A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing

A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing

Eimear McBride - June 2013

The cover of this edition of Eimear McBride's  A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing mirrors the fragmentary and disjointed form and content of the novel. McBride's prose is inspired by the Joycean verbal play that breaks down the barriers of language to evoke emotion and meaning through the form the language takes. This is one of the reasons the novel was rejected for years before its publication by a tiny publishers. The narrative voice is challenging and, at the beginning, frustrating and difficult. But like riding a bike, once you have read a few pages of McBride's prose, your mind adjusts to the text, to the fragments of thoughts, you no longer think about the process and the effect is beautiful.

The prose is a physical reflection of the transient, stunted snippets of thoughts and memories that happen. There are no speech marks, instead it is the reader that gives meaning to the text and decides where the speech is placed. The reader is made to work hard. In many ways this makes reading the text a much more intimate experience, we are forced to interact with the words on the page on our own level and do our own work to place the thoughts and the speech together and organise the thoughts of the protagonist. This is what gives the novel its postmodernist label - the reigns feel well and truly in the hands of the reader. 

"For You. You'll soon. You'll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she'll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I'd say" 

(The opening section of the first chapter)

At times of trauma, the narrative becomes increasingly challenging. Sometimes confusingly so with capital letters in the middle of words and one word sentences. 

“ver tha alrWays. Here. mY nose my mOuth I. VOMit. Clear. CleaR. He stopS up gETs. Stands uP.” 

But these dips in the form of the text only hasten to reflect the confusion and fragmentation of the girl's mind as she is psychologically and physically abused by others and also by herself.

 A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing is fragmentary for another reason. McBride's admiration for James Joyce may as well begin and end with his choice of textual form and Irish setting, because unlike McBride's novel, his perception and portrayal of women are often cripplingly one dimensional and/or objects of idealised devotion. Woolf wrote in her speech "Professions for Women" about the "angel of the house" phenomena (she was writing about the 19th century, but arguably this still effects us today). She talked about the dangers of the idealised woman or "angel" that so many of us deem to be the true ideal of womankind. 

"She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all--I need not say it---she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty--her blushes, her great grace. In those days--the last of Queen Victoria--every house had its Angel."

(Virginia Woolf Professions for Women 1931)

What Eimear McBride reflects perfectly in her novel, is the realistic characterisation of women. Instead of being angelic, they are fragmentary, multi-faceted beings like any other. They are flawed, and a lot of the time not likeable. But they are these things because women are people and people are flawed and often not likeable. The main character is not someone to be liked by the reader, although you do find yourself loving her. She is not portrayed as a victim, though inevitably you learn she is one, a big one. And she is not portrayed with sympathy, although you have a lot for her by the end. These are all the things that make the female protagonist in A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing one of the strongest females in literature, for she is problematic and complicated and this makes her, on many levels, relatable (even if none of the things that happen in the novel have happened to the reader). Too many female protagonists are preoccupied with being idealised, (perhaps one of the reasons Jane Austen's Emma is praised as being a brilliant female character is that at the end of the day she is wonderfully flawed) and McBride takes her protagonist, a rape victim, off of the pedestal and shows us her insides good, bad and ugly. The result is we connect with the character in a very human way. 

The Irish setting of the novel seems to be a morose note on the culture of a Catholic household. The protagonist slowly lapses from the strict catholic tradition in which she has been brought up. At the beginning, like any child that has been brought up to practice praying, she blindly prays for fear of what will happen if she doesn't. Her mother has instilled in her a fear "Will you save us Mammy? I’ll say easy children close your eyes for this world is coming to an end. But Mammy it scares me. Well better behave yourself then." Yet as she grows older and her fate becomes tested, by her brother's illness and her abuse, she begins to lose touch with it. When she first finds out about her brother's brain tumour, she loses faith in the fact that her prayers will be answered “Back to the start. I’d be. Hail Holy Queen no that won’t work, I’ll offer something up. God.”Towards the end of the novel, she finds it difficult to prey "I kneel in my room. Where I pray that. Where I pray that. I pray that. I. Who’s though who pulled out my tongue? Don’t let the air in."

Her mother's incessant, desperate reliance on her faith seems inadvertently damaging to her mental wellbeing. Her mother uses God and Catholicism as an unflinching means of support, it often is a suffocating force, one of desperation whereby she repeatedly sets herself up to be let down. Although God gives her mother hope, her faith repeatedly blinds her to the realities of existence and she often appears unconnected with reality:

“Look you don’t think perhaps we should prepare. For. God won't allow that. He wouldn’t do that to me. I’ve offered myself up and seved him all my life. And I know He would not take one of my children from me”

Her idea that her service to a higher power will result in reward and she will gain more control over her life is portrayed by McBride as being negative. The desperation of the mother's faith and her dependence on prayers, God and living without sin makes her blind to the turmoil her daughter's going through. Whether she does not know or understand her daughter's abuse or does not want to acknowledge it  (she doesn't want to know about her daughter's life in the city "Back up the city doing your own thing, God knows"), its the mother's abuse of the protagonist, which progresses throughout the novel, that poses many questions. Arguably, McBride is commenting on a wider culture in the Catholic church, which has recently been the source of scrutiny after many priests and men of authority within the Catholic church were found to have abused children. Although McBride doesn't wholly demean the nature of the church (she acknowledges its cause for hope and support) there are certain aspects of it that are scrutinised in the novel. 

Her mother is a broken woman too, who has become stifled and defeated by her life (her husband walking out, the death of her father, her son's problems). 

"I can’t do this I cannot. This does me no good at all. Screeching rowing. Every day. When you’re  not here I’m. Feel everything give out. Under me. Under this. He’ll never do anything. My head whacking. Amount. And I wonder sometimes for her. Would you be better off dead? Don’t say that. Don’t you ever say that. I say it in me. But. That’s forever now. Look. That is me. My thoughts. Are all shame.” 

On the one hand, her faith is the only think that keeps the mother going, on the other it is her crippling downfall “It’s time for our faith to be tested. That’s all. Now is the time for prayer.” Moments that are supposed to be calm and mournful in the eyes of the protagonist are damaged by her mother's interference in the name of religion, where she calls on the priest to relieve him of his sins in his last waking moments and calls in the choir to sing “wake up son. Mammy. Leave him. He’s going to die. My son. I won’t let him in a state of sin”. Although these things are done with good intentions by the mother, with a view to help and mourn, to the protagonist they are mortifying and suffocating infringes on her last few days with her brother. McBride explores through these passages the different ways in which people prepare for tragedy, death and mourn. The mother's selfish treatment of the brother's death is both angering and induces sympathy.

Death, Sex and Religion are the overarching themes of the novel, though they all intertwine and feed into one another. 

the title of each of the sections of the novel:

Part I: Lambs

• Youth
• Innocence
• Gentleness and Tenderness
• Sacrifice 

Part II: A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing

• "God says that man must have a partner, and so He puts Adam to sleep and removes a rib He turns into a woman: a half-formed thing, a dependent." (from an article by the NY times, not sure I wholly agree with this line of argument, though it raises and interesting interpretation nonetheless)
• "Girl" not "woman", she is still a girl when she undergoes the abuse by her uncle in this section. She does not fully understand for she is a half formed thing. 
• This section marks the extent to which the protagonist does "form", the things that take place in her childhood leave her unequipped, with damaging habits, to face the rest of life with. 

Part III: Land Under The Wave

• An Irish folk story "Tír na nÓg"  (Irish for Land Under The Wave) in which a man falls in love with a woman from the underworld (under the sea), but when he gets homesick and misses the earth she allows him to go back but warns he should not touch the ground. When he falls from his horse and touches the ground he ages significantly and becomes and old man and soon dies. 
• This folk story could be seen to reflect the fate of the protagonist, for she cannot come back from the horros she has endured without being damaged and prematurely aged. 
• Foreboding of the death that is coming.

Part IV: Extreme Unction

• Anointing of the sick 
• "who, having reached the age of reason, begins to be in danger due to sickness or old age"
• The priest comes and “oil on your nose and lips. Sign of the cross and. Spread his hands there. That’s the way and draw the cross again. Again. On your palms where you have sinned. And feet. There. All the oil stops the devil getting in. out. Places where the sins come in.”
• Whether this section is regarding the physical illness of her brother, or the protagonist's own psychological illness, or perhaps both 

Part V: The Stolen Child 

• A poem by WB Yeats, a prolific Irish poet
• The repeating refrain:

       Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

·       Escaping adulthood and the real world, could be a reference to her brother's passing - his innocence which does not suit the "real world" 

·       The protagonist has also been tempted away from her childhood

·       Although, drawing parallels with the poem she kills herself by walking into a lake, as the fairies tempt the child into the lake:

Where the wandering water gushes

From the hills above Glen-Car,

In pools among the rushes

That scarce could bathe a star,

·       Suicide is easier than facing the realities of the world

Some of the themes & Quotes A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing:

The distortion of language to reflect the mood of the moment: 

"What’s happened? For the radio’s somewhere play. In the house. I’m in the house. Today what’s that. Today. Say Play. May. There’s coming up out of my heads. A. Sssssomeone’s coming. Wwwwwho’s a dddddoctor." 

When her brother's death is approaching, time moves slowly, and with it the words do too. 

“ver tha alrWays. Here. mY nose my mOuth I. VOMit. Clear. CleaR. He stopS up gETs. Stands uP.”

After the protagonist is raped 

The Sea and Water as a place of memory, nostalgia and escape

“The surf’s coming. Jumping up on the sand won’t catch me anyway”

“We go up the hill. Like that. Look down he says. Great sweep of the bay. Lovely. Feel the car catcht in wind from the sea.

“On the beach. On the stones. On the water splash. I’ll hear it go right through me. Now see. Because hes going away. I knew sure. I knew that. But still. The ocean comes. I’ll put my hands in . I’ll baptise. I ike again. That cold running round my knuckles. But. But but. It’s nothing now. Forget all that wwas nothing at all.”

“In the waves. I am in the waves by the city in the sea. I;ve come out. To be in the cold. To see again for a long way off.”

“I’d be free or. Looking from the very far back to the is beach. I baptise. I baptise me. That I take. For I can’t complain it’s wrong. Free me clean me and save me from. My brother from this.”

“but the fun’s gone out of that I’m lost. In the deep sea. In as the saying goes over my head with what. With what. Salt on the Brain.

“Give me unquiet dreams. When the world. That. I dream. I see the plains of the sea, turning over. Tar. Black as. Black as. Through the. My nose press. Open. Close like a seal on the ice.

“You finish that breat.  You are gone out tide. And you close. Drift Silent eyes. Goodbye.

“Start to swim and water rolling through my hair. Scrape me free of. Clean now. All the purity I can."

Sex as a way to forget/self harm

“You don’t think do you that. What? I abused you. That you abused me? Well tht’s the question to end them all is here.

“and did you enjoy it? Yes.’

“why did you if you knew it was so wrong? Squirm him. I couldn’t somehow not. You were like. You were like. It doesn’t matter.”

She asks him to hit her during sex, until her nose bleeds. I thelps her forget. “I feel better”

"Do you feel? Better now. Better than before. And some nice young man’s mouth some nice young man’s hands up my skirt in the toilet open up my thighs. Mind. All my life is hassle and all of this is fine. Singing toora loora, toora loora lay.”

When her brother has chemo:

“Across the toilet kneeling stroke your head go on go on I thought of him. Uncle. What. Want him to do it. Stop. Pierce me. There there. Lance the. And again. Take me save me from this as if."

Faith/Religion/Catholicism

“sicking one more time. Out ot the novena. The rosary. Mass. At the first fucking Friday of lent. The holy hour. The exposition of the blessed sacrament. God. Help Me.

“Hard chapel kneelers bare-kneed real serpents”

“sicking one more time. Out ot the novena. The rosary. Mass. At the first fucking Friday of lent. The holy hour. The exposition of the blessed sacrament. God. Help Me.