"The Fabulous Female Form": The Deadly Erotics of the Male Gaze in Mary Lavin's The House in Clewe Street

Abstract

Recent critical attention to Mary Lavin's The House in Clewe Street has tended to focus on novel's treatment of traditional provincial Irish values, passing down or rejection of these values in course of a story spanning three generations and as many social classes, and losing battle waged by Gabriel, chief protagonist, as he struggles and largely fails to extricate himself from mind-forged manacles of his upbringing.(1) Yet much of this criticism has, surprisingly, failed to recognize this novel for what it is - a relentlessly scathing social commentary. Peterson, Bowen, and Garfitt all concur that The House in Clewe Street, despite its sympathy for doomed characters like Onny Soraghan, is not a text in which Irish middle-class morality is seriously questioned. Even in least complacent, most sympathetic readings of this disturbing and underanalyzed novel, like those undertaken by A. A. Kelly and Augustine Martin,(2) grim details and implications of narrative, and parallel development of servant Onny Soraghan and Gabriel Galloway, bourgeois heir apparent, remain largely unexplored. Furthermore, Kelly's 1980 reading remains most recent serious analysis; novel has been surprisingly unvisited since, despite a critical climate in Irish studies that one would have thought welcoming to just such a questioning portrayal of bourgeois attitudes and treatment of women. Lavin's portrait of Onny's degradation surely illustrates to perfection Eavan Boland's contention that duty of woman artist is to break silence surrounding Irish women's issues and to subvert previously inherited male literary discourse.(3) A necessarily ironic revisionary rereading of and middle-class readings of Onny contained within novel - one demanded by novel itself - emphasizes that Lavin undertook very task later underscored in Boland's revisionist agenda. Why, then, has The House in Clewe Street suffered such neglect in recent years? Why do majority of critical readings of this novel remain virtually unchallenged, when details in narrative, particularly those connected with and female gaze, complicate any attempt at an easy reading, indeed warning alert reader of absurdity of relying on comforting assumption that narrator's perspective must automatically represent that of author? On contrary, Lavin's narrative clearly takes direct aim at very world it evokes. Despite a wealth of recent work on Irish writers, including Lavin,(4) virtual silence on novel since 1980 continues. One possibility is that Lavin's expressed belief, quoted by Weekes (135), that The House in Clewe Street and Mary O'Grady are two bad novels has too much been taken to heart and has resulted in ritualized dismissal of these texts. Certainly Weekes herself, and other fine Lavin critics like Janet Dunleavy, have preferred to turn their attention elsewhere? Yet I believe that it has been a mistake to dismiss The House in Clewe Street. While it is, admittedly, less taut and more verbose a work than is typical for Lavin, it shares with her short fiction a concern with position of in society, a focus on the human need for love and on women and on human concerns that also encompasses the sphere of universal humanity (Weekes 154), and an emphasis on similarities between and female minds, needs, experience, and potential across class and gender boundaries. The meeting of minds across such boundaries that illuminates so powerfully and provides epiphanic moment of Lavin's In The Middle of Fields is explored with similar feeling and greater depth in The House in Clewe Street. Just as Bartley Crossen and young widow cross a social and cultural gulf in their acknowledgment of a shared sense of overwhelming, unmitigated loss in In Middle of Fields, Onny and Gabriel follow paths into adulthood remarkable for their similarities as much as for their differences, despite claims of an array of distorted subjective points of view offered within this polyvocalic narrative. …