The capacity to suffer in silence : a reading of john mcgahern’s the barracks /

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide a reading of John McGahern’s The Barracks whose female protagonist encounters despair and frustration with an amazing wayof endurance and silence. Elizabeth Reegan, a former nurse in England, now thesecond wife of an Irish policeman, living with him and his children by the firstmarriage in the local barracks in rural Ireland. ’Living’ is one way of putting it: tobe accurate, Elizabeth is dying, slowly, and painfully, and unmercifully yo ung, ofbreast cancer, a disease for whose symbolic awfulness McGahern has the greatestrespect. Elizabeth’s situation is further complicated by the fact that as a new stepmother,she is an outsider to children only recently bereft of their mother, and as areturned emigrant, she is an outsider to the community. Even Reegan, the man inwhom she sees her salvation, treats her very badly and regards her as a merehousekeeper. But Elizabeth tries to say yes to the intolerant lunacy of her husbandand the inhabitants of the small village in which her marriage has imprisoned her.She does so by submerging her own wishes and desires in an attempt to please,because she has been taught it is the proper thing for a wife to do. Her ability to seeclearly the horror of her situation makes her the most human of McGahern’scharacters and the most tragic. That Elizabeth whose illness has become a seriousmatter is deliberately ignored by both the husband and his children is indeedsomething unbearable. Thus, her marriage to Reegan proves less an alternative tosuicide than suicide in a different, slower form. More painfully, she was nothingfor the children who refuse to regard her as a second mother despite her sincerewillingness to love and care for them as if these little creatures, hurt by theirmother’s death, have learned to mistrust kindness. Now, Elizabeth is suffering:physically from cancer, and spiritually from the ungratefulness she encounters on adaily basis in a house where she is little more than a slave. Indeed, she ishopelessly trapped. Nevertheless, she decides to lead her life patiently and toendure her suffering silently. To conclude with Elizabeth’s description of herself as’a flower that has withered in a vase behind curtains’.