Delia’s marriage, the unhappiness of exclusion […] faithfully transmuted into spiteful cruelty.”13 While the Derdon stories portray the city as superior, the Bagot stories do the opposite – the countryside there stands for affection, openness, and empathy. This is something that Delia brings with her into her city life with Martin, and which manifests itself in the smallest details.
In an effort not to exclude her next-door neighbour Mrs. Finn, Delia leaves an open space in the line of vine that sprawls over the wall of her own garden, so that the woman “could peer through and make remarks.” (SA 204) Delia’s affection for her children, pets and flowers lacks the possessiveness that Mary Lambert and Rose Derdon show, and she is perhaps the only mother who can stand to compare herself to the cultural stereotype. Furthermore, although she is always shown sad, her selflessness puts all others to shame. At the same time, Martin’s uneasiness about his mother’s and sisters’ unwillingness to forgive him for getting married and leaving them behind makes him avoid Delia. She
did not know for sure whether it was the animals or Martin’s hatred of the animals that caused a good many of the complications in the house. She gave in to him on most things, but she wouldn’t give up the animals. The children would miss them terribly, and so would she. She would simply have to go on keeping the animals out of Martin’s way, and keeping the children away from his door in the morning when he was sleeping. And in the end, all she was really doing was keeping herself out of his way. (SA 208-9)
Delia is aware that Martin shuns all that is associated with her, as well as herself, although she never seems to reach a conclusion as to why. While Brennan’s Dublin-based stories show where selfishness and spite can originate, they do not erase their consequences. “The Rose Garden” makes particularly clear the fact that shaming, self-pity and bitterness exist within a vicious circle, where hate and humiliation tie into rejection and isolation. In this sense, we can speak about generations of shame both in the sense that shame is generated in the process of humiliation, and that it is transmitted across generations. Although The Visitor focuses on the perspective of the young woman who is cruelly wronged by her older relative, the circularity is suggested even there.
12 Bourke 24. 13 Bourke 24. 104
Boylan remarks that as Anastasia becomes caught in a thick web of unhappiness and humiliation, she exhibits the same pattern of self-absorbed behaviour as her grandmother. “Brennan’s extraordinary control is evident in her refusal to use her heroine to mark a contrast.”14 When an old family acquaintance, Miss Kilbride, asks Anastasia on her deathbed to put a ring on her hand during the funeral that is to come, the young girl eventually fails to do, despite her solemn promise. A gift from her past lover, the ring is to be a posthumous secret statement acknowledging Miss Kilbride’s lasting love for a man that her mother, in her selfishness, forbade her to marry. Although Miss Kilbride and Anastasia are both victims of women who try to curtail their freedoms, they are too occupied with their own problems to fully empathise with each other. The Visitor is a story of bitter pain, which is disguised behind smoke and mirrors, showing how a destructive pattern is unconsciously repeated.
Brennan’s characters give the impression of puppets in the hands of shame, or of people possessed by ghosts of past mistakes. They are terrifying by their proximity to the reader, as they inhabit a landscape that is realistic and many of its aspects will feel familiar to everyone. Brennan’s ghosts exist in close relationships between people, in old patterns that cannot be broken. While much of Brennan’s work has to do with public self-awareness, the characters all uniformly lack a profound sense of private self-awareness. Their inability to understand themselves and their situation by ignoring or mislabelling their emotions proves fatal in marital, as well as other close relationships. They repeat what they have always done, to lessen or escape shame, which only produces more of it, ensuring that the spell cannot be broken.
4.3 Women inhabiting patriarchy
The oppressive and humiliating intimidation that people, and especially young women experience in Brennan’s work reflects the broader cultural and social issues at the time. Brennan also may have tried to make sense of very intimate personal and family memories by analysing them in her fiction. The pattern of recurring inter-generational conflicts can be interpreted in a variety of ways. There is much of Brennan herself, as well as her parents, siblings and pets in her characters. As mentioned, the relationship between Brennan’s mother and maternal grandmother could have also served as inspiration for The Visitor. But there are other biographical parallels. Brennan’s “strict and unsmiling” maternal grandmother Johanna Bolger
14 Boylan xi. 105 suffered the loss of her husband, three days before Una’s birthday, as well as that of their daughter Nellie, who died at a young age.15
While the mothers of Rose and Delia are both bitter, and in the latter case this is explicitly ascribed to the loss of a close relative, these traumatic experiences are thematised in different ways throughout The Springs of Affection. Rose’s father died two days before her tenth birthday and Delia and Marin child died. On the other hand, Brennan’s paternal aunt Annie (Nan) Brennan, who shares many crucial biographical traits with the spiteful Min, is remembered as a kind and popular woman, and many of her friends and relatives took offense at the liberties which her niece took when crafting her characters. “Nan’s sewing and reading are there,” Bourke writes about Min’s character,
and her daily trips to buy a newspaper and food, but Maeve’s story leaves out her lifelong involvement in Wexford’s cultural and political life, and the affection in which so many people held her.16
There is certainly a more general level. As a talented and ambitious woman building her career in New York around the middle of the twentieth century, raised in a conservative patriarchal society and Catholic boarding schools on another continent, there is much reason to expect gender issues emerging throughout Brennan’s work. The woman-mother cultural construct of De Valera’s Ireland may be attacked through references to Irish Catholicism, as the least nurturing and motherly women in Brennan’s fiction are both called Mary. This clearly turns the Catholic image of Mother Mary upside-down. Palko also reads The Visitor as a whole through the prism of the silencing and domesticating of Irish women.17 She identifies several “feminist concerns” in the novella; “the role of the Irish mother, the presence of the Catholic Church, and the circumscribed options for adult women.”18 She concludes that “the Ireland that Brennan depicts in her novella is unwelcoming to those who dare to align themselves with the mother.”19
While Anastasia’s grandmother’s name, Mrs King, can be read as a reference to monarchy, evoking Ireland’s colonial past as a British subject, another interpretation is that it symbolically contains the theme of collaboration of women in patriarchal oppression. Ruling over the house which should be Anastasia’s as much as her grandmother’s, she certainly reads as the personification of traditional patriarchy. The home is a conditional right, as it is
15 Bourke 11. 16 Bourke 108. 17 Palko, From the Uninvited 20-7. 18 Palko, From the Uninvited 22. 19 Palko, From the Uninvited 22. 106 associated with oppressive rules and non-compliance is punished with shame and exile. This is something that Bourke might be suggesting in her commentary on “A Young Girl Can Spoil Her Chances,” a story that Brennan started writing in early 1940s and published twenty years later.20 She draws special attention to the words in the title, tracing their choice to the first stages of Brennan’s career.
Perhaps Una had spoken them to her, or another woman relative had written them in a letter when Emer and Derry were preparing to marry and have children, but Maeve was falling in and out of love instead, and choosing to continue her education. Before the outbreak of war in Europe, many states had moved to curb the freedom of their citizens and especially of women. […] The 1937 [Irish] Constitution had given expression to a growing conservatism that relegated women to the home, a change mirrored in the falling proportion of women among students at University College Dublin. With many more children than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, Irish married women were especially constrained. The title of Maeve’s story echoes a backlash of Victorian righteousness that cautioned young women against competing with men, much less outshining them, and warned of the dangers of too much education. That attitude would find widespread support in America too, when the war was over.21
At the same time, in the Long-Windeds women appear as supreme judges of other women’s success. “I had an early dinner last night on the second floor of the Schrafft’s,” starts one piece. (LWL 164)
When I had nearly finished, two ladies came in and took the table next to mine. They both wore very large hats and a great many strands of pearls around their necks, and I could not help hearing every word they said, because they talked very loudly. […] They mentioned the names of good many people they both knew, and each name was ticked off with a remark or two that defined the absent one’s achievement or lack of it – she had married or she had not married, she was divorced, she had or had not moved away from New York, she had gone into business for herself or she had failed in business and was now working for somebody, and so on. The names clattered between the two ladies, and I had the feeling that everyone in the world was of the same size and of the same unimportance, and that we would all be disposed of very easily if these two women ever got hold of our names. (LWL 165)
The judgment is certainly harsh, even dehumanising, and it spells both empowerment and cruel competition. Yes, the women are interested in women, not men, but on the other hand there is nothing to envy about this kind of attention. It seems that Brennan herself found it easier to forgive men their shortcomings, than women. “The only bone of contention between us I was aware of was that she refused to read the novels of Elizabeth Bowen because Bowen was Anglo-
20 Bourke 145. 21 Bourke 144. 107
Irish,” remembers Maxwell. “On the other hand, she venerated Yeats, who was also Anglo- Irish, and she knew a good deal of his poetry by heart.”22 Brennan also decided that it would be a man, and a bishop, who in a rare instance brings light and recognition into Delia’s life in “Stories of Africa.” Mothers, or even sisters, on the other hand tend to take away one’s confidence. The biographical story “The Clever One” shows Maeve telling her younger sister Derry of her ambitious dreams for the future. “I’ll act in the Abbey Theatre, and I’ll be in the pictures, and I’ll go around to all the schools and teach all the teachers how to recite.” (SA 48) Quite unusually, she finds herself shot down:
I was about to continue, because I never expected her to have anything to say, but she spoke up, without raising her head from her necklace. “Don’t go getting any notions into your head,” she said clearly. (SA 48)
This memory resurfaces in a story that describes Derry as a married woman with a house and children, which gives a special ring to her words from the past. In contrast, Maeve in that story seems to have accomplished much less in her life. When a confident, uninhibited female performance appears in Brennan’s writing, it is a humiliating sight. In the Long-Winded called “On the Island” from 1970, “a respectably dressed middle-aged woman” sings “at the top of her lungs to an audience she alone could see.” (LWL 207)
She was blind drunk, and from the sullen expression on her face I would say she wasn’t enjoying herself much. Her face was dark red, and on her short grey-back hair she wore a tiny hat of navy blue trimmed with stiff net. She hadn’t enough breath to belt out the song, as she was trying to, so she screamed the words in a hoarse voice that was coloured more by bitterness and defiance than by music, but she kept good time with her umbrella […]. Her hand seemed a lot steadier on the umbrella than her feet were on the ground, and as she sang and waved she did little bumps and grinds with a desperate coquetry that shamed her matronly dress and the sensible black shoes she wore. (LWL 207)
Dreading the shameful figure, the Lady runs off into a bookshop and hides inside, until the drunk woman is gone. Brennan’s stories show the power of the discouraging voice to travel and reach across time and space, its echo lingering perhaps forever, while making it clear that it is the voice of a specific culture and society, embedded in the characters.
According to Freud, expectations of parents become part of an individual’s subconscious, forming the superego which then controls the conscious part of the self, the ego. The complexity of the relationship between the two lies in the fact that while the superego imposes control on the ego, it is inaccessible by the individual. This is because it is hidden within the subconscious
22 Maxwell 2-3. 108 part of the self, which Freud refers to as the id. Although Freud did not consider shame relevant, his concept of the conscious and subconscious is fundamental in understanding how society controls individuals, as norms are transmitted across generations in a process that is difficult for the self to make sense of.23 Lewis makes use of Freud’s terminology in her treatment of shame and guilt, arguing that the “increased severity of the superego,” which she observed in her relapsing patients, “was transference hostility of some kind.” 24 This is another reference to Freud, who coined the term transference to refer to situations in which one’s feelings for other people, e.g. parents, reappear in a different context (here directed towards the therapist).25
Lewis also observed that these patients “would try to cultivate hostility against me in a vain effort to discharge symptoms.”26 Consequently, she experimented with modes of therapy in order to uncover by-passed and repressed shame.27 By trying to expand Freud’s observations about the superego, Lewis illustrates the difficulty of overcoming shame. As a therapist, she had tools at her disposal that people in everyday circumstances don’t have access to. One can assume that by-passed shame, manifesting as punitiveness against the self and hostility towards the therapist, would be very difficult to work through in regular circumstances.
Brennan’s work singles out shame, as well as depicting the variety of symptoms of suppressed shame. While her fiction stands as a warning against the prevalence and consequences of shame, it also claims that there is no antidote. Women in her writing are both victims and perpetuators of shame in a cultural and historic context that places them into the lower strata of society. Their collaboration with what is essentially an oppressive regime, as well as cruel preoccupation with how the family is seen from the outside, are illustrated on characters such as Mary Lambert. If anyone gets to be themselves, it will be the men, some stories suggest. They might be allowed to “go getting notions,” such as a young man visiting New York that the Lady observes on the bus. “He was unquestionably well brought up,” she observes, “and he must have been exceedingly valuable to the people who brought him up.” (LWL 202)
He thought highly of himself, and although he was unassuming, he was not modest. Someone must have told him that all he had to do was be himself and things would go all right, and he was being himself – unassuming but not modest. […] His eyes
23 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id,
were brown and wide open, and blankly attentive, like the eyes of some children when they are alone among the grownups and listening hard at some solemn occasion – a funeral or a wedding. (LWL 202)
Unlike little Maeve, the young man was allowed to retain his childhood confidence.
4.4 Ireland and motherhood
Una Brennan in Washington, image source:
This circularity of shame and hurt takes place within variations of mother-child relationships, which are embedded into the matrix of a conservative patriarchal society. Just as Mary isn’t able to enter the garden, except for once every year, she is unable to connect with her daughter. While girls are shamed and made bitter, boys are possessively loved by the mothers of Brennan’s Dublin, which seems to destroy them in a different, yet equally powerful manner. Anastasia’s grandmother in The Visitor is responsible for the destruction of her son’s marriage, chasing his wife away from Dublin. As a variation, a similar conflict appears in the marriage between Delia and Martin Bagot, where first Martin’s mother, and later his sister Min sow disaccord between the couple. Finally, Rose Derdon antagonises her son John against his father Hubert.
John’s birth makes Rose temporarily feel more at ease in her marriage, but she ends up instilling her fear, as well as contempt of Hubert in their son. Hubert’s anger about Rose’s passivity is prevalent in the stories, just as her insecurity is, and it has been aggravated by her determination to raise John as only her son, and as an ally against her husband. In Hubert’s
110 eyes, this was one of the many games in which his wife was trying to defeat him. While he is wrong about this elsewhere, his assumption is quite accurate here, and it problematizes the attribution of blame and responsibility over the couple’s problems. “Before, when John was at home,” Rose remembers, “he would sometimes be there when Hubert gave her the money [for housekeeping], and then the two of them, she and John, would exchange a look.” (SA 137)
On her part, the look said, “You see the way he treats me.” And John’s look said, “I see. I see.” They agreed that Hubert knew no better than to behave the way he behaved. This knowledge, that Hubert knew no better, formed the foundation and framework of the conspiracy between them that made their days so interesting and that gave a warm start to most of their conversations. (SA 137)
Just like the maids of Herbert’s Retreat, but in a much more painful way, Rose and John rebuke their feelings of humiliation by constructing a narrative which shames the enemy. This existence of “us and them” is meant as defence, but creates an impasse. Rose’s strategy further deepens the fracture between her and Hubert, and it also forces the son to escape the tension by choosing a career providing as much distance between him and his parents as possible. John becomes a priest and, uniquely united, his parents start harbouring hatred for the clergy. For Rose, “John, her son, had left the house and he would not be back, because he had vanished forever into the commonest crevasse in Irish family life – the priesthood.” (SA 136) Hubert projects that “[i]n time,” John will “probably get to walking and talking with as much authority as any of them, in his black clothes.” (SA 61)
Hubert’s approach is once more deflection, which is difficult since “his department did a lot of work with priests.” (SA 61) Hubert puts “clerical samples [off fabric] well out of his way, so that he might not come upon them until tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow.” (SA 61) He also shapes a narrative that makes him feel better.
He had been disappointed when John joined the priesthood, but, to tell the truth, at the same time he had been relieved. John was a poor example of a fellow, weak and timid and with no aptitude for anything and no inclination toward anything, and Hubert had never been able to imagine what he would do or could do with himself in the way of earning a living and making a life for himself. For a fellow like that, becoming a priest was as good an answer as any. […] What had happened to John, his fate, could all be laid at Rose’s door. She had ruined the boy. She had kept him all to herself all his life, and she had ended up by ruining him. It was a pity about John. Hubert did not like to think about John. (SA 61-2)
Hubert rewrites family history in his mind: John didn’t run away, he could hardly make any choices on his own. Whatever his relationship with John, it was all Rose’s doing. Finally, Hubert is a good father, as he has only his son’s bets interest at heart. As a priest, John “would
111 be taken care of, and he would always be told what to do and what not to do. He would be safe all his life.” (SA 61) Hubert is careful to paint Rose and John as needy and pitiful creatures, devoid of agency when convenient for the narrative, while piling enough shame on them to make sure that they don’t pose as a threat.
The young men leave home, but seem unable to escape the confusion that has been instilled in them. Martin and Hubert, as well as the Herbert Retreat’s husbands, are distant not only as partners, but to a large degree as fathers. Rose’s father Dom Lambert is an exceptionally devoted father, but his unexpected death haunts the daughter for the rest of her life. The mother tends to eclipse the distant father in Brennan’s fiction, and although the reader is given various perspectives, children have access primarily to the mother – her behaviour and her opinions. In the Bagot stories, much about the father is expressed by his absence on the stage that is the family home. The disapproval of Martin’s family is also channelled through Delia to their children.
The situation in the house was unnatural, with no real consideration going for anybody. She found herself getting very nervous about the children when Martin was in the house, and when they were all together she couldn’t stop herself from watching the children, as though Martin were there only to pass judgement on them. She was always keyed up, ready to defend them against him, and ready to take any blame on herself for what they did, and ready to snap as them if they showed signs of doing anything that might irritate him. (SA 209)
As Delia tries to win Martin’s approval of herself and her actions, the couple’s children become an extension of herself. Neither the mother nor the children can act naturally out of fear of displeasing Martin. They also have every reason to think that if they fall out of his good graces, he might distance himself even further.
Delia wishes to make good expressions, and she expects the same from her children. In “The Stories of Africa”, an impending bishop’s visit is putting Delia and her daughters on edge. When Margaret, the younger one, suddenly has “a crying fit,” Delia feels that she “cannot face it this time,” with the bishop coming any minute. (SA 265) “It wasn’t so much that it was hard as that it took time, first to calm her down and then to get her into bed so that she could sleep until her exhaustion lifted and she began to look like her normal self again, her normal self that everyone admired.” (SA 265) Rather than speaking to her, Delia decides to bribe Margaret with the promise of a day off school to calm her down and make her presentable. On a miniature scale, Delia is perpetuating the situation between her and Martin when he did not pay attention to Delia’s feelings after their son had died. Nobody wants to really hear Margaret because all
112 are impatient to see her become her usual, presentable self again. Yet the bishop, who is the cause of all the tension, turns out to be a surprise. “Nobody ever knows what the children say,” he points out. (SA 280)
I used to watch the children out there in the mission – little small black children, very mysterious, very friendly and open. I used to watch them talking among themselves, and when I walked up to them they stopped talking, or if they went on talking it was with me in mind, and what they said was not the same. And it was the same with your father and me when we were children. Even with your grandmother, we watched ourselves. What we said when we were by ourselves was very different from what we said when there was a member of the older generation at hand. (SA 280)
Heather Ingman observes that Irish female writers in the past faced social prejudice and disapproval, where their choice of topics, as well as the fact that they were expected to become mothers and wives in the future, served as the main objections against their work. This view was traditionally taken on board by their mothers as well, whose voice often became the loudest source of discouragement for an aspiring female writer.28 Much suggests that Brennan’s relationship with her mother resembled the kind that Ingman describes – an unresolved conflict not due to a lack of affection, but rather an inability of the mother and daughter to see their different perspectives. By the time that Maeve showed aspiration to become a writer, Una had given up her political and literary activities to fully embrace her domestic role.
Although in Brennan’s childhood stories and in The Visitor the young fragile women seem partly inspired by Una, she was also surprised to find a bit of Mary Lambert in her mother. She comments on the latter during a visit to Ireland.
My father is enfeebled by the illness that struck him early this year, and my mother, who has always used her last ounce of strength every day, has revealed a thorny little personality, little but very thorny, so that instead of the pale patient and suffering cipher that used to confront people McKelway has seen only a bad little woman who hisses like a cat, laughs like a fiend, and chatters from morning till night telling interminable stories (‘then he crossed the road, that road isn’t there any more, it belonged to the Bewley estate, not the branch that owns the restaurants on Grafton Street, the other Bewleys who’) none of the stories containing, as McKelway said, a good word about anyone.29
Maeve Brennan, an adult women for many years then, seems confused about the change in her mother, and her reports are peculiarly voiced through the person of her husband. Later on, she
28 Heather Ingman, “The Female Writer in Short Stories by Irish Women,” Eds Elke D’hoker and Stephanie Eggermont, The Irish Short Story (Bern: Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, 2015) 259-78. 29 Bourke 197. 113 suggests that Una did her best to understand her, and that it is now her turn. Reflecting on the day that her mother died, the author mentions to Maxwell:
I thought then that if I could see in my mind one tree, or one house, or one hill or river, if I could see even the wall of a cottage – a remnant, a door, even, I would cry my eyes out, but the landscape that had been mysterious & familiar as it was, was all gone. There was nothing, and nothing to cry over. She gave me an ‘asylum for my affections’ & I learned that my affections so far exceeded her ability to understand me that she came near to drowning. But she is defined in her struggling – I remember her very well.30
Maeve’s lack of emotional response to Una’s death is represented in the experience of Hubert Derdon, who finds himself unable to mourn his wife when she dies in “The Drowned Man.” Thinking of oneself, rather than grieving with the departed loved one in mind, is also what Mary Lambert experiences when her husband dies, and in this sense both characters seem to serve as grounds for exploration of a situation that Brennan must have found difficult to accept.
In “The Shadow of Kindness,” Delia becomes aware of her mother’s lasting presence. Feeling lonely in the house when her children are gone for some time, Delia goes upstairs to have a look at their room. Then, she goes into her room and starts brushing her hair, noticing “something much larger and even more silent than she was.” (SA 240-1) Instead of her own shadow, Delia sees that of her mother.
Mrs. Bagot could not understand it. She and her mother had not looked alike. But there it was, her mother’s shadow as she had often seen it – the thin line of the cheek, the indentation at the eye, the high curve of the forehead, and, above all, the little straying hairs that always escaped the brush to wave independently at the sides of her mother’s forehead and at the back of her neck. […] It is my mother, Mrs. Bagot thought; there she is, how patient she is. She sighed once and smiled at herself without looking at herself, and then she put out the light and went down to the kitchen, where she found the kettle boiling furiously. (SA 241)
The realisation that her mother is with her is a comfort to Delia. “She felt all different – not sad, not tired anymore.” (SA 242) Her mother’s companionship has made Delia “very hopeful all of a sudden,” as she realised that her mother’s shadow “was upstairs and that it would never go away.” (SA 242) The memory of her mother lessens Delia’s loneliness, as having the shadow at home “was almost like having somebody in the house.” (SA 242)
30 Bourke 266. 114
4.5 Old shame
Although life seems to get harder as one is growing up, even children in Brennan’s work cannot fully escape shame. Brennan’s childhood personas Lily and little Maeve inhabit fictitious worlds of their own to an extent that allows them to play and dream, but it isn’t always there to escape into. Shame can come in minor encounters linked with personal failure, such as a boy’s unsuccessful errand in a Long-Winded titled “Jobs”. Having stepped out of a shop where he could not get what he had been sent for, the boy “kept looking down at the paper [he was holding] and then looking up and down the avenue.” (LWL 61) Although one might assume that he just felt confused, the Lady is clear: “He was only a boy, and his imagination was shaking along with his trust in himself. He was ashamed.” (LWL 61)
Shame is experienced also on a much larger scale in the story “The Devil in Us,” where little Maeve is publicly shamed in a convent school. In order to reaffirm the status quo, the nuns arbitrarily humiliate a group of children is a gesture of power. The implication that one can be possessed by the devil, figuratively, without being aware, is burnt into the child’s memory through the ritual of public shame, and appears later in one of the Long-Windeds. In the 1979 contribution to The New Yorker “Lessons and Lessons and then more Lessons,” we find the Lady sitting comfortably in her favourite restaurant in the Village. It is a unique piece in its biographical detail, where the Lady and Brennan seem to very closely meet, as the author claims her Irish, and more specifically Catholic, roots.
The story opens with the narrator looking over the almost empty restaurant where she usually spends “about two hours every day, sometimes in the afternoon and sometimes in the evening.” (LWL177) It has a window into the street, which also allows her to watch people outside. The Lady describes what was likely Brennan’s own routine.
I was such a faithful customer that a martini usually appeared on the table while I was still arranging my books in the order in which I would look at them. […] I used to always carry three or four books with me, and if I had just visited the bookshop across the street, I often had six or more to look through when I was not attending to the outside scene. (LWL 177)
Besides contributing short stories, Brennan wrote book reviews for The New Yorker. Therefore, both looking through the window and turning the pages of newly acquired publications was part of her job. Drinking, then, was her favourite activity. Seated in this special office, the Lady notices two nuns walking by from the safety of her seat behind the window. “Their black draperies, their resolute tread, and their remote air – everything about them was familiar to me,”
115 she realises. (LWL 177) Nuns, she writes, are a common sight in Dublin, but a rarity in the streets of New York. In her typical self-mocking manner, the Lady boasts of something that she soon proves to be untrue:
There was a time, during the years I spent in a convent boarding school and for many years afterwards, when the sight of a nun would fill me with apprehensiveness and dislike, and I was glad then, sitting by that restaurant window, to know those years were gone. (LWL 178)
The Lady moves on, relishing in the pleasant emptiness of the restaurant and the feeling of “having all the tables and booth to myself.” (LWL 178) Yet, somehow the nuns’ long shadow has been cast even across the glass, as the Lady feels the need to remark:
I had taken the afternoon off, but why, what excuse I had offered myself, I can’t remember. Perhaps I felt free because it was autumn again. Even so, three o’clock in the afternoon is no hour for anybody to be sitting at a window in a public restaurant with a martini in front of her, or half a martini, as it was by the time the nuns passed, and it seemed miraculous to be able to be so free and independent that I could be in a restaurant I preferred and drink what I liked and eat what I liked and read the books of my choice and see two nuns pass and feel nothing except a slight surprise – no apprehensiveness, no wild survey of a panicky conscience, nothing like that. (LWL 178)
However, the nuns enter the restaurant, and their mere presence inspires the exact experience of apprehensiveness and “panicky conscience” that the Lady claims to be immune to. As they start sitting down, she watches them closely.
They had been looking for a nice quiet place to eat, and they had found it. They walked quickly, without making a sound, straight down the restaurant, and I watched them all the way, and watched until they had settled themselves in a distant booth. Then I went back to my menu. The menu was still in my left hand, tilted up, as I had been holding it, but my right hand, with the empty martini glass in it, had somehow gone under the table and was hiding there behind the tablecloth. (LWL 180)
The Lady is proved wrong, forced to admit to herself and to the readers her defeat. The nuns, always described as walking quickly and quietly, have entered her calm sanctuary of freedom. A ghost of the past suddenly appears in the Land of the Free, and the author realises that even in her mid-forties, she is still in its possession. Yet this is never admitted out loud, instead the last two sentences of the piece are a repetition of the sentence: “It was the moment of no comment.” (LWL 180) There is much shame about the experience – the Lady’s assurance of her independence blows up in her face as empty boasting, but the last scene, where the glass somehow moves the Lady’s hand out of sight on its own accord, brings back memories of
116 childhood humiliations. All about this is admitted in an indirect way, and the scope of the power of the childhood memory is shown by the story as a whole. The tentacles of underground shame are long, and hold the glamorous, accomplished author in their grip.
As McKeon puts it, the Lady’s “Catholicism is actually quite startling to think about,” as she scrupulously portraits herself as a New Yorker.31 “The nuns rattled her,” she adds, “but nothing like this happened again.”32 While returning to Dublin of Brennan’s childhood could have had a therapeutic effect, it is always done by proxy, as she explores her feelings through fictitious characters. Her actual visits to Ireland in person only reaffirmed how different she was, how difficult it was and would be to fit in, and it is likely that the trip back to New York amounted to more of a homecoming. However, both places seem to feel more like home when one is not there, and the Lady’s description of New York could just as easily be applied to Brennan’s relationship with Dublin:
New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realise why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don’t know why. (LWL 115)
Brennan’s life in New York was a highly solitary one, which must have felt frustrating as well as embarrassing at times. McKeon draws special attention to Brennan’s later years.
In the later columns especially, her anxiety about what will become of her, and about how she will be treated by the city on which she is dependent, leeches into her portraits of those around her. There are so many shaky or shattered older women in these columns where previously there had been eccentric and intriguing characters of both genders; now it is the shadows she fears becoming who seem to catch her eye.33
The 1968 story “They Were Both About Forty” focuses on two people slightly younger than Brennan was at the time. The woman’s hair is damaged by what seems to be repetitive dying, her “bare legs” are “heavily marked with spots, bruises, and swollen dark-blue veins,” her shoes resemble bedroom slippers. (LWL8-9) “She carried no handbag, not even a change purse – no luggage at all. She was close to home, out for a few minutes, taking a little constitutional with her friend.” (LWL 9) The Lady observes the two people as they are strolling around and window-shopping a little, the woman teaching her Spanish speaking friend how to pronounce
31 McKeon xiv. 32 McKeon xv. 33 McKeon xvii. 117
“Hotpot Kitchen Planning.” The Lady’s musings are interrupted, suddenly, as she realises “That they might turn around and find me staring at them.” (LWL 9) “His expression would hardly change,” she thinks,
but hers would, and I didn’t want to get in its way. When the hauteur slipped from her face, what would I see? Despair, I imagine. Not the passive, withdrawn despair that keeps itself in silence but the raging kind that incinerates all before it. I turned away and went home, leaving them to their English lesson. (LWL 9)
Not willing to see the woman’s despair that the Lady expects to see in her face, she leaves. Walking away from emotions that don’t please is how New York treats its inhabitants, the story “I Look Down from the Window” suggests. “Each person is sealed off from the next person,” the Lady writes, until “[a]n old woman living by herself goes frantic with apprehension and picks up the telephone, but there is no one for her to call.” (LWL 105) “She tries to tell the room clerk of what is threatening her, and he listens, but” he is too busy and “in any case, has heard her story many times before […]” (LWL 105)
The old woman puts the phone back and realises immediately that she has made a bad mistake. It is a mistake that she has guarded against until now. She know perfectly well that she must not call attention to herself. This is her last stand in the land of the living, and she is here only on sufferance. The hotel won’t miss her if she’s gone, and it can rent her room in a minute. She must not complain and she must watch her step. She must be more than polite; she must be obsequious. (LWL 106)
There is no safety net for the lady, no assurance that she will have a place to stay no matter what. She can stay, as long as she is suffered, and not unpleasant to listen to. The city’s treatment of its citizens is shameful, but as has been shown in Chapter 1, shame often forces those around to look away. Just as the Lady runs away from despair in the woman’s eyes, so the younger rather abandon the old than to have to look them and their situation in the eye. All the larger issues that appear in Brennan’s writing are related to the individual’s rights and the power of others over the self.
The status quo is preserved through established norms, and their transgression manifests itself as shame, which the Lady exposes. The victims of political and social injustice bring shame on themselves by stepping out of line, thus drawing attention to their oppression which, when viewed from a different angle, comes itself to be seen as shameful. Yet in reality shame might not be interpreted in a way that benefits the oppressed, or it might not be seen at all. While the Long-Windeds are all about the public eye, the later pieces also spell isolation and fear of being forgotten as the author grows old, which itself can be a source of shame. In 1966, the Lady observes a protest against the Vietnam War put on by high school students. Suddenly,
118 a woman “half a generation or more older than the schoolchildren,” steps on the speaker’s stage to her outrage. (LWL 49)
She was severely dressed in pale khaki, and she was vehement and appeared to be excited. She seemed to have learnt her platform manner from one of those movies in which somebody tries to incite the rabble to action. Her voice sounded so hysterical that the simple occasion of listening to her became an immediate crisis that obscured any crisis or cause she might be discussing. (LWL 49)
Just as the Lady, “[t]he protest marchers watched her with no apparent sympathy.” (LWL 49) What constitutes youth is thematised in “A Shoe Story” from 1960, where the Lady overhears two women discussing an election.
They were talking about Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy. One of them said, “He’s simply too young. He’s too young.” The other one said, “Much too young.” The first one said, “Forty-three years old. It’s absurd.” I began to feel very cheerful. I am forty-three. (LWL 25)
The Lady more often than not sympathises with the lonely and frail. In a 1969 piece she describes an exchange between an old lady “with bad temper written all over her face” who lives in the same hotel as her. (LWL 21) “Twice I have heard her scolding the young clerk in the grocery store next door, and I have seen her engage in an argument with one of the tiny gypsy children who hang around the street,” the Lady adds. (LWL 21) After the woman complains to the hotel clerk about a problem with the lifts, she starts walking up the stairs. “I wonder what the grey-haired lady felt when she reached her room,” wonders the narrator, and sympathises:
Did she feel defeat, at her circumstances, or victory, because of her behaviour in the face of her circumstances? I suppose all she felt was relief at finding herself safe home again. (LWL 22)
In some instances though, the Lady’s life seems enviable in contrast to those that she describes, such as a couple in “A Lost Lady” from 1968, where a husband and wife are dining out. The husband eats, speaks and never listens, while the wife does the exact opposite, silently drinking her Scotch. At the end of the story, the narrator assesses the couple. “I think one of those people was a redeemer – or a saviour, if you prefer saviour – but whether the lost lady married her husband in the hope of saving him from something or other or married him in the hope that he would save her from something or other I do not know.” (LWL 45)
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4.6 Belonging
Maeve Brennan, image source:
The ability to fully rely on oneself, leave when one sees fit and not look back once, is proven false and unrealistic in Brennan’s fiction. The-Long Winded Lady might be headed in that direction, but her anxiety in social settings, as well as her keen eye that notices desolation in her surroundings only too well, betray Brennan’s own experience of dislocation. Independence is possible in economic terms, although this is hardly true for everyone, but the emotional need to belong can never be fully cancelled. Even the Long-Winded Lady still finds herself attached here and there. Remembering a flat that she has once rented, the Lady feels the need to mention how the owner wronged her.
One Saturday afternoon, the owner of the building came to call. He owned it at long distance, through and agent and a manager, and his family had lived there once, and he walked into my apartment and took away the only thing that might have held me to the place – a magnificently ornate gilt mirror that filled the entire space between two windows. He said it was a family heirloom, and he and his abominable companion dragged it away, heavy and big as it was and much as I loved it, and put it in their station wagon and drove off with it. How I hated them. How I hoped it would break and give them seven years’ bad luck. (LWL 96)
If one’s wish to belong cannot be simply erased, it is not possible to escape shame either; this would once more contradict the natural wish to be included and to belong that Brennan’s fiction conveys. The Lady is always tuned to experiences of with shame, which she notices in herself and in others, and notes down. But she seems almost fascinated with its absence, usually implicitly linking it with a sense of healthy self-confidence and belonging. This is why ladies eating at a restaurant and absorbed with themselves draw her attention:
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They emptied big plates of hot soup, plates piled with meat and vegetables, and plates with heaps of salad, and they ate a lot of crusty Adano bread with butter, and when all that was gone they had coffee – American coffee – and a slice each of glistening rum cake. While they were eating, they talked a bit – not much – but they never smiled, and as I watched them I began to be deeply fascinated with them, because their closed faces and their positive, concentrated gestures excluded every single thing in the world except themselves. (LWL 83)
There is some envy, as well as awe, expressed towards people who seem too busy with what they are doing to care about the gaze and judgement of others, such as a trombonist player who often climbs up on the roof of his house in the Latin Quarter to play. “He plays to the stars and he plays to the street and he plays for himself, with a large flourish to the right, a large flourish to the left.” (LWL 104) There is something fantastic about the ability not to feel shame in situations when one normally does. In the Bagot stories, Delia is contemplating her wish to simply lie down as she is doing housework in the middle of the day.
She envied people who felt free to do as they liked, without feeling self-conscious or ashamed of themselves. There were a lot of women who would lie down on that grass, or on that carpet, and never think the less of themselves, and never wonder what other people thought of them. Mrs. Bagot wished she could be like that. They were lucky, those people. (SA 224)
In “The Traveller”, the Lady is sitting in her favourite restaurant, enviously commenting how a young group of boys, and one girl, are looking “quietly about them with a curiosity that was remarkable because it was polite and reserved and at the same time perfectly alive and unashamed.” (LWL 99) The people act so naturally, feeling comfortable in each other’s company that they become the centre of everyone’s attention – but especially the story’s.
Before they reached the door, the owner [of the restaurant], Guy, called to them in French and offered them a drink. “Eau sucrée”, he said, and laughed at them. They were at the door, but they trooped over to the bar and sat up on the high stools. They were all French, visiting here. They talked with Guy and seemed to be just as interested in him as they were in one another. I thought they looked incapable of rudeness or boredom. They were very happy, enjoying their idleness, and in their lack of self-consciousness I saw the international elegance I had looked for at the Waldorf. (LWL 99)
The Lady looks away, so as not to be seen observing them, and their voices remind her of pigeons that often fly outside the window of her hotel.
Just to the right of my window there is a monumentally ornate apartment building with four stone lions sitting upright on the corners of one of its lesser roofs. The lions wear crowns and hold iron pennants in their paws, but crowns, pennants, and paws are all subservient to the pigeons, who perch where they please and fly freely about the long, flowered terraces of the same building. Away over to the left, on the
121
other side of the Forty-fourth Street, there are low, moderately old commercial buildings […] On top of one of those buildings there is a big homemade terrace, hopefully painted pink. It is all the same to the pigeons. All of the buildings, high and low, are only different levels of the great arena in which they play all day, and they own everything in sight and out of sight. As I listened to the voices at the bar, I began to imagine I knew a country where people were so at ease with themselves that they were able to be at ease everywhere. I was thinking of another world, not France. (LWL 99-100)
Although we often find the Lady outraged by someone’s improper behaviour in public, the dream of freedom, and the natural, unassuming confidence of the French tourists and pigeons lead her to imagine a world where this is all there is, and which is the opposite of that which she often creates on paper. That is not to say that animals don’t feel shame, especially those anthropomorphised that appear in Brennan’s fiction. A badly behaved dog will be judged, such as Tiny is, a dog causing outrage in the waiting room of an animal hospital.
All the other animals were scandalised by her bad manners. The other dogs – poodles and a collie and a beautiful Afghan – all kept looking down in embarrassment and looking away, and one small furry young dog just stared at her in astonishment. The cats, in their baskets, were as silent as they were invisible, but their contempt was in the air. One of the men who had surrendered his place on the bench was carrying a tiny monkey wrapped in a shawl, and the monkey seemed to be deliberately averting his damp, wistful eyes from the sight of the hysterical Tiny. (LWL 145)
Happy people, seemingly immune to shame, appear in Brennan’s writing as something far away and unachievable. The Lady, always sitting alone, is looking at many things, but she rarely sees someone who is by themselves and yet self-assured in the healthy and pleasant way that the French group is. Good company is key, all these observations imply. Being surrounded by those one trusts, who support before anything else. And this can be found in the most mundane conditions. Looking out of the Plaza Hotel windows, the Lady sees a group of old women walking by.
Three of them were quite tall and upright, but the fourth, who walked on the edge of the sidewalk, along by the curb, was very small and bent, and she did not walk, she toddled. […] The younger women might have been grandmothers, and she was old enough to be a great-great-grandmother. Her dress covered her ankles. They all looked happy, and the very old woman looked as though she knew she was in good hands. She looked content. She was going somewhere. She was having an outing. Not one of them even bothered to turn their head as they passed by the park and the park entrance. They only looked up and down Fifth Avenue, because of the traffic there, and when they reached the sidewalk that started them towards the east side of the city they all marched forward along Fifty-ninth as though they would be willing to walk as far as the river if what they wanted was to be found there. (LWL 150)
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The confidence and content of the old women attracts the Lady’s attention, and she follows them as they slowly walk past. Brennan herself did not have such help at old age, more because she wouldn’t have it than for lack of volunteers. On the other hand, there is something about animals that makes the Lady confident and more at ease, as she finds solace in the company of her cats and Bluebell, the black Labrador. “This is a daydream: I am lying in the sand just below the dunes on the beach in East Hampton, where I lived for several years,” the 1976 story “A Daydream” starts.
There is a big Turkish towel between me and the sand, and I am quite alone. The cats and my dog, Bluebell, walked over here with me, but two of the cats dropped out at the walled rose garden a short distance back, and the four others are hiding in the long dune grass just above me. Bluebell is down by the water. (LWL 212)
Brennan never had children, and she started living alone at a young age, which she kept up almost throughout her whole life. Yet she “formed an intimate friendship with Gerald and Sara Murphy,” who became a sort of foster parents to the adult woman.34
The Murphys were old enough to have been Maeve’s parents and they had lived in France during the twenties and known everyone of any importance among the expatriate writers and artists. It is said that Gerald served as the model for Dick Diver, the hero of Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night. […] He too had a gift for aphorisms one of which Maeve was given to quoting: “As we grow older we must guard against a feeling of lowered consequence.” He had a Yeats letter, which he promised Maeve would have when he died, but he neglected to put this in writing.35
One disadvantage of acquiring older, rather than younger relatives in this figurative sense is that they are likely to die first, and leave one even lonelier than before. Such a course of action is explored in Brennan’s story “The Bohemians,” although it features a young boy instead of a mature woman. Her pets seem to supplement the experience of unconditional love and dependence on each other that Delia gets from her children, their company providing a sense of belonging that is given and which doesn’t need to be enforced or emphasized. Although they can disappear too, as in “I See You, Bianca” Nicholas’s dear cat companion is suddenly gone one day, and no one ever finds out what happened. Even Bluebell, the black Labrador, finds herself deserted one day, as the children that come to play with her are suddenly not there in “The Children are Very Quiet When They Are Away”, as well as in “The Children Are There,
34 Maxwell 9. 35 Maxwell 9-10. 123
Trying not to Laugh”. “The children drove off in their car to their house in the city, not to return till spring, they said.” (RG 306) And Bluebell is waiting.
But here it is winter, with the cold winter weather that is no good for playing in, and she has been waiting for hours, ever since last summer, and the children have not appeared. If she watches faithfully they will appear. They generally come out this time. Whenever they come out is this time. […] What use is it to plunge into the sea and brave the waves when she has no witnesses? (RG 281)
Yet the Lady doesn’t feel deserted by her animals on that day on the beach, although they have all scurried off, because she knows where they are and they know where she is. Animals, even plants can become a company, the Lady seems to suggest in her 1967 piece “Howard’s Apartment”.
Mr Ainsworth, who owns this house, lives downstairs, and he regards his big ailanthus tree and his big wisteria as his pets. Anyone seeing him look at them know he would love to bring them both in every night, maybe even take them for a walk sometimes. He cares for them with fierce devotion, leaning far out of the high front windows and much too far out over the edge of the terrace, watching for the first sign of malaise in the tenacious, bony vines of his wisteria, or in the leaves and branches of his ailanthus. The ailanthus is fortunate, and the wisteria is fortunate, too, and so is this house – fortunate and well loved. (LWL 169)
In the Bagot stories, Martin’s absence and withdrawal from the marital and family life is countered by the presence of animals and plants, as well as the children. The dog Bennie, named after a dog that Brennan herself owned, is an active and devout companion to Delia despite his old age.36 He watches her do work around the house and, when she comes close, wiggles his tail and runs after her. The cat Minnie is slightly less eager to follow Delia around, but she is there too, as is the orange cat Rupert.
The children are always busy, playing and exploring. Bennie is juxtaposed to Delia’s kids, who are bound to leave home one day. “The children would grow up, but Bennie would remain the same – the same size, with the same expression,” thinks Delia. (SA 212-3) They are also busy inhabiting the magical childhood world that Delia is no longer part of. Yet their presence comforts her, and when they are at home, there is a sense of warmth and security. It is with respect to the house where we find little Maeve that Maxwell observes: “The house is protected by love.”37
36 Bourke 79. 37 Maxwell 3. 124
Even when Bennie is dead, he remains in Delia’s memory, as “[t]here would never be another dog like him.” (SA 213) Unlike Martin, who tries to hide from Delia, Bennie looks for her, and she feels that he understands her much better than her husband or children, who are little. Bourke argues that in the Bagot stories, “most of which she wrote when she herself had been married and divorced and shared her life with a dog and several cats, Maeve attributes a kind of higher wisdom to animals.”38 Even though Delia worries about the neighbours and Martin, and what they think and would think, she falls asleep in the middle of the day when putting her daughter Margaret to bed in a similar scene as mentioned in the Long-Winded above.
Margaret was fast asleep, and then Mrs. Bagot slept suddenly. Before she knew it, she was asleep. Margaret slept with her right arm lying alongside her orange favourite [Rupert the cat]. Bennie slept. Minnie, sensing something unusual, crept across the bed and settled blissfully into Mrs. Bagot’s long brown hair, the best nest she would ever know. They all slept safely. There wasn’t a sound in the house. Nobody came to the door. Nobody saw them. There on the bed they might all have been invisible, or enchanted, or, as they were for that time, forgotten. (SA 227)
Once more, falling asleep surrounded by innocent companions is associated with a sense of belonging and lack of self-consciousness. The Lady’s last contribution ever written and published, which appeared in The New Yorker on the 5th of January 1981, remembers happy childhood days –free of shadows, for once. It is a welcome antidote to Maxwell’s description of the slow deterioration of Brennan’s state. “Many men and women found Maeve enchanting,” writes Maxwell, “and she was a true friend, but there wasn’t much you could do to save her from herself.”39
Though she lived in the country from time to time, she never learnt to drive a car; when she wanted to shop for groceries she called a taxi. She put parquet floors in a city apartment she did not own and then found she preferred living in the Hotel Algonquin, leaving the apartment empty until the lease expired. The she rented a little house near Rindge, New Hampshire. Inevitably she got into debt. She had a valuable library of books by Irish writers, which she would hock when there was no other way she could lay her hands on some money. The books were rescued a number of times by a colleague who was given to anonymous acts of benevolence, and then they disappeared forever. When she returned to the city, The New Yorker stepped between her and destitution by seeing to it that there was a place she could go to when she chose, and be fed and sheltered. There is no way of knowing how many times she took advantage of this. She had begun to have psychotic episodes, and she settled down in the ladies’ room at The New Yorker as if it were her only
38 Bourke 79. 39 Maxwell 10. 125
home. […] During the last decade of her life she moved in and out of reality in a way that was heartbreaking to watch and that only hospitals could deal with.40
The last contribution remembers the house in Cherryfield Avenue, Dublin, with Brennan’s mother’s garden. Everyone feels present. “Every time my father came into the house, coming home, he went first into the back sitting room to look through the big window at his wife’s garden and see for himself what changes she had made there during the hours he had been away.” (LWL 214) The Lady remembers her birthdays and New Year’s celebrations in this goodbye peace, ending the story with a blessing. Although Brennan’s life was far from blessed by its end, the Lady manages to see the past in terms that she can accept. “I am never to be found near the complaints department,” she claims as if in a resolution, “too many mirrors in there for my liking.” (LWL 213)
Photograph of Maeve Brennan by Karl Bissinger, source: Maeve Brennan, The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin. London: Flamingo, 2000.
40 Maxwell 10-1. 126
5. Conclusion
The first chapter has introduced Maeve Brennan as an Irish-American female author of short stories, writing around the middle of the twentieth century in New York. Shame, which has a prominent place in her work, both in an acknowledged and suppressed form, has been defined as an emotion that represents the link between the self and society, as well as a threat to that link. The trend of the twentieth century to focus on guilt rather than shame is being gradually reversed in academia, although the social taboo still prevails to a large degree. When suppressed, shame can manifest itself as other emotions, such as shamelessness, guilt or anger. It never simply disappears.
Born to political activists, Brennan experienced tensions between the reality and social norms already as a small child. Furthermore, Irish nationalist and Catholic conservatism towards women clashed with her choice to become a professional writer. Brennan kept returning to personal experiences, which in turn tell the story of wider cultural shifts taking place during her lifetime. While her USA-based fiction is an exploration of freedom and shows the possibilities of renegotiation of identity, her Dublin-based work returns to these formative years. Maeve Brennan ticks many interesting columns with respect to her biography, and although her writing is an assertion that labels and social roles can be redefined, they are also crucial determinants in her narratives.
The possibility of redefinition is explored through the persona of the Long-Winded Lady, as well as in the Herbert’s Retreat stories. Unlike some Irish women of Brennan mother’s generation, or those with whom she worked at the start of her career in Harper’s Bazaar, Brennan didn’t write explicitly for women. Yet issues of gender automatically come up as we see her making sense of the urban, and suburban, landscape in and near New York. Brennan’s persona the Long-Winded Lady subverts traditional roles of narrator and observer, which have been historically associated with men rather than women. As flâneuse, the Long-Winded Lady is redefining contemporary urban space, while as an observer in a broader sense she is turning around the tradition of the male gaze, where men watch and women are seen. The Lady’s experience of New York comes with varieties of shame – for being alone, a woman, an eavesdropper, and perhaps even for living a good life while many others in the city, and in the world, don’t.
As the Herbert Retreat’s narrator, Brennan adopts the perspective of the Irish maids, as opposed to that of the American house-owners, thus breathing life into the stereotypical image
127 of domestic help of the period. In Brennan’s writing, Irish workers receive agency by forming an in-group that shames the members of the out-group. Shame is a tool that allows the maids of Herbert’s Retreat to unite against a common enemy, the majority social group, by redefining their employers through observation and storytelling. Shame is thus linked with belonging in the second chapter as uniting “us” against “them”.
While the Long-Windeds focus on the victims of shame, thus underlining social, economic, cultural and even political injustice, Herbert’s Retreat fiction presents shaming as a righteous activity. The fact that this part of Brennan’s work is primarily funny, as opposed to the rest, is tied to the implication that the maids act in self-defence. But the main practical reason is that only their perspective is provided in a believable way that the reader can relate to. The last section of the chapter shows how shame appears as a powerful weapon in self- defence in Brennan’s biographical childhood stories, and that it is also inherently unreliable.
Chapters Three and Four focus on suppressed shame, the former serving more as an introduction and the latter focusing on the roots of suppressed shame, as well as its consequences and the possibility of alleviating it. Brennan returned to Ireland several times in person, but the most significant retracing of her steps took place in her fiction. Her earliest work, the posthumously published novella The Visitor, shows Dublin as a lost home, where one is not welcome, yet which is impossible to let go of. Shame is experienced throughout the unfolding of the profound rejection that Anastasia faces in the novella, while her inability to save her face and leave adds to her defeat. The rest of the chapter introduces Dublin of The Springs of Affection collection as a city where shame is in the foreground, as well background.
Little Maeve’s mother is eager to please and conform, which puts her in contradicting social situations where shame cannot be avoided. Growing up is represented as stepping out of the comfort zone of a child who can hide behind the window and observe and laugh at others, just as Brennan’s characters do in her USA-based work. Shame is no longer the source of entertainment or power, but rather the exact opposite. This chapter, as a whole, shows Brennan’s exploration of the obverse of the affect, imagining the person on the receiving end of humiliation, and the consequences of shaming and humiliation in family relationships. Shame is the source of conflicts and misunderstandings, but it is also the obstacle in their confrontation and resolution.
The spite and isolation between family members, and especially couples, can be explained and illustrated by focusing on the experience of shame. Shame is responsible for the
128 glass walls between partners in the broken marriages of the Bagots and the Derdons. They are kept in place because of the inability of individuals to acknowledge their suppressed shame – to each other, but also to themselves. While marriages in Ireland were for a long time formed primarily with economic issues in mind, cultural representations of romantic love, including Hegel’s philosophy, represented the ideal marriage as the opposite of what Brennan suggests in her fiction. Her couples fall short of being good partners, as well as parents, accumulating unresolved, suppressed shame, which leads to further dissonance.
The last chapter looks at isolation and suppressed shame, and the consequences it has for society as humiliation is transmitted across generations. Conflicts and misunderstandings are interwoven with shame, and Brennan’s fiction shows the frustrating incapability of those who participate in them to step out of the vicious circle. The patriarchal Catholic Ireland that Brennan remembers in her work is an unforgiving and unwelcoming place, where people participate in the shaming of each other. Unlike the Virgin Mary, her namesakes are either childless or have a daughter who they destroy through humiliation. Acknowledging one’s shame to others, who respond respectfully, seems to be the only way out of the perpetuated cycles of rejection, humiliation, insecurity and anger. This might be expressed through the metaphor of the rose garden, for which Mary Lambert secretly longs.
Finally, alleviation of shame in Brennan’s work is explored, which takes places within the realm of unconditional belonging and acceptance, achieved in the company of those who we love, including pets. Digging deep to uncover shame means that much becomes exposed, which makes shame-focused literary analysis extremely rewarding, especially with respect to works that suggest, rather than denounce. Brennan depicts environments and atmospheres where the reader connects the dots between causes and effects, and bearing shame in mind serves to elucidate many issues further. Where there is a norm, there is a transgression - and shame. Brennan’s unique position as an outsider, in the USA and in Ireland, and as a published woman writer in a world shaped by male perspectives allowed her to convey the experience of such transgressions. Her traumatic childhood memories too are linked with, among else, humiliation.
Analysing Brennan’s writing can contribute to our historical knowledge of Ireland and the USA of her time. Observations and conclusions relating to her experience of these place around the middle of the twentieth century constitute a phenomenological contribution to what is conveyed through more positivist approaches. Reading Brennan’s work through shame ties deeply into issues of gender, as well as the political and social history of Ireland. Offering a 129 female perspective, her work adds a new kind of ghost roaming Irish landscape. Broader cultural and social issues are focalised in personal relationships between her characters, through which they are expressed. Brennan’s writing is set in the houses where she grew up, the suburban community where she briefly stayed, and the parts of USA where she lived and worked. Her characters are an amalgam of her relatives, as well as the author herself.
Brennan did not fight to right whatever she might have thought was wrong with society, but she represented the experiences that she could not resolve. The author’s treatment of the material also sheds light on the role that psychology plays in art, and vice versa. Reading and analysing her work provides the opportunity to discuss issues of personal identity and strife for self-determination, as well as the power of society and a natural longing to belong. Finally, Brennan’s work is a contribution to a literary canon and tradition within which it was created, and which it can also further inform and enrich.
Given the recent shift in academia and psychotherapy from guilt to shame, this thesis has attempted to thoroughly investigate Brennan’s work for instances of shame, which were then analysed in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, guilt is certainly detectable in her writing as well, for instance in Delia Bagot’s loss of son, Hubert Derdon’s inability to mourn his wife, Martin Bagot’s responsibility towards family members, or the Lady’s observations of injustice on the streets of New York. While space and other constraints did not permit to include an analysis of guilt as well, it might be worth juxtaposing shame and guilt in Brennan’ writing, perhaps by analysing guilt alone and comparing with my findings. This would also further confirm, or question, the importance of shame in literary analysis.
Alternatively, it would be worthwhile to do a shame-focused study on other Irish- American short fiction authors of the period, female and male, for comparison with respect to gender. The Irish republican writer Frank O’Connor’s short stories published in The New Yorker around Brennan’s time could be of special interest. Similarly, Brennan’s work has been read with her double nationality in mind, and a shame-focused analysis of the work of more distinctly Irish, as well as American short fiction authors could serve as an informative comparison. For instance, Mary Beckett’s Belfast short stories focusing on women around the middle of the twentieth century depict overt, as well as suppressed shame.
Finally, shame seems to be very useful for literary expression as well as analysis in general, and can shed more light on literary works and their authors and contexts. The more it is employed, the more hypotheses and conclusions can also be formulated about its utility as an
130 artistic and analytical tool. Shame-focused interpretation is a great opportunity to theorise about human psychology, as well as the influences of gender, nationality, religion, socio-economic situation and politics on people and society. Such findings also further inform our understanding of the nature and role of literature.
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Works Cited
Primary Sources
Brennan, Maeve. The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker. Dublin: The Stinging Fly, 2017. The Rose Garden. Washington, DC: Counterpoint Press, 2000. The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin. London: Flamingo, 2000. The Visitor. Dublin: New Island, 2019.
Secondary Sources
Adler, Alfred. The Neurotic Constitution. Abingdon: Routledge, 2001. Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2004. Bacal, Howard A. “Shame – The Affect of Discrepancy: Commentary on Chapters 1, 2, and 3.” Eds. Melvin R. Lansky and Andrew P. Morrison. The Widening Scope of Shame. New York and London: Psychology Press, 1997. 97-106. Berger, John et al. Ways of Seeing: based on the BBC television series with John Berger. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. Bourke, Angela. Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy: an Irish Writer in New York. London: Pimlico, 2005. Boylan, Clare. “Foreword.” Maeve Brennan. The Visitor. Dublin: New Island, 2019. v-xiii. Brennan, Maeve. “Author’s Note.” Maeve Brennan. The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker. Dublin: The Stinging Fly, 2017. 3-5. Carduff, Christopher. “Editor’s Note.” Brennan, Maeve. The Visitor. Dublin: New Island, 2019. 101-6. Carlson, Elizabeth. “Dazzling and Deceiving: Reflections in the Nineteenth-Century Department Store.” Visual Resources 28. 2 (2012): 117-37. Francis & Taylor Online
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Gangopadhyay, Rudrani. “The 'Woman' of the Crowd: Exploring Female Flânerie.“ Rupkatha Journal: On Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 7.3 (2015): 91-9. Rupkatha Journal
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McKeon, Belinda. “Introduction.” Maeve Brennan. The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker. Dublin: The Stinging Fly, 2017. xi-xviii. Metz, Katharina. Shame as Narrative Strategy - Prose by Scottish Writers Laura Hird, Jackie Kay, A.L. Kennedy and Ali Smith. University of Konstanz, doctoral dissertation, 2009.
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Stolorow, Robert D. “Toward Greater Authenticity: From Shame to Existential Guilt, Anxiety, and Grief, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 6.2 (2011): 285-7, Taylor and Francis Online
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Thesis Abstract
This thesis analyses the fiction of the twentieth-century Irish-American author Maeve Brennan through the lens of shame. All of Brennan’s published writing has been included: her short stories and magazine contributions collected in The Long Winded Lady, The Springs of Affection, and The Rose Garden, as well as her novella The Visitor. Shame has recently been embraced in academia as a subject of research, as well as an interpretative key for literary analysis. The thesis examines shame in order to map out social and psychological experience of belonging, and the lack thereof, in Brennan’s fiction, as both the threat and the reality of isolation, stemming from social rejection, occur as its prominent themes.
These elements are also shown as connected to the issues of self-determination and identity, as Brennan’s characters partly embrace and partly oppose social normativity. As some of their individual needs, especially those of women, are add odds with social expectations, they are effectively choosing between social inclusion on the one hand, and embracing their personal difference. As transgressions of social norms come with varying degrees of shame, the emotion is omnipresent in the highly regulated, and surveilled, environments that Brennan depicts. As the affect itself causes further shame, it often becomes suppressed, manifesting itself through a variety of other emotions, such as insecurity, anger, guilt, as well as an absence of shame.
The thesis first discusses overt shame, mentioned yet glazed over, in an effort to reconstruct the experience of female flânerie in New York around the middle of the twentieth- century. Shame is also analysed as a weapon used to alter social hierarchy in the fiction set in the American suburban residence of Herbert’s Retreat. Through storytelling, the omnipresent Irish maids receive agency, as well as a means to dominate the culturally and economically more powerful American residents by forming a community. The power struggle takes place primarily between women on both sides, while men are largely absent or dismissed from the scene.
Conversely, Brennan’s Dublin-based writing is analysed with attention to suppressed shame, especially as experienced by women. Although fictional, Brennan’s characters relive many traumatic experiences of the author’s family, as well as herself, such as the death of relatives or cruel anti-republican home raids. Rather than raising republican issues, though, this writing quietly denounces the traditional patriarchal Ireland of Brennan’s childhood, largely
136 defined by Catholic morality and conservative middle-class values, as well as Éamon de Valera’s oppressive government insisting on women’s domesticity from the 1930s onward.
This environment is shown as especially damaging to women’s self-esteem and sense of freedom and fulfilment, but it eventually comes across as producing general community paralysis. Suppressed shame appears in the form of insecurity, guilt, frustration and misdirected rage, and as such haunts Brennan’s characters without being fully manifest. It is also inherited through generations, and so entrenched into the social matrix, preventing escape from the vicious circle. Finally, Brennan’s own life-long sense of homelessness and emotional and social fragility comes across from her Irish, as well as American writing, and is juxtaposed to her depictions of friends and relatives, but especially pets, as faithful companions.
The thesis bears in mind Brennan’s unique position of an outsider as an Irish woman writing in a male-dominated American environment at a time when modernity has just given way to the contemporary history. By reading through the prism of shame as a psychological and social indicator of norm-breaching, as well as of a sense of belonging and the possibility of self-determination, this thesis offers insights into larger issues of history, culture, and psychology. It also presents Brennan’s fiction as witty, deep, and unique, as well as of general interest, and deserving of even more attention than it has been recently receiving.
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Abstrakt práce
Tato diplomová práce analyzuje tvorbu irsko-americké autorky Maeve Brennan, píšící ve dvacátém století, optikou hanby. Zkoumá celé autorčino dílo: povídky a časopisecké příspěvky vydané ve sbírkách The Long Winded Lady, The Springs of Affection a The Rose Garden, stejně jako novelu The Visitor. Hanba se v poslední době dostala do hledáčku akademiků jako předmět zkoumání i interpretační klíč pro literární analýzu. Tato práce se zabývá pojmem hanby ve snaze zmapovat společenské a psychologické prožívání pocitu sounáležitosti a jeho absence v tvorbě Brennan, kde hrozba i realita izolace jako důsledku odmítnutí společností představují prominentní témata.
Tyto elementy jsou také představeny v souvislosti s problematikou sebeurčení a identity, neboť postavy v díle Brennan částečně přijímají a částečně odmítají společenskou normativitu. Vzhledem k tomu, že jejich individuální potřeby, a to především v případě žen, jsou v rozporu se společenskými očekáváními, nastává nutnost vybírat si mezi společenským přijetím na jedné straně a trváním na vlastní odlišnosti na straně druhé. Jelikož narušení společenských norem je provázeno různě silnou odezvou v podobě hanby, tato emoce je všudypřítomná ve vysoce regulovaných a sledovaných prostředích, jež Brennan zobrazuje. Protože má pak tendenci způsobovat další pocity hanby, bývá tato emoce často potlačována, a následně se projevuje jako množství dalších pocitů jako nejistota, hněv, vina, nebo také jako absence hanby.
Práce nejdříve zkoumá neskrývanou hanbu, takovou, která je sice zmíněna, nicméně pak rychle přestává být předmětem pozornosti. V této části se jedná o snahu zrekonstruovat prožitek ženské flanérie v New Yorku kolem poloviny dvacátého století. V tvorbě Brennan zasazené do prostředí příměstské rezidence Herbert’s Retreat je poté hanba také analyzována jako zbraň využívaná k pozměnění společenské hierarchie. Skrze vyprávění příběhů a díky následnému vytvoření vlastní komunity získávají všudypřítomné irské služebné svobodnou vůli, spolu s prostředkem k zajištění dominance nad kulturně a ekonomicky mocnějšími americkými rezidenty. Tento boj o moc se odehrává na obou stranách především mezi ženami, zatímco muži jsou z větší části nepřítomní či vyhnáni ze scény.
Tvorba Brennan zasazená do irského Dublinu je naopak analyzována s důrazem na potlačenou hanbu, především tak, jak ji prožívají ženy. Přestože se jedná o fiktivní povídky, postavy procházejí mnohými traumatickými zážitky z historie autorčiny rodiny a z její osobní
138 minulosti, jako je smrt příbuzných nebo kruté domovní prohlídky v rámci boje proti irským republikánům. Tato tvorba ovšem příliš neakcentuje republikánská témata a spíše tiše odsuzuje tradiční patriarchální Irsko autorčina dětství, definované z velké části katolickou morálkou a konzervativními středostavovskými hodnotami, a vedle toho také opresivní vládu Éamona de Valery, jež od třicátých let dvacátého století trvala na ženské domesticitě.
Toto prostředí je vyobrazeno jako obzvláště škodlivé pro ženské sebevědomí a pocit svobody nebo sebenaplnění, ale v konečném důsledku se jeví jako paralyzující pro celou společnost. Potlačená hanba se také projevuje jako nejistota, vina, frustrace a nesprávně namířený hněv, a v této podobě pak pronásleduje postavy Brennan bez toho, aby se plně vyjevila. Hanba se také dědí napříč generacemi, a tímto způsobem se zakořeňuje ve společnosti a zabraňuje úniku ze začarovaného kruhu. V poslední řadě se v autorčině tvorbě, irské stejně jako americké, také objevuje její vlastní celoživotní pocit bezdomovectví i emoční a společenské křehkosti. Toto je poté postaveno do opozice k jejím vyobrazením přátel a příbuzných, ale především domácích mazlíčků jako věrných společníků.
Tato práce bere v potaz Brennan unikátní pozici, v rámci jíž se jako irská žena píšící v americkém prostředí ovládaném muži v době, kdy období moderny pomalu přecházelo v současnost, nacházela vně mnoha společenských skupin. Analyzováním tvorby Brennan za pomoci hanby jako psychologického a společenského ukazatele překračování norem i pocitu sounáležitosti a možnosti sebeurčení se tato práce snaží poskytnout vhled do obecnějších dějinných, kulturních a psychologických problematik. Prezentuje také autorčinu tvorbu jako důvtipnou, hlubokou i unikátní, všeobecně zajímavou a zasluhující si ještě více pozornosti, než jí bylo v poslední době dopřáváno.
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Key Words / Klíčová slova
English: shame, belonging, short story, Ireland, New York, gender, flâneuse
česky: hanba, sounáležitost, povídka, Irsko, New York, gender, flanérka
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