There has been an opera festival in Wexford town every October since 1951. It’s renowned for reviving rarely-seen operas. At 16, as a local schoolgirl, I had the opportunity to get my hands on a ticket to attend an opening-night performance at the old Theatre Royal. Much to the envy of my parents, who fought for tickets for the dress rehearsals each year, off I went in a little black dress of my mother’s to see Elisa e Claudio, a comedy with a complicated web of lovers who, in the end, all marry the ones they love to great rejoicing – an encouraging (and perhaps misleading) start to my interest in the art form.
Jump to 1994 and the red-and-gilt jewellery box of the Gaiety Theatre, in Dublin. I could now afford my own ticket to La Traviata, the story of Camille (Violetta, in Verdi’s adaptation), the vivacious young courtesan who is pressured by the father of her lover to break it off to save his family from scandal. At the end of the opera the heroine with blue-black hair and the voice of an angel dies of consumption. As I was leaving I overheard a patron mutter, “That was bloody marvellous. Not a dry eye in the house.”
Carmen followed, and other classics, but it was not until I saw Puccini’s Madama Butterfly that I thought the storyline was rigged. I still recall the effect of dark red liquid spreading across the stage at Cio-Cio San’s death by hara-kiri. Clearly, I had been wrong-footed by Elisa e Claudio. The message to women was now clear: sin – deviate from the rules, love outside the boundaries – and you must die suffering. But I also detected a far more dangerous subtext: this falling in love must be something truly extraordinary if it was worth dying for.
The poems in Fallen, my new collection, explore in part how the early programming of “feminine ideals”, through art and literature, can perpetuate self-damning and social condemnation. The poems also attempt to reclaim some of these tragic heroines, or at the very least imagine a different ending to their stories:
READ MORE
for Madame Butterfly than hara-kiri?
A day’s walk east from Nagasaki is an orchard
robed in stone-fruit trees. There, let her fall;
and let the precious-metal flying beetles
sense the fruit and seek out Cio-Cio-San’s
remains, to nourish their white larvae on sweet flesh,
a thousand emerald wings carry her, onwards.”
(from Contagion)
LET ME TAKE the story back to Adam and Eve and the Fall. Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, rests the blame heavily on the woman’s shoulders. But other stories tell us that even before Eve there was Lilith, with her heavenly hair, created from dust as Adam’s equal, and not one for the patriarchy.
Her refusal to submit to her husband led to her banishment from the garden of Eden, and her subsequent association with chaos, seduction and ungodliness. She becomes that despised creature most feared by wives, the succubus – tempter of men, murderer of children. In contrast, the ideal woman figure – good wife material – should be demure and subordinate:
a cotton nightdress she’d have to grow into.
She filled her days with busyness,
arranging severed heads
of camellias in crystal bowls, learning
how to make fiddly things—filo pastry,
and babies, which are even more complicated.”
(from The Weight of a Marriage)
After all, the stakes were high. In the days before the paternity test, a chaste and obedient wife was man’s best insurance against cuckoldry or, worse, raising an illegitimate child.
Perhaps the circulation of printed versions of the Bible throughout the 15th century helped spread the fallen-woman trope. Or perhaps it was perpetuated by Renaissance artists, obsessed with the fallen woman, who confected Mary Magdalene – the consummate woman sinner, the holy prostitute – from more than one biblical figure, since no one woman had exactly that right mix of seduction and suffering.
From an early age I’d been exposed to strong, powerful women characters. One heroine of Irish mythology, the wily, promiscuous Queen Medb, struck me, years later, as a possible inspiration for Sylvia Plath’s speaker in Lady Lazarus: “I rise with my red hair. And I eat men like air”. I wanted to eat men like air, and who was to stop me?
Ireland, however, had changed from Queen Medb’s time. A schoolmate dropped out of third year to care for her sick aunt in Cork. It was years before I learned that she had been hidden away in an institution for unmarried mothers and forced to give up her baby for adoption. She later married her long-term boyfriend and they had more children. In Dublin, the city of my birth, the Magdalen Asylum for Penitent Females (later Denny House) only closed its doors in 1994.
And it wasn’t just in Ireland that women were punished for their perceived immorality: the Victorian era had ushered in a slew of almost exclusively male writers and librettists who had, at the centre of their stories, the figure of the fallen woman. These stories were also reaching a wider audience; by the close of the 19th century, following on from Pushkin’s early prototype Eugene Onegin, the novel became the dominant literary genre to propagate these cautionary tales.
The fallen woman had morphed over the millenniums from Lilith – seductress and agent of her own undoing – into the kind of tragic figure we see in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Despite Hardy’s empathy for the central character and his criticism of the moral hypocrisy of the day, Tess nonetheless dies by hanging. In an earlier Hardy novel, The Return of the Native, Eustacia drowns in a weir – punishment, no doubt, for her wanton ways: “To be loved to madness – such was her great desire.”
Even women writers of the period, such as Jane Austen, were creating social blueprints depicting grave consequences for the spirited or naive woman. Writers such as Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, empathetic as they were to social injustice and the plight of women, still produced characters such as Nancy (Oliver Twist) and Fantine (Les Misérables), doomed to violent or lonely deaths. The sale of Fantine’s front teeth broke my heart. Two gold napoleons (40 francs) in exchange for her beauty. What happens to her character haunts me to this day.
WHEN I FIRST READ Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, I was going through a difficult period after the end of my marriage and the start of a new relationship. I related to Anna, one of the world’s favourite tragic heroines, in a way I never could with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
like Anna, or Emma—the fellow-fallen,
how almost accidental it sounds! Fallen—
as though I’d lost my footing, stumbled on the lip
of the moat, or slipped like a child’s doll
over the glass fence of the enclosure.”
(from Fallen)
Emma Bovary was a character I never warmed to, farming out her child while she gads about spending in a fervour. Anna, vain and naive, follows her heart, but as the story unfolded I was filled with fear of what would become of her (and me). I put the book down. It remains unfinished on my bookshelf, with the corner still folded on page 306.
I know, of course, what becomes of Anna – it would be impossible to dodge it forever. But I was bothered for years by questions: why did she have to die quite so savagely? Why does Vronsky, the playboy, get to live? And why is he not a ruined man (if such a thing even exists)? Does Karenin refuse her access to her child because of a societal belief that she’s no longer a fit and proper mother? I don’t know the answers. I’ve since learned that Tolstoy began each working day by reading the work of Charles Dickens. In his creation of the character of Anna, Tolstoy continued to nurture the idea that bad women should be killed off; the more violently, the clearer the message:
and all the better if it’s savage: haemorrhage,
or pestilence (consumption was a favourite),
we scandal-makers murdered, hanged, or dead
by our own hand: Arsenic! Dagger! Train!”
(from Contagion)
HOW FAR HAVE we come? Are men still writing the fallen woman into contemporary literature? When John Fowles published The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in 1969, he took the word “novel” literally. With his three alternative endings, he wanted to create something new. Regardless, the enduring image from the book, and the subsequent film it inspired, is of a lonely woman standing on a pier, pining for a lover who has abandoned her. Some of the poems in Fallen strive to restore agency to characters such as Sarah Woodruff:
He left me there for years. Not really
a man, you understand, but a fiction—
one confected by a real man for his tale.
All that is past. Today these briny spangles
are my diamonds, oarweed my bouquet.”
(from Cold Water Swimming in Lyme Regis)
Even in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, perhaps my favourite novel of all (and one that features Hana, one of the many strong woman lead characters of modern literature), Katherine, the adulteress, dies an unimaginably cold and lonely death in a desert cave. Much like our current fascination with Nordic noir, the fallen-woman trope still sells.
What makes a good person? Can a good person leave a spouse who is also a good person? Can a person who has chosen self over others ever redeem themselves? And should they need to? Is it a given, if they break a vow, that they are immoral? How long does a bad person need to be punished for? These are some of the questions that Fallen grapples with. But at the heart of the collection is a love story, albeit heavily laced with guilt:
two eyes on one side of your face, mouth twisted
like a flounder, the bottom-feeder you have become.”
(from The First Worst Thing)
In exploring the lived experience (both my own and that of others known to me) of falling from social grace due to perceived immoral choices, it becomes clear that one of the worst things is the ongoing and relentless self-damning:
forsook the mirror ponds and topiary
for something dark and lovely as a fox den
stocked with ripened fruit. And still, she keeps
them in the furthest alcove, almost hidden:
her whip, her haircloth shirt, her thigh cilice.”
(from Souvenirs of Paradise)
The post-divorce world can be a lonely, challenging place. Invitations from people once considered dear and unshakeable friends simply evaporate. At the barbecue, wives are wary, as though the newly-single woman were a modern-day Lilith:
They smile at me the way people smile
at leopards through glass, or across a moat:
how safe we are, over here, in our marriages.”
(from Fallen)
Even husbands are a little nervous that whatever scourge the divorcee has might be catching, that their own wives might become dissatisfied through nothing more than clinking wine glasses in such dangerous company. But the fallen woman’s worst critic is often herself, especially if she is also a mother. The internal dialogue of shaming and guilt-tripping rarely quietens.
WHENEVER I FEEL like a bad mother I make lasagne. It’s fiddly and time-consuming and my children eat it in spadefuls. The recipe has evolved over years from the original I got from a New York Italian to include tips from an American married to a Greek. (It’s all about the nutmeg.)
(from Recipe for Redemption)
Even now, 10 years after the catastrophic events alluded to in this collection of poems, I make lasagne gladly and often as penance for my sins, for putting my children through a divorce, for being responsible for their living in two homes. Sometimes you just do what you can.
a toy rabbit dangled from the lowest
branches of a drowned tree, and there,
standing on the muddy banks:
the ones we loved, the ones we love still.”
(from The Ones We Hurt)
Fallen is published by the Gallery Press
