Camillas Hemsida
Camilla Svensson
ENA 202Angela McCourt
“This is a small hymn to an exaltation of women”.
The very first line in Frank McCourt’s book Angela’s Ashes (1996) gives the reader a hint that the autobiographical book that he or she is about to read, in many ways was written as a consequence of influences from powerful women surrounding the author. The most powerful of them all was Frank McCourt’s own mother, Angela, who suffered a great deal during the 1930s when the main story of the book takes place. The troubles of Angela’s began the night she was born, as McCourt writes on page 4, and from then on they pile up into a miserable story about how she fought for her children’s and her own life in Ireland. Family deaths, an irresponsible husband and an accusing family crowd together with a wearing poverty and a constant shame on the list of her torments. The aim of this essay is to exemplify the causes of Angela’s pain.
Within six years Angela was pregnant seven times. She had one miscarriage and had to bury three of her six children before the age of three. The pain of these losses tortured Angela so much she could not stay in the houses where the children had died. She said she would wind up in the lunatic asylum if she had to stay there with all the memories. The family moved and Angela seemed to cope better, but the pain was actually always there.
When Angela was quite young she married Malachy McCourt who had just got out of jail, and who had just got Angela pregnant. There were moments when Malachy was nice to Angela and to the children, but most of the time he was an extremely egoistic husband who did not manage to get a job, and who most often spent the money on beer and whiskey instead of on food for the children, coal to start a warming fire or decent clothes to replace the ragged ones. Angela herself suffered from the hunger and the cold, and the jeers from other people about her lousy husband surely did not make it any better. But for Angela, worst of all was the suffering her children had to bear because of their frivolous father.
The children’s aunts and their grandmother were not particularly supportive. Not even when Angela, her husband and their sons returned to Ireland from America, did the sisters give the poor family a warm welcome. McCourt writes (47) “they nod their heads but they don’t hug us or smile. Mam comes into the room with the twins and when Dad tells his sisters, This is Angela and these are the twins, they just nod again”. The children’s grandmother shows her aversion to the family on several occasions. She is not willing to give the family shelter in her house, not even the first night in Limerick. She keeps telling them all how dirty, sinful and useless they are. And, like everybody else, she nags at Angela constantly for her choice of husband. McCourt writes (277) “She can’t stand the sight of us one more minute. She’s fed up with the whole McCourt clan from the days when she had to send six fares to bring us all back from America, dishing out more money for funerals for dead children, giving us food every time our father drank the dole or the wages, helping Angela carry on while that blaguard from the North drinks his wages all over England. Oh, she’s fed up, so she is, and off she goes across Henry Street with her black shawl pulled up around her white head, limping along in her black high-laced boots.”
The poverty that Angela and her family had to live with was as severe as it was painful. There were few days when they had food enough to fill their bellies. Time and again Angela had to queue among other poor women at the St. Vincent de Paul Society to beg for dockets to get supplies at the local shop. Often, the clergymen teased with and made fun of the women, and often Angela had to beg a long time before she got her docket. Sometimes she brought her children with her to show the men what a miserable way they were in. When the charity from the Society was not enough, Angela and her sons gathered stuff from the roads that had fallen off lorries. “Mam tells us gather anything that burns, coal, wood, cardboard, paper” (71). There were times, though, when neither the Society nor the streets managed to contribute to supplies enough. At those times, Angela exposed herself to the lowest of all kinds of elementary behaviour in order to survive; she begged for any food left over outside the door of the priests’ house by the Redemptorist church.
The shame that Angela experienced, was also felt by Frank. McCourt writes (288) “There in the middle of the crowd in her dirty gray coat is my mother. This is my own mother, begging. This is worse than the dole, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, the Dispensary. It’s the worst kind of shame (…) My mother is a beggar now and if anyone from the lane or my school sees her the family will be disgraced entirely.” It is obvious that Angela, the grown up mother, was aware of these thoughts and feelings even more than Frank, her eleven-year-old son, was. The disdain she must have felt for this act of hers was probably as tormenting as the anguished notion of what she was doing to her family. At the end of the story, when Angela and her three sons are moving from one house to another, Angela again experiences a great shame. The family walks through the streets of Limerick with their few belongings in a pram with a wobbly wheel that tilts it and makes it go in different directions. It is raining and none of the family members have proper clothes. McCourt writes (324) ”Mam says she’s glad it’s late and there’s no one on the streets to see our shame.”
On page 162 Angela McCourt utters something that represents all of her misery, all of her shame and all of her pain. She sits talking to her neighbour, Bridey Hannon. ”Bridey drags on her Woodbine, drinks her tea and declares that God is good. Mam says she’s sure God is good for someone somewhere but He hasn’t been seen lately in the lanes of Limerick. Bridey laughs. Oh, Angela, you could go to hell for that, and Mam says, Aren’t I there already, Bridey?”
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