"My Own Story": Woman's Place, Divided Loyalty, and Patriarchal Hegemony in the Plays of Anne Devlin

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

"My Own Story": Woman's Place, Divided Loyalty, and Patriarchal Hegemony in the Plays ofAnne DevlinAuthor(s): Chris WoodSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Jul. - Dec., 1999), pp. 291-308Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25515276 .

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"My Own Story": Woman's Place, Divided Loyalty, and Patriarchal Hegemony in the Plays of

Anne Devlin

Chris Wood

In Scene 8 of After Easter, Greta, after being reunited with her baby, tells him a story in which she and her mother confront a stag in the forest. After Greta feeds it some berries, the stag's face is transformed, and it takes on human features. As

Greta tells it,

I got on the stag's back and flew with it to the top of the world. And he took me to the place where the rivers come from, where

you come from ... and he took me to the place where the rivers come from, where you come from ... and this is my own story.

(AE15) Like the female protagonists of Anne Devlin's previous works, Greta is interested in telling her story, not in reciting the stories of men who have offered themselves

up as martyrs to some cause that continues to perpetuate itself on their blood. Some of the ways that these women tell their stories are through dreams, art, and songs. In this paper, I will explore the telling of these stories in two of Anne Devlin's

teleplays, A Woman Calling and The Long March, and two of her stage plays, Ourselves Alone and After Easter. In each of these works, the female protagonist tells stories as a reaction to the duties that are imposed upon her as a woman, her

own divided loyalties toward her family and country, and the patriarchal hegemony that seeks to control her life.

One of the first of Devlin's teleplays to deal with storytelling as reaction to

patriarchal oppression is A Woman Calling. Based on Devlin's own short story "Passages," A Woman Calling premiered on BBC 2 Television on 18 April 1984.

While not as emblematic of male patriarchy and the place of woman as the later

works, A Woman Calling does deal with the objectification of and violence towards women by apathetic men and introduces another motif that would later become a common theme in Devlin's works: the validation or rejection of dreams and visions

which convey "feelings of terrified powerlessness" (Lojek 67). The teleplay centres around Laura's "adult recollection of a childhood memory involving strangulation and sexuality. On one level, the play and story are psychological thriller, a murder

mystery. On another level, the play addresses the issues of male dominance and the vocation of the artist and her call to be witness of her experience, even if that witness involves recalling painful memory" (Hogan 351). Her remembrances of Professor

Broderick are of a moment in her childhood in which a maid was murdered by her best friend's brother. As she does in the works that have followed, Devlin struggles



292 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

with the ambiguity or reality and of identity, especially on the part of her female

characters, who are trying to make sense of the world around them as well as of

themselves. Laura sets this idea in motion at the beginning of the teleplay:

I have a strange story to tell. Even now it is not easy for me to

remember how much I imagined. The journey between the shore

of memory and the landfall of imagination is an unknown dis

tance, because for each voyager it is a passage through a different

domain. This story has a little to do with mapping that passage, but only a little: it is also a confession. (WC 161)

Devlin immediately establishes the ambiguity of memory while at the same time

calling attention to the fact that the exploration of memory, especially a bad or

repressed one, is like a confession, a taking of ownership of a past occurrence.

Opposing Laura's notion of memory as a story to tell is Professor Broderick, a visiting professor from New York, who has come "to bury Freud, not to praise him" (WC 162). A practical man, he fails to see the significance or the reliability of dreams:

It has been a long established principle of Freud's work that the

story is the cure ? what we have called the talking of the story. At the very core is the principle of catharsis, through the re-en

acting of the memory of the trauma, the sufferer ? the hysterical woman, the precocious child ? will find release. The nature of

analysis has been to uncover a memory whose secret is held in

dreams. But whose dreams do we dream? Where do they come from? (162)

As we will see in such plays as The Long March and After Easter, Professor

Broderick, like Joe and Malachy, is a member of the patriarchal hegemony, a man

bent on controlling women through largely physical, as well as mental, means. Like

Freud, he unwittingly equates the sufferer of some past trauma with being a woman or a child, discounting the notion that even he may be guilty of causing or receiving some form of trauma himself.

If Professor Broderick represents that type of person who controls and distorts

reality for women, then Laura represents that victim of such manipulation. Domi

nated by men all her life, she returns to the scene of the crime that Broderick had

committed in order to take control of that event herself and to leave with a sense of

understanding:

BRODERICK: What is it you want?

LAURA: I think you can cure me.

BRODERICK: Of what?

LAURA: A dream.

BRODERICK: I'm sorry, they should have told you I'm not

that kind of analyst.



"My Own Story "

293

LAURA: Please. I only want to talk. Only you can help. (WC 164)

Not only has Laura returned to Broderick's house to release herself of the murder he has committed; she has also returned in order to get a confession out of him.

As I mentioned earlier, Laura has been dominated and mistreated by men all her life, starting with Broderick's murder of Moraig and the subsequent guilt Laura has felt for not being able to prevent it to her relationship with John Mulheme, an

Irish revolutionary:

LAURA: John Mulheme was a counterpoint to everything my father with his little shop and his cautious peace-keeping ways stood for. He was so outrageous and angry all the time. He didn't care who he offended. (WC 180)

This kind of angry attitude mbs off on Laura, who displays it toward the "petit bourgeois self-interest" of her father's customers (181). Her father, a Loyalist, is

greatly offended and threatened by his daughter's politically aberrant presence:

FATHER: If that's all the good a university education has done

you, I me the day you ever went to that place.... Your mother and I broke our backs scraping and saving to give you a chance. If this is how you repay us you can take yourself off; but don't ever come here again shaming me in front of my friends! (182)

According to Margaret Ward and Marie-Therese McGivern, when a woman "steps outside of the confines of family life by expressing controversial political opinions she is immediately desexed: but not only is she no longer a woman, her transcen

dence has transformed her into a malevolent presence" (582). Laura has become a malevolent presence to all the men in her life, who feel threatened by her. Like so

many of Devlin's female characters, Laura is "unable to connect fully with a male other... The sense of disconnectedness comes from the inadequacy of memory, the

gender tropes endemic to society, and the sense that any genuine affection will not be able to sustain itself (Hogan 350-51). Laura is a living paradox, expected by the male hegemony to possess a voice, but not being allowed to use it. Perhaps strangulation is analogous to the stifling of the female voice.

The use of the hand as a central image of oppression also figures into A Woman

Calling, an image that would later resurface in After Easter with Michael Flynn's attempted strangulation of Greta. Broderick, for instance, murders Moraig by strangling her during lovemaking, and the image of the hand becomes a dominant

symbol in Laura's dreams:

BRODERICK: What happened to your hand? LAURA: I bit it.

BRODERICK: You bit it?




LAURA: Yes. Last night in a dream I saw my enemy's hand

before my face ? so I bit it, hard. And when I woke up I had this

cut.(*FC164)

Only in her dreams can Laura exhibit the kind of control she needs over male

dominance.

The hand, however, is not only a threat to Laura in her dreams; it resurfaces in

reality, both with Laura's former boyfriend, John, and culminating with Broderick

himself. While making love with John for the first time, Laura becomes terrified

and rums on a light. Still in shock, she tries to explain her malady to him: "I thought you were someone. Don't go away. Don't go away" (WC 183). It's as though Broderick were the one making love to Laura, not John, and yet she implores her

lover to stay, as though it were a partem of oppression from which she cannot divest

herself.

There is, then, a great deal of recurrence at work in A Woman Calling,

beginning with Broderick's strangulation of Moraig and finishing with his stran

gulation of Laura. Thus, the cycle of patriarchal dominance continues to perpetuate itself. Devlin drops hints along the way that this will be the case. When Broderick

returns to his home and sees Laura for the first time in twenty years, for instance, the "overall effect is of a young and pretty female. Her shoes catch his attention, flat with a tiny strap like those of a young girl" (WC 163). It's as though Broderick

were entering into a past that Laura has created for him, and Laura is, as it were, a

memory. Another example of recurrence is when Laura as a girl sees Moraig

"closing the window on the first floor. This is the same position that Laura had taken up in Broderick's study at the beginning of the play. Laura watches for a second before hurrying on. Hold on Moraig's face at the window" (168). Devlin is

preparing the audience for Laura's death. Like Moraig, Laura, too, will die in the

house, strangled by the same man.

The ending of A Woman Calling is somewhat ambiguous, as we never see

Broderick actually murder Laura. For that matter, however, we never witness the murder of Moraig. But Devlin's hints along the way leave no room for doubt that Broderick is the culprit and is capable of murdering again with the same convivi

ality:

BRODERICK: John Mulheme, your lover? What happened to him?

(He puts his hand on her face, touches her cheek. She stares

unblinkingly at him.) He didn't wait for you to heal?

LAURA: No. He didn't wait.

(She is still watching him. He puts his hand on her neck. She closes her eyes. Close-up on LAURA's face.) (WC 190)



"My Own Story" 295

Just as we had previously seen a close-up of Moraig's face at the window before

her own murder, so, too, are we left with the same image of Laura. Like Moraig, she falls victim to male dominance and manipulation, silenced forever with no one

knowing her story. Perhaps Laura had wanted it this way. If Laura's story has difficulty being heard, then Helen in The Long March has

a leg up on her. Premiering on BBC 1 Televison on 20 November 1984, The Long March focuses on Helen, who returns to Belfast to be among her politically active

family and friends after her marriage in England goes sour. Soon finding herself

caught in the tensions surrounding the killing of Airey Naeve and the first hunger

strike, Laura becomes the quintessential female protagonist around whom Devlin's

subsequent plays also centre: a woman torn between loyalty to a cause and telling her own story.

A practical person who doesn't subscribe to nationalism, Helen is regarded by her parents as something of an anomaly:

ROSE: She doesn't care about anyone but herself... She lives

on another planet, that Helen. Another planet entirely.

JOE: Aye. England. (LM102)

Helen is considered selfish, partly because she isn't active politically, but also

because she has lived in England, a place that is regarded with as much suspicion as that which is directed at her:

FRANK: You don't sound Belfast. I can't quite place your voice.

COLM: She sounds mid-Atlantic to me.

HELEN: I am from Belfast, but I've lived in England for a long time.

COLM: I pity you. How can you live in England? HELEN: Oh, it's not so bad. You only see the troops on the street or Maggie Thatcher on the telly and you think that's

England. But it's not. It's all there is to England. (115)

Unlike her family and friends, who have difficulty seeing beyond their own

experience, Helen sees people as people, regardless of their nationality or ideology. When Mona remarks to Helen that even though Helen grew up on the Falls nobody knows her, Helen replies that she doesn't make friends "on the basis of territory" (123).

It is this type of practicality that wins Helen her supporters as well as her detractors. While she and her friend Michael are waiting for a taxi, for example,

Michael suggests that they get a bus instead, but with more political, rather than

practical, aspersions:




HELEN: A black taxi is quicker and cheaper. MICHAEL: The Provos run those taxis! (The taxi stops.) I

don't like colluding with illegality! HELEN: Michael! (She looks wearily at him and gets in. He

follows. The taxi moves off.) (LM103)

For Helen, being politically conscious is a tiresome and childish waste of time. Her

parents, on the other hand, are deeply rooted in their political beliefs and see people for the ideologies they represent. When Joe, her father, refers to the Molloys as

Provos, Helen reminds him that they are not unlike the two of them:

[they are] still people. Ordinary human beings like you and me.

(Quotes) "I am human. I count nothing human alien to me."

JOE: (Gets up from besides her immediately.) Oh Jesus.

You've been away a long time. All we need is you to come back

and tell us how to behave....

HELEN: You always do this to me. You always confront me

with loyalties. (119)

Harkening back to the aforementioned notion that a woman who espouses contro

versial political opinions is regarded as a "malevolent presence," Joe quickly distances himself from Helen, both physically and emotionally. Also like Malachy in Ourselves Alone, Joe is the embodiment of patriarchal hegemony, a man who

asserts his dominance over women by reminding them of their political obligations. These "loyalties" of which Helen speaks, however, have different effects on

the women of The Long March. Similar to Helen, but in a more apathetic state

toward loyalty, is Cassandra, Fergus's Protestant wife. The fact that she has been

beyond the confining boundaries of religious loyalty is evidence enough of Cas

sandra's open-mindedness. Her husband's involvement in political writing, how

ever, has pushed them farther away from each other:

FERGUS: Everything I do now you're against. There' s not one

thing about me you admire or support anymore. Not one.

CASSANDRA: Your causes are destroying us.... I'm tired of

defending something I don't believe in any more. (LM 129)

For Fergus, love comes in the form of political support, but to Cassandra, love is more important than politics, a feeling that Frieda later espouses in Ourselves Alone.

Mona, on the other hand, is closely aligned with the Provos, but for more personal, rather than political, reasons:

MONA: Colm's dead. He was murdered by the Brits. He's dead because of the likes of Joe Walsh... who gave tacit support to a corrupt regime by co-operating with it.... Pauline McLough

lin in Armagh weighs four and a half stone; whether she dies or

not is immaterial, she has probably damaged her womb, kidneys,



"My Own Story" 297

and liver ? permanently. Some of us have been driven too far.

Some of us are past talking! (148-149)

Mona's participation is the result of reaction rather than obligation. Her mention of Pauline McLoughlin is indicative of the physical sacrifices women make for a

political cause. According to Ward and McGivern, if, "of the two thousand dead and countless physically scarred, the majority have been men, it is women who bear the emotional/psychological scars" (580). Mona's political involvement stems from her commitment to Colm and to being a woman.

For most women, however, there are other more important obligations than

politics. When Frank reminds Bridie that they're supposed to go to the prison to visit their son Brendan, Bridie says, "Aye. But I've to go to Confession first" (LM 145). Religion is more fulfilling for her than politics. Colm, who later becomes a

martyr, says, "You women are all alike! There's a war on and all you think of is

being together, happy families, making cups of tea" (134). To him, dying for a cause is preferable to having a family, for the "fear of being regarded as a 'sissy' is

seemingly too big a burden for the Irish male" (Ward and McGivern 580). While this is certainly not the case for all males in Northern Ireland, the males in Devlin's

plays test the murky waters of martyrdom, and some, like Colm, dive in head-first, never to return, leaving their women behind to remember the sacrifices they've

made:

COLM: I'm going to Dublin tonight. HELEN: (Carefully) Are we?

COLM: No. I am.... I'm crossing the border in two and half hours. One of the boys will be calling in a minute....

HELEN: What will I do now? I can't stay here. (She sits.) COLM: You'll never be stuck Helen. You'll find some trendy English intellectual with a taste for adventure, an Irish ancestor and a guilt complex as big as your own, and he'll take care of

you. (She turns her face away in distress.) And when you're happily settled in our house on Hampstead Heath you can always tell your grandchildren that you knew me. (LM 133-134)

Colm seems to be fulfilling Edna Longley's assertion that hero-worship "of the male Gael is part of the Nationalist pitch to women" (190). The involvement of women in political causes is a way for the male hegemony to win over converts who will support them in their martyrdom. Also quoted in Longley's The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Robin Morgan argues that revolu

tionary terrorism inevitably involves a death-cult, which enacts the quest of a male hero who "already lives as a dead man." Morgan goes on to ask: "Why is manhood

always perceived as the too-high price of peace?" and notes that when men take over any movement: "What once aimed for a humanistic triumph now aims for a

purist defeat. Martyrdom" (qtd. in Longley 192). Because men in Devlin's plays




seem to be more interested in making martyrs of themselves than they are in

fulfilling their relationships with women, they end up sacrificing their manhood for

a cause that can only reward them with a memory, a cause that will perpetuate the

need for future martyrs and the sacrifice of relationships and identities. To them, love is something that can only be measured in terms of its practicality to a political cause:

COLM: I don't hate you. I don't have any time for women like

you, that's all.... fto Mona] If we're stopped we're a courting

couple.

HELEN: (Bitterly) You use love as a disguise! (LM 135)

The only important functions that Mona performs for Colm are political and sexual.

Running counter to the martyrdom of patriarchal expectations are dreams and

feminine imagery, for which television is a suitable medium of conveying. In a

dream she has while spending the night with Colm, Helen finds herself alone on a

dark road:

She rums to find she is being followed by four shadowy figures in black; she breaks into a run, but no matter how hard she runs

they are always the same distance away. Suddenly, she breaks

away from her pursuers and runs toward the security gates. They are locked. Sobbing, she grips the gates with her hands, as if to

shake them apart. Through the gate she can see COLM in profile. He does not respond to her. He seems unable to see or hear her.

Still crying and with all her force she continues to grip and shake the gates

? but is unable to open them. (LM 130)

Because it is a dream, it is unclear who the "shadowy figures in black" are, but one

may suppose that they represent the past from which Helen is running, following her wherever she goes. Because of this, she cannot escape them, trapped behind

gates that offer no security from them, and Colm in profile represents a male apathy that is neither interested in nor willing to address her needs. The security gate may also be indicative of Helen's own divided loyalties, both political and personal, and she is trapped by her own diffidence.

Another feminine image that arises at the end of the teleplay is a moon over

West Belfast, which is accompanied by Helen's voice-over:

I still remember that time we thought we were beginning a new

journey: the long march. What we didn't see was that it had

begun a long time before with someone else's journey; we were

simply getting through the steps in our own time. (Joe's face at the window.) What we didn't see was that we never had a time

which we could call our own. (LM 155)



"My Own Story" 299

The most difficult thing for Helen to do is to live without the added pressure of

politics, a life of expectations that had already been set in motion before her and

that had already cast her lot. Reinforcing these expectations is Joe at the window.

Juxtaposed with his patriarchal presence is the moon, which represents a strong feminine presence and may represent a number of things, most notably Ireland's

characterization as feminine. Like the moon's cycle, Helen also represents a similar

cycle at work in Northern Ireland, rearing children to rally to a political cause and

giving themselves up to the same martyrdom for which Colm had given his life.

While a waxing moon also symbolizes creativity, regeneration, and female fertility, Helen still fulfills the role of Devlin's female protagonists, who "seem controlled

and manipulated by the forces around them ? the forces of history, of male

dominance, of political violence, of love and affection" (Hogan 351). As a result, Helen may never be free enough to tell her own story, nor will the other people of

her generation, who eventually give in to the political expectations of their parents. Even more than The Long March, Ourselves Alone deals with patriarchal

pressures to commit to political causes and the consequences that can result when

they are not being followed. Premiering at the Liverpool Playhouse on 24 October

1985, and at London's Royal Court Theatre on 20 November 1985, Ourselves Alone

is the story of three women who try to make sense of their lives in the midst of

political and domestic turmoil. Set in Belfast in the aftermath of the hunger strikes, the play takes its title from the Gaelic Sinn Fein, which is normally equated with

Republican loyalty. Devlin, however, "inverts the militant mantra, not only by

using it to describe three women, but three women who are constrained, dismissed, left behind, even beaten by male heroes of the cause" (Solomon 92). These "male

heroes" refuse to listen to anything these three women have to say.

In an author's note to Ourselves Alone, Devlin explains the following genesis of the play:

I began this play with two women's voices ? one funny and one

serious ? and then I found I had a third ? the voice of a woman

listening. And all the women were in some ways living without men. And then the father and a stranger came into the room. And I found myself wondering who the stranger was and what he was

doing there. And I set the play in Andersonstown because once, I used to live there ? and I still do. (OA 10)

The funny voice belongs to Frieda, "the critic of the male establishment, the court

jester, the iconoclast"; the serious voice belongs to Josie, "an articulate, educated and self-knowing character," and the third voice belongs to Donna, "the quiet figure of authority" (MacGurk 59). Devlin has also said that the "characters in Ourselves Alone were conceived as a trinity of women: the mother (DONNA), the mistress

(JOSIE), and the career woman (FRIEDA)" (qtd. in Kilgore 231), three images that are stereotypically associated with women. The career woman, Frieda is the only one who makes a break with her past and goes elsewhere in order to express herself.




A singer, Frieda is interested in telling her own story through her songs. She

tells Danny in Act One, scene i: "I'm fed up with songs where the women are

doormats!" (OA 13). To Frieda, there are more important things to sing about than

songs praising male martyrs. She would rather sing about her own experience,

especially that of being a woman. The environment in which she lives, however, makes it difficult for her to express herself. On the walls of the bar are pictures of

Pearse and Connolly, which have "given way to the faces in black and white often men: Sands, Hughs, McCreesh, McDonell, Hurson, Lynch, Doherty, McElwee, Devine" (13). In Act One, scene ii, Frieda expresses her fear of being the only woman in the bar:

FRIEDA: I was nearly gang-raped at the club.... I was rehears

ing at the club for the Prisoners' Dependents "do." It was dark

and there was only Danny and myself. Danny's a friend of mine, he's a musician.... I'd been singing for about an hour when I

suddenly looked around and the room was full of men. There'd

been one of those meetings upstairs. They must heard my singing and come down.... Anyway, Danny sent me home. I was the only

woman in the room. (18)

Frieda is constantly surrounded by reminders of martyrdom and of patriarchal

hegemony. The important thing to Frieda, however, is that the men had been

listening to "[m]y own song. We were rehearsing a song I had written myself (18). In a patriarchal society that doesn't listen to women, Frieda considers it an

accomplishment for her voice to be heard. Like Helen in The Long March, Frieda knows no political boundaries, espe

cially when it comes to love, which in her own words is "the only loyalty I know or care about. Loyalty to someone you love, regardless! I'd like to think if I loved someone I'd follow that person to hell!" (OA 23). Of the three women, Frieda is the non-conformist, even as early as her childhood, when as girls they would sleep together, a time that Donna likes to recall to Josie: "You, me and Frieda in a double

bed. We all had to face in the same direction or we wouldn't fit in. Except for Frieda

kept turning the other way and we had to push her out" (35). Being kicked out of bed by her sisters is a precursor to being kicked out of the family by Malachy. Frieda is also willing to go to England in order to pursue a songwriting career. Like Helen,

who sometimes gets "tired of the weight of being Irish" (LM 154), Frieda claims that "[w]hatever England is ? it's got to be better than this!" (OA 80). She explains her desire to leave to Donna, who, like a mother, tries to convince her surrogate daughter to stay:

DONNA: Have you somewhere to go? FRIEDA: England. DONNA: Why England? FRIEDA: Why not? It's my language.



"My Own Story" 301

DONNA: Why not go South?

FRIEDA: I'm not that kind of Irish ...

DONNA: It'll be lonely. FRIEDA: I'd rather be lonely than suffocate. (89-90)

According to Brendan MacGurk, "England regularly features as a means of escape for Northern Irish women in the plays of Anne Devlin, a place where they go to

find, or be, themselves" (52). In a way, the anonymity of England is preferable to

the political determinism of Northern Ireland.

Frieda, however, pays for her independence through male violence intended to

control her, but her will is too strong to be subdued completely. When Malachy ?

Frieda's father ? and a Second Man discover Frieda talking in the club with John

McDermot, a member of the Workers' Party, the Second Man asks Malachy, "Have

you control over your daughter?" (OA 39). The question serves as a challenge to

Malachy's manhood. Not only has Frieda defied his political code; she has also

challenged the patriarchal order. Threatened by her autonomy, Malachy catches

Frieda by the wrist and pushes her across the room:

MALACHY: You stay ?

(FRIEDA is struck in the back of the

head by MALACHY.) ?

away from him.

(FRIEDA remains holding her head, momentarily stunned.) You'll not make a little boy of me! I'm sick to death of hearing about you... All I get is complaints... Bringing that hood in here. FRIEDA: (Recovering) What do I have to do or say, Father, to

get you to leave me alone ?

MALACHY: I'll leave you alone all right. I'll leave you so

you'll wish you'd never been born.

(He makes a race at her. She pushes the table into his path.) FRIEDA: Oh, Mammy. Mammy. (He attempts to punch her in the stomach.)

MALACHY: You'll not make little of me. Siding with the

people who condemned Bobby Sands.

FRIEDA: (Backing away towards the door) They didn't con

demn him. They said he beat his wife! Hard to believe, isn't it? MALACHY: Get out of my sight. (39)

Like his hero Bobby Sands, Malachy displays a volatile side toward women like Frieda who don't follow the cause. It isn't even his political stance that he's trying to defend; it's his male credibility. As I mentioned earlier, when a woman "steps outside of the confines of family life by expressing controversial political opinions she is immediately desexed: but not only is she no longer a woman, her transcen dence has transformed her into a malevolent presence" (Ward and McGivern 582). This desexed malevolence that seems to be coming from Frieda makes it easier for

Malachy to beat her and banish her. This banishment allows Frieda to make a clean




break from "patria and patriarchy" (Solomon 92). She is almost completely outside

the patriarchal order.

Another male who has violent tendencies toward Frieda is John McDermot, who invites Frieda to stay with him after Malachy banishes her from the family. At

first he seems to be supportive of Frieda's autonomy, but patriarchies "can embrace

a species of 'feminism' if it is expedient to do so" (MacGurk 57). McDermot has

ulterior motives for inviting Frieda to stay with him: "I've wanted you for a long time. Why do you think I invited you to stay with me7\OA 59). Like other male

characters in Devlin's plays, John uses a woman for his own political and sexual

ends. Frieda sums it up best when she calls John on his little game: "I find your confidence both in relation to me, other women, and the rest of the world nothing short of nauseous. You behave as if you had nothing to learn, nothing to discover, no problems, and everybody else was waiting for you to fuck them!" (60). Frieda

could easily be addressing most of the male characters in Devlin's plays, men who

have their own ulterior motives for helping women. While he agrees with Frieda's

observation of him, however, John is quick to remind Frieda of the most important reason for his inviting her to stay with him: "When you joined the Party you

promised to secure working class unity ? Catholic and Protestant ? before the

real struggle could begin. I can't see that my personal behaviour towards you should

make any difference to your commitment to that idea" (61). John thinks that the

personal can be separate from the political. When Frieda talks of "leaving the tribes behind" (80), however, and accuses John of becoming an apologist for his tribe, he strikes her repeatedly. When she locks herself in the bathroom to escape him, he

bangs his head against the door until she comes out to stop him. This is his way of

"whimpering for affection without a trace of self-consciousness" (Solomon 92), but it is also a means of control.

Josie, for her part, is involved in the Republican movement, but the movement itself suffocates her and swallows up her identity. When Frieda relates her story of almost being gang-raped by a bunch of men who have come out of a meeting, Donna remarks to Josie, "Strange there was a meeting and you weren't there" (OA 18).

When it comes to doing her duty, Josie is more than willing to carry it out, but she isn't part of the decision-making. She has also been carrying on an affair with Cathal

O'Donnell, a married man with children, and falls in love with Joe Conran, an

English secret agent who joins the Republican movement but later betrays it and their affair. To make matters worse, Joe also sires a son with Josie, who her brother, Liam, wants to have aborted. Of the three women, she seems the most likely to

make it out of Andersonstown, but Joe's betrayal leads to the dissolution of that

hope. "Betrayed and compromised by the father of her child... and her impending motherhood, Josie ... likewise permits herself to be imprisoned within the patriar chal system she understands and despises" (MacGurk 59). She finally gives in and allows Malachy to take her back to his house to stay, where he will most likely raise

up another martyr for the cause.



"My Own Story" 303

Men do not feature well in Ourselves Alone, even those who seem to be

trustworthy and supportive. With the exception of Danny, Frieda's musician friend, men in Ourselves Alone expect women to be there for them at all costs. Although

the lives of all three women revolve around men, however, it's obvious that men

can't be trusted. They lie, cheat, and manipulate their way through women's lives.

Malachy expects the women to support his political cause and becomes violent when one of them doesn't. Carnal O'Donnell cheats on his wife, yet refuses to

commit to Josie. When he gets out of prison, Liam accuses Donna of infidelity, even though he himself has cheated on her several times, and he also tells Josie to

get an abortion when he learns that she is going to have Joe's baby. For his part, Joe not only betrays the cause; he also betrays Josie, leaving her behind with a life to support. Even before he disappears, Joe is very outspoken about his reticence of

becoming a father:

JOE: I hate tots! Babies! I hate this whole fertility business!

I'm not interested in fucking children! (OA 78)

With that kind of belligerence, who wants Joe for a father? Liam isn't much of one

either:

DONNA: ... Catherine fell down the stairs. Her head must have hit every step on the way down. Liam was right behind her. He couldn't stop it.... I sometimes think men don't actually like

children[.] (68) For the men of Devlin's works, having children is about as desirable as having a

monogamous relationship. Both detract from their responsibility to whatever cause

they currently support, leaving orphans and widows in their wake. Of the three women, however, Donna seems to be the only one who accepts

fate at face value. To her, life "just turns things out as they are. Happiness, sadness,

has really nothing to do with it" (OA 89). As the only matriarchal figure in the play, Donna has an uncanny "perception and understanding of things, even in the face of seeming powerlessness" (MacGurk 60). She has an inner strength that guides her and which she tries to share with others. Earlier in the play she offers Frieda some advice on becoming a songwriter: "Happiness requires all your intelligence.

You won't find it just by looking" (34). To Donna, happiness must come from within. Like Josie's mother, Donna has "spent her life listening" (20), not just to the other women, but for warnings of potential violence toward them. "You got me

away from my daddy" (17), Josie tells her. Donna also helps Josie into bed when the latter has been sleepwalking, and she warns the two women whenever Malachy is standing just outside the door to their flat.

It's not surprising, then, that although Frieda has the ending monologue of the

play, Donna is given the last line in order to put everything in perspective. Frieda recalls a scene from their youth "a long time ago, a moonlit night" on a beach when the three of them had "slipped off from the campfire to swim leaving the men




arguing" (OA 90). Her recollection has a dreamlike quality, blending "the arche

typal imagery of sea, moon, and stars" (Roche 239) with a collective epiphany and

solidarity that the women experience before the men intrude on their moment:

we sank down into the calm water and tried to catch the phos

phorescence on the surface of the waves ? it was the first time

I'd ever seen it ? and the moon was reflected on the sea that

night. It was as though we swam in the night sky and cupped the

stars between our cool fingers. And then they saw us. First Liam

and then John, and my father in a temper because we'd left our

swimsuits on the beach. And the shouting and the slapping and

the waves breaking over us. (OA 90)

Just as the women can sometimes be regarded as intruders into the men's political lives, so, too, are the men presented as intruders into the women's personal lives.

And Donna, who "stoically yields to each inevitability" (Roche 239), ends the play with the final line: "How quietly the light comes" (OA 90). This last observation, followed immediately with a quick black-out, is indicative of a "sad, passive

understanding in the face of a hostile world[,] [a] quiet acceptance of the coming of the 'light'" (MacGurk 60). Donna's quiet resolve will help get her through her life.

Whereas Donna feels that the need simply to understand is enough, Greta in

After Easter has to explore every nook and cranny of her life in order to arrive at

any understanding. Stated simply, "Greta goes through a doorway at which we

leave Donna standing" (MacGurk 61). The bravest of all of Devlin's female

protagonists, Greta journeys into the most difficult terrain that Devlin can throw in her way: herself.

First performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Other Place in Stratford on 18 May 1994, After Easter takes place in Belfast in the early 1990s, a

"slightly less comfortable time for patriarchies in liberalising Ireland" (MacGurk 51). Like Ourselves Alone, which centres around the lives of three distinct women,

After Easter centres around three sisters, each unique in her own way. The play "features a career-woman, Helen, who has moved to England to escape the North

of Ireland, Aoife [sic], the sister who stayed home to become a traditional Catholic wife and mother, and the eldest sister Greta, who is experiencing a personal crisis in the form of the semantic breakdown of the relationship between herself and her external context" (59). But whereas "Ourselves Alone features an absent mother and is concerned with patriarchy and politics, After Easter features an absent father and is more concerned with matriarchy and religion" (51), religion being another form of patriarchal hegemony. What also differentiates the two plays from each other is that in After Easter the mother "replaces the father as the ambiguous and

culpable parental figure and the sisters are more often engaged in interrogating each other than in dealing with external relationships with men" (51). While it "carries forward Devlin's familiar themes of exile and return, male-female relations, and



"My Own Story" 305

the backdrop of political violence in Northern Ireland[,] ... After Easter ... also

attempts an integration between the protagonist and all that drove her to exile and a sense of powerlessness

? religion, violence, and family relations" (Hogan 351).

The play takes its title from the Easter Rising of 1916 and the divisiveness among the Irish people since that event. This divisiveness, however, is not only political; it also mns along familial and sexual lines.

The protagonist of After Easter is Greta. Similar to Helen in The Long March, she has been living in self-exile in England, has even given birth to three children, but returns home when her marriage begins to deteriorate. Also like Helen and like

Frieda in After Easter, Greta doesn't judge people by their nationality or political affiliation. She proclaims, for instance, that she is "a Catholic, a Protestant, a Hindu, a Moslem, a Jew" (AE7), and later she says, "I don't want to be Irish. I'm English, French, German" (12). As Aoife adroitly observes, Greta isn't "on anybody's side.

And yet she's on everybody's side" (12). She is a citizen of the world.

The dissolution of Greta's marriage and the loss of her custody of the children are mainly due to her hallucinations, which seem to fall on or around holy days and

which are emblematic of a past from which she can no longer flee. As she describes one of her hallucinations: "It felt as if the whole of Ireland was crying out to me"

(AE 11). In confronting her hallucinations, Greta confronts her past and ultimately herself. When the corpse of her father rises from the coffin and tries to strangle her, one is reminded that the "past will neither die nor release her" (King n. pag.). No

matter how far she runs away, Greta cannot run from herself. This is what leads her at the end of the play to tell the story of the stag to her infant son. Now that she has confronted and tamed her wild side, she is ready to tell her own story. Often held to be a symbol of wisdom, the stag represents Greta's own self-wisdom. She has

finally come to terms with herself.

Helen, for her part, has also shed the skin of Irish loyalty, but only when it benefits her. Like Josie in Ourselves Alone, Helen is a career woman. The youngest of the three sisters, she is also the most ambitious. Like Greta, she has been living in England and hasn't been in constant touch with her family. "I love my family," she tells Aoife. "I'm just very busy, that's all" (AE 9). When asked by Aoife why she uses an American accent, Helen explains that

London isn't a good place to have an Irish accent right now. I find when I'm buying or selling an American accent gets me

through the door. Whereas an Irish accent gets me followed round the store by a plainclothes security man. I'm not exagger ating.

AOIFE: Wouldn't an English accent be better? HELEN: There are limits to betrayal

? even for me. (9)

To Helen, sounding American is preferable to sounding English, as it doesn't

implicate her in any complicity with an oppressor. When she asks Paul, a police man, about the shootings at a pub on Donegal Road, she uses an American accent




and is so successful at it that he later admits, "I thought you were an American," to

which she responds, "I live in England. I've travelled around" (42). Like Greta, Helen begs the question, "Aren't we citizens of the world?" (39). This question, however, goes unanswered among the rest of her siblings.

Running counter to Greta and Helen are Aoife and Manus, their younger brother. Unlike their sisters, Aoife and Manus have elected to stay in their native

Northern Ireland. To Aoife, Greta is "normal ? it's the English who've a problem"

(AE 6). She also shares with Greta her misgivings of Greta's married life in England:

AOIFE: ... I never understood how you could have married a

cold Englishman. GRETA: It's not his fault!

AOIFE: ... The English and the Irish cannot love each other.

GRETA: My children are English. AOIFE: Half English. If you came home and brought them up in Ireland you'd soon find they'd come all right.... I just think

everybody should go home. (6-7)

Unlike Greta and Helen, Aoife realizes that no matter how far away from home a

person travels, she will never be able to flee herself.

Like his sister, Manus is also proud of his Irishness, but like most of Devlin's

male characters, he also has a streak of martyrdom in him. A professional musician, he claims that all great art "will have the tribe behind it" (39). Music for him is not

only an extension of the self; it is also an expression of one's culture, something about which his father had kept him in the dark. Now he spends his time "trying to

get it back" (39). Like Greta, he, too, is digging into his past in order to tap into his roots and come to terms with himself. When he defies an English road-block, however, he upsets his sisters, who may have been killed with him. This leads Aoife to remind him that had they been killed, "no one would know our story" (53).

Having a story to tell, something to pass on, is preferable to the dead end of

martyrdom.

The most pervasive form of patriarchal control in After Easter is the Church. While Irish women make staunch Catholics, the people who make important decisions regarding religious matters tend to be male. Devlin seems to be saying that it isn't only among the Republicans that men have all the political clout; among the clergy, women are also marginalized. Although Elish claims that the Mothers

"are the real harvesters of souls" (AE 29), she cannot give Greta the sacraments.

When Greta asks why a priest has to give them to her, Elish explains that she is "not empowered."

GRETA: Because you are a woman?

ELISH: Yes.

GRETA: So ? these men in skirts have usurped our function, don't you think?



"My Own Story" 307

Even in the Church, matriarchal power has been stripped away to make room for

the patriarchal order. It is this kind of defeminization against which Greta rebels.

Stealing a chalice from a communion altar, she offers wafers to people on the street

and is quoted in a newspaper for condemning the "rank hypocrisy of the churches

in Ireland" (49). Perhaps more than any other of Devlin's female protagonists, Greta

sees hypocrisy around her and is also willing to act against it. According to Greta,

If a woman can be a priest, God can be female.

HELEN: Who cares?

GRETA: I care. It means that women might be loved. (57)

For freedom and equality to exist in Northern Ireland, men and women must also

learn to live and work together. This seems to be Devlin's ultimate challenge in

fixing the troubles in Northern Ireland.

Devlin's teleplays and stage plays offer a whole other world that is missed by the media: the forgotten world of women in Northern Ireland. Hers is a complex

world full of divided loyalties, patriarchal power structures, and violence towards

her if she doesn't accept her role in society. There is one thing, however, that cannot

be taken away from her ? her voice. As long as the struggle for unity in Northern

Ireland continues, so, too, will "my own story" of the woman. Perhaps one day, her

story will gain a male audience, and the struggles will cease. Until then, the story continues.

WORKS CITED

Devlin, Anne. Ourselves Alone with The Long March and A Woman Calling.

London: Faber, 1986. -.

After Easter. London: Faber, 1994.

Hogan, Robert, ed. Dictionary of Irish Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996.

Kilgore, Emilie S., ed. Landmarks of Contemporary Women's Drama. London:

Methuen, 1992.

King, Robert L. "Competing Ideas." North American Review (Nov./Dec. 1995): n.

pag. 5 June 1998. http://www.epnet.com/ehost/login.html

Lojek, Helen. "Difference without Indifference: The Drama of Frank McGuinness

and Anne Devlin." Eire-Ireland (Summer 1990): 67.

Longley, Edna. The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland. New

castle-upon-Tyne, England: Bloodaxe, 1994.

MacGurk, Brendan. "Commitment and Risk in Anne Devlin's Ourselves Alone and

After Easter." The State of Play: Irish Theatre in the 'Nineties. Ed. Eberhard

Bort. Trier: WVT, 1996: 51-52, 57, 59-61.

Roche, Anthony. Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness. New

York: St. Martin's, 1995.

Solomon, Alisa. "Challenging Rhetoric." Village Voice 42 (1992): 92.




Ward, Margaret and Marie-Therese McGivern. "Images of Women in Northern

Ireland." The Crane Bag of Irish Studies 4 (1980): 580, 582.



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"My Own Story": Woman's Place, Divided Loyalty, and Patriarchal Hegemony in the Plays of Anne Devlin

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