"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).