Shame and Belonging in the Fiction of Maeve Brennan
| Thesis title in Czech: | Stud, hanba a sounáležitost v díle Maeve Brennan |
|---|---|
| Thesis title in English: | Shame and Belonging in the Fiction of Maeve Brennan |
| Key words: | hanba|sounáležitost|povídka|Irsko|New York|gender|flanérka |
| English key words: | shame|belonging|short story|Ireland|New York|gender|flâneuse |
| Academic year of topic announcement: | 2019/2020 |
| Thesis type: | diploma thesis |
| Thesis language: | angličtina |
| Department: | Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK) |
| Supervisor: | doc. Clare Wallace, M.A., Ph.D. |
| Author: | hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept. |
| Date of registration: | 07.09.2020 |
| Date of assignment: | 09.09.2020 |
| Administrator's approval: | not processed yet |
| Confirmed by Study dept. on: | 17.09.2020 |
| Date and time of defence: | 04.06.2021 00:00 |
| Date of electronic submission: | 07.05.2021 |
| Date of proceeded defence: | 04.06.2021 |
| Submitted/finalized: | committed by student and finalized |
| Opponents: | prof. Mgr. Ondřej Pilný, Ph.D. |
| Guidelines |
| Maeve Brennan was born in Dublin in 1917, where she grew up, and spent her adult life in New York, writing first for Harper’s Bazaar and from 1954 for The New Yorker. She contributed to the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker under the pseudonym “The Long-Winded Lady.” A collection of these short texts was published in 1969 under the title The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker, identifying Maeve Brennan as their author. This part of her work serves as a unique probe into life in New York in the 1950s and 1960s as a young woman would have experienced it. The Long-Winded Lady is a well-to-do American lady out of the house and about the city – lunching, having drinks, shopping or enjoying a stroll and, unlike Brennan, never seen working. Brennan also wrote short stories, a few of which take place at an exclusive residential area called Herbert’s Retreat, where women with similar lifestyles are featured. Yet there is another level, as almost all the families at Herbert’s Retreat employ Irish maids, whose contempt for their employers is inserted into the stories. Brennan, the daughter of the Irish ambassador to the United States, moved in high circles, but on the other hand she had been raised in traditional Irish settings with values closer to those of the maids. This ambiguity made her an excellent observer of New York society, as well as an outsider both in the USA and in Ireland. Many of Brennan’s other stories are set in Dublin and built around the themes of isolation and severed family relationships. Some were collected in another 1969 publication titled In and Out of Never-Never Land and others in the 1974 Christmas Eve. Brennan’s last story appeared in The New Yorker in 1981, and towards the end of the twentieth century she disappeared from the public eye. A renewed interest in her work was marked by the republication of her short stories under the titles The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin (1997) and The Rose Garden: Short Stories (2000). After a discovery of a previously unknown manuscript, Brennan’s only novella The Visitor was also published in 2000, as well as a new edition of The Long-Winded Lady. In 2004 the Irish historian and academic Alexandra Bourke published a detailed biography titled Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy: An Irish Writer in New York and in 2013 a play about Brennan called “Maeve’s House” was staged by Eamon Morrissey in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Some of the titles mentioned above as well as Bourke’s biography have been since republished several times. The topic of this MA thesis is the relationship between shame and belonging in Brennan’s work. These two themes run through all of her writing, that of a need for, and lack of, a sense of truly belonging somewhere, and that of shame and the fear of it. Shame takes many shapes and forms – nuns publicly punishing a young girl for not singing loud enough during mass, rich American women fiercely competing in the field of house decoration, or the Long-Winded Lady’s confession that she had to leave a restaurant without even touching her meal because she couldn’t remember which part of her broccoli she was supposed to eat. There is shame that is Catholic and concerned with rules, morality and sin, as wells shame that is weaponized in a struggle to get on the top of the social ladder in New York suburbs. But what these forms of shame have in common is most obvious in the story about the broccoli. Somebody is always watching and measuring us up, as if deciding what label to put on us. The public eye is always there in Brennan’s writing, even in the seemingly safe environment of our own family house, and her characters are always on the watch to please it, as if fearing that their life hangs solely on opinions of others, and that if they fail to impress or live up to expectations, they will be cast out and the door shut behind them. Despite Brennan’s descriptions of beautiful houses, gardens and garments, this form of tension is palpable in all her writing and is worth exploring both as an artistic tool and as a psychological, cultural and philosophical concept. In the first part of the thesis, I am going to map and describe in what forms shame appears in Brennan’s writing and I will attempt to determine some basic patterns (eg. shame stemming from norms dictated by religion, by society and its culture, by the code of the neighbourhood, by the power structures in one’s family etc.) The second part will focus on linking these modalities of shame to the concept of belonging, especially the threat of a failure to belong. The last part will hopefully comprise a discussion of how the tension created by linking these two concepts served Brennan in her writing and what effects she achieved by building her stories around it. I intend to use a variety of secondary sources spanning the fields of literary theory, philosophy, sociology, social anthropology, psychology, religion and gender studies. I expect the last part to pose as the biggest challenge, as it will only take its full shape when the first two parts are completed. Nevertheless, it is also the most interesting and important part of the whole research. One of the possibly problematic aspects is that Brennan seems to have structured her stories on various dichotomies, such as disappointment and isolation, as Bourke documents, but although the concept of shame can be traced down in most of her writing, it is not clear to what extent she employed it consciously.[1] Brennan’s writing has been important as an example of a female voice in the male dominated The New Yorker in the second half of the 20th century, as well as of an Irish woman living and working in the USA at that time. Yet it is her ability to convey emotions and display aspects of human psychology too difficult to fully grasp that makes her work truly deserving of our attention. [1]Angela Bourke, Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy: an Irish Writer in New York (London: Pimlico, 2005) 180. |
| References |
| Primary sources: Brennan, Maeve. The Visitor. Dublin: New Island, 2019. The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker. Dublin: The Stinging Fly, 2017. The Rose Garden. Washington, DC: Counterpoint Press, 2000. The Springs of Affection. London: Flamingo 2000. Secondary sources: Adamson, Joseph, and Clark, Hilary.Scenes of Shame. Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 2015. Bouson, J. Brooks. Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Bråten, Stein. On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007. Broucek, Francis J. Shame and the Self. New York: Guilford Press, 1991. Bourke, Angela. Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy: an Irish Writer in New York. London: Pimlico, 2005. 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