‘Kate had herself sterilized’

Abstract

The connection between Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1960–86) and Shakespeare has never been explored, despite the author’s insistence that she is an avid – even daily – reader of the Bard. This chapter undertakes this task by examining the correlations between The Country Girls’s villainous men and Shakespeare’s heroes and lotharios. Mr Gentleman is a version of Othello, while Eugene Gaillard is cast as both Othello and Petruchio. This means that Caithleen ‘Kate’ Brady becomes, passively and in response to the men, the fille vièrge Desdemona and the tamed ‘Kate’ from The Taming of the Shrew. These women suffer because of and through their bodies, just like Caithleen, who bears the post-war burden of inhabiting the Mother Ireland figure. Caithleen’s final response to the male hegemony is to elect to have a hysterectomy. In the Epilogue, refreshed and unencumbered by her burdensome womb, she is able to reject the Mother Ireland symbol and become the woman she chooses to be. In doing so, her actions echo Hermione’s from The Winter’s Tale who, when revivified in the mode of early modern hysterical discourses, re-joins her daughter and family.