The Fabulous Female Form

7/29/2019 The Fabulous Female Form

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"The Fabulous Female Form": The Deadly Erotics of the Male Gaze in Mary

Lavin's 'The House in Clewe Street.' (Author)

Lynch, Rachael Sealy, Twentieth Century Literature

Recent critical attention to Mary Lavin's The House in Clewe Street has

tended to focus on the novel's treatment of traditional provincial Irish values,

the passing down or rejection of these values in the course of a story

spanning three generations and as many social classes, and the losing battle

waged by Gabriel, the chief male protagonist, as he struggles and largely fails

to extricate himself from the "mind-forged manacles" of his upbringing.(1) Yet

much of this criticism has, surprisingly, failed to recognize this novel for whatit is - a relentlessly scathing social commentary. Peterson, Bowen, and Garfitt

all concur that The House in Clewe Street, despite its sympathy for doomed

characters like Onny Soraghan, is not a text in which Irish middle-class

morality is seriously questioned. Even in the least complacent, most

sympathetic readings of this disturbing and underanalyzed novel, like those

undertaken by A. A. Kelly and Augustine Martin,(2) the grim details and

implications of the narrative, and the parallel development of the servant

Onny Soraghan and Gabriel Galloway, the bourgeois heir apparent, remain

largely unexplored.

Furthermore, Kelly's 1980 reading remains the most recent serious analysis;

the novel has been surprisingly unvisited since, despite a critical climate in

Irish studies that one would have thought welcoming to just such a

questioning portrayal of bourgeois attitudes and the treatment of women.

Lavin's portrait of Onny's degradation surely illustrates to perfection Eavan

Boland's contention that the duty of the woman artist is to break the silence

surrounding Irish women's issues and to subvert previously inherited "male"

literary discourse.(3) A necessarily ironic revisionary rereading of the male

and middle-class readings of Onny contained within the novel - onedemanded by the novel itself - emphasizes that Lavin undertook the very

task later underscored in Boland's revisionist agenda.

Why, then, has The House in Clewe Street suffered such neglect in recent

years? Why do the majority of critical readings of this novel remain virtually



unchallenged, when details in the narrative, particularly those connected with

the male and female gaze, complicate any attempt at an easy reading,

indeed warning the alert reader of the absurdity of relying on the comforting

assumption that the narrator's perspective must automatically represent that

of the author? On the contrary, Lavin's narrative clearly takes direct aim at

the very world it evokes. Despite a wealth of recent work on Irish womenwriters, including Lavin,(4) the virtual silence on the novel since 1980

continues. One possibility is that Lavin's expressed belief, quoted by Weekes

(135), that The House in Clewe Street and Mary O'Grady are "two bad novels"

has too much been taken to heart and has resulted in the ritualized dismissal

of these texts. Certainly Weekes herself, and other fine Lavin critics like Janet

Dunleavy, have preferred to turn their attention elsewhere? Yet I believe that

it has been a mistake to dismiss The House in Clewe Street. While it is,

admittedly, less taut and more verbose a work than is typical for Lavin, it

shares with her short fiction a concern with the position of women in society,

a focus on "the human need for love" and on "women and on human

concerns" that also encompasses "the sphere of universal humanity" (Weekes

154), and an emphasis on the similarities between male and female minds,

needs, experience, and potential across class and gender boundaries. The

meeting of minds across such boundaries that illuminates so powerfully and

provides the epiphanic moment of Lavin's "In The Middle of the Fields" is

explored with similar feeling and greater depth in The House in Clewe Street.

Just as Bartley Crossen and the young widow cross a social and cultural gulf

in their acknowledgment of a shared sense of overwhelming, unmitigated

loss in "In the Middle of the Fields," Onny and Gabriel follow paths into

adulthood remarkable for their similarities as much as for their differences,

despite the claims of an array of distorted subjective points of view offeredwithin this polyvocalic narrative. What I offer here is a long overdue

reassessment of an inexplicably overlooked text.

The novel was first published in 1945, during a period of unparalleled social

policing and sexual repression in Irish society. That Lavin is not exaggerating,

and that her fictional world accurately parallels provincial Irish society during

the period 1930-1950, deserves emphasis, and is shockingly affirmed in

details like this one provided by Tony Gray:

In October [1943], a cinema in Clones, Co. Monaghan, introduced a new

regulation which enforced segregated seating of the sexes, men on one side

of the aisle and women on the other, though married couples were permitted

to sit together. It was not necessary to produce a wedding certificate. Age

and a general appearance of respectability were given more consideration by



the cinema staff than such things as wedding rings, which could easily have

been borrowed for the occasion. (159)

Three points are notable in Gray's account of this appalling invasion of

privacy. First, we see evidenced a need, carried in this example to obsessive

lengths, to suppress in the public interest all behaviors not deemed

respectable. Second, the primary emphasis is placed not on the probable

existence of respectability but on its image, identifiable through appropriate

"appearance." Lastly, the authority invested in the cinema employees, hardly

leaders of society, as arbiters of public morality reveals a society that has

internalized self-censorship to an alarming degree. The gaze of the authorized

observer, regardless of the social class or personal power of the gazer, is a

potent one indeed, since it is this gaze that gauges the appearance of

respectability and renders its judgment accordingly. These points are exactly

the ones that Lavin addresses in The House in Cleve Street, she here exploresdefinitions (and the transmission of such definitions) of respectability in a

patriarchal and repressive society, the primacy of appearance, and the

destructive potential of the literally killing look. Furthermore, in her ugly

fictional exposure of the socially sanctioned writing of women's lives in Irish

society, Lavin lays bare the hierarchical framework of Irish society and warns

of the dangers of the unthinking acceptance of the dictates of the status quo.

Lavin's sympathies in the novel appear to be close to those of Irish feminists

like Nuala ni Dhomhnaill and Edna O'Brien, rather than supportive of receivedmiddle-class values. Her portrayal of the attitudes and assumptions behind

the building of conventional female narratives and points of view invites

comparisons of The House in Cleve Street with other contemporary Irish

women's responses to female experience in the context of Irish patriarchal

culture. For example, the emptiness of the lives of the unmarried sisters,

Theresa and Sara (lives serving as textbook illustrations of Carolyn Heilbrun's

descriptions in Writing a Woman's Life of patriarchally determined female

existences, male-written women's lives), is purportedly caused by their

father's yanking them before they were ready from one gender role (that of

spoiled daughters) to another (that of surrogate mothers) after their motherdies in childbirth. The pair, still children themselves, are commanded thus by

their father: "You must love your little sister... so that she will never miss the

love of her poor mother." "He spoke to them," the narrator adds, "as if they

were themselves... beyond the need of love and care" (36).



However, the real tragedy underlying these women's personal narratives is

clearly shown to grow from the very existence of such rigidly predefined

roles, narratives of gender controlled and stage-managed by men. Theresa

and Sara do dutifully mother their little sister Lily, stifling their resentment

and wearing their own youth thin. But how could these two elder daughters

have avoided feelings of bitterness, given that before Lily's birth they baskedin the satisfied approbation of their father? He anticipated the "grand time"

he would have in the sport of "hunting down suitable husbands" for them

(19), and he determined - since "a girl would not be expected to work, and

since all that she would have would come to her from two sources, from her

father and from a husband" (18) - to provide handsomely for their futures.

What Lavin is detailing here is the early twentieth-century provincial

bourgeois version of a centuries-old Irish tradition that has inscribed the

female in rigid ways, reflecting cultural and religious views on women.Women in Irish culture were and are typically constructed as mothers, love

objects, temptresses, servants, nuns, or symbolic embodiments of Ireland.

Lavin's female space in The House in Clewe Street, like Edna O'Brien's in

stories like "Courtship," "Irish Revel," and the graphic and powerful "A

Scandalous Woman" - a tale of violence, abuse, narrowly conventional

morality, and their destructive consequences - is far less mythic than that

inhabited by Ni Dhomhnaill's revisionary Mebh (10), for example, and its

occupants rarely come close to defending it with dignity and honor. Onny's

defiance, her subversive refusal to behave like a servant, do not and, as Lavin

shows us, cannot result in her escape from the ranks of the defensive, thestruggling, the violated, the trapped. Lavin's Ireland, like O'Brien's, contains

its share of "strange, throttled, sacrificial women" (O'Brien 265). The three

sisters, living their lives according to rigidly encoded guidelines, are, less

obviously than Onny but equally, the victims of a culture that they would not

themselves dream of questioning. Lily's son Gabriel may be able to draw

strength, and even gain a degree of maturity, from his ultimate reliance on a

set of values that favors his existence, but surely the rigid social codes

inscribed in the novel offer a feminist commentary on the ways in which

women in Irish culture are routinely and, Lavin seems to be suggesting,

inescapably trapped by these codes.

That Gabriel's values are inculcated by his sisters, and in particular by the

overbearing Theresa, is typical of the manner in which, as Mary Daly has

observed (163-65), the society of women in patriarchal cultures frequently

functions in self-destructive fashion as a powerful - maybe the most powerful

- perpetrator of patriarchal values. Edna O'Brien's "A Scandalous Woman," for



example, contains an unforgettable scene in which the terrified and very

young female narrator is forced to submit for a time to a weekly symbolic

clitoridectomy performed by a slightly older female neighbor, with a younger

sibling as horrified assistant. In the course of these games of"hospital,"

performed with the help of a "big, black carving knife" and a winding-sheet,

the older girl passes on to the two younger ones the essentials of the societyin which they live, and in particular that women's lives are full of pain and

their bodies are dirty, fearsome vessels for childbearing, itself best viewed as

a clinical process. As the narrator lies stretched on the table like a sacrificial

victim, the neighbor, adopting a male doctor's persona, right down to their

real doctor's "dry, knowing coughs," traces the point of the carving knife

around the narrator's "scarcely formed breasts" before moving lower and

pronouncing "What nasty business have we got here?" (24142).

Theresa's treatment of the pregnant teenage widow Lily is a no-less fearsomefemale transmission of rigid views on the position of women in a male-

dominated society. Theresa does grudgingly accord her youngest sister the

modicum of respect due to "the band of gold that would make such a

difference in the distribution of authority between herself and her [unmarried]

sister" (64). However, relations are marred by Lily's having won her husband

and her band of gold from under Theresa's acquisitive and expectant nose.

Lily's relative household weight is so increased by her marriage that, with her

father's blessing, she can put out her shoes with her husband's for her

outraged elder sister to polish (77). As long as Cornelius remains alive, his

husbandly authority combines with that of the paterfamilias of the CleweStreet household to provide Lily with a safe patriarchal space, and in it she

plays her wifely role, flourishes, and, of course, becomes pregnant.

After Cornelius's fatal fall from his horse, Theresa is now free to abuse her

power as the family manager, viciously exacting revenge by literally

squeezing the life, and the wife, out of her now husbandless and therefore

vulnerable younger sister. Lily is infantilized, rendered directionless and

dependent, uncertain without her narrative of marriage which script to follow.

Declaring to her sister that "It makes me sick to hear people calling you Mrs.Galloway" (91), Theresa attempts to erase entirely Lily's privileged "married"

and "widowed" scripts: "The privacy of Lily's room was no longer regarded.

The sisters came in and out once more without knocking, and [the servant]

was instructed to take away the second pillow that wasn't needed any more"

(90). It is only at Theodore's insistence that Lily is given her "proper name" by

her sisters, and that the uncontrollably envenomed Theresa even

acknowledges the existence of Lily's pregnancy. Theodore, aware at least of



the clinical implications of his daughter's condition, insists that she be taken

to see the doctor.

Theresa's treatment of Gabriel reflects her feelings of ambiguity toward him.

He is the product of an undesirable union, and the potential usurper of her

own position of "patriarchal" household authority, yet he is also the future

man of the house. This delicate balance of Theresa's feelings toward her

nephew is weighted against him as a result of Lily's very existence having

robbed Theresa of her chances to marry a "suitable husband" while still

young. Surely her controlled hatred and abuse of Gabriel, denying the

intelligent youngster suitable schooling, for example, can be explained by her

sense that she herself is powerless to escape the "assigned script" (Heilbrun's

term) of spinster, having been denied a choice even among the limited

gender roles available to her. Lavin's feminist treatment of the three sisters

may not be strident, but it is nonetheless vivid in its detailing of the plight of women encased in seemingly inescapable narratives of gender. Their stories

are never idealized; the women of Clewe Street do not "find beauty even in

pain," and Theresa in particular does not transform her rage "into spiritual

acceptance" (Heilbrun 12) as she would if she were a heroine in a more

traditional genre. Lavin offers us in Theresa a woman poisoned, and

poisoning, as a result of the script to which she has been assigned, and it is

not a pretty sight.

Close examination of Lavin's portrayal in the novel of Lily's moment of emergence into womanhood, and of Onny, particularly after she becomes

Gabriel's mistress, further reinforces our awareness that Lavin is here

presenting us with a radical analysis of the ways in which women's

destructive personal narratives are written according to the rules of the

patriarchist status quo. Both these doomed women are treated far too

powerfully and sympathetically to be dismissed as the creations of an author

whose agenda is, as Peterson and Garfitt claim, close to that of the status

quo. Onny in particular is painful to watch as she struggles, at times blindly,

to escape from her inscription as servant and then as slut, from the stifling

"assigned scripts" written for her by all who surround her. Onny's desperateattempt to build something as yet unknown - because how could she know? -

only to be seduced along the way by the beguiling and ultimately destructive

versions of a woman's life she observes in Dublin, is portrayed with searing

comprehension. Garfitt, inexplicably, declares that "The fundamental

condescension of the middle-class characters toward [Onny] goes

unchallenged" (233). Such readings entirely ignore not only the ample

evidence to the contrary with which Onny's entire personal narrative is



loaded but also the foreshadowing complexity of early scenes like that in

which Cornelius "discovers" Lily in the darkening garden to be a woman.

This premonitory example of Lavin's dark vision of women's circumscribed

lives clearly warns of the dangers of superficial reading. It both underscores

Lily's role as victim of the objectifying male gaze that creates what it most

desires, and foreshadows the text's later treatment of the "very plastic" Onny

(338). The transformation of 16-year-old Lily from "girl" into "woman," in

Cornelius's eyes and under his transforming gaze, is sparked by his

complicity in the girl's wish to have a long dress to wear to the Annual Outing

of the Women's Sodality. Realizing that careful unpicking of the tucks in the

dress she is wearing can result in the granting of Lily's wish, Cornelius

proceeds, with mounting excitement, to help her in the execution of the task.

Lily herself, obviously, remains intrinsically unchanged from the beginning of

the scene until the end, but Cornelius, gazing upon her face, is brought to"the sight of desire" (59) by his stage-managing of the event and by the

lengthening and shaking out of the girl's dress and the fastening up for the

first time of her hair. Lily also is conscious of herself as spectacle, as making

changes, through Cornelius's vision of her, in her personal narrative: "in

shaking out the folds... she was shaking out the lottery of the years ahead."

Cornelius has won his prize because he functions as sculptor: "Like a statue

that rests unnoticed on a sculptor's bench, awaiting but one more stroke to

release it from the matrix and free it as a work of art, Lily's face needed but

the lifting of her hair to show what the town would be most astonished to see,

that she had both grace and beauty" (59).

This undeniably sensual scene of Lily's unfolding womanhood is read by

Bowen as Edenic (65-66). On the contrary, it is clearly provided with sinister

undertones, not only by its obvious dependence on the transforming power of

the male gaze but also by the gathering evening gloom in which Lily's coming

of age is perceived by its initiator, and by the images of entrapment, even

muffled violence, that pervade the occasion. Lily's little finger is "caught," for

example, on the gold ring of Cornelius's watch chain (61), stimulating her

"elated" suitor to "catch" first one, and then both, of "her slender wrists" inhis grasp. The reader leaves this scene feeling not that Lily has unfolded into

womanhood like a flower but that she has been "pricked" (58) by scissors,

unpicked, in a metaphorical act of violation, and then "caught" in Cornelius's

inscription of her as woman and wife.



Lavin's portrayal of the objectification of Onny Soraghan is no less specific

and astute. Onny's doomed struggle to generate her own personal narrative,

with few resources and little knowledge of what is available to her outside the

limited conventional scripts written for her (servant, slut, wife) by the Misses

Coniffe in Clewe Street and the three men who gaze upon her in Dublin, is

punctuated by scenes in which her role as gazee, as spectacle, is underlined.Most notably, a ghastly foreshadowing of her fate is provided by her work as

an artist's model for Sylvester's friend Telman, and the room in Sylvester's

apartment that he makes available to her and Gabriel is his studio, strewn

with abandoned "statuary" and "unfinished canvases" (338). Gabriel himself,

who spends much of the novel staring at Onny and making value judgments

ranging from the admiring to the repelled, is ashamed of the spectacle she

makes in her old clothes when he sees that Sylvester's glance is "sharp and

critical" (337) as he introduces his lover to his artist friend after they first

arrive in Dublin.

Onny's steadfast resistance of the judgmental gaze is truly extraordinary,

particularly given her limits of background and experience. She, more than

any other character in the novel, defies received notions about who she is

and how she should act, displaying a fine spirit of courage and rebellion. Her

shunning of Sunday Mass shocks Gabriel, as does her refusal to play the role

of submissive servant when Gabriel's aunts come to retrieve him and find

Onny instead: "You're not in Clewe Street now, Miss Coniffe," she says, "and

you've no rights over me" (384). However, that Gabriel, the well-trained

nephew, does presume upon such rights is emphasized throughout. Heconsistently refers to Onny as his "belonging," refusing to grant his

"permission" (414) for Telman to use her as a model, despite financial

hardship. When Gabriel protests that he could not live on Onny's money, she

rightly counters that "You can live on Sylvester's.... I don't see the difference"

(415). Sylvester, superficially less judgmental and morally hidebound, proves

to be no better. His "affection" (432) for Onny is clearly based on his own

feelings of superiority and views on Onny's inescapable class and gender

role: "To me she is just a little servant," he says (432), and orders her "to get

the dinner" (366).

Onny's eventual fate should not surprise us, given that she is surrounded by

such narrow-minded, provincial, bourgeois bigotry, and armed with so few

tools for self-survival besides her spirit, her "rich racial pride" (409) in her

humble part-tinker origins, and her magnificent body. The wonder is that she

resists the definitions and judgments of others as long as she does. Her

struggles toward self-definition against all odds result in the only real



moments of triumph in the novel, even if these struggles are doomed. We

rejoice when Onny, newly arrived in Dublin, refuses to veil her gaze of

wonderment at the people and pigeons that afford her such delight. She

resists Gabriel's controlling guidebook narrative, his attempts to direct her

gaze toward what she refers to as "stupid old buildings" (335), insisting

instead on viewing Dublin through her eyes. She also prevails in her choice of a new wardrobe, against the judgment of Sylvester and Gabriel, with

spectacular success and an unerring eye for what suits her.

Yet Sylvester is not one to pass up the opportunity for a satisfying male gaze.

In a scene remarkably reminiscent of Lily's coming of age in the garden, he

fixes the newly appareled Onny with an objectifying stare, offering his artistic

seal of approval: "Now, yon look effective, Onny," he says.

You were only a bundle of clothes when you got off the train; but now you are

a woman. The test of a well-dressed woman comes when a man can look at

her without being conscious that she is clad; when nothing distracts from the

sense of being in the presence of the fabulous female form. (342)

Onny later models her new clothes, not for Gabriel or Sylvester but for

herself. Gabriel comments, as she postures and pirouettes in front of the

mirror, "It isn't every man who can boast that he has a cabaret show in his

bedroom to entertain him while he changes his shirt," but he entirely misses

the significance of Onny's performance. "Her eyes were fixed upon the mirror

where a reflected lady bowed and postured with her, gesture for gesture. The

cabaret show was not for Gabriel. It was for her own delight" (406).

Onny is eventually destroyed, not least as a result of her inability to

understand or prevent her continued objectification by those surrounding her.

How cap a woman with no concrete sense of what is possible outside the

limitations of her own experience write her own successful script? She

confuses new situations with freedom, enjoying, for example, the opportunity

to play "housewife" (358) when she has for so long been cast as servant, and

reveling in the financially profitable gaze of Telman. Since he is paying her to

perform as spectacle, she does not feel, as she does with Gabriel, that he

wishes her to "belong" to him. Her earnest desire to find new models of

behavior from which to learn cannot and does not take her far in a society in

which every member, from Sylvester to Gabriel's new ultra-respectable



female friend Helen, is bound by rigid conventions. Her reactions to her new

life, her changes in attitude and assimilation of new ideas, as well as her

alterations in clothes and appearance, far outstrip Gabriel's small

accommodations to his new environment. Yet the limited gender roles in

which she continues to be cast, her naive vulnerability to new impressions

and need for the approbation of her new friends, her (hardly surprising)continued ties to her family and superstitious fears, and her increasing

compulsion to rebel against Gabriel's wish for total ownership of her person

cannot in the end be countered by her courage and sense of self, or such

dubious lessons as her new situation has to offer, like "the skillful trick of

countering criticism by criticism" (391).

It must be emphasized that Onny's developmental experiences mirror

Gabriel's at an earlier stage. Clearly, the fact that she is a little behind him

can be traced entirely to delays in opportunity, not inferiority based ongender or class. We remember that the young Gabriel possesses a well-

documented superstitious side, as when he fears divine retribution for

missing Mass on a Holy Day (172). His younger self even shares with Onny a

belief in the beauty and powers of crude religious art. When we remember his

surprise that Sylvester finds much to criticize about a beloved gaudy "cheap

print of a religious subject," his "pity" when confronted with Onny's faith in

her holy picture (442) is as misplaced as his later hypocritically authoritative

rebuke when he discovers that she has put the picture to good use to keep

her feet dry (428). Furthermore, of course, Gabriel also is driven to rebel

against authority and control as represented by his panoptical Aunt Theresa,she who "sees everything" (173). Such consistency of parallel development

as that existing between the personal narratives of Gabriel and Onny, despite

the class and gender gap, reminds the reader of the constructed and

arbitrary nature of such gaps. In the face of such careful, detailed narrative, it

is impossible to accept Garfitt's contention that Onny's behavior is "presented

as regrettable immorality ... without the least hint that she might have been a

vital individual in her own right, who was simply taking the only opportunities

ever likely to come her way for discovery and growth" (233). Such

provocative hints are exactly what Lavin so painstakingly provides; one

assumes that the hints missed by Garfitt are those suggestive of irony.

In the light of the details provided by the narrator of Onny's doomed attempt

to write her own life, that Gabriel and his friends choose to read her fate as a

straightforward example of licentious behavior and subsequent "degradation"

(449) is clearly suspect. We doubt the "generosity" of Gabriel's self-conscious

tears in Joyce's "The Dead," and I see no reason not to treat with equal



caution the final judgments of Lavin's successor. In Lavin's Gabriel can be

detected the same unreliability, the same techniques of distanciation, as we

note in Joyce's. It is obviously true that we cannot argue that Onny's

attempted journey into self-discovery is a triumph. Her recasting of herself in

new roles is a failure, and her death on the Dublin streets after a botched

abortion is an appalling one. Yet "evil" (449) is clearly a deliberately biasedterm to describe the site of an illegal termination. Onny's fate must not be

separated from the detailed parallel narrative treatment of her and Gabriel

before this point. "Degradation" (449) as a term for Onny's final condition, her

refusal to bear a child she did not want, reveals more about the abiding

Clewe Street mentality than it does about Onny's situation. Gabriel's flawed

perspective angles for our sympathy, but in so doing it lays for the unwary

reader a textual snare. The words used to judge Onny's ghastly end rise from

the consciousnesses of the young men who have proved themselves

incapable of allowing her to write her own script. The spectacle of female

degradation is in the mind of the man who gazes upon it, just as the

spectacle of emerging sexuality, "the sight of desire," depends on an alert

Pygmalion for its existence; this is the point that The House in Clewe Street

makes with such undeniable force.

It is difficult, therefore, to concur with critical responses to this novel that,

apparently oblivious to Lavin's potent deployment of irony and point of view,

assume her acceptance of the conventional bourgeois attitudes she depicts.

The text itself warns abundantly of the dangers of reliance on the belief,

surely absurd when applied to self-conscious twentieth-century literature,that the narrator's or characters' perspective must automatically represent

those of the author. While Bowen does not dismiss the complexity of the

novel, he does argue that perhaps the author herself would not see religious,

social, and domestic entrapment as "particularly horrendous," since "in

Ireland they are merely the given, those constant elements against which real

people and Mary Lavin's characters play out their grim existence" (71). Yet

surely the novel exposes "the given" with such clarity and exactitude of detail

that the effect is indeed repellently "horrendous." Do we really also need

Lavin's guiding authorial voice advising us that "the given" as depicted by her

narrator is in need of change and suggesting alternatives? Garfitt believes

that Lavin does not understand the implications of her own narrative, arguingthat "There is sympathy for Onny's death: but that, in literature, as in life, is

no substitute for the effort of understanding" (233). I agree entirely, as I

agree with Garfitt's further comment that "Gabriel's sudden propulsion into

maturity is left dangerously incomplete" (233). However, I cannot see these

facts, as Garfitt does, as proof of "the limitations of Miss Lavin's perception"

(233; emphasis mine). The key to this distasteful and ironic novel is an



awareness that it is written with, and indeed derives its force from, an

insider's understanding of Gabriel's limited perspective, but that this "effort

of understanding" is neither sympathy nor concurrence. The House in Clewe

Street has been harmed by easy critical assumptions, perhaps formed

precisely because Gabriel's world is so vividly and painstaking depicted and

the Clewe Street point of view so convincingly articulated. Yet if the irony andcomplexity of narrative stance so central to this novel are recognized for

what they are, an overdue appreciation of Lavin's darkly satiric vision will be

ensured.

NOTES

1 Both Zack Bowen and Richard F. Peterson examine the novel in the context

of the social commentary it provides, although they, and in particular

Peterson, do not see Lavin's treatment as ironic. Peterson's reading grounds

the perspective of the novel firmly in "the values [Lavin] observed when she

lived with her mother's relatives in Athenry," arguing that the narrator's

voice, and that of Lavin herself, echo "the social and moral standards of the

Irish middle-class world of Castlerampart" (48). Bowen, while he is more alive

to the complexities of the situation, also accepts the bourgeois perspective in

the novel as triumphant. Roger Garfitt's reading is even more limited; he

dismisses Lavin's portrayal of Onny Soraghan as condemnatory and lacking in

"understanding." See Douglas Dunn.

2 A. A. Kelly argues that in this novel Lavin is urging us to "stop reacting to

preconceived patterns" (171), and that the author, "always acutely aware of

the social framework in which her characters move" (39), is drawing our

attention to the unpleasantly hierarchical, respectable, judgmental, and

perennially suspicious nature of the society in which Lavin's characters have

their existence. Augustine Martin, in the afterword of Lavin's The House in

Clewe Street (464), acknowledging Lavin's portrayal of a world "dominated by

class, property, and a religion that finds its chief expression in the demand for

social conformity," notes the ambivalence of the "momentary" triumph of "middle class morality" (474) at the end of the novel, when Gabriel abandons

his illusory and tainted freedom in favor of a return to the values he had

thought to escape when he ran away with the servant girl Onny.

3 For these and related arguments, see Boland.



4 See, for example, Ann Owens Weekes. Chapter 6, "Textual Gardens,"

discusses Lavin.

5 Both Weekes and Dunleavy concentrate on Lavin's shorter fiction.

WORKS CITED

Boland, Eavan. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our

Time. Manchester: Carcanet, 1995.

Bowen, Zack. Mary Lavin. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1975.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston:

Beacon, 1990.

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RACHAEL SEALLY LYNCH is an assistant professor at the University of

Connecticut, Waterbury. She is the author of recent and forthcoming essays



on Irish writers Liam O'Flaherty, Molly Keane, Edna O'Brien, and Jennifer

Johnston.

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com

Publication information: Article title: "The Fabulous Female Form": The Deadly

Erotics of the Male Gaze in Mary Lavin's 'The House in Clewe Street.' (Author).

Contributors: Lynch, Rachael Sealy - Author. Journal title: Twentieth Century

Literature. Volume: 43. Issue: 3 Publication date: Fall 1997. Page number:

326+. © 1999 Hofstra University. COPYRIGHT 1997 Gale Group.

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The Fabulous Female Form