Mothers and Daughters in Conflict in the Motherland, Edna O'Brien's The Light of Evening

María Isabel Arriaga

doi:10.37389/abei.v20i2.3203

Abstract

The Light of Evening explores the difficult relationship between two Irish mothers and their daughters: Dilly Macready and Eleanora, a writer whose life shares many common features with that of Edna O’Brien’s, on the one hand, and young Dilly’s previous relationship with her own mother, Bridget, on the other hand. Both relationships are depicted through a succession of daily letters, usually not sent. These conflictive bonds resemble those of Irish people with their motherland throughout the twentieth century.This tension emerges, in all cases, when expected roles assigned to women by a patriarchal culture clash with the desire of emancipation and selfdevelopment. The purpose of this article is to explore mother-daughter representations in O’Brien’s novel in order to analyse the author’s own conflictive relationship with Ireland in her early development as a creative writer. Immigration, tradition, memory and fragmented identity, all constituitive elements of Irish history, are present in this paper.Keywords: Mothers; conflict; exile; tradition; motherland.

Highlights

The Light of Evening explores the difficult relationship between two Irish mothers and their daughters: Dilly Macready and Eleanora, a writer whose life shares many common features with that of Edna O’Brien’s, on the one hand, and young Dilly’s previous relationship with her own mother, Bridget, on the other hand
Is travelling up to a healer with the hope of being cured of her shingles, but the man advises her to see the specialists in Dublin, so she is taken to a Dublin hospital run by Catholic nuns, where she will accidentally find death after being diagnosed with cancer
The father drinks, runs horses and gambles; the daughter has an unconventional life in England, sometimes morally unacceptable for her catholic mother (Eleanora has a number of lovers after her divorce); and the son, an optician in Dublin, plots with his wife to deprive his sister of her inheritance and claims his right to inherit Rusheen

Summary

The construction of the Motherland and women in patriarchal Ireland

Richard Kearney (1997) argues that most contemporary nations invoke indigenous myths that provide a sense of origin to its people, whose function is to heal the fractures of the present through the ritualistic reiteration of some foundational events of the past, in order to develop a feeling of timeless unity. By the early twentieth century, Irish nationalism would make use of patriarchal mechanisms of oppression over women to sustain its hegemony, by using the feminine body to symbolise the nation This representation of women as passive subjects has been present in the construction of Irish nationalism and the 1937 Irish Constitution and in Irish literature, given that the political and the literary discourses are almost inseparable in Ireland. Marisol Morales Ladrón (2007) agrees with Rosende Pérez and claims that women in Ireland have been subjected to “a double colonization” (231): the imperialist and the patriarchal: “women in Ireland have been marginalised within a culture which has itself been situated on the margins of History, colonial or not” (232) Within this panorama, many Irish women had little possibility of independence or professional achievement before the 1990s and its consequent modern political culture introduced by Mary Robinson, the first Irish woman president. As Harte claims, along the last three decades, contemporary Irish writers have been renegotiating meanings of a received nationality and opening spaces for a revised rethoric of Irishness (Id. 2)

Mothers that mirror the Motherland

Female migrants in search of freedom

Final thoughts

Works Cited