Flora's Answer to the Irish Question: A Study of Mary Lavin's "The Becker Wives"

Abstract

ish my nation? is a question that surfaces time and again, and in various forms, throughout Irish literature. It most explicitly appears in Shakespeare's Henry V, with an answer that leaves much room for emendation, particularly considering that it originates in English, not Irish, literature. ish my nation? asks an Irish captain named Macmorris. Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal (3.2.125-26). If this answer is not a compelling catalyst for Irish imagination, question is: It has driven Irish people back into old mythology, old language, or forward into a nation state - just as mythic - free from outside influence. Irish poet Eavan Boland paints tortuous Irish quest for an identity eloquently: Across years of humiliation no people can hold their possessions intact and least of all their chief possession of identity. Sooner or later they begin to lose it by seeing themselves through eyes of their oppressors, and to measure worth by that measure until pride becomes shame, self-knowledge self-denial. Yet a people who take so long to form, like a rock in sun, cannot altogether be destroyed; like a human soul, once they are created they exist. (Innocence 81) This passage touches on long process of change and elusiveness of a final form, a final center, in Irish people. Mary Lavin's short story The Becker Wives (1945) dramatizes this Irish quest for identity, asking of question ish my nation? Perhaps in context of this story, though, a winding river delivers an even more appropriate metaphor for Ireland than a rock: a river incessantly turning back on itself, questioning itself, dancing over perpetually changing ground. What Lavin ultimately uncovers in this story is not a rock of solid identity, not centrality, but elusiveness and eccentricity. story dramatizes more phenomenon of asking question ish my nation? - a phenomenon that I think hits on what is really characteristic of Ireland - than answer that ultimately surfaces. Lavin does not, however, stop simply with an exploration of as if it were a single entity. looks specifically at female Irishness and reveals how particularly pressing question of identity is to modern Irish women. anticipates another insight of Boland: trivializing of Irish femininity by using it as a national emblem. Once of a nation influences perception of a woman then that woman is suddenly and inevitably simplified, writes Boland. She can no longer have complex feelings and aspirations. becomes passive projection of a national idea (Outside History 33). In The Becker Wives Flora, central female character, is exploited by her husband not as a national but as a family emblem. Lavin explores in microcosm, then, pattern Boland depicts; and by exploring way that a woman is objectified, made the passive projection of a national [or familial] idea, Lavin also investigates larger Irish problem, male and female: struggle to establish an identity from within rather than to succumb to vision of politically powerful outsiders. story illuminates simultaneously struggles of gender and nation. In this context short story becomes for Lavin perfect vehicle, a genre Frank O'Connor characterizes in Lonely Voice as one devoted to little man living on margin of a large, established society (16). He elaborates: Always in short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about fringes of society . (19). In many senses Lavin's Flora is just such a person: small in stature and unconventional in her actions, she is a character whose internal life could be deemed insignificant in a context wider - or in a genre larger - than one Lavin creates for her. The Becker Wives joins, in fact, a number of other Lavin stories about small characters. …