Double Readings and Double Rewritings. Alternative Texts in Mary O'Donnell's Remake of Mary Lavin's "The Widow's Son"

Giovanna Tallone

doi:10.37389/abei.v20i2.3200

Abstract

Mary O’Donnell’s short story “The Story of Maria’s Son”, from her collection Storm over Belfast (2008), consciously and openly rewrites Mary Lavin’s story “The Widow’s Son” in the urban setting of contemporary Ireland. O’Donnell follows the steps of a significant figure among Irish women writers and plays with the plot of her source text in a process of expansion, providing background information to weave a realistic pattern of suburban life. However, O’Donnell also engages with the structure, tone and narrative modes of the Lavin original and reproduces the pattern of Lavin’s story in her deliberate use of a double ending, or of alternative endings, thus questioning narrative authority. The purpose of this paper is to analyse Mary O’Donnell’s “The Story of Maria’s Son”, vis-à-vis Lavin’s “The Widow’s Son”, shedding light on the way both texts elaborate conflicting endings and taking into account the variety of narrative voices in both stories. If on the level of plot the tragedy of the loss of the son is generated by a mother-son conflict, on the level of discourse and structure O’Donnell develops the conflicting double endings into a postmodern reflection on the construction of texts.Keywords: rereading; rewriting; alternative ending; Mary O’Donnell; Mary Lavin.

Highlights

Mary O’Donnell’s short story “The Story of Maria’s Son”, from her collection Storm over Belfast (2008), consciously and openly rewrites Mary Lavin’s story “The Widow’s Son” in the urban setting of contemporary Ireland
In her 2009 essay “Irish Women and Writing: An Overview of the Journey from Imagination into Print, 1980-2008”, Mary O’Donnell sheds light on the difficulties and problems Irish women writers of her generation met with in a literary landscape dominated by men, considering issues of publication, censorship as well as marginalization of female creativity
O’Donnell’s “The Story of Maria’s Son” is a writerly and critical “response” (O’Donnell 2008; 63) to Lavin’s story, a rewriting that gives her the opportunity to play with the pretext of a forerunner and to reflect on the act of writing, retrieving Lavin’s story from its neglected past

Summary

Introduction

Mary O’Donnell’s short story “The Story of Maria’s Son”, from her collection Storm over Belfast (2008), consciously and openly rewrites Mary Lavin’s story “The Widow’s Son” in the urban setting of contemporary Ireland. Mary O’Donnell acknowledges Lavin’s experiment with text and textuality writing her own version of Lavin’s story in “The Story of Maria’s Son”.

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