Abstract
After tuberculosis became curable rather than a death sentence, it did not take long for this previously unimaginable reversal to appear in fiction. The moment of fictional change first appears in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. While such narratives written after the midpoint of the twentieth century are obviously historical in nature, they can be considered in two distinct categories: first, one in which the writers themselves are born early enough to bear witness to untamed tuberculosis, and second, those in which the personal memory of the disease no longer exists. The novels in the second category are, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, “retelling” rather than “telling.” They rely more heavily on the writers’ imaginations, moving us toward a point where tuberculosis is no longer being represented as simply itself. The most recent novel examined in this study, Mary Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl, offers what Morrissy herself calls a “Sanatorium of the Imagination” where tuberculosis itself is imbued with and used to convey metaphorical resonances and buried secrecies. In Morrissy’s narrative, written in 1996 against the backdrop of ongoing shocking revelations, tuberculosis leads us right into the dark heart of the continuing lingering conditions currently under examination in Irish Studies.
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Notes
- 1.
See Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980), 179. Quoted by Margaret Kelleher, “Irish Famine in Literature,” in The Great Irish Famine, edited by Cathal Póirtéir (Cork: Mercier Press, 1995), 241.
- 2.
Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy (New York: Plume, 1987), hereafter abbreviated to CG.
- 3.
The mystery is never fully explained. Mama probably drowns in a Shannon lake, but could possibly have run away to escape an abusive marriage. The most likely explanation is perhaps that she was hoping to borrow some much-needed money from a relative. Her body is never found.
- 4.
Williams himself died of consumption in 1862. For the full text of the poem, see The Ballads of Ireland, collected and edited by Edward Hayes, vol. 1 (1857), 331–2. Digitized by Google Books, 2013. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Ballads_of_Ireland_Collected_and_Edi/1fum8gc62BYC?hl=en.
- 5.
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), hereafter abbreviated to IM, 73.
- 6.
Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), hereafter abbreviated to DS.
- 7.
Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (New York: New York University Press, 1999), hereafter abbreviated to WD, 79.
- 8.
See Table 3.2, Deaths from TB and other ‘general’ diseases, Dublin 1896–1911, DS, 160.
- 9.
Alan Carthy charts the path leading to the closure of the sanatoria in 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. He records the success of multidrug treatments, the consequent shortening of hospital stays, the transfer of the remaining patients to dedicated wards in general hospitals, and, finally, closure. The last patient left Newcastle Sanatorium in County Wicklow, where Noel Browne’s own father died of tuberculosis and he himself worked, in October 1963, a bare ten years after Baba’s fictional stay, and the sanatorium was handed over to Wicklow County Council “for use as a mental hospital,” still in use for that purpose today, TTI, 344.
- 10.
Greta Jones, “Captain of all these men of death”: The History of Tuberculosis in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Ireland (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), hereafter abbreviated to “Captain,” 227.
- 11.
Mary Morrissy, “TB in a Sanatorium of the Imagination.” The Irish Times, 2 January 1996. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tb-in-a-sanatorium-of-the-imagination-1.18338.
- 12.
Maeve Kelly “was born in Ennis, Co. Clare, trained as a nurse at St. Andrew’s Hospital in East London in the 1950s, and the fictionalized diary of which the novel consists is clearly based on these experiences.” See Tony Murray, “Writing Irish Nurses in Britain,” in A History of Irish Working-class Writing, edited by Michael Pierse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), hereafter abbreviated to “WINB,” 199.
- 13.
For a more rounded analysis of Florrie’s Girls, please see Murray, “WINB,” who examines Cos’ maturation and her move toward independence. In my analysis I focus on tuberculosis in Cos’ life rather than all that this brave, plucky young woman learns about life and love.
- 14.
Maeve Kelly, Florrie’s Girls (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1991), hereafter abbreviated to FG, 167.
- 15.
The Great London Smog is brought to life in Season 1, episode 4 of the Netflix series The Crown, first aired in November 2016.
- 16.
See Anne Mac Lellan, “Victim or Vector?: Tubercular Irish Nurses in England, 1930–1960,” in Migration, Health, and Ethnicity in the Modern World, edited by Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), hereafter abbreviated to “Victim or Vector?,” 108.
- 17.
The BCG vaccination was in use from 1924. See Jones, “Captain,” 133–4.
- 18.
“The formation of calcified granulomas in the lungs is often due to infections. These can be from a bacterial infection, such as tuberculosis.” see https://www.healthline.com/health/calcified-granuloma#symptoms.
- 19.
PAS (para-aminosalycilic acid) “was a powerful inhibitor” of the mycobacterium tuberculosis, and was in frequent use from 1950. Streptomycin was in use by 1946.
- 20.
See Fintan O’Toole, “The Impossible Irish Novel,” in The Irish Times, 30 March 2013, hereafter abbreviated to “Impossible.” https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/strumpet-city-the-impossible-irish-novel-1.1343043. The novel was chosen as Dublin’s One City One Book title for the centenary of the Lockout. Radio Telefis Eireann also aired a television miniseries adaptation of the novel in 1980. This lavish production, directed by Tony Barry, boasted several notable cast members, including Peter Ustinov in a brief appearance as Edward VII, Peter O’Toole as James Larkin, Donal McCann as Mulhall, and David Kelly as Rashers. Hugh Leonard wrote the script. See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0233110/fullcredits.
- 21.
James Plunkett, Strumpet City (London: Arrow, 1969), hereafter abbreviated to SC, 370.
- 22.
“The Lockout was, as Plunkett shows in Strumpet City, the culmination of five years of increasingly bitter disputes between Dublin’s unskilled workers, organized by Larkin’s Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union, on the one side and the city’s employers, led by William Martin Murphy, on the other…. The lockout of 20,000 workers lasted for more than six months before the ITGWU members and their families were effectively starved into submission,” O’Toole, “Impossible.”
- 23.
James Larkin was the charismatic leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. While the 1913 Lockout served up a temporary defeat to the workers, Larkin brought energy, hope, and the possibility for change. O’Toole draws a telling comparison between Strumpet City and Joyce’s Dubliners: “Joyce saw Dubliners as an anatomy of the city as ‘the centre of paralysis’. This might very well be a description of the city in the first part of Plunkett’s epic. But in Plunkett’s case the paralysis is convulsed by the shock of James Larkin’s arrival,” “Impossible.”
- 24.
Talia Schaffer, Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), hereafter abbreviated to Communities.
- 25.
Ida Milne, Stacking the Coffins: Influenza, war, and revolution in Ireland, 1918–1919 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 88.
- 26.
Granny Nash, Henry’s maternal grandmother, assists at his birth in 1901, and immediately afterwards “discovered that she could read.” And Henry himself was “a broth of an infant, the wonder of Summerhill and beyond …. the Glowing Baby.” Yet as Henry himself adds, the greatest miracle of all is simply that he was “a healthy, good-sized baby …. a fine lad who was going to live,” Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry (New York: Penguin, 1999), hereafter abbreviated to SCH, 26–7.
- 27.
For the full review-article containing both viewpoints, see “Did Roddy Earn His Star? Tá! Níl!” Reviews by Sandy Manoogian Pearce and David Krause, Irish Literary Supplement 21, Issue 2 (Spring 2001), 13–4. The subsequent critical conversation has been more positive than negative. See, for example, Kim McMullan, “New Ireland/Hidden Ireland: Reading Recent Irish Fiction,” The Kenyon Review 26, no. 2 (Spring 2004), 126–48. McMullan praises Doyle for writing a revisionist narrative with what she describes as “deconstructive vigor,” and reads Henry’s story as offering “a persistent faith in the possibility of a newer Ireland,” 130.
- 28.
Sontag stresses that tuberculosis is just a disease: “The most truthful was of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking,” IM, 3.
- 29.
For more details, visit Tóibín’s own website, http://colmtoibin.com/content/biography.
- 30.
Consider, for example, Tóibín’s incorporation of historical detail in his fictional biographical portrait of a period in the life of Henry James, The Master (New York: Scribner, 2004). Another masterful piece of historical recreation occurs in Brooklyn (New York: Scribner, 2009), 38–52, in which Tóibín describes in meticulous detail the realities of a third-class ocean crossing between Liverpool and New York in the very early 1950s.
- 31.
These hitherto unspoken realms in a multigenerational family are all brought to the surface in The Blackwater Lightship (New York: Scribner, 1999), hereafter abbreviated to BL. Young Helen and Declan experience their father’s death from cancer at a distance, without ever having the nature of his illness explained or even mentioned to them. Declan, who is gay, keeps the secret of his sexuality and then of his AIDS from his mother and grandmother until he is very close to death. In The Master the probability of James’ homosexuality remains just beneath the surface of the text, never becoming fully visible.
- 32.
Colm Tóibín, The Heather Blazing (New York: Scribner, Reissued with an Afterword 2012), hereafter abbreviated to HB, 64.
- 33.
See TTI, 244. Dr William O’Connor was the tuberculosis officer.
- 34.
Colm Tóibín, Nora Webster (New York: Scribner, 2014), 362–3.
- 35.
Mary Morrissy, Mother of Pearl (London: Vintage, 1996), hereafter abbreviated to MP, 4.
- 36.
For a detailed and fascinating interrogation of Morrissy’s use of Gothic motifs in the novel, see Haruko Takakuwa, “Irish Neo-Gothic: Mary Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl,” Reading 25 (2004), 89–99. Haruko pays attention to many key motifs, including the haunted castle and the domestic sphere (the houses on Jericho Street and Mecklenburgh Street), mother-daughter mirroring and doubling, and the return of the past. They note, however, that in keeping with the contemporary anxieties addressed in the novel, Mother of Pearl reverses “the usual formula of the Radcliffean suspense where the terrifying mystery is answered and explained at the very end,” 97. Mary never knows the full truth of her story; answers are not within her grasp.
- 37.
Spectral, decaying houses, the skeletons of homes gone terribly wrong, continue to manifest themselves in Irish fact and fiction. In a haunting murder case in May 2018, fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Ana Kriégel was sexually assaulted and murdered in a derelict house by two thirteen-year-old boys. See Conor Gallagher, “Ana Kriégel murder trial: the complete story,” The Irish Times, 18 June, 2019. Online: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/criminal-court/ana-kri%C3%A9gel-murder-trial-the-complete-story-1.3929570. See also Sally Rooney, Normal People, (London: Faber & Faber, 2018), 33. Conor takes Marianne to a similar filthy, polluted abandoned house with its damp, bloodstained mattress in the post-Celtic Tiger “ghost estate, Mountain View.”
- 38.
“As early as 1837 this area was noted for its ‘great number of destitute poor, [and] dissolute and depraved characters’ of both sexes. The Mecklenburgh/Montgomery district of the city, north-east of the Custom House, marked the infamous ‘Monto’ district.” https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/monto/.
- 39.
Haruko offers a similar reading of the collapsing of the cities as a way to demonstrate the impossibility of escaping the past. However, they think of the past specifically in historical Colonial terms, saying that “What this allegorical Irish ‘capital’ seems to point to is the nation’s history of colonialism,” 98. They are of course correct, also citing “some odd references to the Famine; Irene’s mother comes from the village ‘deserted by famine and emigration’ (5), and Granitefield ‘was a poorhouse in famine times’ (11),” 98. However, I extend the use of the cities to focus also on the shadows caused by personal pasts and the false security offered by border crossings.
- 40.
Jennifer Johnston, The Gingerbread Woman (London: Headline, 2000), hereafter abbreviated to GW, 39.
- 41.
Natalie A. Hewitt (2013), “Something old and dark has got its way”: Shakespeare’s Influence in the Gothic Literary Tradition, CGU Theses & Dissertations, 77.
- 42.
Siobhán Kilfeather, “The Gothic Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, edited by John Wilson Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 82.
- 43.
See Sinéad McDermott, “Maternal belongings and the question of ‘home’ in Mary Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl,” Feminist Theory 4, no. 3 (2002), 279. See also McDermott’s EN 4, 280: “Anne Fogarty discusses Mother of Pearl as an example of recent fictions by Irish women that ‘respond to and are embedded in the prevailing public debates about the recent revolutionary and unprecedented alterations in Irish society’ (Fogarty, 2000, 61–2). She locates the ability of such texts to intervene in, and to move forward, these debates in their subversive questioning of the family/home and the entrenched gendered roles associated with it.”
- 44.
Fintan O’Toole, Preface, Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus, The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), xi.
- 45.
de Valera’s vision of the nuclear family is enshrined in Article 41 the 1937 Constitution. “1.1.The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law. 1.2. The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State. 2.1. In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” See https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Ireland_(original_text)#THE_FAMILY.
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Sealy Lynch, R. (2024). Naming the Scourge and the “Sanatorium of the Imagination”. 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_7
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