DOMESTIC PURITY, CATHOLIC VIRTUE, AND THE THEOLOGY OF CONTAINMENT IN THE ANTE-ROOM BY KATE O’BRIEN
DOMESTIC PURITY, CATHOLIC VIRTUE, AND THE THEOLOGY OF CONTAINMENT IN THE ANTE-ROOM BY KATE O’BRIEN

Summary/Abstract: Domestic Purity, Catholic Virtue, and the Theology of Containment in The Ante-Room by Kate O’Brien. Kate O’Brien’s 1934 novel The Ante-Room offers a critique of the Catholic domestic ideology by constructing a theology of containment. The Catholic doctrine, together with gender ideology, creates a system in which female agency is regulated through spatial confinement, internalised surveillance, and emotional repression. This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of pastoral power and Teresa de Lauretis’s theory of gender as social technology to demonstrate that the ante-room itself functions as both a literal and symbolic apparatus of containment. Agnes Mulqueen’s moral crisis becomes the novel’s central test case as O’Brien reveals how Catholic virtue is built on silence and self-denial, exposing the psychological cost of a system that equates feminine purity with the renunciation of desire. The analysis further draws on Sandra Harding’s feminist epistemology and Adrienne Rich’s theorization of compulsory heterosexuality to argue that the domestic architecture described in the novel encodes not only physical but epistemological confinement.

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