A Pagan Place by Edna O'Brien

First published: 1970

Type of work: Domestic realism

Time of work: The mid-1930’s to the early 1940’s

Locale: A village in Ireland

Principal Characters:

• The Protagonist, unnamed, an Irish girl in her early teens
• Her Mother
• Her Father
• Emma, her elder sister
• Ambie, a lodger in the family house

The Novel

A Pagan Place is written in the form of a monologue, delivered by a narrator who speaks only in the second person, as he or she recalls the childhood and family background of a girl from a small Irish farming community as she grows up in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The unusual point of view (“you” and “your” constantly occur, as in “Your father said he made a great cup of tea, your mother said it was like senna”) keeps the focus on the young girl, as if she is the center point around which all the events revolve.

The family lives in a small isolated village in Ireland, where it rains on two days out of every three, and in which everyone knows everyone else’s business. Occasionally, there are glimpses of events in the wider world, with references to Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, and Winston Churchill, but in general the village is bound up in its own concerns. The small details of daily living and the colorful anecdotes about a gallery of eccentric village folk occupy a large part of the narrative. Everything is seen through the eyes of the child. In the house in which they live, for example, “The landing was big and cold. There was a sofa that never got sat on....” During a threatening visit from the bailiff, “He was so nice and kindly that you thought he was a priest. He smiled at that and so did your mother although she was crying just before and shaking holy water and saying Jesus and Mary.”

Underlying the narrative is the pervasive influence of Catholicism, especially as experienced by the child. At her first communion, for example, “The bits of paper soaked up all your saliva but it was not a sin when they grazed your teeth whereas it would be a sin if the Host were to.” There is always a strong sense of guilt, and the fear of the Devil is manifested in vivid images in the child’s mind. Catholicism is woven into the mundane, everyday fabric of things. Finishing a prayer with “Glory be to the Father” was routine, “like the full stop at the end of the words.” It makes itself felt unexpectedly, as when the child rebukes herself for whistling: “The Blessed Virgin blushed when women whistled and likewise when women crossed their legs.” There are glimpses, too, of the hostility between Catholic and Protestant: One of the worst sins “your mother” committed was to attend a Protestant funeral service.

The power of sex, most of it guilty and furtive, also pervades the story. It ranges from the obscene attempts of a man known as the Nigger to waylay girls as they pass by, to the tailor who touches the breasts of his female customers when he measures them for clothes, to the protagonist’s guilty pleasure in masturbation, and Emma’s shameless pleasure in recording her sexual activities in her diary.

There are only a few major events in the story. They begin when Emma returns from America for a visit. She had been born in New York and had, it appears, continued to live there after her parents returned to Ireland, having failed to make the fortune they had planned. Emma is five months pregnant, and this causes a fearful family quarrel. She only just avoids a beating from her father. He suggests an abortion, but the family doctor will hear nothing of it. The search for the father is made impossible by the revelations in Emma’s diary, which has a long list of her various men friends. Eventually, she is sent away to a temporary lodging house. Later, she gives birth to a boy, but she does not wish to see her mother again. There is a total rift in the family. The baby is never to be mentioned again, and Emma’s father cannot bring himself even to speak Emma’s name.

The climax of the story is when the young protagonist has a sexual encounter with a priest, Father Daclan, who is home from the South Seas on holiday. Her parents hear of it, however, and her father thrashes her, an event which arouses her sexually more than her experience with the priest. After the beating, she does elaborate penance. When a nun comes to speak to her class at school, encouraging new recruits, she immediately decides on her vocation. Arrangements are quickly made for her to attend a convent in Belgium, and the novel ends with her departure, as she eagerly awaits her future.

The Characters

The protagonist emerges as a girl of acute sensitivity who suffers more than her share of fear and guilt. She fears everything from lockjaw to the Druids, from being kidnaped to the imagined death of her mother. Some of her fear is related to sex and results from her religious upbringing. She is shocked when she sees young couples embracing outside a cafe, and when her cousin exposes his chest to her she is overwhelmed by thoughts of sin and the Devil. It is nakedness which she fears most of all.

Her religious nature is clear throughout: At one point, she experiences what she hopes is religious ecstasy, and later she sees herself with Jesus in a vision. She devises the most unpleasant forms of penance for herself, with the simple logic of the child: “Everything you did was the opposite to what you wanted to do.”

Her embrace of the sisterhood is therefore no surprise, particularly when it is remembered that throughout the story she is closer to women than to men. Almost all the men she encounters are threatening figures. She cannot, for example, bear her father’s attempts to kiss her: “You told yourself that you were not experiencing anything and in that way you didn’t.” At one point, she even fears that her father may try to seduce her. In contrast, she feels extremely close to her sister and to her mother.

Her father is an experienced farmer and a local peace commissioner, which causes him to boast that he has influence in the community. Yet he is also a vulgar man and a poor husband. Often drunk, bad tempered, and abusive, he gambles while his wife struggles to make ends meet, and he often threatens her with violence. In contrast, the wife is long-suffering and self-effacing. Her habit of always giving herself the worst parts of the Sunday chicken dinner is typical. As a remedy for the lack of love in her life (even though she refers to love as a dope), she carries on an illicit affair with the village doctor, a man who is more often drunk than sober.

Emma is the black sheep of the family, the complete opposite of her sister. She has airs “because she was born in New York.” Called a “fashion plate” because she changes her clothes before each journey, she is thoroughly attuned to the worldly life of New York, where she is so popular with the bus conductors that she rarely has to pay her fare. After the birth of her baby, she is impatient to return to America and quietly insists on living her own life, without parental interference.

An assortment of odd minor characters, many of them sketched with deft economy by the child’s observing eyes and ears, helps to bring the story alive. Chief of these is Ambie, “who lived in your house but was always ready to go.” Roaming from pub to pub, cheating at cards to win a turkey, cheating again when he sells his winnings, acquiring candy for the young girl who adores him, called “yahoo” “plebeian” and “aborigine” by the lady of the house, Ambie is the archetypal lazy, likable rogue. Then there is the schoolteacher Miss Davitt, tall, skinny, and too intellectual (at least in the child’s view), passionately interested in politics but eventually falling victim to her own highly strung temperament and drowning herself in the river.

Critical Context

The publication of A Pagan Place marked the close of Edna O’Brien’s first hectic decade of literary activity, which produced six novels. A Pagan Place contains a number of familiar O’Brien characters and themes: the uncouth and violent father is one of many brutal men who appear in her fiction, and as in her earlier work, the novel is notable for its sexual explicitness and its unflattering portrayal of Catholicism. It is for this reason that her novels were banned in Ireland. In particular, A Pagan Place resembles her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), in that its subject is the development of an adolescent Irish girl, although its technique of using a second-person rather than a first-person narrator serves to distance the narrator from the action. In its tendency toward a stream-of-consciousness technique reminiscent of James Joyce, it looks forward to Night (1972).

Although one critic referred to A Pagan Place as O’Brien’s finest book, in general it had a poor critical reception. The reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, for example, described it as “sentimental and neurotic. . . a sad waste of talent.”

There is no doubt that the book has major flaws. In particular, O’Brien’s experiment with the second-person narrator becomes monotonous and self-centered. The staccato effect of too many short, childlike sentences is simply irritating. In spite of this, however, the book is sometimes extremely amusing, for those who like their humor vulgar, and occasionally attains real wit, as when family friend Hilda becomes a spiritualist and attempts to contact her dead husband: “. . . people said that as she hadn’t spoken a civil word to him when he was alive it was mere hypocrisy trying to talk to him when dead.” Perhaps the novel is most valuable for the occasional glimpse it gives of the acute way in which the child’s senses receive the world. The protagonist, for example, can separate the various smells of the countryside “the way a prism separated light”; the flutter of the leaves almost puts her into a trance, and as she runs through the fields the grass seems to dance with her and communicate with her.

Bibliography

Donoghue, Denis. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXII (May 3, 1970), p. 5.

Eckley, Grace. Edna O’Brien, 1974.

MacManus, Patricia. Review in The Saturday Review. LXXX (April 25, 1970), p. 34.

O’Brien, Darcy. “Edna O’Brien: A Kind of Irish Childhood,” in Twentieth Century Women Novelists, 1982. Edited by Thomas F. Staley.

Paterno, Domenica. Review in Library Journal. XCV (May 15, 1970), p. 1861.