Hood
Page 31
P.S.
Insights, Interviews & More…
About the author
Meet Emma Donaghue
About the book
A Closer Look at Pen
A Conversation with Emma Donaghue
Questions for Discussion
Read on
Further Reading
About the Author
Meet Emma Donoghue
EMMA DONOGHUE was born in Dublin in 1969, and has been a resident of Canada since 1998. A prolific author working in numerous genres, she published her first novel, Stir-fry, in 1994 and with it set the tone for the kind of work she would go on to produce in her later novels and short stories. Donoghue’s fiction is dryly witty and displays a sharp empathy for her characters, who range from the contemporary to the historical. In the contemporary novels Stir-fry, Hood (1995), and Landing (2007), Donoghue explores the lives of her Irish and Canadian protagonists as they try to navigate adulthood and relationships, both straight and queer. For Hood, Donoghue won the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Book Award for Literature. Female sexuality is also to the fore in the historical novels Slammerkin (2000), Life Mask (2004), and The Sealed Letter (2008), while her fascination with form is evident in the fairy-tale cycle Kissing the Witch (1997), in the story collections The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) and Touchy Subjects (2006), and in work for the stage (I Know My Own Heart premiered in 1993, and Ladies and Gentlemen in 1996), for radio, and for film (Pluck, 2001). Donoghue’s writing also includes critical nonfiction and literary history, including Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 (1993), We Are Michael Field (1998), and Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (2010). She has edited several anthologies, including a section in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vols. 4 and 5: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (2002). Donoghue’s most successful work to date has been the contemporary novel, Room, short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, bringing her to a wider audience and reinvigorating readers’ interest in her early work.
This P.S. section was written and edited by Brian Cliff and Emilie Pine.
BRIAN CLIFF is Assistant Professor of Irish Studies and English at Trinity College, Dublin. He has published essays and articles on contemporary Irish writing, and is the coeditor (with Éibhear Walshe) of Representing the Troubles: Texts and Images, 1970–2000 and (with Nicholas Grene) of Synge and Edwardian Ireland.
EMILIE PINE lectures in modern drama at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of numerous essays and articles on Irish film, theatre, and literature, and most recently published The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture.
About the book
A Closer Look at Pen
HOOD IS THE STORY of Penelope (Pen, to her friends) as she struggles emotionally following the sudden death of her long-term lover, Cara Wall. By crafting a memorably engaging voice for her heroine, Emma Donoghue brings us into Pen’s world. Through this voice, we hear about Pen’s life, from her turbulent past “riding the seesaw between dignity and abandon” in her relationship with Cara, to her traumatic present reality.
In the ancient Greek story The Odyssey, Penelope waited at home for the return of her wandering husband Odysseus. In Hood, Donoghue draws on the same epic source as did James Joyce in Ulysses, recasting the myth in recognizably contemporary terms. Like Homer’s Penelope, Donoghue’s Pen at first seems to be a passive woman, waiting so often for Cara to return from her travels or from another’s bed that she wonders how she would “recognize Cara if she was not always on the brink of leaving.” Cara’s death ends this waiting and so, in one way, liberates Pen. But because Pen has for so long defined herself around Cara, this liberation also means the loss of Pen’s identity as the one who waits. Now, Pen must re-create her very self.
Pen, though, is not “out” to the world or to her family, despite having lived as a couple with Cara in the Wall family home, alongside Cara’s father. For much of the novel, however, Mr. Wall, like the novel’s other heterosexual characters, seems unaware of their relationship status. As a result, where her mythic counterpart Penelope could claim the status of “wife,” Pen is relegated to the less official rank of “friend.” The social silence surrounding lesbianism makes Cara’s death more difficult for Pen, who must now struggle not only with her grief but also with the secrecy surrounding her own life. Though planning the funeral helps Pen manage her pain, it also confirms her hidden status because she does not feel licensed to mourn Cara publicly: “Beloved housemate, friend, schoolmate, pal? Which words would I be allowed?” Indeed, Pen can take only a short time off from work for the funeral, and even fears that she will lose the home they shared.
Hood has no traditional Irish wake to relieve these anxieties, but there is an unorthodox version at the Attic, the feminist collective that is Cara’s alternative family. Yet even in this space, which she defensively dismisses as a “touchy-feely commune,” Pen feels less than fully understood as Cara’s partner: the Attic women are Cara’s friends rather than hers, and Cara’s last fling before her death was with one of the women there. Pen’s struggle with her bereavement reflects these complex social barriers and the cultural uncertainty surrounding her and Cara’s relationship, which is fully recognized neither at the convent school nor at the collective. This is important for the integrity of this novel, which does not idealize any social group; instead, they are all depicted as both fallible and humanly flawed.
“By leaning on irony and sarcasm, Pen may hide the depth of her pain from the world and even from herself, but through a style that is always open and direct Donoghue’s writing allows readers to identify with Pen.”
By leaning on irony and sarcasm, Pen may hide the depth of her pain from the world and even from herself, but through a style that is always open and direct Donoghue’s writing allows readers to identify with Pen. Over the week following Cara’s death, for example, Pen frequently becomes lost in reveries about their early days, when they discovered their sexuality together. These memories allow Donoghue to convey some of Pen and Cara’s passion in erotically charged scenes which are never coy, and which are instead exceptionally open about women’s bodies and sexuality. Sex scenes are notoriously difficult to write well, but Donoghue conveys to great effect the connection between Pen and Cara’s physical and emotional intimacies. Though the novel is clear about the specificity of lesbian experience, it also depicts women who love each other as one facet of society, and not as different or as “other.” In particular, the novel’s depictions of Pen’s recognizably mundane domestic realities insist that readers understand her as “normal.” In doing so, Hood weaves together the particulars of Pen’s experiences as an Irish lesbian with the universality of love and death, of grief and mourning. The empathy with which it does so makes the novel powerfully accessible to readers of very different backgrounds.
“Hood weaves together the particulars of Pen’s experiences as an Irish lesbian with the universality of love and death, of grief and mourning.”
In part through an epiphany about the grief that connects us all—“Why did we pretend to be strangers when we were all webbed together by the people we had lost and the short future we had in common?”—Pen finally begins to come to terms with her loss. To do this, she must acknowledge Cara’s flaws as well as her love. In a kind of rebirth that allows Pen to be open about who she is and the support she needs, she also prepares to come out to her mother. Sitting in her mother’s house, Pen at last begins to cry, releasing her pent-up grief and, symbolically, cleansing herself in preparation for a new beginning. Though Donoghue doesn’t offer a simplistically happy ending, this scene brings a close to the novel by suggesting that grief has had a catalyzing effect for Pen, who emerges speaking at last in her true voice.
A Conversation with Emma Donoghue
When you wrote Hood, what were you hoping readers would see in it? And how did you envision readers reacting
to Pen and Cara?
I was aiming high: I wanted to write a lesbian romance that readers of all stripes would care about. I hoped that the universality of grief would compensate for the specificity of lesbian identity, and that Pen and Cara’s flawed but persistent relationship would be interesting even to readers who had never lived anything like it.
It’s often been for exactly that reason—the empathy they find with Pen in particular—that our students have loved discussing Hood in Irish literature courses. Authors sometimes have an uneasy relationship with academic readers, but how do you find having your book read in university courses?
As a “spoiled academic” myself—by which I mean someone who strayed off the professorial path, as some trainee priests wander from the seminary—I take pure pleasure in my interactions with the university world. Occasionally I am amused by students writing to alert me to the blindingly obvious (“Did you know that your Kissing the Witch collection has thirteen stories, and thirteen is the number traditionally associated with witches?”), but often scholars manage to squeeze more meanings out of my work than I thought I’d put in.
Do you ever wish you could have a conversation with your characters and give them advice? Is there anything you wish you could go back and say to Pen?
“Even while I was writing the novel I wanted to slap [Pen]. Stand up for yourself! Dump the girl! Chuck the job! Move on”
Oh, even while I was writing the novel I wanted to slap her. Stand up for yourself! Dump the girl! Chuck the job! Move on! The writer-character relationship often has elements of both identification and antagonism; that helps the sparks to fly.
The title of Hood seems like it evokes a lot of elements in the novel. What suggested the title to you?
Olga Broumas’s poem about Red Riding Hood, quoted in my epigraph. Also the weirdly nineteenth-century hoods attached to our school uniform coats. The clitoris. The pleasures and claustrophobia of secrecy.
How important is it that the novel is set in early-1990s Dublin? Is the city another character in the book? Could this novel still be set in post-Boom Dublin, or has the city changed irrevocably from the one Pen knew?
The Dublin of Hood seems to me utterly pre-Boom—not just in its details, but in the way the novel broods over the enfolding, constricting stasis of Irish culture. Whatever “state of chassis” Ireland might find itself in now, it’s not like the old days.
How would you fit Pen’s spirituality, particularly her very personally defined Catholicism, into this sense of change? Is that something you think could still be true of a similar character in contemporary Dublin?
While I’m sure Ireland is still littered with à la carte Catholics, and maybe even à la carte Catholic lesbians, I do think Pen’s heroic attempt to stay inside a church that despises her is typical of the period in which Hood is set. Since the early ’90s, many Irish Catholics I know have either given up on that institution, or stayed in it but with an increasingly skeptical attitude.
The Attic and Immac are convincing and distinct worlds. How did you create them as spaces and as groups of characters? Were they based on any of your own experiences in Dublin?
Immac is basically my secondary school (Muckross Park Convent in Donnybrook, Dublin) with the uniforms switched from green to red. I was grateful for the excellent intellectual education I received, but I chafed under the nuns’ ideological regime. The Attic is inspired by the all-womyn (as we used to spell it) Paradise Housing Co-op I spent many years living in while I was doing my PhD in Cambridge. I loved it, in all its shabby and occasionally absurd collectivity, but I thought it would probably give a loner like Pen the creeps.
Pen and Cara have a very intimate sexual life. Was it difficult to write the sex scenes and integrate them into the plot?
Readers are sometimes surprised that certain of my books have lots of sex and others have almost none. For me, it’s all about what the book needs. Room is the story of an innocent five-year-old so the rapes are barely alluded to, for instance. By contrast, Hood is about the loss of a lover, so it seemed to call for a detailed and authentic evocation of exactly what has been lost: the suddenly truncated history of two hearts and two bodies.
How did you make Pen’s experience of grief and mourning so convincing? Was there much research involved? And would you say that Pen starts to come to terms with her grief by the end?
Yes, I think that in that one intense week she does work through the worst of it. I feel a little sheepish in admitting that it was all research—though that’s too cold-blooded a term for the kind of reading, interviewing, and unsparing imagining I did when I was writing Hood. I hadn’t (and still haven’t) experienced any major bereavement; mostly I sat with my eyes shut, asking myself highly specific questions such as “It’s been eighteen hours since the phone call. How would you be feeling right now?” I tried not to exclude anything that rang true to me, from Pen’s still-hearty appetite for cake to her surges of irritation at her dead beloved.
Looking back at your second novel, how do you feel it has aged? How do you see Hood fitting alongside the rest of your books?
Hood strikes me as having a lot in common with elegaic AIDS fiction of the 1990s. Not that lesbians were losing each other to an illness in great numbers, but we did share gay men’s sense of loss, damage, anger, isolation and invisibility—and a bereavement premise lets you shape all those dark emotions into a strong story. Although Hood did not sell well on first publication—I joke that it was about lesbians and death, two turn-offs for the average reader—I have always been fond of it. Not just because it has so much of my adolescence in it, I hope, but because it stands up for itself: it has a clear tragicomic voice, a sort of my-heart-is-broken-so-I-couldn’t-give-a-damn-if-I-offend-you quality. Culturally, it sits between an earlier Dublin novel (Stir-fry) and a later one (Landing), but actually I think it has most in common with Room: they are the only two novels I’ve written in a single first-person voice, and they are both about the peculiar intensities of a loving relationship.
If you were to write a sequel to Hood, or to revisit some of the characters as Landing did with some of the Stir-fry characters, where would they be in their lives?
My hope is that Pen has long left both the closet and the convent school behind her, and now rolls her eyes in disbelief that she wasted so many years in both. I see her as running a business of her own in Sligo with a devoted girlfriend, perhaps planning their civil partnership…taking up the space she’s entitled to, basically.
Questions for Discussion
1. How did you respond to the depiction of Pen and Cara’s relationship? What moments in the novel most characterise that relationship?
2. What are some recurrent images and patterns in the novel?
3. How does the water imagery link to female identity?
4. What is the significance of the title, Hood?
5. The novel is set in Dublin, and includes a wide range of specific references to Irish culture. How important are those references here? How “Irish” is this novel?
6. How does the first-person voice help to create the character of Pen? What characterizes her narration?
7. How is the Attic presented? Does that presentation change over the course of the novel?
8. There are a number of scenes involving religious discussions, both at the Attic and at the Wall family home. What role does religion play for different characters in the novel?
9. Is the concept of “family” significant to this novel? If so, how?
10. How would you place this novel in current debates about women’s sexuality?
Read on
Further Reading
FROM THE VERY BEGINNING of her career, Donoghue’s writing has been widely recognized in academic and popular publications, some of which are listed here. She also maintains an extensive and regularly updated list of interviews, criticism, and her own publications on her website, www.emmadonoghue.com.
Fiction by Emma Donoghue
Room (20
10)
The Sealed Letter (2008)
Landing (2007)
Touchy Subjects (2006)
Life Mask (2004)
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002)
Slammerkin (2000)
Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997)
Hood (1995)
Stir-fry (1994)
Nonfiction by Emma Donoghue
“Once upon a life,” Observer Magazine, 5 September 2010.
Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).
“How I Write,” The Writer 118, January 2005.
“Lesbian Encounters 1746–1997” (editor), in The Field Day Anthology Of Irish Writing, Vols. 4 and 5, edited by Angela Bourke et al. (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002).
The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories (editor), (London: Robinson, 1999).
We Are Michael Field, (Bath: Absolute Press, 1998).
“Noises from Woodsheds: The Muffled Voices of Irish Lesbian Fiction,” in Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland: Towards the Twenty-first Century, edited by Ide O’Carroll and Eoin Collins (London: Cassell, 1995).
Selected Interviews with Emma Donoghue
Stacia Bensyl, “Swings and Roundabouts: An Interview with Emma Donoghue,” Irish Studies Review 8.1 (2000).
Sarah Crown, “I Knew I Wasn’t Being Voyeuristic,” Guardian (Manchester), 13 August 2010.
Brian Finnegan, “Room at the Top,” Gay Community News, 27 August 2010.
Linda Grant, “The Bishop and the Lesbian,” Guardian (Manchester), 22 March 1995.
Marti Hohmann, “Women’s Passions of the Millennium,” Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 6.4 (Fall 1999).
Alice Lawlor, “Emma Donoghue’s historical novels,” Xtra (Toronto), 29 July 2008, www.xtra.ca/public/viewstory.aspx?story_id=5128&pub_template_id=5.