Imperfection as a Chance: Matrixial Borderspaces in Anne Enright

Abstract

The opening line of Anne Enright’s first short story collection is strongly programmatic: ‘Cathy was often wrong, she found it more interesting’ (Portable 3). From the very start of her writing career, Enright’s protagonists focus on imperfections in the so-called phallic order, which is based on identity, control, facticity, causality, delineation, completeness, harmony, individuality and chronology. Instead of glossing over the imperfections in this world, her women explore them and—as we will see in The Portable Virgin, The Wig My Father Wore, The Gathering and The Forgotten Waltz—focus on a dissemination of subjectivity, on surprise, potentiality, associative perception, incompleteness, discrepancy and an intense interaction between inside and outside worlds, past and present, literal and metaphorical. In a way, the title story of Enright’s first short story collection, The Portable Virgin, contains all these changes in a nutshell: whereas the virgin mother Mary is usually seen to be (trans)porting Jesus, the title changes the traditional image of a factual subject to a potential quality. The whole title story is a deconstruction of the Irish model mother figure, the unerotic ‘virgin’ mother of many children. Enright’s childless protagonist, Mary, a woman who eroticizes everything, is ‘carried away’ by jealousy: she believes her husband has an affair with another Mary. As she wants to look like her (imagined) rival, Mary goes to the hairdresser’s in whose multimirrored parlour she finds her metamorphosis multiplied. Reaching into Mary’s handbag (the reader remains totally confused as to whether the protagonist is an imagined or a real rival) she finds the image of the virgin Mary, which contains holy water. She drinks it and sets the Mary afloat on a stream. From this title story onwards, subjects are split and multiplied in real and imagined qualities that move in and out of containers in literal and metaphorical ways. Enrightian protagonists do not believe in entities; they can only ‘come into their own’ when they are ‘beside themselves’. This search for what Enright herself has called ‘a very deliberate feminine aesthetic’ (Schwall 22) chimes in perfectly with Bracha Ettinger’s and Giselda Pollock’s idea of the ‘‘matrixial borderspace’. This term, denoting a new paradigm of matrixial perception that considers ‘interactionality’ as the central concept of its philosophy, replaces the idea of a static, delineated core of being that inspires phallic perception. Pollock summarizes this new philosophy as follows: