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eBook details

• Title: Politics and Feminism: The Basque Contexts of Kate O'brien's Mary Lavelle (Critical Essay)
• Author : Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies
• Release Date : January 22, 2009
• Genre: Reference,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 360 KB

Description

This essay looks at Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle in relation to its Basque setting, concentrating on the chapter 'Don Pablo', which offers a fictionalized portrait of the Basque surgeon and intellectual, Enrique Areilza. Reductive readings of the novel as a romance or bildungsroman are contradicted by this chapter, and complicated by historical and political contexts usually ignored by criticism. The quotation from the Times Literary Supplement printed on the back cover of a recent edition of Mary Lavelle describes it as '[a] superior type of romantic novel'. (1) The book has been marketed as a tale about the discovery, by an Irish governess in Spain, of her emotional and sexual potential. And yet, as Adele Dalsimer has noted, it is also important as a political work. (2) Mary Lavelle includes a full chapter devoted to the political beliefs and evolution of a tangential character, Don Pablo, as well as a subtext of nationalist aspirations. The sexual and gender politics of the novel are, in fact, interwoven with the parallel movements of nationalism and socialism, which were growing in the Basque country in the first decades of the twentieth century. Kate O'Brien based Mary Lavelle on her own experiences between 1922 and 1923 in the Basque city of Bilbo (or Bilbao), in the province of Biscay. (3) For nearly a year, she worked as an English tutor for the Areilzas, a family that was to play an important role in Basque and Spanish politics for many years. The head of the household, Enrique Areilza (1860-1926), was the model for the character of Don Pablo, the employer of the protagonist or Irish miss in the novel. Although not a professional politician, Areilza devoted most of his energies to improving the living conditions of the disadvantaged in his hometown, and was considerably involved in cultural circles. To this day, culture shares a common centre with politics in Basque history.

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