MY PHYSICAL EXAMINATION OF the patient proved that she had indeed been subjected to repeated and forceful sexual penetration, without doubt upon the night in question by person (or persons) unknown. As yet it is impossible to ascertain if conception occurred; the patient is too deeply shocked to supply information concerning her periods. I shall recommend that she remain here at the clinic until some degree of certainty is possible. It will be some time before she will be capable of receiving the news if it proves positive.
Rape is a particularly detestable crime—it is a violation of the whole person. The physical damage may be small (though not to be dismissed) compared to the wounds inflicted on the mind; it may take many weeks of counselling in a conducive atmosphere before she is ready to return home, and many more until she is fully healed from the experience, if ever.
The psychological wounding may be deeper than I thought. My initial presumption was that Miss Desmond’s youth would have blessed her with a natural resilience; that, like a rubber ball, she would rapidly spring back into her natural character. Rather, it seems that her tender years have rendered her all the more emotionally fragile and vulnerable. Since her arrival with us she has not spoken a word. Though she submits meekly to Nurse O’Brien’s and my medical examinations and treatments, she has maintained an unbroken silence under all conditions. That she hears and responds to my questions is apparent, but she refuses adamantly to answer them with even so much as a nod or shake of the head. She is eating, but meagerly, and never in the presence of the staff. Nurse O’Brien reports that her favourite occupation is sitting by the window for hours on end, looking out at nothing. Long after darkness has fallen, she may be found in the same chair by the window, staring into the street. In the absence of concrete answers to my gentle probings, I am forced to hypothesise, a thing I am loath to do. Is her blank preoccupation a self-inflicted, selective amnesia, a hiding away of the pain of violation behind multiple locked doors, or is it an obsessional playing over and over and over the events of that September night, a memory burned like a brand so deep into her mind that it colours every thought, every feeling, every experience? Certainly, it is not healthy, but faced with a stone wall of silence, I am unable even to begin to help.
The silence has at last broken, but only partially; light streams through the cracks in the masonry but the wall still stands. The key that partly released her from self-imposed incarceration was a simple request for her diary. Nurse O’Brien entered her room yesterday morning and found Miss Desmond sitting up in bed, wringing her hands in agitation. When Nurse O’Brien asked what was wrong, Miss Desmond replied that she wanted her diary. Nurse O’Brien at once summoned me, and the question was repeated to me. I replied that I was not in possession of her diary, would some loose paper and a pen suffice? Miss Desmond insisted that she wanted her diary, her own diary, and would accept no substitute. By this stage she was becoming quite forceful in her demands, and I deliberately fostered her anger and frustration to prevent her from lapsing back into her near-catatonic state again. Finally, she agreed to be content with a pen and some foolscap in return for a promise that I would obtain her diary from her mother at my earliest convenience.
Several volumes of those diaries arrived last post this evening and I will shortly study them for the key that will fully unlock the mind of Emily Desmond.
At present she is answering some direct questions, mostly of the “Are you hungry?” “Are you thirsty?” “Do you want me to open a window?” kind. Questions that impinge too closely upon the rape she meets with a blank silence. Her sensitivity and subtlety are phenomenal. My least attempt to steer the conversation in that direction causes her to retreat into sullen, withdrawn silence. Yet it is these very subjects that must be brought to mind and dealt with openly if we are to progress to a true psychological healing.
To the Man On The Clapham Omnibus, Emily would seem to be making a first-rate recovery—she is writing in her diary every day, expresses an interest in the outside world, and will engage in casual conversation. She is restless indoors and has expressed to Nurse O’Brien a desire to go on a shopping expedition to Clery’s to buy a new autumn outfit. At the end of the week, weather permitting, I may prescribe short walks in the clinic gardens, or Fitzwilliam Square. Certainly, while the current labour unrest continues to make the streets and squares unsafe for any citizen, there will be no shopping expeditions. Current civic woes aside, I am not convinced that Emily’s recovery is as total as she would have us believe. There is, for want of a more exact term, a leadenness about her features, her gestures in unguarded moments. Her general demeanour is colourless and unanimated. Her conversation displays the same concealed accidie. Though she no longer refuses to answer point-blank any question bearing on the night of the rape, her replies are reluctant and often evasive. She refuses to accept the rape as having been an actual event, at times treating it as if it had happened to someone else, at others incorporating it into her elaborate fantasy life as some terrifying supernatural experience divorced from everyday reality.
My role is clearly now that of guide and shield: guide from this stage of denial through possible subsequent anger and depression into acceptance and regeneration; shield from the revelation of current events that could catastrophically retard her progress. The first of these traumatising events is the news of her father’s failure, disgrace, and doubtless financial ruin in the wake of the collapse of his experiment to communicate with purported extrasolar beings. The second, and perhaps the more devastating, is the confirmation of her pregnancy. This second event cannot be long concealed; she is young, but by no means naive. I can only hope that I can guide her to the point of acceptance before she guesses herself.
Always in the science of psychology there is one set of symbols, one golden key, that opens the patient’s mind and unrolls it like an ancient map of a far country to the explorer of the psyche. At last, drawing on the notes I have taken from Emily’s diary, I feel I am close to unlocking that chest. Repressed sexuality is the key. The monastic regime of the Teaching Sisters at Cross and Passion has been well testified to in both the diaries and in conversation with Emily. Doubtless the juvenile dalliance in illicit sexual play inevitable in such establishments, coupled with the attentions of the young Mr. O’Byrne (how forthright Emily is in her diaries! Nothing withheld, nothing concealed!), would certainly drive her need for sexual expression deep into the subconscious and seal it there under layers of guilt. Such volcanic forces are not so easily penned: her sexual desire, her need to escape from what she perceives as social restraint, found expression in her creation of the imaginary Otherworld, a place without restraint, restrictions, without recognisable social mores. This Otherworld, a country created in considerable detail, for which she has formulated a sophisticated rationale, is a place of symbol and analogy, where her need for sexual, sensual, emotional, and artistic self-expression may be indulged without fear of censure, without guilt. Many of the kings, warriors, goblins, faeries, poets, harpers, even lovers, with which she populates it are clumsy recapitulations of her mother’s mythological studies, the works of W. B. Yeats, the folklore of the locality as imparted to her by Mrs. O’Carolan the housekeeper, and her own “literary” aspirations. It is a ripe and ready medium in which to sow the seeds of sexual frustration and guilt, and for them to reach fruition into a personal, even sinister, symbolism and significance.
Is it therefore proper to conclude that the events of the night of September 4 may not have been rape at all, in the purely legalistic sense of the word; that Emily may in fact have deliberately gone searching for a partner, a “faery lover,” and found instead an experience which turned so sour for her that she could only reject and deny it?
It is important also to incorporate the role of the father in any hypothesis. At an early age, Emily clearly idolised her father, yet at the time of the Craigdarragh incident she had grown hostile to both him and his work. That the rape commenced with the night of her father’s hoped-for vindication of Project Pharos cannot be insignificant. Emily’s response to her fifteenth birthday is crucial here. Again, from her diaries, it is obvious that she considered herself to be a woman in the fullest sense of the word. Her father, perhaps in response to needs and motivations of his own, refused to consider her anything but a little girl—sexually and emotionally immature, utterly dependent, a child. Certainly her retreat into the imaginary Otherworld of distorted mythology and superstition can be seen as a strike back against her father and his rigorous, rational, scientific world view. Tragically, even at this late stage, her diary entries hint that she was desperately striving for his approval, while at the same time attacking his vision for her life, and punishing him for his supposed inadequacies as a father. That she should have succeeded is the capstone to the entire tragic episode.
However, I am utterly at a loss to proffer any explanation for the photographs of the faery folk.
September 12, 1913
Craigdarragh
Drumcliffe
County Sligo
Dear Mother Superior,
Just a brief note to inform you that Emily will not be returning to Cross and Passion School in future. Alas, the poor child has recently suffered a major breakdown of health, and after a spell in Dr. Hubert Orr’s renowned Fitzwilliam Street clinic, will shortly be returning home to Craigdarragh to convalesce at length. It will be many months, I fear, before Emily fully regains her health. However, her education will not suffer—a governess is being hired to school her in a style better suited to her particular disposition. May I take this opportunity to thank you, Reverend Mother, for what you have done in the past for my daughter: education truly is a gem beyond price in this modern world, and I know that the private tutor we will be hiring for Emily will build soundly upon the solid foundation laid at Cross and Passion. In parting, then, I would ask for your prayers for Emily’s safe and full recovery. As ever, my own thoughts and prayers are all for my misfortunate daughter.
Sincerely,
Caroline Desmond
September 24, 1913
Minutes of the A.G.M. of
The Royal Irish Astronomical Society
The minutes of the previous A.G.M. having been read, accepted by the House, and signed by Mr. President, the meeting then moved to the first topic on the agenda: a motion proposed by the Member for Temple Coole that the Member for Drumcliffe be expelled from the Society.
Proposing the motion, the Member for Temple Coole stated that the activities of the Member for Drumcliffe had brought the Society into disrepute both nationally and in the international astronomical forum. The Member for Temple Coole further deplored the member under censure’s blatant self-publicity and courting of the press, as well as his indiscriminate abuse of his privilege as a Member to use the name of the Royal Irish Astronomical Society. In order to recoup some credibility from the Sligo fiasco, the Member concluded, the Society had no other option than to dissociate itself forthwith from the Member for Drumcliffe and his activities.
Seconding the motion, the Member for Aghavannon said that the Member for Drumcliffe’s work had not been true to the high standards of mathematical and scientific rigour demanded of members of the Society; that in the persuance of his Project Pharos and his hypotheses on the nature of Bell’s Comet, he had done irreparable damage not only to the Society which had opened wide the arms of astronomical fraternity, but to Scientific Method as an entity, and that, for the preservation of what the seconding Member deemed “The Temple of Science,” the Member for Drumcliffe be expelled from the Society.
Mr. President then threw the motion open to debate from the floor.
The Member for Queen’s University agreed with the Member for Aghavannon that the science of astronomy itself had been brought into disgrace, and added that a motion of censure also be passed upon the Member for Dunsink, the then Secretary of the Society, for encouraging the Member for Drumcliffe to publicise his theories in the lecture hall of the Society in the first place.
The Member for Derrynane declared that any Member who openly associated himself with “mediums, ghost hunters, table tappers, ectoplasm swallowers, and other such charlatans” had no place in the Royal Irish Astronomical Society.
The Member for Elaghmore, while reminding the assembled Members that he had tried to keep an open mind on the veracity or otherwise of the Bell’s Comet controversy, deplored what he termed as the Member for Drumcliffe’s “dog-in-the-manger” attitude, in that, while freely associating himself with the name and intellectual stature of the Society, his intent had never been to share any possible glory with his fellow Members.
Member for Slane commented that the member for Drumcliffe had received an offer from the Irish Rugby Football Union for the lights from his floating pontoons. He trusted that the Member for Drumcliffe would take great gratification in knowing that future generations would thank him for providing floodlit rugby at Lansdowne Road.
There being no further speeches from the floor, the President then moved for a division. The votes have been cast. The motion for expulsion was passed by 125 votes to seven.