A JAIL OR A REFUGE: CATHOLIC CONVENT EDUCATION IN KATE O’BRIEN’S THE LAND OF SPICES AND EDNA O’BRIEN’S THE COUNTRY GIRLS
A JAIL OR A REFUGE: CATHOLIC CONVENT EDUCATION IN KATE O’BRIEN’S THE LAND OF SPICES AND EDNA O’BRIEN’S THE COUNTRY GIRLS

Summary/Abstract: This article sets out to explore how the two Irish authors, Kate O’Brien (1897-1974) and Edna O’Brien (b. 1930), convey Catholic convent education in their novels, The Land of Spices (1941) and The Country Girls (1960) respectively. Drawing on Louis Althusser’s theory of the „ideological state apparatuses” which subtly but continually control the everyday lives of individuals, this paper argues that in the chosen texts Catholicism and Catholic convent education largely function as an ideological and repressive social force in twentieth-century Ireland. Kate O’Brien’s representation of convent life is, however, in many ways much more subtle than Edna O’Brien’s unsympathetic and down-to-earth portrayal of the education at the hands of nuns. What is common to both authors and what situates these two novels in the same ideological and cultural context is that they use the representation of this particular educational apparatus to the same end, in order to offer strong critics Irish Catholicism of their time.

• Details
• Contents