A Pagan Place: Analysis of Major Characters
"A Pagan Place: Analysis of Major Characters" delves into the lives of complex individuals in a deeply traditional, Roman Catholic community in the West of Ireland. The narrative centers around an unnamed ten-year-old girl, described as intelligent and imaginative, who navigates a world steeped in superstition and harsh societal norms. Her experiences range from witnessing her sister Emma's struggle with an unplanned pregnancy to her own sexual awakening influenced by the local priest.
The girl's father is characterized as a violent and alcoholic farmer whose erratic behavior affects the family dynamics, while her mother plays a role of passive endurance amid her husband’s volatility. Emma, the rebellious sister, challenges societal expectations but ultimately faces the consequences of her actions, leading to tragic outcomes. The story also introduces other local figures, such as Ambie, the hardworking farmhand, and Michael Flannery, a socially isolated man marked by both physical and emotional scars.
The young priest, Father Declan, embodies the tensions of religious constraints, culminating in a troubling interaction with the protagonist. Through these characters, the narrative explores themes of oppression, sexual awakening, and the struggle for escape from a restrictive environment.
A Pagan Place: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Edna O'Brien
First published: 1970
Genre: Novel
Locale: A village in Ireland
Plot: Domestic realism
Time: The late 1930's to the mid-1940's
The protagonist, an intelligent, imaginative, sensitive, ten-year-old, pubescent schoolgirl in the superstition-ridden, legend-haunted West of Ireland. She is never given a name except “you.” In her close, proscriptive, Roman Catholic village community, the girl grows up. Smart, very observant, and bookish, she goes through a series of initiations. She is present at a violent family row in which her pregnant, unmarried sister Emma is packed off to Dublin to have her child and have it adopted. She experiences her own sexual awakening at the hands of a young priest, Father Declan, who ejaculates on her closed thighs. Her second sexual arousal follows when her brutal father, to punish her for her conduct with the priest, beats her bare buttocks with a school ruler. Still vulnerable, priggish, nasty, and hypocritical, she escapes from her restrictive home, village, and country (if not immediately from the church) by becoming a novice in the Order of the Enfants de Marie convent in Belgium.
Her father, a drunken, violent, horse-fancying farmer. Generous to a fault, he is headed rapidly down on the social scale.
Her mother, who married above her social station and is a martyr to her husband's violently shifting moods. To salvage some personal satisfaction, she lives the lie of married bliss and keeps both the newly arrived village doctor and the hired hand on the farm interested in her sexually.
Emma, the protagonist's sister, born in New York. She is a rebel who does what she wants, then is crushed by the system. She is pregnant when she comes home from Dublin, where she works, and provokes a violent explosion from her father in a family council, where no one father can be located among so many candidates.
Ambie, the good-hearted hired hand who holds the farm operation together with his steady labor. Eventually, he saves enough money to make his escape.
Michael “the Nigger” Flannery, one of the many odd local characters who surround the central character. He gets his nickname from the purple, disfiguring birthmark on his face. Lonely and sexually frustrated, he sees no exit, though he makes the central character's going-away trunk.
Father Declan, a young Roman Catholic priest on leave from the mission field. The effects of religious constraint on him show in his assault on the central character. He is last spotted leaving the community, sent away quietly by his superiors.