Girlfriends & Improbable Dreams: Casualties of Patriarchy

Discovering Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls is the first in a trilogy of novels, I looked forward to reading the others. The Lonely Girls (originally titled Girl with Green Eyes) was written in 1962 and Girls in Their Married Bliss in 1964. These are O’Brien’s first books. She added an Epilogue to the trilogy in 1986, letting readers know what eventually happened to dear friends Caithleen (Kate) and Bridgit (Baba).

Although O’Brien claimed, and perhaps was “no darling of the feminists”(Allardice), these novels scream feminism in their stark portrayal of the devastating effects of patriarchy and its sidekick misogyny. Yes, the protagonists are “two Irish girls full of yearnings and desires,” but any fulfillment of these is dashed by the harsh reality they encounter.

O’Brien’s depiction of the damaging impact of patriarchy was new on the scene in 1960s Ireland and this reveal was not received well.

In the article, Another “Scandalous Woman”: Edna O’Brien, Irish Feminism and her Gébler Men, scholar Jeffrey P. Griffin states:

“Due to the relative absence of feminist discourse prior to the 1960s, O’Brien truly enters the movement at “Year One,” ready to attack the most crucial women’s issues in Ireland. O’Brien’s first and main concern is questioning the Irish masculine hegemony that subjugated women so severely, propagating the notion that an Irish woman’s place is in the home, where she can fulfill her constitutionally-mandated responsibility as the center (but not head) of the family”(26).

Yes, that a woman’s place is in the home was stated in Ireland’s constitution and strangely, still is.

Read our post on The Country Girls, O’Brien’s first book: Woman Writer Edna O’Brien: ‘Fearless Teller of Truths’

Although depressing and infuriating, O’Brien’s trilogy is captivating. One must keep reading, even when it becomes clear that these women are not able to break free from the grip of male dominance. They have little sense of self and are trapped between what others want from them and their own desperation. Duo Caithleen and Baba repeatedly make bad decisions, often driven by misguided attempts to experience some semblance of happiness and relief from their lives, over which they have little control. Usually, these poor choices involve a man offering something better or at least different than what they have. Yet, these moves inevitably make a bigger mess of what is already dysfunctional.

The Lonely Girl

Caithleen is the lonely girl. Her mother drowns in the first book, The Country Girls, and subconsciously she is haunted for the rest of her life.

She winds up in a relationship with a divorced man, which is considered more of a scandal for the woman who never divorced than the man who did. Caithleen even allows Englishman Eugene Gaillard to convince her to change her name.

“We met three evenings a week after that. In between he wrote me postcards, and as time went on he wrote letters. He called me Kate, as he said that Caithleen was too “Kiltartan” for his liking – whatever that meant”(202).

So, she is now Kate, living in Dublin with Baba and dating Eugene Gaillard, who has an ex-wife in London and a daughter, she later discovers. Their relationship is tumultuous because Kate struggles to adhere to what he wants her to be AND be in any way true to herself.

Following one disagreement, Kate reflects:

“I longed to do something dramatic, to scream or throw his new coat back at him, or jump out of the car while it was moving.  A minute later, I longed to be in his arms, unafraid, pleasing him. More than anything I longed to please him. It seemed like weeks since he had put my hair behind my ear and whispered, “I am never going to let you go”(236).

When an anonymous note reveals Kate is seeing a divorced man, her father is determined to bring her back home to the country to save her reputation. He literally kidnaps Kate from Dublin and brings her back home to live with him and his sister.

“Come back here,” my father called. I ran faster, knowing that he was too drunk to catch up with me. But the car drove on a little, passed by me, and then he jumped out just as I turned to run the other way. He caught me by the belt of my coat.

“I tell you, you won’t do this again.”

“I’m not going home, I’m not going home,” I screamed, hoping that some passing stranger might rescue me.

“Get in that car,” he said. I held on to a railing.

“I’ll tell the police,” I said, and by now the taxi driver had come out of the car, and both of them hustled me toward the door, which was swinging open.

“They pulled me across, and I was afraid that my new coat (Eugene’s) would get torn…

“Good beating she wants,” he said as I cried to myself”(249).

After some time and plotting, Kate escapes back to Dublin and then her father and some of his friends try to kidnap her again from Eugene’s house. She is only spared when Eugene’s housemaid threatens to shoot them all if they don’t leave.

If only she had run for her life then! Kate cannot break from her abusive father or her abusive lover, with whom, after this episode, she intensifies the relationship.

Griffin explains that Kate’s

“desire for her fairy-tale romance becomes so overpowering that she expedites the courtship and is suddenly engrossed in a full-scale relationship. Unconsciously mimicking her mother, Caithleen fails to realize that her new companion, the older and previously-married Eugene Gaillard, is very similar to her father in his predisposition toward abuse (albeit emotional, not physical) and support of the stifling patriarchy”(40).

Occasionally readers glimpse Kate’s longing for freedom, a break from all the men in her life:

“Always when I escaped from the house I felt a rush of vitality and hope as if there was still a chance that I might escape and live my life the way I wanted to.

“It was a bright windy morning, the fields vividly green, the sky a delicate green-blue, and the hills behind the fields smoke-gray.

“It’s nice, nice, I thought as I breathed deeply and walked with my aunt’s bicycle down the field toward the road”(267).

Yet, Kate returns from the country into the arms of Eugene, who wants her to be entirely accepting of his ways and past, with no demands of her own:

“I suppose if Laura [Eugene’s ex-wife] came back it would be the same thing,” I said.

“It might,” he said. “One relationship does not cancel out another, you’re all” – he thought for a word – “different.”

“Well, if that’s the case then, I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“I certainly don’t know what you’re doing here, acting like a barmaid,” he said urbanely as he walked slowly over to the fire grate…

“He leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece, pushed a bowl of primroses from the edge, and said, “You are incapable of thinking. Why don’t you get up and wash your face and put some powder on? Do something. Sink your inadequacy into washing walls or mending my socks or conquering your briary nature…”(359).

After this particular row, Kate decides to teach Eugene a lesson, but it backfires. He doesn’t come for her after she leaves as she imagines he will, leading to this desperate scene:

“I’m going to Eugene, I’m going to him, “ I said, getting to my knees.

“No, you’re not,” Baba said firmly. “He doesn’t want you.”

“He does want me, he does want me,” I shouted, and then Gustav came in, and opened his mouth with shame and wonder when he saw me kneeling and crying on the floor, my hair wild about me.

“Miss Caithleen who is so gentle,” he said, and I thought, Yes, I was so gentle and now I am a wild, debased person because of some damn man, and I lay flat on the floor and howled”(365).

The final paragraph of The Lonely Girl is slightly hopeful, as Kate goes to school at night to study English, but there’s too much against her. Some overcome, some succumb. It is indeed an ‘improbable dream’ that she’ll break free and find her voice and own way.

“Even Baba notices that I’m changing, and she says if I don’t give up this learning at night, I’ll end up as a right drip, wearing flat shoes and glasses. What Baba doesn’t know is that I’m finding my feet, and when I’m able to talk I imagine that I won’t be so alone, but maybe that too is an improbable dream”(377).

Girls in Their Married Bliss

After The Country Girls and The Lonely Girl, readers suspect the title Girls in Their Married Bliss must be sarcastic. It is.

Baba meets and marries Frank, a successful, albeit uneducated builder. There is no married bliss, rather there are beatings. But Baba is up for the challenge.

Kate reconnects with Eugene, becomes pregnant and they marry. A loveless marriage it is, and Kate finds solace in a man with whom she has an emotional affair. When discovered, Eugene kicks her out. An emotional mess, Kate turns to Baba to find her a place to live. She can’t stay with Baba because her husband Frank won’t have it. He has his reputation to think about, after all.

Eventually, Kate forfeits her son Cash to his father, Eugene. After Baba and Kate drop Cash off at Eugene’s, Baba thinks:

“Parents, I thought, the whole ridiculous mess beginning all over again. Hers and mine and all the blame we heaped on them, and we no better ourselves. Parents not fit to be kids. Talk of tears, we bawled and bawled, and the driver had to go around the square twice before she was ready to go into her new lodgings”(421).

Kate and Baba are unable to create a safer and saner environment for Kate’s son Cash than their dysfunctional parents were able to provide them. The realization of their brokenness is heartbreaking.

For years, Kate knows that Eugene is manipulating her. But she cannot bring herself to confront him for fear of losing him indefinitely:

“You know,” he interrupted, “the first time I began to fall out of love with you – oh, years and years ago – was the day it hit me like a bomb that you never cry for anyone but yourself.”

“Does anyone?” she said. “Show me the man or woman who does,” she said, and thought to remind him that he had chosen her for his own needs, too. His little dictatorship demanded a woman like her – weak, apologetic, agreeable. Self-interest was a common crime”(455).

Kate questions Baba about her relationship with Frank:

“Did you marry him for money?” she said. I said I didn’t know.

“Do you hate him?” she asks. I didn’t know that either.

“I don’t hate him, I don’t love him. I put up with him and he puts up with me…”(462).

That’s about the best Baba feels she can muster. Again, tragic as it is, it’s more stable than anything Kate can sustain.

Then one day Kate’s son isn’t at school when she goes to pick him up. Eugene had fled to Fiji with him and the maid-turned-lover, Maura.

“She [Kate] rang the passport office, and after frantic explanation to a telephonist and then a secretary, she was put through to the official who had in fact issued a passport for Cash. She asked why she hadn’t been consulted, and the clerk said that a mother’s signature was not necessary for such a thing.

“You call that just?” she said.

“What?” the man at the other end asked.

“Oh balls,” she said savagely, and hung up. The conspiracy was too enormous, the whole machinery too thorough; it was like seeing a newspaper heading that read Holiday Coach Crashes and experiencing a senseless, futile, blinding rage”(504).

At the end of Girls in Their Married Bliss, Kate decides to get herself sterilized.

“Well,” Baba said after some time, meaning, “What does it feel like?”

“Well,” Kate said, “at least I’ve eliminated the risk of making the same mistake again,” and for some reason the words sent a chill through Baba’s heart”(509).

Kate cannot get pregnant again, but that seems off the mark in terms of ‘mistakes’. Sadly, her only child lives far, far away with his father and their former maid.

A chill runs through the reader’s heart too.

O’Brien’s Epilogue

Edna O’Brien’s 1986 epilogue completes the saga of Kate and Baba. Readers may have hoped for some semblance of a happy ending, but O’Brien could not deliver on that.

The epilogue begins with Baba saying, “It goes on, by Jesus, it goes on.”

Kate has committed suicide by drowning. Baba is at the train station where her coffin is set to arrive.

Baba reflects:

“She’d gone to a health farm to recoup. Recoup! She’d flipped. I suppose all that starvation, and time to think, brought her face to face with brass tacks, realized she was on her ownio. Good Shepherd wasn’t coming. Oh, Kate, why did you let the bastards win…why buckle under their barbaric whims?”

Baba continues to find her fun away from her husband, but then he has a stroke, and now as caretaker, she’s chained to the household. “I’d be whiling the time attending to him, reading articles on rehabilitation, getting him to recognize a shoe from a sock”(518).

Cash, grown and living in London, meets up with Baba to fulfill his mother Kate’s final wishes:

“Her son and I will have to take her ashes there and scatter them between the bogs and the bog lakes and the murmuring waters and every other fucking bit of depressingness that oozes from every hectometer and ever furlong of the place and that imbued her with the old Dido desperado predilections. I hope she rises up nightly like the banshee and does battle with her progenitors”(523).

Before her suicide, Kate had written a letter to Baba. It takes Baba some time, but when she feels she can, she finds this scribbled on the back:

“Saw on my evening walk just now the young ferns, lime-green and wand-like, as if waiting to be picked and carried onstage to accompany lines of Shakespeare – oh, Shakespeare deepest and powerfulest of friends, father of us all.”

Baba responds:

“Father – the crus of her dilemma. I daren’t think of the hours beforehand, the frenzy, trying to dodge it, trying to circumvent. I suppose it was the future she couldn’t face, the thought that it would be the same forever, eons of fucking emptiness…I don’t blame her, I realize she was in the fucking wilderness. Born there. Hadn’t the reins to haul herself out. Should have gone to night school, learned a few things, a few mottos such as “Put thy trust in no man.”(531).

O’Brien lived a vibrant and productive life, largely on her own terms. She was but starting out on her prolific writing career when she penned this trilogy. I await the first biography of this remarkably talented and courageous woman!

Edna O’Brien is a Nasty Woman Writer.

© Maria Dintino 2024

Works Cited

Allardice, Lisa. “Edna O’Brien: her fearlessness paved the way for today’s female Irish writers.” The Guardian, 29 July 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/29/edna-o-brien-erotic-adventures-young-irish-women-sally-rooney-the-country-girls

Griffin, Jeffrey P., “ANOTHER “SCANDALOUS WOMAN”: EDNA O’BRIEN, IRISH FEMINISM AND HER GÉBLER MEN” (2007). University of Connecticut, Honors Scholar Theses. https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=srhonors_theses

O’Brien, Edna. The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.