Why We Are Not Getting It...
Ruth Barton on female desire and contemporary Irish cinema.

The Film Board, in the latest promo for its product, prominently displayed the image of Mary Kate Danaher aka Maureen O’Hara, thus laying claim to a film made by a second generation Irish-American in the 1950s. Featuring an émigré actress commonly referred to as the Queen of Technicolor, The Quiet Man sees her play out the fantasy of the feisty Irish colleen opposite an actor best known for embodying the quintessential American cowboy. This suggests not only that this is an iconic image of Irish womanhood, but that little has been produced in the intervening fifty years or so to dislodge Mary Kate from her throne. You may well object, as many do, to the sequence in which Sean Thornton (John Wayne) drags Mary Kate back from the train through the fields of Innisfree to their wee humble cottage. There she will, as we know she must, eventually rule over hearth and home with the same matriarchal dominance that characterised her days in the Danaher family homestead.

This display of machismo is not what elevated The Quiet Man to a surprising position of importance in the feminist canon, but rather the fact of Mary Kate’s hold over the narrative; put simply, Sean Thornton may believe that events occur because he has initiated them, but nothing may progress without Mary Kate sanctioning it. Tossing her head back and stamping her feet, she is the image of the passionate woman. There is something deeply sensual in that first kiss in the graveyard, with Wayne’s shirt drenched through and O’Hara, his longtime off-screen acquaintance, seemingly caught off-guard by her own desire.

It is the strength of that desire, whether expressed through love or anger that marks out The Quiet Man’s portrayal of Irish femininity. Only in another bizarre minor British release, Lance Comfort’s 1948 film, Daughter of Darkness, do we see the same exploration of passion. This film, however, is not the kind of masterpiece of Irish representation that would make one recommend it to the ifb. Neither the Irish countryside nor the Irish character come off well. Played by Siobhan McKenna, Daughter of Darkness’s central protagonist Emily Beaudine is the demented product of a Church-ridden territory. Once relocated to England from her dreary Irish homeland, she proceeds to unleash on English masculinity the terrible thing that, as she says, ‘rises up in me’ by seducing and killing the males of the Tallent Farm. The film concludes with the still-shocking final sequence of ‘Emmie’ dementedly playing the organ. She plays as the storm breaks outside the Gothic church in which she has taken refuge and from which she will be eventually lured into the murderous hands of the first man she maimed.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 120.