The capacity to suffer in silence : a reading of john mcgahern’s the barracks / | ||||
| مجلة کلية الآداب.جامعة بنها | ||||
| Article 8, Volume 29, Issue 2, July 2012, Page 3-24 | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/jfab.2012.53374 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
| Abdel Mohsen Ibrahim Hashim* | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| The aim of this paper is to provide a reading of John McGahern’s The Barracks whose female protagonist encounters despair and frustration with an amazing way of endurance and silence. Elizabeth Reegan, a former nurse in England, now the second wife of an Irish policeman, living with him and his children by the first marriage in the local barracks in rural Ireland. ’Living’ is one way of putting it: to be accurate, Elizabeth is dying, slowly, and painfully, and unmercifully yo ung, of breast cancer, a disease for whose symbolic awfulness McGahern has the greatest respect. Elizabeth’s situation is further complicated by the fact that as a new stepmother, she is an outsider to children only recently bereft of their mother, and as a returned emigrant, she is an outsider to the community. Even Reegan, the man in whom she sees her salvation, treats her very badly and regards her as a mere housekeeper. But Elizabeth tries to say yes to the intolerant lunacy of her husband and the inhabitants of the small village in which her marriage has imprisoned her. She does so by submerging her own wishes and desires in an attempt to please, because she has been taught it is the proper thing for a wife to do. Her ability to see clearly the horror of her situation makes her the most human of McGahern’s characters and the most tragic. That Elizabeth whose illness has become a serious matter is deliberately ignored by both the husband and his children is indeed something unbearable. Thus, her marriage to Reegan proves less an alternative to suicide than suicide in a different, slower form. More painfully, she was nothing for the children who refuse to regard her as a second mother despite her sincere willingness to love and care for them as if these little creatures, hurt by their mother’s death, have learned to mistrust kindness. Now, Elizabeth is suffering: physically from cancer, and spiritually from the ungratefulness she encounters on a daily basis in a house where she is little more than a slave. Indeed, she is hopelessly trapped. Nevertheless, she decides to lead her life patiently and to endure her suffering silently. To conclude with Elizabeth’s description of herself as ’a flower that has withered in a vase behind curtains’. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Irish authors | ||||
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