“I am in a bed, a fourposter no less [.]” (1). Such is made of the surroundings of Edna O’Brien’s Mary Hooligan, narrator of her 1972 novel, 'Night.' Mary’s inward-reflective monologue throughout the text not only colors her character but the very force of her existence between an Ireland of masculinity and censorship and an England of escape, still tinged with lament. For my final project, I have chosen to complete a creative writing piece, set to video, that emulates the form and voice of 'Night.' The facets in O’Brien’s writing I have focused on in my piece are the creation of a mental-scape populated by characters, ornate and epithetical prose, and a sense of existence tugged between two localities. The culmination of this is an assessment of O’Brien’s role in the Irish literary canon, as well as that of Eavan Boland and Elizabeth Bowen, whom I reference as case studies within this canon. The ultimate goal is to examine how introspective narrative forms its own female-centric-- or at least female-voiced-- genre.

 

Primarily, my piece is written as a response to O’Brien’s form. Just as 'Night' is set in a fourposter bed outside of London, thinking back on England and Ireland, so too does mine begin in an apartment in New York-- and “windowless no less”-- thinking back on living in Ireland. O’Brien’s confined location means that the narrative is an interior, meandering monologue of previous experiences; as Mary describes, her “winding dirging effluvias” (7). This perhaps best encapsulates her tone and plot: it establishes the possibility for “winding” stream-of-consciousness tangents so that farcical side-stories develop her character’s introspective self; it establishes that these progress with a melancholy lyricism characteristic of musical dirges, which also call back to Mary’s Irish identity; and finally, her effluvia (odor or discharge) not only indicates O’Brien’s bodily imagery but establishes a trace that Mary leaves behind, an existence fabricated within these trailing thoughts. In replicating this in a much shorter piece, I tried also to present a contrast between the physical locality and the imagined one. I established briefly the actual location in New York and then allowed for stream-of-consciousness to derail individual anecdotes so that they function more as vignettes than a driven plot line. One such example is the opening in which I write about the sky in Dublin vs. New York which serves as a tangential bridge into my other thoughts and comparisons about the cities. In the video, I had the chance to push this theme farther by expanding the setting of the room in New York into multiple shots, which I hoped would add a realism and hearth to the video to make it not just a travel video; the greater implication is that the subsequent video clips that come from outside of a dimly-lit room seem fanciful in comparison, which visually helps to link that the narrative is leaving the present and delving back into memories. 

​

O’Brien’s presiding style is ornate and epithetical. From the first page, Mary voices: “I’ve had better times, of course-- the halcyon days, rings, ringlets, ashes of roses, shit, chantilly, high teas, drop scones, serge suits, binding attachments, all that. I used to have such a penchant for feelings [...]” (1). The result is an embellished and vivid ambience that tumbles over itself with experimental word-combinations. Her farcical inclusion of “shit” and conflation of better times with mundane oddities such as metal binding attachments crafts a bitter or at least ruminating nostalgia. The sentence I wrote that most closely follows this example reads: “Cerulean, cloudless, less, even in the wintertide and eveningtide and the cusp between when the air should collect its mist like pollen on petals, dreadful filaments, it is empty.” I presented the listed transition from “cloudless” to “less” to add a negative connotation to such clear skies as are in New York and almost never in Dublin. I added the interjection, “dreadful filaments,” to mirror O’Brien’s technical words, with the double use of “filament” as a floral anatomical term to reference O’Brien’s usage of bodily diction. Where O’Brien writes of “halcyon days,” I include epithets like “sun-gold” and “moonbeam opacity”-- and often just hyphenated combinations-- to get the double-beat rhythms she achieves with epithetical descriptions. 

​

O’Brien is also widely known for her intertextual inclusion of different, even archaic, languages, academic words, and Irish vernacular. She writes of “cacodemonizing,” the Victorian slang, “quim,” the Old Irish “leum,” and she makes up her own Joycean turns of phrase, along with using Greek, French, Middle English, and Modern Irish. In my piece, I used the Old English 'cwena' and 'cyninge' (kings and queens), which I had to learn my first year at Trinity (along with other useful words like ‘marble coffin’ and ‘sword’). This precedes an allusion to Æthelthryth, a princess and Anglo-Saxon saint written in Bede’s 'Eccliastical History of the English People,' as another scholarly reference to the Middle Ages and English literary canon. I included my knowledge of Irish, which almost exclusively includes the train commands; I used 'an chead stad eile' (the next stop is…) as onomatopoeia which contributes thematically to a sense of “finding” when followed by the next phrase, “a home.” 

​

O’Brien populates her anecdotal memories with past lovers and Mary’s Plath-esque mother, usually in a stylistically eroticized and cynical existence. It was for this reason that her books were banned in her native Ireland, indicating the broader problems of Irish censorship (especially in the ‘60s and ‘70s), the disenfranchisement of the literary female experience, and the subsequent diminishment of female authors that try to depict it. In order to pay tribute to this, I decided to populate my text with female literary figures so that the mental scape that depicts Ireland is not completely interior but draws in these figures and humanizes them as characters with direct influence on the narrative, just as Mary’s anecdotal characters impact her self-actualized voice. 

​

The first of these allusions is to the Irish poet, Eavan Boland, who after spending much of her adolescence in England, felt she did not fit fully into either country, as proven by her title: “In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own.” My text is largely based on her essay, “Letter to a Young Woman Poet,” in which she describes the commute she used to take as a seventeen-year-old through Dublin and how it was dominated by the marble, immutable statues of male writers that excluded her from seeing herself reflected in the literary canon. She writes: “In a certain sense I discovered my country by eroticizing it: by plotting those correlatives between maleness and strength, between imagination and power which allowed me not only to enter the story but to change it” (18). She concludes that her female existence “stood as a subversive historian, ready to edit the text,” which allowed her to feel a part of the place she lived, a sentiment I borrowed for my last line. 

​

As for borrowed lines, I also included an abbreviated version of 'Night’s' last lines: “Oh star of the morning, oh, slippery path, oh, guardian angel of vagrants, givvus eyes, lend us a hand, let’s kip down on some other shore, let’s live a little before the awful all-embracing dark enfolds…” (117). I focused on “let’s kip down on some other shore” and “let’s live a little” to emphasize a hope to return and live in Europe in the future, a positive end for some of my angstier musings-- because that is just what they are. Edna O’Brien and Eavan Boland both present a struggle in self-identifying between two places. I spent the past two years in Dublin and the last full year without returning to the US. My parents also moved over there during that time, and our family in the US became estranged, so I watched my entire life shift to there instead of here. Though it was always the plan and the right choice to return, I had spent a year in heavy lockdown there yearning for the things Dublin could offer me, the dinners on the floors of my friend’s apartments in Georgian buildings, the sense of excitement and profound placement when you thought of your location on the map. It sometimes feels silly, but there is a certain struggle in coming out of lockdown in a place and experience that you did not spend so much time wishing for, even while you were only half a part of it. These are the sentiments that I tried to equate to the level of self-actualization that O’Brian and Boland both dealt with in the cultural differences between Ireland and England. 

​

My other reference, and one I ended on, is Elizabeth Bowen’s novel 'The Last September.' Its teenage protagonist, Lois, exemplifies coming-of-age as a woman in the Irish literary canon, in a world determined by sociopolitical turmoil. The prevailing image from a Trinity lecture on the text was an image of a woman’s portrait burning in the Danielstown Protestant Big House, which I learned was not, actually, the final scene of the book but an imagined image of femininity closing out the text. This instigates a reclaiming of Irish identity and literature through female visages and voices, the same that Boland writes of as her own “subversive historian.” 

​

The ultimate implications are that these three Irish authors, Bowen, Boland, and O’Brien, demonstrate characters that come of age and perceive their own identities through paradigm-shifting locales or their very existence between two countries. Their introspective narratives take on a lyricism akin to what scholars call the “female sentence” such as in Virginia Woolf’s writings, which presents a greater poetic intimacy than the sentences of those white male heads of the canon. Therefore, these authors together do not just form a female Irish literary canon, but their own, distinct genre that pairs their introspective voice with themes of the topo analytical discovery of self.