"A Girl" part 4

This chapter further expands on McBride's  view of women and their role especially in times of distress. So far, every significant male character has been either a woman-user or an otherwise sickly character. So I found it surprising but also clarifying when we are given hint into the woman's role in a society filled with these males. When the girl goes for the first time, the narrator says,"Sister be a brother sister fixer of her woes. Am I like that? Am I that thing it seems yes" (131). Her mother thinks that this is how a woman should act, as a corrector or remedy for male problems.  But the girl refuses to help her mother with her brother, saying that it isn't her fault he is sick; it's not her problem to solve. Interestingly enough, she begins praying more by the end of this section comes. At first she looks down on her mother for doing this. But the girl comes to faith through her brother's worsening cancer. It seems that McBride is saying modern Irish women fight with their faith and are tempted by their sexuality. We keep getting reminders of the female body, but not just in a sexual way. We see the human body as a temple, or house, of God. When the girl invitingly says, "Come into me. Come into my house" she is not just talking about her apartment but more of her body as a house of God.

In connection with this,  we see an increased imagery of veins, flesh, meat and animals in these chapters. The narrator draws a parallel between her uncle and her brother by describing her uncle: "He is so white. Threads there under his skin. Blue twists I could trace" (145), similar to the vein imagery we get of the cancer in her brothers brain back in the beginning chapters of the book. Men are associated with disease and bodies as simple flesh or meat. We hear the girl describe a swan to her brother, how a beautiful creature with grace and poise turns into a dead animal with "wiggling bits" inside it that gets served on a plate (150). I think this could represent the girl as her body/ house of God and grace has been infected with wormy disease from the men she has gone back to. By the fifth chapter, the girl's idea of sex has shifted. She views it more as a martyrdom, way of getting tortured, to feel cleansed. She uses it as a way to suffer for her brother's sake, like Jesus suffering crucifixion to forgive the sins of mankind.

"A Girl": part 3

In part III, entitled "Land Under the Wave," we see the narrator leaving home and her mother to move out to college. There she finds herself among the smoke and sex of the city, still trying to find her way. Another female figure is introduced to us, a presumed peer  who shows the narrator the ins and outs of the party life. Up until this point there have been the mother, aunt and narrator to demonstrate what a woman in Ireland values and embodies. So far, all of these women have been simple cogs in the cycle of domestic life; they can only gain their self-worth by pleasing and unquestioningly supporting male's  sexual, religious or gender cravings. They are forced to satisfy every male craving in order to be validated.
Part III continues this theme when the girl goes home with a man that she met at a party. The girl still has no self-made identity and, therefore, no self respect until a small glimps of hope comes at chapter two's ending. She begins pondering her role at home in contrast with her role away in the city. As she wonders about creating a new world she says, "I could make. A whole other world a whole civilization in this this city that is not home? The heresy of it. But I can. And I can choose this. Shafts of sun. Life that is it" (96). Rather than constructing an identity that defies the constraint that the (male) world has put on her, she and her new friend boomerang the other way; they reach a whole new level of male-pleasing as she starts to love "feeling ruined....To fill out the corners of this person who doesn't sit in photos on the mantel next to you" (98). Her search for purpose has landed her in another place that church does not support.

Heaney paper ideas

Heaney writes during one of Ireland’s most tumultuous times. In “Digging” he starts by initially differentiating himself from his father’s generation. The narrator likens the pen he writes with to a gun. A very powerful image when read and published in a country filled with warring men and mixed ideals. Heaney thinks of writing as his equivalent to digging for potatoes. His words will bring nourishment to his family (the people on his side) and sustain them through the tough times.

Toughness is also an image drawn upon in “The Forge” where “a door into the dark” leads to an environment that forges metals together. Heaney’s one line, “He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter/Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows” not only shows us that the outside world will always be right behind those doors, but also that constant chatter from the opposing side will always try to break in and taint the efforts of the hard workers. The poem describes a centered anvil that is like an altar to the forger. The meeting-in-the-middle concept is important and must be reached if Ireland is ever going to unify against the English and their oppressive demands. Forging poeple together can only happen though if hard labor is employed "to beat real iron out, to work the bellows." 
Another poem that connects to these two is "Follower," in which a young boy recounts his childhood of trailing behind his father as he labors in the barn, yet another image of work. All three of these poems are concerned with the motif of hard labor, potentially harking back Ireland's dark past of being enslaved for and by the British. But in "Follower," the boy recalls that he was a nuisance for his father in his childhood and then notes that now in his adulthood  notes that "It is my father who keeps stumbling/Behind me, and will not go away. " The role reversal is clear and now it seems that Ireland's past is getting in the way of its future, slowing it down from the progress it could be making.

 

 

" A Girl" part 2

Part two of the book shares the same title as the book itself, and for a justified reason. We begin by seeing the narrator (and her brother) as a teenager, trying to discover who she wants to be in a family that seems so engulfed in its own problems that they end up isolated from the outside world. Based on the vivid scenes of rape and then self-promiscuity, we see the girl as a half-formed thing. She is not sure who she is, what form she should take, until her uncle has raped her. But as a way of coping with the confounding trauma, she turns sex into a weapon herself. She uses sex as a tyranical device against boys her age, becoming a "social rapist" in a way by taking her male peers' virginity in order to gain respect and affirmation of herself. In these events by the pond, she thinks of herself as fully formed; her identity has been well defined in her peers' eyes now. But her brother is the one that questions and ultimately disapproves of her assumed role as sexual liberator. Her grades slip, and all talk of faith and Christianity vanishes until her mother suggests that the brother pursue the priesthood. The kids no longer ponder what it means to be Christian; their faith in God has been replaced with ill-placed faith in themselves as ultimate deciders of their fates. They have put themselves above God. In times of crisis, we see this most clearly. After her rape and after his poor report card, neither child turns to the church for help. Yet, still their mother tries against their wills to convince them, but even she does not have a firm control over them.
 

"Lost Ground" reactions

William Trevor's short story packs saintly events around Milton's life in a way that is too blatant to ignore. What struck me the most was actually not the boy's death, but the doubt and lack of support that his family gave him. After seeing and kissing St. Rosa in the orchard and being compelled to preach about her saintliness in a predominantly Protestant neighborhood, Milton must have known that his words would not go over well. But his family was the worst offender to his faith, imprisoning him in his bedroom, being the first to "martyr" him before his actual death. There are saints that have been considered "fools for Christ" and Milton's family hangs this "wrong in the head" sign on him as a scapegoat to their embarrasement.

What Milton found while in his bedroom acting as a  hermit (a life some saints have taken up and lead), he "practiced preaching, all the time seeing the woman in the orchard instead of teh sallow features of Jesus or a cantankerous-looking God, white-haired and bearded, frowning through the clouds" (175).  The predetermined images that the Protestants had constructed of God needed to be torn down in Milton's mind in order to spread the truth of what he experienced. Similarly, Milton is provided a puzzle as entertainment while in solitary. But this puzzle also represents how Milton is piecing together his visions from St. Rosa and defining a new Christianity, one that is not endorsed by his family or neighbors and marks him as an enemy.  Milton wonders if he will finish the jigsaw; he had heard the story of Dudgeon McDavie dozens of times, and "yet it seemed a different kind of story when he thought about the woman in the orchard..." Christianity was being redefined through St. Rosa, and then through Milton. Like St. Catherine, Brigid, and Bega, Milton proved: "Your bodies a living sacrifice" (182). And it ends with the Catholic view of martyrdom when the family tells themselves "that Milton's death was the way things were, the way things had to be..."(183).  

"Dipping" into Heaney more: Peninsula

A selection of Heaney's poems in Door Into the Dark are concerned with landscapes and what they mean for their inhabitants. I said in my blue book writing on "Digging" that "Heaney is spacing himself from his father and grandfather after the alliterated lines...Similar to how Larkin looks back and wonders what people thought of him when he was younger, Heaney looks back and distinguishes himself from the past generations." This makes sense when we look at what Ireland was doing post- WWII. England had pulled back after experiencing the vast destruction caused by the war, and artists like Heaney and Larkin reflected this in their cynical, slightly rebellious and obscene (for the time) poetry. 

In "Peninsula" we get this pulled back, even escapist, feeling from our narrator who ironically enough starts his poem to us in a nurturing older brother way/ advice column way. His tone is more instructional, in the first few lines, then flows into a gentle description of the peninsula's landscape, and returns back to advising. In this way Heaney follows suit of his previous work and Larkin, but then deviates when he describes the landscape and his ultimate moral. He uses phrases like "horizons drink down sea and hill" and "ploughed fields swallow..." with repeated imagery of consumption, almost like gulping down medicine to get rid of an ailment or vacuuming something up to make sure that its not there anymore. Then "you're in the dark again," literally and metaphorically. As a spectator of war, he saw the consumption of human life in its most horrific light but he is now just as lost as he was before, until he reaches his final stanza. In it he says that you may not have something new to talk about, but you will have a greater understanding of what is now around you and how it was shaped, "in their extremity." 

"Lambs"

One section that I understand...

Chapter 4 where the mother freaks out on her kids: The grandfather has the dialogue at first, then the mother starts disciplining her children and the girl is back to narrating. I think I understand the "religious rearing" aspect. The grandfather walked into his daughter's house and sees that his grandchildren are not behaving according to what he feels is the proper Christian way. Grandpa and the kids are having a normal conversation until Mom gets back, and then the kids go off to play because kids get bored listening to adult conversations. The grandfather's judgment weighs heavily on the mother, who then takes her anger out on the children. It's sad, but understandable why the mother would punish her children in this instance. She was raised to act a certain way and when her children don’t act that way, she feels guilty for letting her father down. She was forced to adhere to all the Christian doctrines when she was a child, and now she probably looks back on her childhood and wants more than to punish her children all the time. It is an example of the mother's conflicting ideas of spirituality, which the girl seems to be having as well.

One section that gave me difficulty...

The girl drawing on the picture of Jesus, drawing blood coming from his eye (knows that she’s defacing god's image): "I'd like to hear him crying, screaming most of all. How bad was it Jesus? Mr. Jesus Christ. I thought Christ was his second name.” It looks like she is making Christ suffer more by drawing more blood on him, giving him more wounds, digging in with the marker. Is the girl just trying to wrap her head around God? Or is she grappling with his dual nature/ humanity of God? It seems like she wants to know and understand him. She could be trying to relate to him by asking him how much it hurt.

Bloom and "A Girl"

Joyce's sentences stop as soon as the reader is about to learn something important. He cuts himself off before he fully concludes a thought. The prose of the text (if you can call it that) is another thing that made reading comprehension difficult. It felt like a constant stream of consciousness with no editing, almost frantic and frenzied, like senses being bombarded. At some points, it was like watching a movie, except with a constantly-moving camera.  Although his sentences are abrupt, his ideas are not; they linger from one of Bloom's  church-going experiences to the next, giving the feel of one huge religious moment with smaller, less distinguishable events within.  Bloom was very critical of priests in all his religion endeavors. From John Conmee's sermon , to communion, to the "secret invitation" funeral service, Bloom always critiqued something the church's authority figure did. After communion, Bloom notes, "The priest was rinsing out the chalice...Wine. Makes it more aristocratic..." Father Coffey is described and compared to sick animals and aggressive symbols ( bloated with belly of "poisoned pup", "burst sideways like a sheep in clover",  "eyes of a toad", "looks full of bad gas") Later Joyce says, in a slightly authoritative voice, "Mr Bloom glanced about him and then stood up, looking over the risen hats. Stand up at the gospel of course." like Bloom was following some code, rather than being a sincere Christian that internalized and embodied the virtue of respect.

Joyce's style prepares us for McBride's writing by conditioning us to ignore the grammatical aspects of the text and focus more on the imagery and ideas. The prose, in both "Ulysses" and "A Girl," feels more like poetry than a narrative of characters and events. The narrator that is introduced to us is a little girl that weirdly recounts her own birth and from then on begins explaining her life's events in a child's way of thinking. We are forced to see the world through a child's eyes, and because our childhood is so far behind us, we lack that imagination and that is where the difficulty lies. We must picture a world where we abandon what we know and try to start from the beginning like the girl does. Once again, there's a feeling of cinemation when reading these texts, like the sentences are the camera directing us to focus on certain emotions or events and then quickly diverting to the next (similar to the way kids take in everything, and everthing looks big to them). It's challenging to follow, but once we've read for a little while we start to see in the same way she sees.

 

Araby and Yeats' Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Joyce calls attention to the nation's identity in Araby, especially at the end of the story. His first paragraph uses words that associate with sight or vision when talking about the Christian Brothers' School letting out. Words like "conscious" and "blind" are paradoxically used when the man recounts the neighborhood at night. He also spies on the young woman through the blinds. When he does this he says, "I kept her brown figure always in my eye..." He references "her image" on a couple occasions and there is always a mysterious quality to her. And finally after the man visits the bazaar, we get another "sight" reference: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." As he noted, his eyes were always full of tears. His eyes are burning again by the end of the story, symbolizing his emotional response to venturing out on his own, just as Ireland tried to do away from England.

Yeats' poem is about a pilot that suddenly questions why he is flying thousands of feet in the air, risking his life to guard people he does not love. This is another example of sight and vision being brought up in the years surrounding the Easter Uprising.  His eyes are metaphorically opened to the reality of his cause. He realizes, "No likely end could bring them loss/ Or leave them happier than before." There is no point to his actions. He has officially lost hope in his cause, now believing that he will never be able to enact change; his death will be meaningless. "A waste of breath" is all that he sees his efforts as now. In both cases, the vision that both men recieve ultimately leads to their depression and lost hope; hte cause they were fighting for may not have been what they thought it was.

Playboy of the Western World

Last class we were able to unpack a lot of "Pot of Broth." Through looking at classmates' blogs, we found that the type of literature that was released and circulated during the beginning of the 1920s was meant to stir up the Irish public. The Irish were portrayed as naive to the trickery from the Church of England as demonstrated by the couple's acquiescence to their house visitor.  Irish hospitality was cast in an unfavorable light when put along side the local community's religious politics surrounding feeding the priest. They were practicing their religion but had inadvertantly stripped it of its meaning by putting earthly concerns on a higher priority than spiritual ones. In this way, the Irish might as well have been pagans again. And that was how Yeats wanted to portray them: to get the public angry. He needed a piece of literature that everyone would go see and that would ignite the fire of rebellion by calling attention to the negative way the Irish were portrayed.
Originally, I had seen Yeats' work as an example of oral storytelling, purely an example of the culture's artistic tendencies. I ascribed no real, penetrating meaning until we looked closer at the Christian concepts of hospitality which then brought us to the differentiation of earthy and spiritual concerns, comedy and tragedy, low and high order art forms.  

Reading "Playboy of the Western World" post-binary discussion allowed me to look for lines of dialogue that said more than just what the characters thought.  In this play's case, the Irish were portrayed as a non-unified people. "Slaying his da" is what earns the Playboy fear and respect in his new community and is what allows Pegeen to even consider marrying him (although they just met). This play has another wise widow that helps the younger generation male in his quest to gain respect and affirmation from his generation and his father's. The widow, in her fairy godmother-way, always regarded the boy as better than what he really was. His father was convinced that the boy was a dunce, could not talk to girls, and would therefore die alone with nothing to show for his name. Widow Quin says, "I am your like, and it’s for that I’m taking a fancy to you,..." (Act 2) Oddly enough, the widow tells Christy that he has to handle his daddy issues on his own; she cannot help him with that dispute.
The culture of the play values daring and courageous youth, which makes me believe that it is  another nationalistic work, but slightly less than Yeats'.  As Michael says in act 2, "A daring fellow is the jewel of the world, and a man did split his father’s middle with a single clout, should have the bravery of ten, so may God andMary and St. Patrick bless you, and increase you from this mortal day." Similarly the widow says, "...isn’t it a great shame when the old and hardened do torment the young?" It is the act of killing his father that makes Christy so attractive to Pegeen. But once she finds out that he indeed failled at his attempt (multiple times), she immediately loses interest and returns to the more earthy concerns of marrying a stable man with money.

Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Pot of Broth

My Irish Lit reading background: almost nothing.
I may have read a few Yeats poems in ENG 196, but other than that I have no experience with specifically Irish literature.  Learning about the country's history, I expect the Irish to thrive off pagan folklore and myth. In that folklore, I anticipate characters to be very socially consciousness and that it will provide an avenue for justifying their actions. In other words, I imagined characters using their social status as a excuse for acting immorally. Having read "Pot of Broth," I was not surprised to find one character exploiting another in a similar way that other people have exploited the Irish. It seems like the Irish tradition is to remain resilient through extreme hardship, whether it be exploitation, persecution, or depravity, and to prove one's worth despite various false titles being laid on by others.

This tradition was also seen in "Cathleen Ni Houlihan." The younger generation was cautioned by thier parents to stay safe at home, marry, and collect money. But the old woman represented the ideals of a long lost tradition, to defend one's true love, the Irish country.  In both plays, the oral storytelling and script culture are peppered with  themes of political persecution and paganism. In both stories we see the generosity of Irish hospitality, but the effects of it are what make the two stories different. Bridget says to her husband, "Shame on you, Peter. Give her the shilling and your blessing wiht it, or our own luck will go from us." But the old woman represents a high order, one that doesn't simply beg for money. So the question is, why is she there then? She is there to inspire the younger generation, to convince them of a worthy cause, one that thier parents would not have approved of. By doing this, she claims it's noble to die for one's country and culture in order to preserve what is rightfully theirs.