My Dream of You

Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You is less a parallel-plot historical novel (although it's that, too) and more a "burden of history" novel. The burden in question is Irish history in general and the Famine in particular, but for most of the characters in the novel--particularly its first-person narrator, Kathleen de Burca--that burden weighs heaviest in its domestic, intimate ramifications. O'Faolain's novel interweaves a number of Big Themes: the meanings of "passion" and "love"; physical and spiritual homelessness; the expatriate experience (Americans in England, the Irish in England, the English in Ireland...); and women's roles in Catholic Ireland. Kathleen, a rootless travel writer (the latter symbolizes the former) nearing fifty, abandons her job in England and temporarily returns to Ireland. Her quest: to find out the truth about the charge of adultery behind a Victorian divorce case. The reader thus becomes privy to Kathleen's historical narrative as well, although as Kathleen soon realizes, the text rapidly slides into historical fiction. (The novel is more metafictional than it is metahistorical.) The adultery plot involves a young Englishwoman, Marianne, married to an Irish landlord who resents Ireland; bored and dissatisfied with her marriage, Marianne has a passionate affair with an Irish servant, Mullan. Or does she? Kathleen herself is "awakened," as it were, by her own passionate affair with a married Irishman, another expatriate who has temporarily returned. As Kathleen weaves her historical fiction around what little--and shifting--evidence remains of the case, she develops an uneasy account of the relations between England and Ireland that incorporates her own cultural anxieties. Marianne's husband Richard, persecuted as a child in England because of his Irishness, identifies with neither country. Marianne herself loathes Ireland and the Irish people; her affair with Mullan transcends neither their national nor their class differences. Indeed, by initially making Marianne commit passionate adultery with Mullan, O'Faolain thumbs her nose at the literary tradition that makes marriage between individuals into a symbol of union between peoples. The novel makes no pretense of resolving Anglo-Irish differences on a national level, just as Kathleen herself ultimately relinquishes her attempt to identify the divorce case's singular truth. What's left, then, is individual survival. One of Kathleen's discoveries is that she cannot simply blame everything on Ireland, whether her own Irish past or the anti-Irish prejudices of her English present; instead, she needs to work out a new relationship between self-consciousness and historical consciousness. The solution, which I won't go into here, is perhaps the most Victorian thing about the novel.