Women and “Troubles”- “One by One in the Darkness” by Deidre Madden

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The story “One by One in the Darkness” is a deeply social narration studying the life of a North Ireland family who tries to get over the tragedy of the head of their family, the beloved husband and father, being killed. This is a story about the three sisters and their mother and the complexities of their relations in the context of continuing fighting in Northern Ireland and the peculiarities of their relations in terms of the different lives they live and different characters they have.

The story begins with the focus on Caty who lives in England and works for a modern magazine – she is going home to visit her sisters and mother in Ireland. She has some dreadful news for them, but the reader is kept in suspense as there is not the slightest hint on what this may be. However, the news seems to be highly important, taking into consideration Cate’s nervousness:

In the course of the journey from Primrose Hill to Heathrow, she grew increasingly anxious. Once in the departure lounge, she checked in and then paced restlessly by the windows, watching the planes taxi and take off” (Madden, p. 1).

As soon as she comes home, she gets into the friendly home atmosphere of the family circle. However, practically at once, the problem uniting all of them is expressed – it is too hard for the family of four women to bear the burden of the tragic death of their father and husband. They are all in deep grief and cannot get used to the thought that he is not with them:

But as they sat eating the salmon on this Saturday afternoon… Cate was aware of the other thing that bound them to each other, and that hadn’t been there in childhood: the thing that had happened to their father. They wanted to give each other courage: Cate felt that just by looking at them, people might have guessed that something was wrong, that something had frightened them; and that fear was like a wire which connected them with each other and isolated them from everyone else” (Madden, p. 9).

In the third chapter, much attention is paid to the religious beliefs of the family. The family is Catholic and there is much attention in the story devoted to their religious education, attending the Mess and praying. This way the reader understands that the issues of religious education have been and still remain very strict in the depicted family. At first, the meaning of religion is shown by the suspicions of Helen about Cate’s religiosity:

Helen suspected for a long time that she only went to Mass when she came home to save face and not hurt her parents; that she probably hadn’t been across the threshold of a church since she arrived in London (Madden, p. 22).

This might have been really true, as a young woman leaving Northern Ireland and living a modern, luxurious and even glamorous life, dressing in an expensive way and revolving in the deluxe mass media circles in London is not likely to attend the church. However, on the same page the true attitude of Cate towards religion is shown:

Cate’s religion was a ramshackle thing, a mixture of hope, dread, superstition and doubt; upon which she depended to an extraordinary degree (Madden, p. 22).

The question of religion was the central one in the fights that took place in Northern Ireland. For this reason much unfair, awfully cruel and terrific took place:

the complex geography of religious segregation has also determined the terrain for sectarian assassination. Republicans legitimate their actions as an anti-imperialist struggle. The legitimate targets of this struggle are those involved in or associated with, the British state (Fay, p. 4).

The whole story is filled with plenty of flashbacks built in a positive way – the girls’ remembrances about their childhood, Granny Kate and Uncle Peter, about their cousins, their little treats and secrets they had all together. The girls’ relations with father were always very close and even intimate – they worshipped him and always listened to his wise words. Their father hated the fighting that existed in Ireland and prayed for it to be finished – this was one of his dearest wishes. It is not surprising that the second wish of their father was that “Helen would return to church” (Madden 22). Speaking about Helen, it is first of all necessary to note that she worked as a solicitor and worked on the acts of terror happening in Ireland. The work she chose made her look at the whole set of horrors, cruelty and inhumanity that terrorists committed in Ireland, so it would be really hard for her to restore her faith in good. Helen’s work did her not much good – the things she had to face were out of being ordinary and pleasant: “From her work and her life she knew the fate of both the victims and the perpetrators, and both were dreadful” (Madden, p. 52).

In general, the description of Helen adds some negative shades to the whole understanding of the relations inside the family – first of all, one can judge some tightness of relations by the attitude of their mother, Emilie, to both daughters:

She didn’t like to admit that she was intimidated with her own daughter but it was true. Sometimes when Cate came home she would feel a little strange with her at first, because she was beautiful…Helen was different and always had been (Madden, p. 109).

The relations between the two sisters, Cate and Helen, are rather complicated, as one can see from the narrator’s words later in the story. At first, it seems that the sisters love each other deeply and care about each member of their family even more than before the tragic death of their father. But they have some underwater stones because of their perception of themselves and each other:

Helen could see why people gravitated to Cate, why they liked her, but also why they shied away from Helen and found her intimidating. Cate was on the side of life, and it was painful to Helen to have to admit that that was not true of herself (Madden, p. 25).

The tragedy of riots, fights and rebels the family had to stand in the North of Ireland was an awful burden for the weak, humble women who did no harm to anyone in that world. When one of the riots strokes, it shocked everyone by its being close to reality, involving the grief of their close people:

the rioting spread to Belfast, and the trouble broke into their world. On a television news report, they recognized the street where their mother’s friend Miss Regan lived, whose house they visited every Christmas” (Madden, p. 95).

Summing the story about the Quinn family described in the fiction story “One by One in the Darkness” one should note that all women have some peculiarities about their lives and characters, but actually all of them have broken lives – neither of them has got married; Sally is terrified by the riots and rebels and sees horror dreams being deeply afraid of death; Helen has become a tough, cold woman deprived of emotions who does not have any other life but work and does not even take care of herself because she does not bother about that, Cate having a beautiful but meaningless life and missing her family, Emilie losing her personality and being absorbed by the family issues, etc. The only positive element in the story is Cate’s pregnancy that leaves a hope that the family will concentrate their effort on the child, which will make them live a full life again. As the summary for the Northern Ireland military juxtaposition given by Jonathan Tonge (2002) indicates:

Between 1969 and 2000, the conflict in Northern Ireland produced a death toll exceeding 3,600. The vast majority of Northern Ireland’s 1.6 million inhabitants have always desired peace, yet conflict was endemic from 1969 until the mid-1990s and sporadic thereafter (1).

Such an account of the military action given by the author is really depressing, though it gives the reader a much better understanding of the fact that the conflict meant for the peaceful residents of Northern Ireland and what it turned into. These women have been broken by the military actions and the unfair death of their only man in the family, and the way they try to get out of that is not helpful at all. However, the birth of the new life will probably be able to restore their faith in life and will arouse their wish to live fully again.

Works Cited

Fay, Marie-Therese et al. Northern Ireland’s Troubles: The Human Costs, 1999.
Madden, Deidre. One by One in the Darkness. Faber and Faber, 1996.
Tonge, Jonathan. Northern Ireland: Conflict and Change. Pearson Education, 2002.

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Women and “Troubles”- “One by One in the Darkness” by Deidre Madden

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