Irish Recall Sad Homes for 'Fallen' Women
By SARAH LYALL
DUBLIN, Nov. 21 - Everyone of a certain age in Ireland knows about the Magdalene Asylums, where women who offended the country's moral code were sent to live, and sometimes to die, in disgrace.
When Charles Oliver was growing up in rural County Tipperary, a friend of his family disappeared into such a place in a cloud of shame after giving birth out of wedlock. But it was not until a recent evening that Mr. Oliver, 59, began to learn what really went on behind the locked doors of the Magdalene homes, which took in 30,000 women over the decades until the last one finally closed in 1996.
Emerging from a showing here of "The Magdalene Sisters," a film written and directed by Peter Mullan about the casual cruelty and commonplace despair in the homes, Mr. Oliver was stunned, and sad.
He said he had always considered the asylums part and parcel of the landscape; never had he thought to question their existence. "People knew very little about what happened, very little," he murmured. "It was a different time in Ireland then, and hopefully we've moved on."...
"The Magdalene Sisters" won the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice Film Festival and was denounced by the Vatican as "an angry and rancorous provocation." But with so many scandals and investigations percolating at once here, it is not surprising that the film has stirred not a peep from the Catholic leadership in Ireland.
That has not dulled its impact in a country where misconduct by the church has been actively discussed only in the last several years. Since the movie opened across Ireland at the end of October, more than a million people, about a quarter of the population, have seen it, according to its distributor, Eclipse Pictures.
The Magdalene Asylums were set up in the 19th century as a refuge for prostitutes and other so-called fallen women. Operated by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd and other orders of nuns, the asylums financed their operations by functioning as commercial laundries providing service to schools, prisons and other institutions across Ireland.
The asylums soon became places where families - under pressure from the Catholic Church and the stringent code of morality in place - could send daughters who, for whatever reason, had brought shame on them.
The women worked long hours and received no pay. They were required to pray virtually nonstop. If they were unwed mothers, their babies were put up for adoption or sent to orphanages. Many of the women were so cut off from the outside world that they never left the asylums, and lived and worked there until they died.
"The Magdalene Sisters," which is fictional but based on accounts from former Magdalene women, tells the story of three girls taken to live in a home outside Dublin in the 1960's.
One is taken there because she loses her virginity when a cousin rapes her at a wedding, another because she is caught flirting with the local boys through the gates of the orphanage where she lives. A third ends up there because she has just given birth to a baby out of wedlock. The baby is quickly taken away by a priest, despite the mother's desperate pleas.
The nuns in charge prove to be a cruel lot. The girls are made to work seven days a week, 364 days a year (they get Christmas off), given little food, discouraged from forming friendships, beaten for minor infractions, humiliated and ridiculed and, worst of all, forbidden to leave the home or make contact, even by letter, with anyone on the outside.
It is a harrowing account, but one that is all too familiar to Mary Norris, who was a Magdalene girl when she was in her teens and who has seen the movie twice, through curtains of tears.
Mrs. Norris, 69, grew up on a farm in County Kerry and was abruptly placed in an orphanage, along with six of her seven brothers and sisters, after their local priest decided that their mother was an unfit parent because she had begun a relationship with a man.
Mrs. Norris, then 12, could not stop sobbing when she arrived at the home, she said in an interview, remembering that one of the nuns, Sister Laurence, had said: "What are you crying for? You know your mother is a tramp, an evil woman, and I sincerely hope you don't turn out like her."
"To this day, I'll never forget the answer I gave," Mrs. Norris said. "I said, `Yes, sister.' I was agreeing with her."
She remained at the orphanage for four years, escaping to a domestic job in a nearby village. But she was dismissed in disgrace, she said, when she defied her employer and slipped out one night to see the movie "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."
Sent back to Sister Laurence, who remarked, "I always knew you'd turn out like this," the girl was then dispatched to a Magdalene home in Cork.
Her hair was chopped short, she said. She was given the name Myra and made to dress in a long gray shift, thick stockings and a white cap that marked her as a penitent whose patron was Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who repented before Christ and was allowed to wash his feet. Every waking moment was spent working or praying, often both at once. "It was to stop you from talking," she said.
Once, when she refused to work or eat and spent the day sitting on the stairs, she was made to lie prostrate on the floor at bedtime, endlessly repeating "Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault," until finally the nun in charge said, "I forgive you, my child."
She was released after a relative began making inquiries about her, and eventually married and had a daughter. But others were not so fortunate, particularly those who came to believe the nuns' admonitions that the asylums were their only chance of avoiding eternal damnation for their sins.
One of Mrs. Norris's fellow inmates, a woman in her 80's, died and was buried anonymously in a plot belonging to the local jail.
"I was looking at the older women, who had been there for years, and nobody was crying, even though she had spent her whole life with them," Mrs. Norris said. "It wasn't until later that I realized that they were probably happy for her."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/international/europe/28DUBL.html> *****
Cf. Derek Malcolm, "Sins of the Sisters," <http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,793110,00.html>; "Peter Mullan: Sisters of Misery," <http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/interviews/story.jsp?story=330950>; David Sterritt and Mikita, "NYFF 2002 REVIEW: The Magdalene Sisters; Mullan's Scathing Indictment of the Church's Not-So-Distant Past," <http://www.indiewire.com/film/reviews/rev_021001_Magdalene.html>; "The Magdalene Sisters," <http://film.guardian.co.uk/london/story/0,12558,822718,00.html>. -- Yoshie
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