Mother Ireland meets the Virgin Mary: feminine identities in Anne Enright’s The Wig My Father Wore.
Elke D’hoker
K.U.Leuven, Belgium
Anne Enright’s The Wig My Father Wore is a magic realist Bildungsroman of sorts. In a cool and ironic voice, Grace, a television producer at the LoveQuiz, tells of the changes that occurred in her life when she opened the door one morning to find an angel on her doorstep. This angel, Stephen, is sent back to earth to “set despair to rights” and Grace comments wryly “By that time I needed anything I could get, apart from money, sex and power which were easy but hurt a lot.”[i] As Stephen’s list of opening questions – about her mother, her love-life, her fertility, and despair – makes clear, a lot is missing from Grace’s life. She may have money, sex and power but lacks, Stephen tells her, “purity, wisdom and grace” (4). The oppositions between Stephen and Grace are immediately drawn in stark binary terms. Grace, who makes an unsuccessful pass at Stephen the first night he stays, represents body and sexuality. Stephen, on the contrary, is strangely immaterial – his body makes no dent in the bed (4) – and his physical whiteness represents the purity of his soul. While Stephen is pure, clean and naïve, Grace is cynical, sarcastic and world-weary. Through her work for the LoveQuiz, she is also associated with duplicity, artificiality and shame. All in all, Grace assumes the male role in their relationship and Stephen, who cooks, cleans, cries and cares is the prototypical angel in the house.
Gradually, however, both protagonists undergo a change. Stephen slowly acquires more body: he bleeds for the first time (102), has to shave and cut his nails (106, 114), and starts to grow hair all over his body (128). He even becomes ill in true human fashion: “he has a fever and I put him to bed. The heat coming off him is physical …. His sweat smells. He asks me to take the lilies out of the room …. It makes a change, to look after him, instead of the other way round” (148). Under Stephen’s influence, Grace goes through pretty much the opposite development. She strips down layers of wallpaper in her apartment and allows him to paint the walls white: “So I am beginning to feel the benefit of Stephen’s care, his breath over my shoulder, the fact that he is clean. The white walls make the rooms look bigger and more deliberate. They have opened up the angles, made sense of the corners; they comfort me in the dark” (124). Her physical desire for Stephen disappears as her body grows paler, more translucent: “My nipples have faded and there is something wrong with my stomach” (125); “I become too clean, my arms more languorous, my knuckles more dimpled, my flesh so soft I am afraid it might tear” (136). Her “body [is] going” and she quite literally becomes a virgin again. Both transformations finally culminate in the love-making of ‘angel’ and ‘virgin’, a scene which could be read as Enright’s reworking of the Immaculate Conception.
In the final chapter of The Wig My Father Wore the pregnant narrator describes her present situation: after Stephen’s disappearance, she has resigned from her job, left Dublin and moved to the West of Ireland. Every morning she takes a swim in the sea, repeating one of her mother’s pregnancy rituals:
I swim every morning in the sea, in the sun and in the rain and I say to God that this is my prayer for our child, whoever it is, whoever it might turn out to be. I swim on the back and look at the sky, which reminds me of the sky when I was a child, the sky when I asked my father ‘Why is the sky blue?’ realising as I said it that it wasn’t really blue at all. And my father gave an answer as mixed as the weather. (214)[ii]
When sketched in these general terms, Grace’s development can easily be recovered in the conservative framework of the traditional romance.[iii] In that view it is the beneficial influence of Stephen – as lover and as angel – which leads Grace to give up on her inauthentic, materialistic and alienated existence in the city and to return to Ireland and to nature. Through Stephen, in other words, Grace has discovered her femininity and has found her true place in society as a mother. In this way, Grace’s narrative would reinforce rather than challenge the traditional conventions governing feminine behaviour, both in literature and in life. Though this development can indeed be traced in the events of the novel, it is at the same time consistently undermined in Grace’s narration and the fantastic elements of the novel play an important role here.
First, reading the novel as an account of Grace’s journey inward and westward presupposes a symbolic, or even allegorical, interpretation of the fantastic elements in Grace’s narrative. The angel then becomes but a metaphor for purity, spirituality and grace and Grace’s bodily transformations merely symbolize her spiritual development. Yet this reading ignores the realistic inscription of these magical events in the story world of the novel itself. Indeed, Stephen acts as a real figure in the novel, who meets and converses with other characters and who has a past as real as the red marks around his neck. Similarly, Grace really worries about the actual changes her body is going through and is not simply using these to highlight an inner transformation. An allegorical reading of the texts also ignores the hesitation and bafflement of the reader at several places in the narrative when he or she is at a loss to interpret certain strange events. This combination of the symbolic and the literal is in fact something which The Wig My Father Wore shares with magic realist fiction. In her study of magic realism in British fiction,Anne Hegerfeldt calls this strategy the “literalization of metaphor” and describes it as follows:
Much magic realist fiction appears suspended between two levels of signification, inviting a literal and a figurative reading at once. In this way, the text once more induces hesitation about how it is to be understood, simultaneously offering and retracting metaphor or allegory as a tantalizing possibility of recontextualizing the fantastic elements. Many magic realist texts play quite openly on their ambivalence, insistently foregrounding the figurative aspect without in any way resolving the tension in favour of one interpretation.[iv]
The use of fantastic elements in realistic novels not only destabilises the strict distinction between real and fantastic, but also between a literal and figurative reading of literary texts. In The Wig My Father Wore, furthermore, this destabilisation is part of a larger framework. At several levels indeed, Grace’s narrative itself challenges fixed categories and undermines binary oppositions. This consistent challenging too makes a reading of Grace’s development as a return to nature and tradition ultimately untenable.
The stark terms in which Grace’s ‘salvation’ could be described – authenticity, purity, femininity, the West, nature and their implicit opposites – are mocked and undercut in the course of Grace’s narrative. In a deconstructive double gesture, in fact, Grace both inverts and displaces these binary pairs in her narrative. To give a few examples. The confrontation of Grace and Stephen is at first drawn in terms of clear opposites: Grace is body and Stephen is soul; Grace is male and Stephen is female; Grace is inauthentic and Stephen is true. Yet several smaller details complicate this rigid framework, even before the two characters mutually affect one another. Grace is associated with body yet estranged from nature, while Stephen, who is considered bodiless, makes “the onions sprout through their net bags” and “turns potatoes green just by looking at them” (38). Similarly, though Grace’s work for television is characterised as alienating and unnatural, the ‘authentic’ Stephen simply loves it (50).
Moreover, the end of the novel is not really the return to tradition it appears to be. Grace is pregnant but remains single and though she has left her television job, she is more than ever determined to realise her professional ambition of making her own movies (214). In this way, she does not so much revert from a masculine to a feminine paradigm as undermine the conventions associated with these terms. Grace’s move to the West of Ireland, furthermore, is not an unqualified return to a conservative ideal of an authentic Ireland. All through her narrative, in fact, this romantic image has been mocked and exposed as a profitable marketing product which also a television show such as the LoveQuiz likes to cash in on. In discussions with Marcus, Grace also challenges the binary opposition between urban, Protestant and inauthentic on the one hand and rural, Catholic and authentic on the other: “You just think that ‘urban’ means ‘privileged’ and ‘inauthentic’, because where you come from, everyone went to Mass and lived in a cow’s arse and fucked their uncle on a Saturday night, while we sat around forgetting who we really were and trying to speak proper” (35).
Grace’s mockery of this false opposition between authentic rural life and alienated city existence is part of the novel’s sustained critique of the authentic – inauthentic binary. Though many elements of Grace’s life are initially codified as fake – the LoveQuiz, her colleagues, her love life – the prime emblem of inauthenticity is her father’s wig. At first Grace considers it as something negative, terrifying and shameful. It is a piece of fakery that covers nature; a lie that conceals a true identity. When asked about the embarrassing quality of the LoveQuiz, for instance, Grace answers: “I am intimate with the subject of shame. I am the daughter of a man who used to wear a wig. After that, television is easy” (24). Gradually, however, Grace comes to admire the way this piece of fakery fortifies her father’s pride and sense of self. Moreover, in the title of the novel, the wig is implicitly opposed to the ‘sash’ of the Protestant marching song “The Sash My Father Wore”. This is the kind of song in which identity is considered to be authentic, natural, essential and sacred and is consequently used to justify sectarian war and bloodshed. By comparison, the artificiality of the wig is perhaps not such a bad thing. In this way, the wig not only destabilises the opposition authentic – inauthentic which it seemed originally to uphold but also questions the traditional notions of identity formation which the ending of the novel at first blush seems to propagate.
Throughout her narrative, indeed, Grace challenges in various ways “the belief in a coherent self”, which the editors of The Voyage In. Fictions of Female Identity call “the primary assumption underlying the Bildungsroman”.[v] Identity, the novel suggests, is not made up of a single, unified self but rather of a combination of multiple selves. Moreover, it is not so much found as creatively constructed. Hence, the self-acceptance necessary for happiness is a self-conscious acceptance of many different selves. Grace’s split identity is first signalled in her double name. At home she is Grainne, a name which derives from the Irish gran (corn) and denotes the patron of the Harvest. Because she has always detested that name – children at school called her ‘groin’ – she later anglicises it to Grace. The two names thus denote opposites – the material and the spiritual, body and soul – which Grace has difficulties resolving. The closing scene of the novel in which Grace comes to terms with her (Irish) background, also entails an acceptance of this split identity. While her mother continues to call her Grainne, Grace no longer corrects her.
The postmodern tenet that identity is created rather than discovered is foregrounded most explicitly in Grace’s liberal refashioning of her childhood memories. In a discussion with Marcus about the television programmes she saw as a child, Grace defends her memories even though they are proven wrong, until Marcus exasperatedly says: “I have to admire you … you make yourself up as you go along” (34). For one long chapter, moreover, Grace imagines different times and ways in which her father obtained a wig and then settles on the version which links the arrival of television in their family with her father’s wig (25-30). Similarly, Grace draws attention to the way memories are altered to appear meaningful when she points out: “My mother thinks that the loss of my virginity caused my father’s stroke and so do I. Never mind the facts” (45). In The Wig My Father Wore, in short, one’s past is something which can be adapted and refashioned almost at will. And the same holds true for one’s identity. This postmodern, performative concept of identity and identity formation clearly destabilises any reading of the novel as a traditional Bildungsroman in which Grace has at last ‘found’ her ‘true’ self.[vi] Indeed, a closer reading of the novel shows that Grace’s playful and fantastic narrative not only subverts the traditional categories it seems to uphold, but is also in itself evidence of Grace’s conscious construction of a strong and versatile identity. Of crucial importance in this respect is the gap between the end of the events, which leaves Grace bereft, and the end of the narration, which finds her triumphant and self-confident. This shows how the process of narration itself has been crucial in the formation of a stronger sense of self.
Finally, Grace’s peculiar first-person narration itself also serves to undermine traditional notions of femininity which her narrative at first seems to uphold. Recently, a number of feminist narratologists have pointed out that since the 18th century, female narration has conventionally been associated with immediacy, artlessness, and honesty, with a protagonist who speaks directly from the heart.[vii] Through the use of fantastic elements to tell her story, the narrator of The Wig My Father Wore already partly breaks away from these conventions. For the patently improbably characterisation of Stephen effectively breaks the illusions of reality and immediacy and draws the attention away from story to discourse, from plot to narration. Grace’s narrative is thus revealed as a consciously constructed story rather than an immediate record of real life. This impression of artificiality is reinforced through Grace’s sparse staccato style and the inclusion of lists, newspapers cuttings and T.V. guides. The experiments with different formatting as well as the short chapters with catchy titles further reveal the novel to be a consciously constructed work of art rather than an emotional outpouring or immediate confession.
In short, the peculiarities of Grace’s narration - the fantastic elements, the steady deconstruction of binaries and the unconventional first-person narration – successfully question the traditional development which the narrative events initially seemed to uphold. Yet, this does not mean that the novel ends up with the opposite picture: a total denial of the validity of love, motherhood, nationality and nature. Rather, the novel’s peculiar combination of fantasy and fact, of authenticity and artificiality, of stereotype and innovation, allows Enright to develop a subtle and ambiguous picture of what it means to be a woman in contemporary Ireland. Hence, The Wig My Father Wore is able to talk about love, motherhood and relationships without entering into the style and vocabulary of romance. Similarly, Enright is able to question the stereotypes concerning feminine identity without falling into the trap of an all too radical reversal of rejection.
In this way, The Wig My Father Wore successfully enlarges the possibilities of the female Bildungsroman, moving beyond both the nineteenth-century endings of either marriage or death and the early twentieth-century options of female bonding or mother-daughter relationships. As in the traditional Bildungsroman Grace has moved from despair and isolation to happiness and a sense of identity through love. Yet this development does not end in marriage, but rather in a state of happy independence. While she has learnt that a strong sense of self is only possible when one lets oneself be touched and transformed by others, she is not dependent on the stability and exclusiveness of marriage to keep up that sense of self. The transforming experience Grace has undergone leaves her ready to face the future and their confident and inspiring narratives are there to prove this. The nature of this proof is, importantly, not epistemological, which makes it performatively powerful even for those of us – all of us? – whose lives are unblessed or untouched by impossible experiences, other than the experience of fiction.
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[i] Anne Enright, The Wig My Father Wore, London: Minerva, 1996, p.1. All further references are to this edition.
[ii] In the beginning of the novel, Grace’s mother asks in despair: “Where did I go wrong? … The summer I was pregnant with this young woman, I swam in the sea every day, in the sun and in the rain. And I said to God that this would be my prayer for the child – whoever it was, whoever it turned out to be. And now … now look at her.” (8)