58

DISARMING THE IRISH - REFLECTIONS ON IRISH

BODY IMAGE

Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Department of Anthropology

Southern Methodist University

Dallas, Texas

The countryside is tainted by slowly withering

blossoms like me. At the creamery in the mornings

I see them with black overcoats and unwashed faces,
many of them smelling of the very milk which they

have come to deliver, except that, like themselves,
the milk has gone sour. They have missed out in
the game of love.

John B. Keane

The apparent reluctance of the Irish villager to court and marry,
and his inclination to marry late and intermarry with cousins, if and

when he marries at all, has fascinated social scientists for a genera-

tion (see Connell 1962, 1968; Walsh 1970; Kennedy 1975; Messenger 1969).
Many levels of explanation have been offered: historical, socio-cultural
and psychological.

Economic historians and demographers (Connell 1962, 1968; Kennedy
1975) have singled out the years and traumatic experience of the Great

Famine (1845-1849) as the turning point in the trend to later and fewer
marriages. They suggest that celibacy be seen as a socially adaptive
response to control the once excessively high rural birth rate.

Socio-cultural explanations have concentrated upon the unique patterns
of land tenure and inheritance in Ireland (Arensberg 1937) whereby only

one son stands to inherit the farm and the privilege of marrying. Psycho-
logical analyses suggest that the "basic personality structure" of the
Irish male pivots around feelings of masculine inadequacy, ambivalent
hostility and dependency feelings towards women originating in strong
mother-son Oedipal conflicts (Opler and Singer 1956). John Messenger

(1969) emphasizes the role of Irish Catholicism-a tradition steeped in
sexual repression, mistrust of the flesh, and the glorification of the
ascetic virtues of temperance, continence, and self-mortification.

Within Ireland itself so very much has been written in recent decades
about the puritanical nature of Irish Catholicism and its eroding effect
upon rural marriage and the freedom of sexual expression (see O'Brien
1954; O'Faolain 1949; Sheehy 1968; Fennell 1974; Rohan 1969) that here
I will add only my scattered observations on the ways in which Irish
body image unconsciously reflects and reinforces sexual repression.

59

These observations are based on a year of field work (1974-1975) in

"Ballybran," a mountainy parish of long living, mostly celibate shepherds,
publicans and fishermen in the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht of West Kerry.1

THE CELIBATE IDEAL

According to Irish folk belief, there are two ways of achieving cer-
tain salvation. The first is through a red martyrdom, or dying for one's
faith in the tradition of the early Christians and the great missionary

saints. The second path to sainthood, and the one chosen by most ordin-
ary people, is the white martyrdom (ban-martra), a slow "death to self"

through acts of self-denial - fasting, penance - and, above all, a life
characterized by sexual purity. The lives of numerous "little saints"
such as the Black St. Martin and St. Teresa the Little Flower are held

up to villagers as models. However, no one illustrates better the vir-
tues of Irish asceticism and scorn for the body than the modern day

Catholic hero, Mat Talbot, a reformed alcoholic and laborer who died in
1925. The Irish clergy have succeeded in bringing Talbot's case to the

attention of Rome and he is presently being considered for canonization.
Mat's main attribute is that following a youthful period of drinking and
dissipation, he converted to a life of rigorous and unremitting penance.
According to his biographer, Albert Dolan, Talbot's normal day consisted
of equal parts of prayer and work, followed by three hours of sleep and
a single scanty meal. When Mat finally dropped dead on a Dublin street,
heavy chains were found wrapped around his body and legs underneath his
clothing, presumably to prevent any temptation to sexual sin. Father

Dolan said of him, "There was packed into Mat Talbot everything that is
best in Irish character" (cited by Blanshard 1953:176).

Because of its celibate tradition the Irish Church has been accused

of being anti-life, bitter, gloomy,and sexist. Several years ago, Oliver
Gogarty protested to the Irish Senate that "it is high time the people

of this country found some other way of loving God other than by hating
women" (cited by Sheehy 1968:203). As late as the 1940s and 1950s, the
"peasant priests" of Maynooth seminary were trained in a moral theology
so repressive that the sacrament of marriage was seen as an occasion of

sin which necessitated constant supervision on the part of Mother Church.
The affectionately termed "penny catachism" upon which most Ballybran
villagers were raised teaches that celibacy is the highest status in

life, and that the married state is a problematic union of two concupis-
cent natures.

Sexual intercourse in marriage is lawful but only when indulged in

modestly and for the purposes of procreation. The sexual sins of marriage
include intercourse for pleasure alone (or "lust" as the Irish clergy

refer to it), deviations from the approved coital position, and contra-

ception. Irish women are explicitly prohibited from cooperating in sexual
intercourse if the husband uses a condom. The clergy counsels such women
to resist their husbands as "a virgin threatened with rape." The only
approved form of birth control in rural Ireland is abstinence from sex,

and a number of distraught village parents who have reached their desired

limit of three or four children have reverted to what rural Church sanctions

60

as a "brother-sister" marriage  -a celibate (or, in the vernacular, a
"dry") union.

Until recently, sexual intercourse was forbidden on the eve of the
reception of the Holy Eucharist and on Holy Days of Obligation. The

rural clergy, armed with the power to forgive the retain sins, as well

as with the authority to withhold Holy Communion at the altar rail as a

sign of public censure  maintains a firm control over the bodies as well
as the souls of their notoriously obedient parishioners.

Such restrictions on sexual expression have been found to be impli-
cated in a number of prevalent social problems in the Irish Republic,

among them:  alcoholism ("the good man's vice,," see Bales 1962); marital

desertion and wife beating (O'Higgins 1974); hypochondria, depression and
masochism (Messenger 1969:107); schizophrenic episodes (Scheper-Hughes
1978); and, widespread female ignorance of orgasm (Rohan 1969:67-70).

In Ballybran the celibate ethic has contributed to the construction
of village institutions and to a pervasive spirit of anomie and demoral-
ization which I discuss elsewhere (Scheper-Hughes 1978). Suffice it to
say here that the predominant household in the parish today is based on

blood rather than marriage ties. Of 138 households, 63 are comprised of
various combinations of consanguinal kin:   solitary bachelors, unmarried
brothers with spinster sisters, widows and widowers alone or with their

unmarried adult children (Table 1). The last parish marriage took place
in 1972.

Although the newly ordained post-Vatican II clergy have attempted
to correct the Augustinian excesses of past ideology (in the interests
of preserving their dwindling flocks), most adult villagers, permeated

with years of prior indoctrination, still tend to view sex as dirty and
shameful, and still refer modestly to the "decent" and "indecent" parts
of the body. When Father Leary reinstituted the tradition of Sunday

The sight of that medley of wet nakedness
chilled him to the bone. Their bodies

corpsewhite . . . gleamed with the wet of

the sea . . . . It was a swordlike pain to
see the signs of adolescence which made
repellent their pitiable nakedness.

James Joyce

Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man

night dances for parish youth (after years of their suppression by his

predecessors), village parents insisted upon the curate's presence as a
chaperon and limited the dancing to daylight hours. Some parents were

alarmed to learn that the priest had approved slow, close dancing between
the couples as well as traditional Irish step dancing with its minimum

of, and highly formalized, body contact.   In response to a village school
teacher who protested the slow dancing as "sinful" the good priest re-
torted that the problem with village youth was not too much caressing

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62

between the sexes but too little. Parental resistance was also strong

with regard to sex education for their adolescent children. At a parish
meeting on the topic headed by a representative of the Catholic Marriage
Advisory Council, several parents expressed their fear that frank dis-
cussions of sexuality might awaken the dormant "appetites" of their

naive adolescents. As one mother put it, "'Tis better to let sleeping
dogs lie."

That adult attitudes towards the "wicked flesh" have already been

transmitted to the younger generations was demonstrated through a Values

Hierarchy Scale (Table 2) which I administered to 67 primary and secondary
school children. The students were asked to rank order the following

values from most to least important: knowledge, career success, health,
honor, economic security, freedom, friendship, respect, character, love,
religious faith, good disposition, humor, wealth and power.2   The reac-
tions of the youth to the test itself were revealing: they protested

that certain of the values were either irrelevant or repetitious (Didn't
respect include a notion of honor?   Wasn't good disposition the same as
humor?) while other very essential values were left out, among them
self-discipline and happy death. In the subsequently modified test,
self-discipline occupied a middle rank in the students' evaluations.

"Mind the body and you will lose the soul," cautioned one adolescent.

FEAR OF INTIMACY

An Irish psychiatrist and director of a district mental hospital in
County Cork summed up the basic psychological problems he encountered in
his clinical practice as follows:

Emotions which seem to me, and indeed to others,

to cause particular problems to many persons . . .

in this region are greed, envy, bitterness, frustra-
tion (sexual and otherwise), guilt, hatred, anger,
a general feeling of lack of love, a fear of loss
indeed a very high expectancy of and resignation
to loss, with consequent fear and avoidance of
tenderness and intimacy (Dunne 1970:23).

Certainly, both a fear of and longing after intimacy was a central
theme on the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)3 responses of village

adolescents of both sexes (22 girls and 14 boys). Communication failures,
or simply absence of communication between family members, appear to be

largely responsible for the themes of personal alienation, loss, and iso-
lation which permeated the TAT stories. In the farm scene of card 2, for
example, half the village boys tested, and a third of the girls told

stories in which one or more of the characters feels isolated from or

scapegoated by the rest of the family. In general the story characters
tended to be walled off, locked within themselves: sulking, hurting,
longing, crying internally, while externally expressing nothing. In

response to card 3BM (figure huddled on floor), young Peter says, "The
boy feels so hurt and angry he wants to cry" (but he doesn't); and

63

TABLE 2

VALUES HIERARCHY SCALE

A.  Ballybran National School (6th Form), ages 10-12 years

Rank Order

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

Boys (10 )

Religious faith
Health

Friendship
Respect
Freedom
Love

Economic security
Self-discipline
Happy death

Career success
Power

Knowledge
Wealth
Humor

Girls (11)

Religious faith
Health

Respect

Happy death
Friendship
Love

Knowledge

Economic security
Self-discipline
Freedom
Humor
Power

Wealth

Career Success

B.  Ballybran Secondary School (th and 5th_year classes), ages 15-19

Rank Order

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

Boys (12)

Health

Freedom

Friendship
Love

Religious faith
Respect

Career success
Self-discipline
Happy death

Economic security
Humor

Knowledge-learning
Wealth
Power

Health

Religious faith
Love

Friendship
Freedom
Respect
Humor

Self-discipline
Happy death

Career success

Knowledge-learning
Economic security
Wealth
Power

64

Grainne, a seriously depressed 18-year-old from an isolated mountain farm,
says:

This poor creature, she have nobody to talk to.
She wants to tell her problems to somebody,
but she can't.  (Why can't she?)   She's the
type that keeps to herself.

In those TAT cards particularly evocative of dynamic family inter-
actions it was characteristic of the Irish response style to tell a good
deal about what the characters were thinking and somewhat less of what
they were feeling, but to create little dialogue between the figuresg
even when the card clearly suggests conversation. Frequently, one or

more characters was described as "a silent type," "the kind that doesn't
say much," "a dreamer," "lost in thought," "in a world of her own," or
as lifeless statues or paintings.

In actual village society, a lack of communication is not only char-
acteristic of the parent-child dyada but of relationships between adult
peers:  friends, neighbors, men and women, husbands and wives. Long-

standing feuds between villagers no longer erupt into the famous "faction
fights" of the past (see Fox 1962); rather, anger and disapproval are
expressed in silence - "not giving them the time of day." A village

artisan and raconteur articulated village etiquette to me on one occasion.
Noteworthy is the wariness of human nature and lack of what Erik Erikson
might call "basic trust";

I do find that in Ballybran there's more of
a general conversation between people.   If

you or I went to Tom's [the pub] we couldn't just
chat it up, you and I. No, not at all. Be-
cause if I say something to you and you say

something to me, well the other man will think
we have a secret and he'll want to hear it too.
So, he'll come over to us and say, "hello,

dearies, give me a fag, and how's the races?"
To my own ideas, it does great harm, great

harm, indeed, to become too intimate with a

person. When people become too intimate, they

have too much knowledge of each other, and that
is very detrimental. You confide in them, and
they "soft" 'it out, and "soft" it out, and you
say this and that, and later on you live to
regret it.

In a similar vein a well-liked villager once told me his formula for

successful human relationships:   "Be courteous to all, have few friends,
and trust no one."  In such an emotional climate it is little wonder

that attempts at courtship and romantic love so often end in stalemate.

65

"INNER AND OUTER SPACES" -   REFLECTIONS ON IRISH BODY IMAGE

Mary Douglas has suggested (1966, 1970) that all societies might

be classified along what she called "group-grid" lines according to body
symbolization and concern with ritual pollution. She would see the body
as a natural and primary symbol for the social order such that peoples'

attitudes towards the governing of their bodies would reflect their ideas
about the ways in which social relations (especially between the sexes)

should be ordered. Certainly, the rural Irish share with Orthodox Jews,
Hindus, and the Yurok Indians of California, among others, a rather

strong preoccupation with matters of ritual and sexual purity, which is
often expressed through a rigid vigilance over bodily boundaries.

Ballybran villagers, for example, evidenced a high degree of anxiety over
both what goes in and what comes out of the body. Ambivalence towards

"giving out" or "letting go" was reflected in women's beliefs that breast
feeding is "too draining" an experience, in men's fears of wasting semen,
in older villagers' attitudes towards guarding gossip and secrets ("I
have a prayer," confided old Maggie, "and nobody else have it, and if

you think you can get it from me, just see if I don't die with me lips
sealed").

The "giving out" of sins in confession was particularly anxiety-pro-
voking for many villagers, and their scrupulosity was expressed in an

agonizing regard for the proper religious fulfillment of the sacrament:
had they confessed the exact number of omissions and commissions?   were
there any extenuating circumstances that might increase or mitigate

blame?  had they recited their penance adequately?   shouldn't they per-
haps repeat it, just to be sure?   One elderly villager expressed her

state of confusion, impatience, and ambivalence about the sacrament as

we were standing together on a particularly slow moving confessional line.
She volunteered, "Yerra, we do make mountains out of nothing. And I

think we do be wasting the priest's time in the box. But we never know
for sure what is a sin, and so we do confess it all."

A kind of ornery retentiveness was suspected of sick children who

did not respond well to medication - they were said to be "holding in"t
the bug, fever, or infection.   One distraught village mother asked me

to have a look at her three-year-old who she was sure might succumb to
a severe strain of the measles that was spreading through the village

during the spring of our stay. The child had a high fever but not a sign
of the characteristic rash. "That's just the trouble," said the mother,
"the girl is too stubborn to put out the spots and be done with it."
Similar sentiments were expressed about cancer: the bad kind, said

villagers, was not the visible growths, but rather the kind people held

inside them, the dreaded "inwardly disease" referred to so frequently in
the Ballybran death register.

The concern with bodily exits, entrances, and boundaries, and the
fear of violation and penetration extend as well to those convenient

symbols of the body - the home with its doors, gates, fences and (in
Ireland) stone boundaries (see Bachelard 1969; Jung 1964). The same
Irish defensiveness and guardedness is projected into the numerous

66

allusions in Irish folklore to the proper way to enter or leave a home,
the magical marking of the four corners of a new house site, and in the
protective precaution of a St. Briget's cross over every door lintel.
Before going to bed at night, the old grandmother blesses each of the
four bed posts and asks that a holy sentinel stand guard at each one:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
Bless the bed that I lie on.

One to guide me, one to guard me,

And two to carry my soul to heaven.

In "smooring" the fire for the night it is customary to pray:

I save this fire as noble Christ saves.
Mary on the top of the house
Brigit in its center

The eight strongest angels in heaven

Preserving this home and keeping its people safe.

In terms of Irish body image, folk beliefs about the soul reveal

Irish anxieties about penetration, loss, retentiveness, and vigilance.

The soul, traditionally believed to be a slippery bit of muscle located

under the arm in the form of a fish (hence called iasc ne beath, the fish
of life), is not to be entirely trusted. According to folklore from the
neighboring Blasket Islands (and still recited by older parishioners of

Ballybran), the soul can escape from the body in the form of a butterfly
should the unwary person fall asleep with his mouth open. Similarly,

mothers are relieved when the vulnerable fontanel (loiQir an bhaitlhis)
closes in their infants -  another port of exit for the wily soul.

Current wake rituals are oriented around the precaution that friends and
kin sit with the body for a few days to be sure that the unpredictable
soul has left the body. As one young farmer explained, "we don't like
to bring the body into church while it's still 'fresh-like.'   You'd
want to be good and sure the soul isn't still hovering about."

Finally, I am reminded of the tradition in west Kerry of annually

checking the heavy stone boundaries that separate one small, rocky field
from the next in order to be certain of no "tinkering" on the part of a

mischievous neighbor - a common source, I might add, of paranoid delusion
among schizophrenic patients in Kerry. A violation of the land (symbolic
of family integrity and pride) is tantamount to a violation of the body.

On the other hand, villagers are equally guarded about both what
they take into the body (as in sex and food) as well as about being

"taken in" (as with "codding," flattery or blarney). Hence, one finds
a receptivity to fasting and abstinence, a concern with eating only

"plain and simple" food, and a preference for liquids over solids. Many
village women rejected tampons as "dirty things," and the few women who
would discuss it thought that protective sheaths and condoms (i.e.,

sex-once-removed) would be preferable to either intrusive diaphragms or
the pill.

Ca7

There is a tendency among country people to use clothing defensively
as well. Adult villagers demonstrated the characteristic Irish "scorn

for the body" in wearing the same wollen sweaters, heavy boots and pants
or skirts both indoors and out, in summer and in winter, in wet weather
and in dry. The clothing tended to be layered, long and loose, both
concealing and protecting the body. Long black shawls wrapped across
part of the face served as a disguise for older women, and waistcoat

and sweaters, often pulled tightly across the chest in a defensive ges-
ture, served as armor, Legs crossed, arms folded, head slightly bowed,

the typical Ballybran pub stance is a posture of caution and guardedness.
The countryman (and woman) is equally reserved and dignified in his walk

and, when working in the field, he anchors his feet with his legs stiffly
and firmly together. He makes no idle or random gestures with his hands
while talking, and a subtle snap of the neck or a raised index finger

is his greeting.  In all, the body image of the Kerryman is a study in
control, understatement, and tenseness.

The traditional Irish reticence regarding the reception of Holy

Communion also fits into the general pattern I am describing. Even many

years after the late Pope John relaxed fasting and confessional regulations
prior to communion, older villagers will not take anything into their

mouth after midnight on the eve of receiving the Blessed Sacrament, nor

will the majority receive without prior confession of their faults. The

public act of receiving the wafer on the tongue is embarrassing for some,
and criticism is reserved for those who "snap up the host" too quickly
or those who extend their tongue too far or too early. The "improper"
reception of the Eucharist is a common element in folk narrative.   In

the numerous communion motifs which I collected in the village as well

as those courtesy of Professor Sean OfSuilleabhain of the Irish Folklore
Commission, the tension between "taking in" and "putting out" is par-
ticularly marked. Two tales will serve to illustrate this prominent
theme: "The Woman Who Could Not Die" and "The Fairy Rider." In the

first, a priest encounters a woman over a hundred years old, infirm and
suffering terribly, but apparently unable to die.   The priest acts as

her confessor and the old woman reveals a terrible secret that she had
kept back all her life. Once as a child when returning from the altar
rail, after receiving Holy Communion, the wafer slipped from her mouth

and fell to the floor. Shyness and shame prevented her from bending down

to pick it up, so she left it there and went back to her pew.   She carried
this grave sacrilege unconfessed all her lifetime and had finally come to
realize that her punishment was a curse that she would never die until
the Sacred Host was recovered and placed back in the ciborium on the
altar or else received properly. The priest, filled with sorrow and

compassion at the old woman's tale, gallops to the site of the church
which has since been destroyed, and finds a beautiful bush flowering

among the ruins. He finds the Sacred Host at the roots of the bush and
he carefully carries it to the ancient woman who receives it as Holy

Viaticum (communion at death) at which point her tortured soul is released
from captivity in the decrepit body and flies up to eternity.

The second tale is of an old woman who dies and is waked but who is
visited every night by a mysterious horse and rider who commands her to

68

sit up in her wake bed. The people are terrified and run away to find
a priest, who reluctantly agrees to sit watch on the third night and
confront the horse and rider. The rider appears and explains to the

priest that the old woman had taken Holy Communion with an unconfessed
mortal sin on her soul, and hence the devil was coming to claim her

soul. The priest commands the dead woman to sit up and surrender the

Host which had been received unworthily. The woman obediently complies,

and once the priest has the wafer in his consecrated fingers he announces
loudly, "Be gone, Satan.   Now that I have her soul safely, you can have
her worthless body" (field notes, November 1974). This message is re-
inforced at Sunday Mass where one missionary, a frequent visitor to the
parish, would remind the congregation immediately after the communion

ceremony, "whosoever received unworthily, he is guilty of the body and
blood of Christ."

If I am correct in my speculation, these oppositional themes of
flesh/sprit, purity/pollution, guilt/shame, taking in/giving out, so

basic to rural Irish personality modalities, and expressed through body
imagery and folklore, inhibit the expression of physical sexuality and
make celibacy a more comfortable and less conflictive way of life for

the great number. Some years ago the Irish Catholic Church called for
a national movement of "moral rearmament" to combat the twin evils of

materialism and secularization.   To the social critic, even more serious,

perhaps, are the twin evils of sexual devitalization and cultural demoral-
ization, and these might be countered through a call for "physical dis-
armament" - a surrender of those heavily guarded body boundaries of the
fears of penetration, loss, giving up and taking in that are so preven-
tative of the expression of intimacy and conjugal love in rural Ireland.

NOTES

lThis paper is based on a section of chapter four in my forthcoming bookV
Saints Scholars and Schizophrenics; Mental Illness in Rural Ireland.

University of California Press (scheduled for publication, summer 1978).
2The Values Hierarchy Scale was first developed by Diaz-Guerrero (1963)
for the purpose of investigating value differences between Mexican and
American youth.

3The Thematic Apperception Test consists of a series of standardized
pictures which reflect everyday characters in a variety of moods and

human situations. The subject is asked to make up a story for each pic-
ture with a definite plot and a final outcome. He is encouraged to tell
what each character is thinking and feeling.

69

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