Amongst Women

“What did we get for it? A country, if you’d believe them. Some of our own johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishmen. More than half of my own family work in England. What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod.”

Moran’s perspective on the Irish War of Independence and the current state of affairs in Ireland is integral to his characterization. He fought in the War of Independence, which was also a very difficult civil war. Moran’s resentment about the war turns into bitterness as he sees his children move to the same country he fought for independence, an ironic turn of events. This also suggests that Moran himself feels ignored for his contributions. “Cod” is a bit of Irish/British slang, diction that John McGahern uses to create an authentic Irish setting.

“All his dealings had been with himself and that larger self of family which had been thrown together by marriage or accident: he had never been able to go out from his shell of self.”

This characterization of Moran highlights his introverted nature and his relative isolation from his community. While his neighbors see this isolation as suspicious and odd, it is described here as simply part of his personality. The “shell of self” is a metaphor for Moran’s interior walls against society and suggests an important and misunderstood interiority.

“[H]e had always despised friendship; families were what mattered, more particularly that larger version of himself—his family; and while seated in the same scheming fury he saw each individual member of gradually slipping away out of his reach. Yes, they would eventually all go. He would be alone.”

This quote highlights the importance of family and its centrality to Moran’s sense of identity. At the same time, Moran’s perception of his family as a larger version of himself emphasizes the traditional, patriarchal nature of his family structure; the family is his, stressed by italics in the passage. As patriarch, he embodies a fraught masculinity, represented in his “scheming fury.” While patriarchs are meant to unite their families, Moran is shown incapable of doing so here, as each of his children “slip[s] away out of his reach.”

“She had heard dark mutterings about him but after a few minutes of talking with him she was ready to put it down to common envy. She found him attentive, intelligent, even charming, but with a distinct sense of separateness and pride that she found refreshingly unlike any of the other local men she had known.”

This quote characterizes both Moran and Rose. It recharacterizes Moran to highlight his positive traits, showing that he’s different and intelligent. This makes him odd in his small town, but it doesn’t prove that he is a bad or suspicious person. Rose emerges as a compassionate, empathetic, and untraditional individual. While she dismisses Moran’s bad reputation, these “dark mutterings” foreshadow his cruel nature at home.

“She was able to conceal her restlessness, the pacing about, her dream of a different beginning to a new life, her impatience with the old shapes that she had used for too long; she was not young and was old enough to foresee failure.”

Rose is characterized as faithful and loyal, but as an early-to-mid-20th century Irish woman, these qualities keep her oppressed and bored. Moran presents a new hope for Rose. Her love for him is based on curiosity and a sense of adventure that separates her from other, more traditional women. This journey also highlights the struggle for women in closed-off and normative communities.

“He felt a low cry of frustration against the inadequacy of life break silently within, and ripple out.”

Despite a fulfilling family life, a successful enough farm, and a new marriage, Moran still feels unhappy. Life has been disappointing to him, but he doesn’t reveal how. Moran’s existential crisis is a common one, but it also indicates the way his past traumas prevent him from being happy in the present. The way Moran processes his feelings—“silently within”—highlights his adherence to traditional gender roles, and his reluctance to show vulnerability results in him externalizing it as anger.

“All the girls were deeply ashamed. No one had ever seen a bride or groom walk to their wedding; even the very poor found a car for that day.”

This quote emphasizes that Moran’s behavior is at odds with his society’s norms and expectations. However, it also highlights that societal expectations can be steeped in old-school mentalities about behavior that isn’t harmful. The daughters’ shame is emphasized here and becomes instrumental in character and plot development in this novel.

“Often when talking with the girls she had noticed that whenever Moran entered the room silence and deadness would fall on them […] If they had to stay they moved about the place like shadows.”

This quote characterizes the tension in Moran’s household. Moran’s presence and temper are influential on all his children and can be extremely oppressive. The simile “like shadows” emphasizes how Moran’s children have learned to hide and fade in the background.

“She had chosen Moran, had married him against convention and her family. All her vanity was in question. The violence Moran had turned on her she chose to ignore, to let her own resentment drop and to join the girls as they stole about so that their presences would never challenge his.”

When Rose discovers Moran’s fearful anger and temper, she has no choice but to accept this flaw. At this time, divorce was illegal in Ireland. What’s more, Rose decided to marry Moran, and she doesn’t want to face the shame of being wrong about him. Rose acquiesces to Moran’s temper in the same way his daughters always have, highlighting how the women in Moran’s family give up a part of themselves for him. Rose “join[ing] the girls” likewise emphasizes her unequal role in the marriage; through Moran’s domineering, patriarchal nature, she is infantilized.

“He was changing less predictably than the tide. Soon he would need to vent the anger she felt already gathering, and she was the nearest person. Her life was bound up completely with this man she so loved and whose darkness she feared.”

McGahern characterizes Moran as frighteningly unpredictable through a metaphor—choosing the tide for a comparison highlights how frequently his moods change, though Rose does not have the benefit of a tide’s regularity. This characterization explains the tense dynamics within the family. Rose’s emotions mimic the push and pull of waves and tides oscillating between fear and love.

“He would not have liked it if she seemed to be saying that they could get away any time they wanted to. Anything easy and pleasant aroused deep suspicion and people enjoying themselves were usually less inclined to pay attention to others.”

When Rose and Moran go out to have a nice day together, Rose is careful not to show too much pleasure. Moran needs to be the center of Rose’s attention, superseding even her own sense of self. McGahern shows this through indirect language, speaking around the problem, which mimics the feeling of walking on eggshells around a volatile person.

“Brought up from infancy by a screen of girls, and now growing confidently in Rose’s shade, he escaped the fear of Moran.”

McGahern uses figurative language to convey the protection offered by Michael’s sisters and stepmother. The girls are unified into a single screen, while Rose offers more organic protection as a tree, connecting her maternal instincts to nature. This quote emphasizes that under a woman’s influence, a young man like Michael can grow into a healthy person. This celebrates the impact of women. It also highlights The Importance of Women in raising balanced men who don’t fear their fathers’ authority.

“Rose’s coming to the house had smoothed their lives and allowed them to concentrate everything on school and study, which, above all, they saw as a way out of the house and into a life of their own.”

Rose helps propel the character development of Moran’s children, taking on domestic responsibilities that otherwise would keep Moran’s daughters away from their dreams. This quote also highlights how traditional notions of women in the household can prevent women from living individualistic and autonomous lives.

“It was not so much that she took things from the house—though his racial fear of the poorhouse or famine was deep—but that she left the house at all.”

This quote alludes to Ireland’s difficult history with poverty, colonialism, and famine. Moran inherited generational trauma and experienced his own trauma serving in the war, and Ireland was extremely impoverished in the midcentury. His protective and solitary nature is due in part to that history, and the fear he instills in his children implicates them in this generational trauma as well. The house is Moran’s protected space; his anxiety when Rose leaves the house is an anxiety about being left alone.

“Sheila could not have desired a worse profession. It was the priest and doctor and not the guerrilla fighters who had emerged as the bigwigs in the country Moran had fought for. For his own daughter to lay claim to such a position was an intolerable affront.”

Moran’s attachment to the past and resentment of the present state of affairs in Ireland is projected onto Sheila’s aspirations. Moran prevents Sheila from reaching her full potential because he is biased against people who have more power and socioeconomic clout than him. Moran’s longstanding resentments foreshadow Sheila’s own lifelong resentment that her father stood in the way of her dreams.

“From Moran he inherited a certain contempt for women as well as a dependence on them.”

Michael has been influenced by Moran and women in different ways. Through this characterization, McGahern addresses Moran’s sexism and points out that a biased and closed-minded attitude towards women can be taught, even subliminally. This quote also suggests that being dependent on women for care and nurture does not mean that a man will respect women; in fact, the more the women in this novel care for the men in their family, the more the men resent them. This contradictory yet simultaneous disdain and dependence highlights the nonsensical nature of sexism.

“Above all they brought the bracing breath of the outside, an outside Moran refused to accept unless it came from the family. Without it there would have been an ingrown wilting.”

Moran preserves his home, farm, and lifestyle against society’s changing ways. His daughters, who leave home and return to visit, are emblematic of those changes. They discover new ideas and ways of being because they free themselves from a stagnant rural life. The metaphor of “ingrown wilting” suggests that change is not only unstoppable but necessary, no matter how Moran feels about it.

“Michael suffered keenly the incongruity of his position—a man with a woman by the sea in the early day and now a boy on his knees on the floor.”

Michael’s coming-of-age story is complex because of his masculinity and his relationship with his father. Outside of his father’s house, Michael is a man, but within the walls of the house, he is a child. This quote highlights Michael’s desperate and natural need to break free from the control and authority of his father.

“I knew I’d be blackened. I’d never harm any member of the family. Anything I ever did was done for what I thought was in the best interests of those concerned. Sometimes what I did might have been misguided but it was always meant for the best.”

Moran is loyal to his family, but he is also myopic about what devotion looks like. Moran claims he has never harmed anyone in his family, but it is clear to everybody else that he has inflicted lasting emotional damage on his children. This quote highlights how Moran perceives himself in contrast to how McGahern has shown him to be. Moran uses circuitous language here to describe his actions, and linguistic beating around the bush to avoid looking honestly at them.

“Now he went from field to field, no longer kept as well as they once were, the hedges ragged, stones fallen from the walls, but he hardly needed the fields any more. It did not take much to keep Rose and himself.”

Moran’s farm is a symbolic parallel between his aging and the changing nature of the Republic of Ireland. Moran’s farms degrade slowly, as does his body with age. As Moran’s farm and house are symbols of Ireland’s past, the worsening quality of his fields is a metaphor for how old rural ways are becoming incompatible with Ireland’s present and future.

“Beneath all differences was the belief that the whole house was essentially one. Together they were one world and could take on the world. Deprived of this sense they were nothing, scattered, individual things. They would put up with anything in order to have this sense of belonging. They would never let it go. No one could be allowed to walk out easily.”

Moran’s children have inherited and internalized his belief in the family unit as singularly important to the well-being of the individual. Despite flaws, tension, and Luke’s long-standing absence, Moran and his children—especially his daughters—believe in the power of the family unit. Individuality Versus the Collective is an important theme in this novel because it highlights the internal conflicts everyone faces in pursuing their own autonomy or sacrificing happiness for the good of others.

“She became the most reliable link with the outside world that increasingly shadowed their lives.”

In this quote, Mona is characterized by her reliability and loyalty. She is also a young woman who exists mostly in the world outside of Moran’s house and farm, representing the progress of the outside world. This quote also uses the term “shadowed” as a way of foreshadowing that no matter how much Moran tries to preserve the past, the future is unstoppable in changing his country and life.

“The girls listened in silence to what they could never accept. They had been brought up to keep the outside at an iron distance and now their father was welcoming it into the house.”

When Michael gets married and Moran welcomes the new wife as another daughter, Moran’s daughters get jealous and resentful. Moran raised them to be suspicious of outsiders, and his willingness to accept this new woman as a daughter offends and confuses them. This quote emphasizes how influential Moran has been in raising his daughters with a certain worldview, even if they disagreed with him or moved away from him.