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N ElL L 'S I R ISH CAT H 0 LI CIS M
581
your talk-tapes." Or in the words of an Irish medieval monk in a
verse concerning a cat:
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night
The dualism of religion-blasphemy likewise runs through the
Tyrone family. The father- and this is often true of Irish families–
is conventionally pious, without any deep commitment to the Old
Faith. He uses his religion in a purely conventional fashion, to blame,
for example, the worldly failures of his two sons on the fact that
they have both become apostates: "You've both flouted the faith
you were born and brought up in-the one true faith of the Catholic
Church-and your denial has brought nothing but self-destruction!"
The mother, on the other hand, is deeply, neurotically, but still hon–
estly, pious. Like Claudius, she cannot lie to God, He being so real
to her. Rather in her case, as might be expected, it is the Virgin
Mary who, in effect, usurps the Trinity and becomes "God," for the
Virgin is the symbol of female purity and is thus inevitably the patron
saint of Irish Roman Catholic convent girls.
As
such, the Virgin
signifies innocence and childhood, the shelter of the convent, the
benign smile of the Mother Superior, the loving earthly father at
home-in short, the happy times before she married the hard-drinking,
rather crude, though kindly, James Tyrone, and had encountered the
rude male world of tobacco, alcohol, cronies, and sweat, the agonies
of childbirth, the failure of children, the black abyss of dope addic–
tion. Yet she cannot pray, although she would like to, for God or
the Virgin sees all:
Longingly.
If
I could only find the faith I lost, so I could pray again!
She pauses-then begins to recite the Hail Mary in a flat, empty
tone.
"Hail, Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with Thee; blessed art Thou
among women."
Sneeringly.
You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend recit–
ing words! You can't hide from her!
The morphine is a road back to that virginal childhood and her "Long
Day's Journey into Night" is a psychological regress to her convent
days.
