Introduction

242
Melanie Swiatloch
positions” (ibid. 45). Consequently, education became for many Catholics the only
way to be somebody in a biased society.
Education was the only hope, it was like a rope that you struggled to cling
to, in the hope of pulling yourself up to a position less disadvantaged than
the one in which you started out. Keep your head down, look to your own,
and don’t expect too much in any case: nobody ever said those words explicitly
to her, but then nobody needed to, because the world around her
wordlessly insisted on this every single day of her life (Madden 115).
What Emily feels in this passage goes as far back as to the introduction of national
schools in the nineteenth century. Although the main focus does not lie on the
acquirement of English anymore, education is still seen as the only option to transcend
the as inferior perceived Irishness.
As a young teacher Emily encounters children whose future is still unclear.
Many of them have unemployed fathers and Emily even thinks it a blessing they
do not have high aspirations because this would only leave them frustrated (Madden
119). In a time of economic hardships and an unemployment rate five per
cent higher than in Great Britain (Mulholland 42) Emily’s pupils dream of driving
horses for the local brewery or working in the linen mills as their mothers do
(Madden 119). These fields of traditional Northern Irish economy – agriculture,
textiles and engineering (Mulholland 42) – in addition represent the traditional
Irish country life as celebrated by the Irish Literary Movement. That most of the
parents are unemployed and look to an uncertain future also symbolises the slowly
vanishing traditional Irish life. By contrast Emily stands for a Catholic woman
who enjoys a rather independent work life (at least until her marriage) and who
will pass this new way of life on to her children.
Yet, Emily’s life is not as independent as that of her daughters is going to be.
Because she wants to marry Charlie she is supposed to quit her job as “it wasn’t
seen as right for women to go on working when they were married” (Madden
121). At that time a married woman should not take jobs from unmarried women
or from men who needed to support their families as expressed in a newspaper
article Emily reads (ibid.122). Whereas she had to choose between a family and
her job, Emily’s daughters Sally, Helen and Cate are no longer forced to decide on
one option. Still, the importance of education is very strong in Emily’s mind and
she is constantly worrying that Cate in her teenage years might get pregnant. In an
argument she says: “What if you get into trouble and have a baby, what then?
That’ll be your life ruined; and all your education lost” (ibid. 109).
In terms of images of the New Irish Emily stands somewhere inbetween. Her
daughters, however, are able to lead new and different lives. All three of them are
educated well and rather successful in their jobs, Sally as a teacher like her mother,
Helen a lawyer specialising in terrorist cases, and Cate working as a journalist for a
fashion magazine. All three of them are still unmarried, and Cate is even having a