Eclipsed, Patricia Burke Brogan

Anne F. O’Reilly

Another memory play that attempts to deal with the reality of Irish women’s lives in the 1960s is Eclipsed, Patricia Burke Brogan’s play about the Magdalen Laundries. This play was ‘inspired by the practice – which started in the time of the Famine, and lasted well into the 1960s and later – of forcing pregnant and unwed Irish mothers to work as ‘penitents’ in church-run laundries.’ (Burke Brogan, 1994) Burke Brogan, herself a former novice, spent some time working in one of these institutions. This may well be the real hidden Ireland. To tell these stories is to interrupt the master narratives, to give voice to an underside of history, to allow what Foucault called the insurrection of subjugated knowledge to emerge and question dominant cultural narratives of identity.

From a feminist point of view the whole role of Mary Magdalen – traditionally depicted as sinner and prostitute – has been revisited. While traditional patriarchal interpretations of her have tended to stress the quality of her repentance and the forgiveness of her sins, feminist hermeneutics has called attention to her role as apostle in ministry. One of the early ground-breaking works of feminist hermeneutics is Schussler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her (1983), which takes the lines from Mark’s gospel, that follow Mary Magdalen’s anointing of Jesus with precious oil prior to his death, as the epigraph for her book: ‘Wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her’ (Mark 14:9). It is how and what we remember that is so important. Burke Brogan dedicated her play ‘In Memory of the Magdalens’. She remembers the women who lived and worked in the Magdalen Laundries, as women not as sinners. In a highly theatrical piece she invites us to be on the inside of these women’s lives, in their companionship and grief, in their humour, and despair. She opens the theatrical space towards a deeper remembering. Music from plain chant and Handel to Elvis Presley and a host of other songs punctuates the narrative. The props of the laundry become in turn resources for creativity and play while also reminding audiences of the hard physical work that these women actually performed. The women find themselves in a nowhere place from which it is almost impossible to escape. They find themselves carrying a culture’s and a religion’s negation of the body and of female sexuality. They are scapegoats who embody and carry the sins of the society. They are needed to keep the society and its moral code intact. The conflict between alternative ways of interpreting these women’s lives is expressed in the conflict between the women and the nuns who run the laundry (Brigit’s experience in particular) and also between Mother Victoria and the novice Sister Virginia. In Eclipsed the treatment of this conflict is nuanced and sensitive in contrast to many other portrayals of the same subject.

Act One, Scene One and Act Two, Scene Six take place in 1992, the rest of the play in 1963. It has a cast of seven women. The nuns are dressed in pre-Vatican 2 clothing with full ‘veil-coif-domino-guimpe’, which includes large black rosary beads and long black leather belts. The women are dressed in ‘shapeless worn-out overalls with white aprons, black laced-up shoes and thick black stockings’ (Eclipsed 3). A series of muslin drapes are pulled back to distinguish the different spaces in the play.

The play opens in the present when Rosa, Brigit’s daughter arrives to find out what she can about her mother. In a dusty basement she is shown a large old Laundry Basket which contains many of the props for the play and out of which the story and the memories will emerge. She opens a battered ledger and reads the names and the details of the Penitent women who were signed into St. Paul’s Laundry, Killmacha, in 1963 by their parents or employers. She finds her own mother’s name Brigit Murphy, along with a baby photograph in a chocolate box. (6-7). As each of the women is introduced and named, it is almost like a ritual of naming and remembering. The play proceeds to flesh out and embody these lives for the audience and for the culture that has forgotten them. In a similar fluid narrative to Christina Reid and Anne Le Marquand Hartigan we are invited to access the memories of women’s lives through shifting time-frames. Rosa’s stance in the present allows the audience to participate in her uncovering of the forgotten women’s memories.

Through a minimum of words and props the time and place is established. Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is in contrast to the earlier extract from the oratorio of Handel’s Messiah. Whether one interprets the women as Christ figures in the way that they too have been despised and rejected, one cannot but feel the poignancy of alluding to their institution as Heartbreak Hotel. The women have been signed into this institution, simply because of pregnancy outside of marriage. Themes of love and sexuality weave through the narratives as the women’s lives unfold. Love may indeed be a trick (20), but the women still remember and dream. There may be different rules for women and men but they can still imagine relationships with a smasher (10), or a pop star like Elvis. The women who work like slaves in the laundry can always pretend, and imagine themselves somewhere else. This element of play pushes the parameters of Eclipsed beyond the narrow confines of a realist frame, as the world of what if intermittently breaks through the prison of their lives, and questions all received interpretations. The quiet desperation of these women whose children have been taken from them (or who have had still-births) is temporarily alleviated through moments of play but the despair has a darker side, and also emerges in violent outbursts, both verbal and physical, as the women rage against the cruelty and arbitrariness of their condition.

It is imperative that one does not question the status quo or try to escape it or change it in any way, whether that applies to the ‘penitent’ women or to the young novice who is working in the institution. Blind obedience, physical beatings and removal of privileges will keep the system in place. The dehumanizing effects of this on the lives of those who keep this system in place are questioned by Sister Virginia, which at least offers an alternative spirituality:

Are you a God of Love? A God of Justice? – I thought I’d be working for the poor! Am I being brain-washed? Will I become dehumanized too, if I stay here long enough? Locked in Obedience? (32)

Her questioning of her faith is influenced by contemporary feminist theological thinking and provides a believable counter-point to the authoritarian unquestioning extremes of Mother Victoria. As Sister Virginia wonders how far her own order have deviated from the vision of their founder she questions:

Was early Christian History rewritten too? Women’s witness submerged? – Christ Crucified! Help them! For a woman bore you, carried you for nine months! Mother of Jesus, do something about Cathy, Mandy, Nellie-Nora and the others!

Sister Virginia finds it sad to be working with these women. She feels that the nuns are like jailers, that it is wrong to take the children from the women, and that they need vitamins, medication, fresh air. She disobeys rules and invites the Bishop to visit the Laundry to see the conditions for himself. She chooses not to remain aloof from the women as her superior has advised and endangers her life in the process. She feels that she understands the women’s despair and says she would tear down the walls with her nails if her own child was taken from her (46). While she is undergoing her own crisis of faith, the women, and Brigit in particular, see her on the side of the enemy. Brigit wants her to hand over the keys in order to escape but she refuses. Brigit speaks angrily to her:

Pretending to help! You’re just like the rest o’ them! You think if you keep us locked up, that we’ll forget about living! About being alive? Don’t you? That our heads will go soft and mushy from hymns and prayers!

Brigit’s rage is palpable, she becomes threatening and menacing:

You don’t know anything! Never had a lover! Never had a baby! So you’re white and shining, Sister! Not the same as us, are you? Whose side are you on anyways? Why aren’t our lover-boys locked up too? One law for them and another for us! (59)

As she writes Scab on the wall with lipstick she pulls off Sister Virginia’s veil and shouts ‘I’ll daub it on your baldy skull! Scab! Spy! Informer!’ (60).

The women’s lives have become so despairing that one can identify complete loss of soul, and understand such violent out-bursts. We are reminded that one of the women had thrown bleach at another sister in a similar outburst. And in the very opening moments of the play Brigit says how much she hates Mother Victoria:

That rip Victoria! God how I hate her! Some day I’ll put her through the washing machines! Then I’ll smather her with red hot irons! Herself and his Lordship with his buckled shoes! (11)

But the soul loss is on both sides whatever Brigit may feel. When one of the women (Cathy) is found dead (from an asthma attack) in a laundry basket after an escape attempt, the women find it hard to believe and they blame themselves. As they are invited to pray for the repose of her soul, Brigit faces Sister Virginia in one final showdown. Brigit asks her for the keys and she unclips them from her belt, allowing her to escape. Brigit leaves, shouting that the nuns are the ones who are dead inside their laundry basket hearts.

The laundry basket is used in an imaginative and resourceful way throughout the play. While it is obviously associated with the kind of work the women do, in being the container for the linens, blankets and clothes that the women launder and repair it also becomes a container for play. In place of the humiliation of laundering other people’s undergarments it becomes a space in which they can parody their situation and imagine alternative realities. In turn it will also be used for Cathy’s escape attempt and thirty years later will be the last remaining container for the memories of the women’s lives. It is almost as if the play emerges from the laundry basket (like the box from which the play emerges in Tomas Kilroy’s Talbot’s Box and the basket of vestments in Belfry).

While responsible for laundering the Bishop’s clothes Brigit puts on his surplice and uses an upside-down mop as a crozier. The parody of Brigit as Bishop allows the women to imagine freedom, in having money for cigarettes and access to a pantry full of rich food. While the reality of their situation doesn’t give them access to celebration they can imagine being in Paris or Hollywood, believing that ‘It’ll be true if you pretend!’ (18). The women decide to get Mandy ready to meet Elvis, her idol and urge her into the basket, to pack her off to the USA. They also dress up a mannekin doll in clothes from the laundry to represent Elvis and then plan a mock wedding. Brigit continues to act as Bishop dressed in a crimson soutane and surplice and performs the wedding. All of this takes place accompanied by the women singing a number of popular songs about love and marriage and the poignant playacting ends with the voice-over of an Elvis song. The parody and playacting may give a temporary access to a sense of power and may not render the real power of the church any less significant. However its enactment does allow the performers and the audience to experience some reprieve even if it is temporary and imaginary.

The women find themselves in a world without men, but the issue of sex just doesn’t disappear. The women fantasize or remember moments with their men, whether tender or abusive. They create dream lovers and paper babies to remind them of their children. They are very much aware that they are carrying the sins of the society, and that the men can carry on with normal lives while they exist as the scapegoats on whom all the sins are heaped. To refuse to carry such sins demands that the religion and culture look again at their self-definitions. Brigit’s outspokenness and anger allows her to name the reality from her perspective. In Act 2 Scene 2 the women are dusting and polishing a floor. When Cathy says that they need a machine for polishing instead of the old wooden blocks that they’re using Brigit says: ‘We’re the machines, Cathy!’ (48). As Brigit is emptying the dust into the bin she begins a parody on Purgatory, to which Nellie-Nora chants the catechism answer: ‘Purgatory is a place or state of punishment, where some souls suffer for a time before they can enter Heaven!’ (50). Brigit throws each of the women (symbolized by their polishing cloths), along with their boyfriends into the bin, which she pretends is the fire of purgatory. She consigns Mother Victoria and her own boyfriend John-Joe to the hotter fires of Hell, and remarks how they are all burning with thirst, which cannot be slaked. Again the elements of play and parody succeed in undermining some of the crushing orthodoxies that define the women’s lives.

The women occupy the position of outsiders. Their outsider status can be interpreted in a number of ways. On the margins, they can be rejected, and forgotten. Or they can be accommodated by those who consider themselves carers or do-gooders, but they still remain powerless. If however they are allowed to speak, to have access to tools of transformation including education and money, their status as outsiders can be radically interruptive and empowering as they question assumptions about knowledge and power. All three levels operate in the play. Brigit encourages Mandy to write her return address on her letter to Elvis:

Saint Paul’s Home for Penitent women! Home for the unwanted. The outcasts! Saint Paul’s Home for the women nobody wants! (35)

The Catholic Church represented by Mother Victoria argues: ‘We give them food, shelter and clothing. We look after their spiritual needs. No one else wants them!’ (31)

She feels that they are there to protect these women from their passions, that they are fallen women, and are weak. Such a theology identifies women with nature, bodiliness, sexuality, temptation and evil. Women in this paradigm carry responsibility for the body which is always a source of temptation as it pulls us down to earth rather than allowing us aspire towards spirit. Women who engage in sexual liaisons outside of marriage must also be contained as they threaten the whole social order. They foreground the repressed aspects of a cultural system. Keeping them locked away allows the system to continue uninterrupted. Increasing levels of violence and dehumanization accompany this process. Cathy who tried to escape is beaten around the head when she is brought back. Mother Victoria says she needed to slap her to ‘bring her back to reality’ (45). Mother Victoria has managed to silence her own conscience: ‘When I was nineteen, I had the same thoughts! I wanted to free the penitents’ (45). She tells Sister Virginia that she will receive the grace to do God’s will and that God’s ways are not our ways. When she asks Virginia whether she has been meditating she answers:

I try Mother! But there are dark – dark clouds – doubts, Mother! The women are drudges, are bond-women! I – I didn’t expect this!

Mother Victoria answers:

We all go through those dark nights! – Dark Nights! Try to remember that We Are Eclipsed! But that deep inside is a Shining that is Immortal – a part of us, which is outside Time. Hold on to that thought! Do not question the System! You want to change the Rule, the Church, the World! You must start with yourself! Change yourself first! Get rid of Pride! Obey the Rule, Sister! Remember – We are eclipsed. But Blind Obedience will carry you through! (46-47)

If we consider the meaning of eclipsed we are in the realms of what is hidden or overshadowed, what is obscured or darkened. St. Paul wrote about our human perception of the divine as ‘through a glass darkly.’ While this can become in turn the basis for a true mystical knowing of God (where unknowing and the dark are a central part) it is dangerous when such a theology is used to validate spiritual existence over earthly life, and when all human questioning is to be stifled in a disposition of blind obedience. When a theology promises eternal life and neglects the quality of human lives in the here and now, it needs to be questioned. This would be the starting point for many contemporary theologies of liberation, where the divine promise of liberation is interpreted as a call to transformation of unjust social and political structures that impede human growth and becoming.

The status of the outsider is very important in contemporary theology. The God of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is interpreted as being on the side of the outsider, the marginalized, those on the outskirts of society whether women, prostitutes, sinners, tax collectors or despised social classes. This has given rise to a theology which speaks in terms of a preferential option for the poor. Theology is urged to find its starting point in terms of the dispossessed, to ask what might the message of the scriptures be when interpreted from the point of view of the poorest of the poor. Sister Virginia’s theology begins from the experience of the women (the outcast or the poor in this situation). Her doubts and disquiet at the conditions of the women’s lives stands as a corrective to the dominant theology represented by Mother Victoria. Her vantage point and the narratives of the women themselves foreground the experience of the outsider and cause us to question many of our received assumptions. The play as a whole presents the stories of women who were outsiders, and who were almost written out of history. In so doing it forces reassessment of narratives of cultural identity that focused exclusively on people of privilege and prestige. The scene between the two sisters ends with a soprano singing of the ‘Magnificat’, a wonderful biblical female song of praise, of the triumph of the weak over the rich and powerful.

The epilogue of the play continues the story. Brigit escaped and was never heard of again. Mandy who was becoming increasingly unstable in the course of the play was admitted to a Mental Institution the following year and never left it. Cathy had died, Julie returned to the orphanage and Nellie-Nora remained fearful, permanently scarred and institutionalized. In 1992 the real bodies of the dead were exhumed and reburied to make room for building development. Hundreds of the women who were exhumed were unnamed.

Works Cited:

Burke Brogan, P., Eclipsed (Clare: Salmon Publishing, 2001).

Extract From: Sacred Play: Soul – Journeys In Contemporary Irish Theatre, by Anne F. O’Reilly (2004)

Cross Reference: See Anu productions and the essay by Haughton on Fringe Theatre

See Also: Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices By Women In Ireland, edited by Miriam Haughton and Mária Kurdi