Lessons in Lunacy: Mental Illness in Liam O'Flaherty's Famine

Abstract

Well before contemporary writers helped popularize the idea, the Irish had been marked as a people prone to mental illness. Nancy Scheper-Hughes's infa mous anthropological examination of family and community in County Kerry, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1977), mere ly articulated, loudly, what others had been mumbling for years. Her rendering of a ruptured society in western Ireland, which closely traced the local frag mentation caused by the Famine and the mass emigrations that followed, sug gests a period of heightened anxiety that traumatized many an individual mind as it dissolved ties between the aged and young, men and women, even parents and their infants.1 Republished in 2001 for a new audience, Scheper-Hughes's study joins such popular fare as Patrick McCabes novels The Butcher Boy (1993) and The Dead School (1995) in implicating rural mores and rapid social change as a way of explaining the high rates of Irish mental illness. Both fictional and academic accounts owe much to precedents set by earli er twentieth-century writers, including James Joyce, whose analysis of the Irish condition provided powerful formulations with which later generations would be forced to wrestle. The Dublin streets of Ulysses (1922), for instance, intro duced the memorable madmen Dennis Breen and Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitz maurice Tisdall Farrell, while George Moore peopled the towns of The Unfilled Field (1903) with a m?nage of unbalanced characters. Moore's acclaimed short stories provided Irish society with another set of influential archetypes, among them the delusional Biddy M'Hale, convinced that the hallucinations she expe riences in church are of divine origin; the senile Granny Kirwin, whose trau matic relocation by family members has wiped out all memories save that of her marriage day; and the isolated, Joycean clerk, Edward Dempsey, whose patho logical obsession with an unknown woman unhinges his mind and leads to his death.