Women Writers and the Death of Rural Ireland: Realism and Nostalgia in the 1940s

Abstract

In May 1942 Ria Mooney produced Jack B. Yeats's two-act play La La Noo at the Abbey Theater in Dublin. Its fusion of a realist setting, in a pub in a remote area of the western seaboard, and a fatalistic, almost symbolic, treatment of death, owes something to Synge and something to W.B. Yeats, but it is more playful than either. A party of seven women shelter from the rain and strip off their wet clothes in a back room, handing them out to be dried by a foreign-traveled stranger. The audience is asked to imagine that seven naked women are standing behind a partition on the stage. Their talk of men and violent death suggests West Coast witchery, the seven women a figure for all womankind. But even when the stranger is killed it is hard to pin symbolic meanings on the women, whose down-to-earth concerns are with themselves, their clothes, and their bodies. The tone and setting of the play share a good deal with Margaret Barrington's 1944 short story, Village Without Men, about a group of women in a remote area of Donegal, whose husbands are all drowned in a storm. "Over and over again they told the story of the women of Monastir, who, when widowed and alone, lured with false lights a ship to their shore. What matter that their victims were dark-skinned Turks. Their need was great." The story ends as the women seize on the prize of a boatload of torpedoed sailors: "Their voices sang out in wild exultation: The Danes. The Danes were come again."1 [End Page 192] Perhaps we should not be surprised to find women's physicality and sexuality explored in wryly fantastic or surreal settings, rather than in the realist texts of the period.2 These representations seem entirely, and deliberately, at odds with the Catholic nationalist construction of femininity as both sexually innocent and safely domestic. (In Barrington's story the women do the men's work in the fields; in Yeats's play they do no work at all, but crowd into the male sphere of the public house.) But they are also at odds with the liberal realist challenge to the Free State orthodoxy on women's role in the national family. Writers such as Sean O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor—the most well-known of the realist short story writers in the period—chose to undermine images of chaste and wholesome femininity not by exuberant tales of women's power and sexual control, but with stories of sexual corruption, disillusion, and violence. Both types of literary representation, however, share a number of tropes. First, we might note the link drawn between sexuality and foreignness. As the publican in Yeats's play says, "It must be a gorgeous thing to be able to speak maybe two or three languages. So that you could be entertaining two or three persons within yourself. 'The nude' says he 'the nood' is that right? 'The Nood' says he 'La La Noo' says I.'" Throughout this period we find sex associated with places abroad, particularly with France. In the work of self-consciously liberal writers, a character's ability to speak a few words of French, or the ownership of a few French books, was a marker of dissatisfaction with provincial Ireland. In a particularly Gothic scene at the beginning of Sean O'Faolain's 1940 novel Come Back to Erin, reading Maupassant in Cork Cathedral heralds a drunken interlude with a pimp and a visit to a brothel. The bitter tone here is similar to that in Frank O'Connor's 1944 story, The Star that Bids the Shepherd Fold, which also couples French books and sex, as the local curate is dragged from his bookshelf to "rescue" two local girls working as prostitutes on a French boat in the harbor. The implication in...