The Ethos of Honor and Francie Brady's Psychosocial Anger in The Butcher Boy

Abstract

This article is designed to illuminate Irish social pressures for honor as a cultural drive of Francie Brady's manic violence in Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, the Gothic narrative of an Irish colonial mentality. The novel's geo-psychic setting in "a small town" casts light on the spatial segregation in Northern Ireland where Irish lives in detachment are contained within an ideological totality of identity in opposition to the English other. In an enclosed space of internal inclusivity, the desire for unity over diversity generates the communal ethos of honor and shame, thereby fostering a social means for rejecting the undesirable. The alienation of the Brady family in The Butcher Boy demonstrates social discrimination signifying inequality in the egalitarian ideal of unity within a segregated community. Francie's emotional resistance to the ontological hierarchy in this honor-shame ethos accounts for his murderous fury at his debased pig status. Culturally, Francie's anger indicates a masculine facet of Irish nationalism in adherence to the honorable state of heroic manliness. Despite his loyalty to Irish nationalism, yet, his adoration for Englishness contradicts an Irish identity that strives for solidarity in Irish self-sameness.