Abstract
The writers examined in this chapter, though working in the same early twentieth-century time period as Joyce, Moore, and Macardle, approach phthisis very differently, eschewing any reference to Romantic imaginings and the attribution of meaning, even for contrasting effect. Instead they ground themselves in stoic, realistic portrayals of tubercular bodies and the toll exacted by the illness on everybody involved. Moreover, while the impossibility of a cure remains a grim constant in both groups of writers, Maura Laverty and the Irish language life writing discussed here emphasize the benefits of community. These narratives do not provide a tidy metaphorical sense of meaning, focusing not on what tuberculosis means, or represents, or signifies, but what it is. If there is meaning to be found, it is through the community care practices so often portrayed in the fiction. They do not grant an overarching sense of meaning to the disease itself, but are meaningful in their own right. Until Dr Noel Browne succeeded in taming the disease in the mid-1940s, its victims and the writers who portrayed their sufferings could only work with what they had: stoic acceptance and community care.
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Notes
- 1.
Grandmother in Maura Laverty, Never No More, with a Preface by Sean O’Faolain and a New Introduction by Maeve Binchy (London: Virago, 1985), hereafter abbreviated to NNM, 43.
- 2.
Sean O’Faolain, Preface, NNM, vii.
- 3.
Delia secretly sends her first poem, entitled “Flight Into Egypt,” to “the Poet’s Corner of a Dublin weekly paper.” She recounts that “When it won the weekly prize of half a guinea a few weeks later, I nearly went out of my mind with joy and excitement,’” NNM, 87. Her second composition, for which she is not paid, is published in The Irish Monthly, NNM, 185. Binchy tells us that in this respect Delia is like her creator. As a schoolgirl Laverty “struggled with little poems which she sent to religious magazines, and they won prizes” NNM, Preface, xiii.
- 4.
See Mary M. Macken, Review of Never No More, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 31, no. 5 (1942), 393.
- 5.
“Newspaper coverage has enabled the identification of three waves of the disease, in the early summer and autumn of 1918, and in the spring of 1919,” Ida Milne, Stacking the Coffins: Influenza, war and revolution in Ireland, 1918–1919 (Manchester University Press, 2018), hereafter abbreviated to Stacking, 18.
- 6.
Milne also ties “the lowest county influenza death rate in 1918,” in County Clare, to Ireland’s rail links. “The county’s infamously poor rail infrastructure, pilloried in the Percy French song ‘Are you right there, Michael,’ may have actually helped it escape the worst ravages of the influenza crisis through social distancing,” Stacking, 63.
- 7.
C. S. Breathnach and J. B. Moynihan, “The Academy’s foray into the politics of phthisis (tuberculosis) 1940–1946,” Irish Journal of Medical Science 173, no. 1 (2004), hereafter abbreviated to “Politics of Phthisis,” 50.
- 8.
Alan Carthy explains why tuberculosis patients in Kildare would often have had to leave the county to gain admission to a sanatorium in the 1920s. Amalgamation schemes intended to improve delivery of services were being organized and implemented in each county, but in Kildare and elsewhere, “Following the amalgamation schemes there was a shortage of accommodation in which to treat patients. In seeking to resolve this situation the most frequently adopted remedy was the acquisition of period houses and their adaption as sanatoria. Ostensibly this solution, using existing buildings, would provide the quickest means of increasing bed provision.” However, in practice progress was slow, beds were in short supply, and patients were referred to sanatoria in other counties: “Following the Kildare amalgamation scheme a small numbers of advanced tuberculosis cases were accepted in the county home in Athy. The minister had approved of the premises for such cases only on a temporary basis, ‘pending the provision of special accommodation for the purpose’ as his officials were of opinion that it was unsuitable on account of the ‘number of inmates of delicate constitution…likely subjects for infection’. Arrangements had been made with Peamount sanatorium to reserve sixteen beds for early curable cases.” The situation was not resolved until the 1930s, too late for poor Andy Flaherty. “The Kildare sanatorium was formally opened by Dr E. P. McCarron the secretary of the department on 2 February 1934. It was named St Conleth’s and contained a chapel dedicated to the saint. It had accommodation for thirty patients in three ten-bed wards,” Carthy, The treatment of tuberculosis in Ireland from the 1890s to the 1970s: a case study of medical care in Leinster. Thesis for the degree of PhD, Department of History, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2015, hereafter abbreviated to TTI, 234, 242, 248–50.
- 9.
“Grandmother had a remedy for ‘the looseness’ as she had for everything else. She pricked a nutmeg full of holes, toasted it on the point of a knife and boiled it in a quart of milk until most of the milk had evaporated and the nutmeg was soft enough to break up,” NNM 42.
- 10.
The ravages of tuberculosis also appear elsewhere in Laverty’s fiction. See, for example, “If Love Had a Color,” Woman’s Day, New York (May 1956), 28–9, 121–30. In this melodramatic little story, Eileen Casey succumbs to her greedy, manipulative mother’s wishes and stays home to look after her rather than marrying Dermot O’Brien, the love of her life. Dermot moves to Dublin and marries his landlady’s daughter after a chance meeting and “a quick flare-up of casual passion,” 127. However, Dermot’s delicate wife dies “after a year in a sanatorium,” 127, and Laverty treats her readers in the final pages to a little revenge fantasy, in which Eileen’s gluttonous mother is deprived of a particularly delicious cake she has forced her daughter to bake when Eileen instead offers it to Dermot’s daughter Katie for her ninth birthday. In a final twist of the knife, Eileen and Dermot are given a happy ending; they are to be married “four weeks from Wednesday,” 130. While death from tuberculosis here functions as a plot device, its presence in the story underlines its prevalence.
- 11.
Talia Schaffer, Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2021), hereafter abbreviated to Communities. See also Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), for another powerful argument for the importance of care and its role in community well-being. While Tronto is more interested in interrogating care in its political context, she also underlines the importance of the work of caring as contributory to “our definition of a good society,” Moral Boundaries, 2.
- 12.
Carthy reports that in 1920 Leinster experienced “2.05 [tuberculosis] deaths per 1000 the highest rate of the four Irish provinces,” TTI, 229.
- 13.
I here use English translations of these three texts: Maurice O’Sullivan, Twenty Years A-Growing, Translated from the original Irish by Moya Llewellen Davies and George Thompson, with an Introductory Note by E. M. Forster (New York: Viking Press, 1935); Tomás O Crohan, The Islandman, Translated from the Irish by Robin Flower (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951); Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island, Translated into English by Bryan MacMahon, Introduction by Eoin McKiernan, Illustrations by Catriona O’Connor (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1974). All subsequent references to these texts are from these editions, minimally abbreviated.
- 14.
Rita Charon, “At the Membranes of Care: Stories in Narrative Medicine.” Academic Medicine 87, no. 3 (March 2012), 342.
- 15.
For example, Peig explains that poetry offers comfort in times of sorrow: “People had a habit at that time of composing poetry whenever loneliness came over them—this so as to banish the sorrow from their hearts.” She goes on to cite six stanzas, forty-eight lines in all, of a poem that illustrates her contention, Peig, 95–7.
- 16.
Twenty Years, Introductory Note, v.
- 17.
See Elizabeth Grubgeld, Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 126.
- 18.
I here use an English translation, Patrick Pearse, Short Stories, Translated by Joseph Campbell, Edited and Introduced by Anne Markey (University College Dublin Press: 2009), hereafter abbreviated to Stories. A Note on the Text in this edition says that Campbell’s translations of the stories first appeared in the first volume of the three-volume Collected Works of Pádraig H. Pearse, published by Maunsel & Co., Dublin, in 1917. See Markey’s Introduction to Stories, xlvi. “Eoineen of the Birds” was first published in Irish in An Claidheamh Solais in 1906, while “The Thief” first appeared in Pearse’s second collection of short stories in Irish, An Mháthair agus Sgéalta Eile, published in 1913 by the Dundalgan Press. See Markey, xix and xxix. I would like to thank Aedin Clements for her help in identifying “Eoineen of the Birds” as the story I dimly remembered from my 1972 Leaving Certificate Irish syllabus.
- 19.
Other short stories written in Irish, like Padraic O’Conaire’s “Páidín Mháire,” also contain doomed tubercular subjects. See Maureen Murphy, “The Short Story in Irish,” Mosaic 12, no. 3 (Autumn 1979), 81–9.
- 20.
Schaffer argues that care communities are not limited to human beings: “Jane Eyre’s care community includes the moon and the tall grasses,” Communities 15. If we embrace an animist understanding of community in which “the world is infused with life,” Communities 41, we can extend the concept of care relations to include Eoineen’s swallows and even his favorite inanimate rock on which he sits. Schaffer notes that psychologists see such connections as “necessary for healthy development,” suggesting that “to the extent that a particular object gives us comfort, we are in a care relationship, though it may be one we have engineered,” Communities 41.
- 21.
See note 20 above for the role non-human subjects and inanimate objects can play within a care community.
- 22.
In a similar vein, Barry Devine argues convincingly for a consideration of Seán O’Casey’s play The Plough and the Stars through a tubercular lens. See “A Subject of Deepest Dread: Seán O’Casey, The Easter Rising, and Tuberculosis,” Journal of Medical Humanities 44 (2003), 61–71. Devine emphasizes that the characters in the play are “representatives of Dublin’s poorest communities forced to live in unhealthy conditions and endure the worst poverty in Europe,” and demonstrates that “there are more pressing matters with which these characters and audience members need to be concerned than elevating the leaders of the Easter Rising to hero status. This pressing matter was the tuberculosis epidemic that was still raging through poor communities as represented in the play. The Easter Rising serves only as a backdrop to the story O’Casey puts on stage,” 69.
Works Cited
C.S. Breathnach and J.B. Moynihan. “The Academy’s foray into the politics of phthisis (tuberculosis) 1940–1946.” Irish Journal of Medical Science 173, no. 1 (2004): 48–52.
Carthy, Alan. The treatment of tuberculosis in Ireland from the 1890s to the 1970s: a case study of medical care in Leinster. Thesis for the degree of PhD, Department of History, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2015.
Charon, Rita. “At the Membranes of Care: Stories in Narrative Medicine.” Academic Medicine 87, no. 3 (March 2012): 342–7.
Devine, Barry. “A Subject of Deepest Dread: Seán O’Casey, The Easter Rising, and Tuberculosis.” Journal of Medical Humanities 44 (2023): 61–71.
Grubgeld, Elizabeth. Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Laverty, Maura. Never No More, with a Preface by Sean O’Faolain and a New Introduction by Maeve Binchy (London: Virago, 1985).
Laverty, Maura. “If Love Had a Color.” Woman’s Day, New York (May 1956): 28–9, 121–30.
Macken, Mary M. Review of Never No More. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 31, no. 5 (1942): 393–4.
O Crohan, Tomás. The Islandman. Translated from the Irish by Robin Flower (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951).
O’Sullivan, Maurice. Twenty Years A-Growing. Translated from the original Irish by Moya Llewellen Davies and George Thompson, with an Introductory Note by E. M. Forster (New York: Viking Press, 1935).
Pearse, Patrick. Short Stories. Translated by Joseph Campbell, Edited and Introduced by Anne Markey (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2009).
Sayers, Peig. Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island. Translated into English by Bryan MacMahon, Introduction by Eoin McKiernan, Illustrations by Catriona O’Connor (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1974).
Schaffer, Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021).
Tronto, Joan. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993).
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Sealy Lynch, R. (2024). Contagion and Community in Irish Fiction 1900–1942. In: Tuberculosis and Irish Fiction, 1800–2022. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40345-3_6
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