Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment by James M. Smith

Author:James M. Smith [Smith, James M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Christianity, Catholic, History, Europe, Ireland, Women
ISBN: 9780268182182
Google: MpFZDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Published: 2007-09-01T00:24:46+00:00

THE ILLOGIC OF PREVENTION: THE MAGDALEN AND THE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL

The four documentaries also shed light on the interconnectedness of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums and the nation’s industrial and reformatory schools. Phyllis Valentine’s experience already speaks to the transfer of young girls between these supposedly separate and distinct institutions. The historical documentation for these practices outlined in chapter 2 is enriched by survivor accounts. Aileen, one of the women appearing in Washing Away the Stain, spent two years in the Good Shepherd’s Magdalen asylum in Cork in 1969–70. Even in 1993 she still struggles with the legacy of her experience, a struggle manifest in her decision to maintain her anonymity by remaining in silhouette while on camera and by withholding her surname. The documentary genre facilitates this intermediate testimony, speaking out but only from a position of anonymity.

Aileen’s experience evinces the distorted morality underpinning Ireland’s containment culture. She explains how, as a two-week-old infant, she was placed in an orphanage. Her unmarried mother was sent to a Magdalen home because Aileen was not her first illegitimate child. Later in life, Aileen was transferred to an industrial school, and later again, at sixteen, she was sent to the Good Shepherd’s Magdalen asylum in Cork. Not only did Aileen understand that she was made to suffer for the sins of her mother, she recalled the following conversation with the industrial school inspector who twice transferred her within Ireland’s institutional maze:

I remember him saying, “You get more like your mother every day,” and then he says, “If you don’t stop talking to the men,” he says, “I’ll have to put you away.” And I says to him, “Why? What am I doing wrong?” and I wasn’t even going outside the door. He says, “Your mother had you outside of marriage so we’re not giving you that opportunity.” (Washing 1993)

In the documentary genre living discourse becomes part of the story. This valuable information on the impact of how Magdalen women were spoken to and described by others cannot be verified in empirical historiography. The remembered conversation underscores the violence of language itself, and this verbal abuse seems as psychologically damaging as any of the physical hardships the women had to endure. The testimony of someone who lived in the system verbally challenges the official history of abstract rules and regulations that prohibited transfer of children between institutions. Her account is corroborated by Burke Brogan’s dramatic representation of the way religious congregations rationalized these transfers in moral terms, claiming that the sin of lust passed through seven generations of women before it abated. Aileen’s recollections of the inspector’s comments introduce evidence of the prevailing ideological myth that this generational contamination theory was justification for particularly cruel institutional practices.

The separation of unmarried mothers from their children, ironically undermining the constitutionally revered maternal bond, was especially cruel when both resided within the same religious compound but in different buildings.23 Mary Norris and Josephine McCarthy, in the 60 Minutes segment, suggest that unmarried mothers confined to the Sunday’s Well Magdalen

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