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Kate O’Brien was a member of a relatively
limited class in Ireland, the Catholic haute bourgeoisie whose
commercial success in the late-nineteenth century resulted in
their possession of houses, furnishings, manners and interests
which put them on a footing with the equivalent class in England.
Nothing in the novel more deliberate conveys this sense of an
increasingly-accomplished class embued with considerable self-esteem,
but still subject to English condescension, than the reflections
of the cancer specialist come to visit Teresa Mulqueen, the dying
mother in the novel: ‘So this was Ireland! Surprise was still
naively in his face, and still there was a nervous desire to make
a joke of the surprise, and yet again the uneasy feeling that
he had better not do that’ [205].
But if the Irish bourgeoisie is beginning to
feel itself on a par with English society, it is also nationalist,
though nationalist in the context of a social project which placed
the demonstration of Irish civility higher than the establishment
of a popular republic. It is not, in other words, the strand of
nationalist that ‘won out’ in the early twentieth-century
revolutionary period. Yet these were the native attitudes of the
novelist herself and it is pertinent that they are here embodied
in a narrative set some fifty years before the decade in which
the novel was actually written. Kate O’Brien was, to a large
extent, cut off from the ‘official culture’ of contemporary
Ireland - pious, petty-bourgeois and demotic in its conception
of republican ideals. In addition she was lesbian and, as such,
cut off from the most significant element in her social and national
background, the Catholic Church in Ireland.
In The Ante-Room she produced something
quite unique, however: an Irish novel that captures the nuanced
religious consciencious of a young Irish woman who finds herself
sexualy attracted to a married man - and the husband of her own
sister, at that. The resultant conflict is the stuff of romantic
fiction, especially as it ends in a pathetic suicide - a story
line that suggests an eye to the market place and a wider-than-literary
audience. At the same time it is open to consider that O’Brien
was aiming to produce a modern novel about Ireland, depicting
the ethos of a neglected class while reflecting the psycho-sexual
realities which were part of the common stock of English literary
fiction at that time, but without reneging on the defining elements
of the Irish social experience (of which Catholicism appeared
to be the chief).
The Ante-Room can, indeed, be read as
something of a seminar on Irish Catholicism. Teresa, like the
saint after whom she is probably named (Teresa of Lisieux), is
a patient sufferer and a worshipper of the Catholic God and his
Holy Mother. She herself is a ‘holy mother’ to a great
extent, and her sole wish on the brink of extinction due to cancer
is that she will live long enough to see her problem-child Reggie
settled in a marriage. Reggie, alas, is the victim of syphilis
contracted through his lack of discipline - a trait undoubtedly
nurtured by his mother who has long ago turned away from her own
husband and concentrated her affection on her son.
The “ante-room” of the title is, in
fact, a chamber outside Teresa’s bedroom where her brother
Canon Considine is saying a triduum mass in hope of divine assistance.
The tri-partite novel imitates the form of that ritual, and the
term ante-room similarly becomes a metaphor for the passage from
life to death which Mrs. Mulqueen is about to undergo. It is Dr.
Curran who remarks this; and it is for the reader to infer that
the term also refers to a passage from life to death for Vincent,
and a comparable transition for Agnes Mulqueen - these being the
central characters of the novel.
One of the great pleasures of the novel lies
in the descriptions offered of the characters and the treatment
of the minor characters is no exception. Dr. Curran, for example,
is neatly pinioned in a series of sentences which capture his
predicament as a staid ‘Victorian’ - the term is correctly
used since the novel is actually set in the time Charles Stuart
Parnell - suddenly encountering the experience of personal love.
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William Curran had always been clear
in his views about women. Every inch a doctor, he deplored
the mischief which the amorous instinct had done and continued
to do to the human race. It would have to be reckoned
with, he knew, but he did not see that it was worth its
own high and often hysterical claims. The sane thing was
to despise it, since you could never kill it. For his
own part, women so far had been hardly more important
to him than so many decorative toys. He had enjoyed himself
abroad, and kept his head. Here at home he was continent,
because he believed in continency and found it practicable.
One day, and before he was very much older, he would perhaps
want someone to keep his house and bear his children.
[55]
...
He was a Victorian bourgeois, rationalist in the idiom
of his mind, Catholic in tradition and practice, a man
eager to harness feeling into usefulness. This unlooked-for
love, once quick in him, he must examine his chance to
satisfy and domesticate it, since it seemed now to be
essential to his future ability and peace. What hope had
he that Agnes Mulqueen would marry him? [57]
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Similar sketches are offered of Nurse Cunningham,
who eventually marries Reggie, and thus resolves Teresa’s
dilemma:
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Among her qualities was a self-control
which the exercise of her profession had not yet hardened
into callousness [...] Its absence always seemed to
her very disgusting, and she reflected now, not for
the first time, that this man [Reggie] must have been
born without a vestige of it. But he had been born
lazy too, and that should have kept him from the mischiefs
of the first defect. - Her realist’s eye, helped by
professional training, took in all the details of
his appearance - [which] had made this ruin, and he
was the second son. But his elder brother was a priest.
[221]
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- and of Canon Considine:
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Thirty-five years of priesthood, years
as imperfect as they were virtuous, years in which his
vocation had as often failed as conventionally upheld
him and in which his period-philosophy had revealed confusing
differences from his eternal one; years in which the fanatic
in him had learnt to keep step with the bourgeois, but
which had also given curious moments of self-distrust
and wistfulness; years in which he had unconsciously trained
vanity to reward more than to wound him, thirty-five years
in which he had been at least as faithful to his own idea
of himself as to the eternal idea of God - had yet not
taken from him a central wonder before this recurring
moment [the eucharist] of his priesthood. [174]
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Elsewhere we are told that, though ‘an
unimaginative man, imagination came to life in him before the
spectacle of her suffering, just as, a prudish man, he mastered
his prudishness in relation to Reggie, for Reggie’s mother’s
sake’ [46]. Certainly what is notable here is that, in
spite of his obvious worldliness and self-regarding traits,
the priest is allowed to have retained some affinity with the
spiritual and mystical inherence of the Catholic religion. (Where
Protestantism effectively banished mystical experience to the
next life, Catholicism retains it in the form of the sacramental
doctrine of transubstantiation.) Where mysticism fits
into the lives of the other characters is, perhaps, the central
concern of the novel.
Agnes Mulqueen meets with it in a rather sanitary
sense in the sacrament of confession, which affords the purging
of sin and presumably temptation:
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How simple! How formal and civilised
was the method of the Church in its exactions. - Self
would thin away if one pursued the idea of God. Oh,
blessed absolution, which can absolve us not only of
our sin, but of its occasions, by making out its own
tranquillity nothing of them and of our confusion in
them. [-; 90] God had absolved her from all that. She
was loosed from sin. [91]
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Yet the reality is more complex: Agnes
has formed in childhood a close bond with her sister Marie-Rose
but now finds herself in love with her sister’s husband
Vincent. Religious sentiments, as well as family feeling,
oppose against the passion which she feels for him but which,
however, she is unable to control. (O’Brien catches
the sensuality of her feelings and the magic of exchanged
looks very well at their first meeting in the novel.) Indeed,
she continues to desire Vincent until, at the end, she contemplates
in utter starkness the moral decision she has to make.
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Here were Christian and social
duty combining with sisterly love to make one foolish
craving of hers impossible. And she with brains
and blood and training found them justified and
her desire insane. It followed it must die. It would
die - but how quickly? [240]
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This is not simply a choice between religion and love but
between different kinds of blasphemy, and different orders
of fulfillment:
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[T]hough conscience might be somehow tranquillised,
though purity might be preserved and a technical loyalty
to sisterhood remain - that death of love would be at
an immorally high price. For even if she was prepared
to sacrifice her early womanhood to the strains and
silliness of an unexpressed infatuation, even if she
was prepared to pray herself resolutely into an enfeebled
spinsterhood, the careful process would react on others,
and be too slow to give them a fair chance to recapture
life. - violence must drive out violence. A desperate
remedy must be found - No point in long, enfeebling
treatment. - Let them face each other and decide on
the cleanliness of a complete good-bye. [241]
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The ‘cleanliness of a complete good-bye’
invoked in these sentences ultimately involves a corresponding
realisation on the part of Vincent, resulting in his suicide.
But is that a necessary outcome? In other words, does Vincent
kill himself because of the moral logic of his and Agnes’s
situation, or for reasons which are entirely more self-centred
and self-serving?
Certainly the honourable dimension of his
drastic action (whether we consider it warranted or not
in terms of the humane discourse for which Agnes is the
chief spokesperson) is seriously impeached by the oedipal
turn of his last thoughts when he addresses his ‘darling
mother’ - a female principle for whom, it seems, Agnes
has been a kind of substitute all along.
Vincent’s mentality is not one of
the most intriguing things about the novel, if not the most
successfully imagined. What tends to redeems it from the
banality that attaches to a mind still locked in an infantile
fixation with his dead mother (for that is the case with
him) is the close ressemblance between his psychological
limitations and those of Marie-Rose - or, rather, their
mutual complicity in the mechanics of an exemplarily bad
marriage.
O’Brien examines this perverse bond
and the individual mentalities involved in it more than
once in the novel, and in the end it the writing it elicits
is perhaps the finest imaginative achievement of the whole
book. It is there that she catches the inner reality of
character - at least on one isolated context - and produces
sentences that have the dynamic of ‘felt thought’.
It is also informed with a kind of moral knowledge which
the reader inevitably refers to his or her own experience
of such relationships, past, present or come - and to that
extent it has a didactic (or at least a cautionary) thrust,
as of a fact observed and a lesson learnt:
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For some time now both were aware
that their original power to drown mutual offences
in passion, and build again on the oblivion that
passion gives - that this power was going, if not
gone. And one of them knew that the will to seek
such periodic mending was gone out of him. But,
having been infatuated with Marie-Rose and having
failed in that infatuation, he was no longer the
man he had been before he saw her. She had taught
him much, and taken much away. There was no regaining
his old imperviousness to feeling; there was no
going back to contented isolation. [103]
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And, a little later:
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Youthfully in love, Vincent and
Marie-Rose had entered married life, each unconsciously
on guard against a passion which might submerge
the beloved and familiar self, which might ask arrogance
to die. And quick emotional antennae had not been
long to find for each this hidden harshness, this
antagonism in the other. Delight made little enough
of it at first - indeed exulted sometimes in its
stimulation - and found no trouble in subduing it
to natural rapture. But the aftermath was always
bitter - neither could see why; neither could bear
to have it so. Resentment, always quicker in both
than tenderness, spread itself, evolving a game
for them to play, so that if Marie-Rose, in temper
to punish her own softness as well as her husband’s,
ignored or jibbed from his moods of amorousness,
he had his vengeance when in turn she played the
lover. [109]
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No wonder, then, that for Marie-Rose,
‘the only real escape’ from this ‘cat-and-dog
life’ was to return to a sister ‘who had always
rejoiced to take her as she found her’ [110]. Whether
it is entirely credible that the sisters who are so
closely bonded in one sense and so different in character
in another could have fallen for the same man, and he
in turn for them, is a question that lies in the real
of novelistic design and literary intention.
Given the intra-familial framework
of this novel, it is arguably the house itself - of
which it is said ‘[t]here was no space in it where
a hear might scold against a private wound’ - that
provides the unifying element in the setting and the
events described. In this sense, The Ante-Room is
quintessentially a novel of family life, rather than
the story of one character or another. Indeed, the novel
fits neatly into a series about the same family from
Mellick which forms the subject matter of Without
My Cloak (1931), the winner of Hawthornden and James
Tait Black prizes, and a chronicle of three generations
of the Considines.
Smaller in scale that the former novel,
it more persistently interrogates the quality of personal
consciousness and carries the reader into areas of more
refined discovery, as in the early passage where it
poses the question whether personality amounts to a
‘spiritual unity’ rather than a bundle of
familial associations. Hence Agnes who asks this of
herself:
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She wondered if other lives
had more unity than hers, which seemed to have
only a circumstantial and not a spiritual consistency.
Her early childhood, for instance, except for
a few comic and catastrophic memories, and a
suspicion that then already her sister Marie-Rose
had seemed specially to decorate the scene for
her, might have been from her present vantage
point someone else’s, uninteresting, normal,
happy and unhappy. [5]
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In the world of romantic fiction,
it is usually the beloved who embodies the ideal of
an integrated existence - and understandably so. In
this case, Vincent represents for Agnes her (and the
novel) that ideal, and does so through his character
as a man of a certain isolated kind, masterful and
apparently immune to the ordinary confusions and diminishments
that result from happenstance involvement with the
lives of others. In her eyes, before marriage, he
thus appears ‘remote, Hellenic, in his perfect
balance of gaiety, intelligence and beauty’ as
if he ‘could hardly be bothered to percieve ...
the humdrum lives of normal men in which he had to
share’. [32-33].
As one of the most extended passages
of analysis in the novel, the account of Vincent’s
transformation after marriage is worth examining in
detail. The personage whom O’Brien describes
in it is something like a cross between the Tom Buchanan
and the title character in Scott Fitzgerald’s
novel The Great Gatsby (1926) - in every way
robust and manly, and given to a selfish conceit that
takes no account of other’s feelings, but at
the same time an idealist, even a mystic of a kind.
It is, precisely, the defeat of this mysticism in
the face of marital disharmony that leads to his destruction.
Before marriage, Vincent was ‘a
dreamer ... detached from the immediate world’
and impervious, in particular, to the blandishments
of young women - the ‘beauties’ of Limerick
and Dublin of whom the novelist speaks in a lightly
ironical tone. When he falls for Agnes’s sister,
however, his heroic stature starts to dwindle: ‘having
been infatuated with Marie-Rose and having failed
in his infatuation, he was no longer the man he had
been before he saw her’ [103].
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There was no regaining his
old imperviousness to feeling; there was no
going back to contented isolation. She had taught
him to sulk at the world on which he had been
used to smile. having led him much further than
any other woman into the maze of passion, she
had somehow with him missed the way to a central
and explanatory love so that he was left guessing
at the measure of her disappointment, but ruthlessly
and bitterly aware, out of his accomplished
knowledge of her, that it [103] could never
be as dark or deep as his. [104]
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And now love, we are told, ‘had
come back to play a devil’s trick on him ...
It was the nemesis of his temperament.’ [104]
That is to say, having been tutored in emotional dependence
- which he had purposely shed with the death of his
own mother, he is frustrated in his marriage with
Marie-Rose and turns to the more substantial personality
and no lesser beauty of Agnes to find the fulfillment
for which that his soul yearns.
Set in the 1880s - as an aside on
the part of the novelist reveals (p.105) - the novel’s
brief events are contemporary with the career of Charles
Stewart Parnell, another magnificently independent
man and one who provided leadership for the class
from which Kate O’Brien sprang, though himself
a Protestant Irishman with admixed American parentage
and temperament. This element of deliberate archaicism
in the novel - which is almost a historical tale at
the time of its composition - reveals that fact that
the class of whom O’Brien was writing had, by
then, virtually passed out of existence or had, at
least, lost its tenure as a dominant social group.
By 1934 Irish history belonged to the petty-bourgeoisie
- class of shop-keeper class, priests, school-teachers
and ‘strong farmers’ - and, in this sense,
Vincent’s suicide is emblematic of the nemesis
of an entire social order.
Encouraged to vie for leadership
in Ireland under successive Home Rule Bills, the haute
bourgeoisie were finally cast aside and deposited
- if not in the ‘trash-heap of history’,
in Trotsky’s brutal phrase, then - in the a sequestered
region of society where only those with the superfine
ears that make the prose of this novel writable and
readable were aware of their refined existence. This
novel is marked by a stylistic ardour that sets it
apart from much contemporary Irish writing. Indeed,
the nearest point of comparison is the Anglo-American
prose of Edith Wharton or even of her master, Henry
James - whose novel Washington Square, ‘which
everyone was reading in Cornhill [Magazine]’
[123] is all the rage at the time of the events described.
In this sense, the space into which
O’Brien has slipped her novel is itself an ante-room
beyond which extend the less hospitable spaces
of modern Irish society where there will be no Roseholms;
or if they exist, they will remain suffused in post-colonial
twilight. It is thus that the novel strikes an elegiac
note, not merely of something that flourished on Irish
soil and passed away in time but of something that
was still-born or died in infancy: the Irish catholic
bourgeois civilisation to place against the English
Protestant middle-class world against which, in form
and substances, it pitted itself in the age of Charles
Stewart Parnell.
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