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AN
REV lEW
misty existence of the convent. It is after marriage that she learns
that Tyrone had had a mistress, that he drinks, that he will go out
with cronies and get drunk, while she remains alone in a "cheap"
(as she keeps repeating) hotel room. Always in her mind is the
terrible discrepancy between her life as a girl, or her metaphor for
it,
and her life as an adult married woman.
The sons, especially Jamie, represent the obverse side of the
sexual chastity of the Irish. For while they are anything but chaste,
they yet cannot partake of normal sexual relations and connect sex
with love. For them it must always be a desecration, consecrated by
drink and debauchery. The mother laments the fact that they never
have anything to do with "nice" girls. Precisely, because they in
their way are devotees of the Virgin too. Yeats said of Dowson:
"Sober, he looked on no woman; drunk, he picked the cheapest
whore. 'He did not even want them clean,' said a friend. 'I have
been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.''' Jamie Tyrone will
have only whores, and only fat ones, and to them he recites, of
course, Dowson.
As
Edmund describes it:
It's a good likeness of Jamie, don't you think, hunted by himself and
whiskey, hiding in a Broadway hotel room with some fat tart-he likes
them fat-reciting Dowson's "Cynara" to her.
Be recites ,derisvuely, but with deep feeling.
"All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara!
in
my fashion."
Jeeringly.
And the poor fat burlesque queen doesn't get a word of it, but suspects
she's being insulted!
Fat, blonde, whores: that is the reaction of some Irish males to
the sexual prohibitions that his culture imposes on him. This is the
Saturday night dream of young Studs Lonigan: going to bed with
a buxom blonde. For it is generally buxom women, with marmoreal
thighs and full breasts, as if size alone could make up for the im–
posed frustrations and inhibitions. Abbie
in
Desire Under the Elms
is "buxom, full of vitality. Her round face
is
pretty but marred by
