Sacrificial women in short stories by Mary Lavin and Edna O'Brien

Kristeva comments upon the fluidity of the Madonna, who encompasses diverse female roles, as do the Irish female characters who emulate her. Discussing the dimensions of the Madonna - Virgin, mother, wife - Warner describes the primary effect of the Madonna myth: "By setting up an impossible ideal the cult of the Virgin does drive the adherent into a position of acknowledged and hopeless yearning and inferiority," (337). The heroines of Lavin's and O'Brien's stories fit the pattern of self-hatred that Warner describes. Their varieties of sacrifice stem from self-disgust fostered by failing to reach the standards of the Madonna myth.

In O'Brien's "Sister Imelda," the teenage narrator falls in love with her teacher, the beautiful young nun of the title. The joys of their love are the Foucauldian pleasures of self-denial - a passion never to be realized but fanned by both teacher and student through notes, whispered confidences, devotional gifts, and an occasional hug or kiss. This story fits the pattern of O'Brien's novels that Thomas F. Staley calls confessional, "crying out for absolution" (188). Imelda's and the narrator's romance makes life in the cold nunnery, tolerable, even enjoyable. The romance stands, in miniature, for the unrealizable passion that Sister Imelda holds for Christ. Thus it becomes an enlistment tool for the nunnery, as Sister Imelda lures the narrator into a permanent sisterhood of sublimated passion. The narrator abandons her plan to become a nun after she leaves the convent, instead taking up the worldly solaces of makeup and nylons to attract the attention of men. Her best friend, Baba, outdoes her at dressing like a mature woman, becoming the narrator's model as Imelda once was. Baba's name suggests trite babytalk among lovers, as well as the magic of the Arabian Nights - here the transformations of puberty that are supposed to lead to marital joy.

The narrator's struggle to sublimate her sexuality into a pure love for Sister Imelda may come from her wish to emulate the Virgin. Warner writes that "the foundations of the ethic of sexual chastity are laid in fear and loathing of the female body's functions in identification of evil with the flesh and flesh with woman" (77). The nuns' routine mortifications, which the schoolgirls are expected to imitate, reveal their sense that the female body is an inherently evil possession for which they must compensate. Sister Imelda gets a sty that suggests both her neglect of her body and her distorted view of it. Meanwhile, "Most girls had sore throats and were told to suffer this inconvenience to mortify themselves . . ." (2373). Sore throats are a metaphor for the voicelessness of the girls and the nuns under the convent's regimen. Both the nuns and the girls are often hungry because the convent habitually underfeeds them. Delicacies, such as the narrator's comically suggestive gift of bananas for Imelda, are saved for visiting bishops. The semi-starvation of both nuns and girls by a wealthy church forces their bodies into thin and spiritualized shapes that avoid the lush fecundity stereotypically associated with woman as sexual body. Weakened from hunger and other mortifications, the women are to look as undesirable and feel as undesiring as possible; however, the story, shows that neither goal is actually met.

The narrator feels the loathing for her body that underlies the convent's ascetic practices when, at the end of the story, she wants to jump out of the bus window to escape the gaze of Sister Imelda after two years of living outside of the convent. The narrator now sees Imelda as a judge who might condemn her for adhering to her culture's vision of woman as a sexual commodity. To the narrator, Imelda stands for the virgin identity that the narrator has decided to shun despite its high status when held by nuns. As Warner writes, "Thus the nun's state is a typical Christian conundrum, oppressive and liberating at once, founded in contempt for, yet inspiring respect for, the female sex. . . . But the very conditions which make the Virgin sublime are beyond the powers of women to fulfill unless they deny their sex" (77). That denial of sexuality is not easy for Imelda is suggested by the narrator's describing the nun's lips as those of "a woman who might sing in a cabaret" (2372). When Sister Imelda reads Cardinal Newman to her class, "she looked almost profane" (2372). Imelda's sensuality surfaced during a fling with a boy on the night before she became a postulant; it reappears during her inappropriate friendship with the narrator. In the convent's context of preserving a nun's or a schoolgirl's virginity, a mental lesbian liaison is more acceptable than a consummated heterosexual relationship. Within the context of current sexual scandals within the Church, the reader may wonder if the narrator's and Imelda's liaison was ever consummated, and if that consummation was beyond representation when the story was written. For the story's purposes, however, the desire itself is what matters. As Kiera O'Hara writes of O'Brien's characters, it is "the possibility of union," however unlikely, that obsesses the narrator of "Sister Imelda" (322). That transcendent union with Imelda would have both spiritual and physical dimensions.