Critical Discourse Analysis of The Bride, by Maeve Brennan

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Critical Discourse Analysis of “The Bride”, by Maeve Brennan
Social Practice (explanation)
At the level of social practice, the text is a literary short story written by a woman, Maeve Brennan, that has as main character a migrant and lonely Irish woman. 
The discourse is shaped by Brennan’s view, as she herself is an Irish migrant. In “The Bride”, Brennan delineates the identity of an Irish woman working in the United States as maid, and her story works as an example of dozens of others Irish girls feeling homesick, treated as outsiders in the family’s houses where they work, in relationships with also migrant boys, with no bounds in their workplace, learning to live in a complete different place, under new and stranger rules. The story is influenced by what the writer saw in the USA, many Irish women migrating and working at family homes, because in Ireland they had no jobs, no opportunities, and they need to help their own family sending money home. The reasons why Irish girls migrants used to opt for work in homes, even if they could have other choices of jobs in USA: it was what they already did in Ireland. Even if they didn’t work as a way of living in their hometown, they came from big families, with many siblings and no lux, having to help in housekeeping and in rearing the youngest. Another reason was the domestic universe put them in company with other Irish with similar situation (outsiders in the USA) and culture. Even if they did not came from the same Irish town or county, they were a cohesive group in sharing memories and aspirations: “It was in the company of their fellow immigrant domestics that these women began the process of assimilation into American life” (PALKO, 2007, p. 77). Still, in “their” kitchens, they were supreme, feeling almost at home, as if that space at least was their own. 
This short story contributes to give the readers a new perspective of migrant women reality in the USA, around 1950, when the Brennan wrote it. The text positions Irish migrant in a superior position comparing with other European groups, such as Germans. There is a sense of Irish superiority that makes the main character, Margaret Casey, feels she is nearest the American family she works to (even if they do not care about her) than of her German migrant boyfriend. 
Margaret is presented as a fragmented individual, divided in the life in Ireland, which somehow to wants to return to, after saving some money in the United States, and the life far from Ireland, as an immigrant that doesn’t belong to the small island any more. The identity of Margaret Casey was constituted by her memories, by what she lived with her family in Ireland and what she experienced by herself in the USA. Both at home and at Smith’s house she had to deal with the fact she was not important to anyone. At home, she testified her mother’s sorrow because the older daughter got married: “there were fewer tears shed over Margaret’s departure for a foreign land than over Madge’s decision to marry a boy she had known all her life” (BRENNAN, 2000, p. 155). In the house she was working she could not count on the family to stay with her in her wedding day. The lonely and not loved person she felt she was in Ireland reverberates in relationships in the new place for her. Thus, she has no bonds with the employers and keeps a relationship with Carl only to not be completely alone. Both in home as in Smith’s house, the lack of bonds happens because the other people don’t see Margaret as important, because she was opened to stablish connections. The only one prone to be by her side is the person she doesn’t really like, but is her only option, Carl.
Margaret’s relationships are marked by incommunicability. She had not an outright dialogue with her mother and sister. Instead of that, she felt apart from her family. It is the same with the Smith, to whom she plans to say something, but does not succeed and has her speech changed by their reactions. As what happens when she wants to tell them to stay with her in that difficult moment of her marriage, since they were her only “family” in the USA, but she says nothing. When she plans to give notice, but with no reason blurted out she was going to marry Carl and then there was no way to come back and undid the already said. Lack of communicability is the predominant feature of her relationship with Carl as well. She does not love Carl, and gave him her promise because of his persistence. She feels he is beneath her, because not only he is a plumber, but also because he is not tough enough and shows himself as a good-natured person, as she is sure her sister Madge would realize in the first minute she put her eyes on him, as we see in the fragment: 
He would never fit in with the crowd at home. They would laugh at him behind his back and say he was thick. Madge’s cruel eyes would cut clear through the smart American clothes to see the soft, good-natured, easily hurt fellow underneath (BRENNAN, 2000, p. 156). 
Margaret fears the disapproval of her family for Carl would extend to her. Even when they are the same level, Margaret is above the boyfriend and if she is still engaged is because she has no other person and because of his persistence. “When he reached the second-floor landing, he looked up and saw her. […] She wanted to scream at him that he was beneath her, and that she despised him” (BRENNAN, 2000, p. 157-158). Carl’s weakness, for Margaret, is to be inclined to show feelings, much more than not to be Irish or be poor. Maybe because she was sweet once, she feed her dreams of traveling in a charabanc, as her parents had promised, and she was repeatedly deceived by them, as the day out never happed for her. But, to someone that had only rosary beads for herself, Carl was at least a warm body to have some ties with. 
The narrator reproduces Margaret’s world view, and according her values what is good and desirable has no connections with get married with a German plumber. She accepted to marry him as a postponed decision, believing she would manage to fix this on time. Margaret usually postpones decisions. She chooses to live in the present, but because of her difficulty to communicate with other people, she commits herself more and more with a life she does not really want.
The narrator solidarity level in relation to Margaret is low. As in “Of course, it was her own idea in the first place to get married the day after they left for the summer” (BRENNAN, 2000, p. 153), the narrator does not ease Margaret’s fault for being alone in her marriage’s eve. This sentence is of the narrator, but it can be read also as Margaret’s thought, blaming herself for her loneliness. There is also a prejudgement from the narrator when it says “It would be heartless to tell him straight out that she had no use for him” (idem, p.154), about a possible intention that Margaret could have in broke up with her boyfriend. In some points of the narrative, the narrator voice and Margaret voice appear in the same paragraph, with no linguistic mark to point the direct speech, like in: “Margaret sat as astonished as though they had ordered her out of the house. All I wanted to do was give notice, she thought, and here I’ve gone and committed myself” (idem). 
Discursive practice (interpretation)
“The Bride” is one of the short stories in The Rose Garden (2000). Maeve Brennan published her stories as journalist of The New Yorker in 1950 decade. The writer was born in Dublin, Ireland, and moved in to USA when she was teenager. In the USA, Brennan graduates in English in 1938. She and two of her sisters stay in America when their parents go back to Ireland, in 1944. In New York, she works as journalist to a feminine fashion magazine. After that, she is hired by The New Yorker, where she writes sketches about life in New York under the pseudonym “The Long-Winded Lady”. The New Yorker starts to publish her short stories in 1950. The first one is “The Holy Terror”. 
A book with her short stories, called The Springsof Affection, was published in 1997, by Christopher Carduff. In 2004, the Irish author and historian Angela Bourke, who searches the Irish oral tradition and literature, wrote the biography Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker. In that, Bourke speculates that Brennan could had been the inspiration to the character Holly Golightly, of the novel Breakfast at Tiffany, by Truman Capote, published in 1958, because of the coincidence of style and elegance between the character and Brennan. She and Capote worked together both in Harper’s Bazar Magazine and in The New Yorker.
Emigration was a constant trace of Irish culture in the past. But because of the Great Famine between 1845 and 1849, more than one million Irish people had to live Ireland and many of them head to America. This historic episode represented a social shock that entered popular memory, being one of the most remembered points by Irish nationalist movements. The cause was a disease that contaminated potatoes throughout Europe around 1840. It is estimated that nearly thirty percent of the Irish population would have perished. The crisis triggered by the potato “rust” marked the Irish people by the wave of deaths caused by hunger in the 19th century. Around the 1930s, a policy of restricting quotas for entry into the USA began, causing Irish emigration to that country, for the first time in a century, to be greater in the number of men returning to Ireland than leaving the island to America.
The story in “The Bride” reverberates in the novel Brooklyn, (2009) by the also Irish writer Colm Tóibin. Both narratives focus in an Irish young woman that has to migrate to the USA because of the lack of opportunities in Ireland and/or as a way to help the part of family still there. They are both lonely women living among strangers, feeling homesick and disconnected from the new life in America. They both have an older sister that is a model in some way, a distant mother and plumber boyfriends by whom they didn’t fall in love. Both of them are walking into marriages without no emotional connection, but inspired for the sense of practice, what leads us to think they are going to stay in the USA and they were the Irish girls who “made” this country. The way the main character of Brooklyn resembles Margaret Casey and the similar way Tóibin and Brennan create these characters can be an indication of how often stories like hers were. 
As a literary short story, “The Bride” could be classified as practical genre according to Fairclough (2003), because it is telling a fictional story and not governing the way anything is done. 
Text (description)
The first paragraph of “The Bride” is focused on actions. It happens at this part of the text, the beginning of the short story, to locate the reader about who are the characters, where they are, what is happening. The circumstances of the first sentences help the reader to understand something important about the main character, Margaret: she is an outsider at that house. We can infer this by the information of where her room is located (at the top floor, apart from the rest of the rooms) and by the way she sits on her own bed (on the edge, not comfortable). These circumstances let the reader to know Margaret lives apart from the family and she does not feel comfortable there. And it is reinforced by the fragment “The phone was shut off, the refrigerator was disconnected, the windows all were locked, and all the beds, except hers, stripped for the summer” (BRENNAN, 2000, p.153) that the family doesn’t really care about Margaret. She will be in the house for at least one day more, as her marriage will be tomorrow. But even the refrigerator is disconnected. This shows how few the family consider their maid. We almost can infer Margaret’s presence in the house means the same that an empty house for the family, as they turned all the appliances off. As if she is less like a human being and more like a plant or another of the appliances. It is her wedding day eve and she cannot drink a glass of cold water, at least. The sentences are in passive voice, what keeps also a message for readers: it was not Margaret’s action to turn the appliances off. As the text was telling about her actions in active voice, if the appliances had been turned off by her, the text would be kept in active voice. Because of the change in voice from active to passive we can infer it was not the bride who closed the house, but someone else closed and turned everything off, despite of the fact she remains there. 
From the clause “Margaret had dreaded the moment of their departure” (BRENNAN, 2000, p. 153), the narrator “jumped” into Margaret’s head and heart, and the reader, that is already aware about the scenery, will be informed about Margaret’s feelings. The verb “feel” itself appears on the next lines. As the short story goes on, we have a much more psychological narrative, pervaded by actions expressed through material processes when it talks about her past.
References:
BRENNAN, Maeve. The Rose Garden: short stories. Washington D. C.: Counterpoint, 2000.
COTS, Josep M. Teaching “with an attitude”: Critical Discourse Analysis in EFL teaching, 2003.
COUGHLAN, Patricia. Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the “New Yorker” by Angela Bourke. Irish University Review: Edimburgh University Press. Vol. 34, Nº 2 (Autumn – Winter, 2004), pp. 435-442. Acesso por meio do site JSTOR em janeiro de 2020. 
FAIRCLOUGH, N. Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research.London/New York: Routledge, 2003.
PALKO, Abigail L. Out of home in the kitchen: Maeve Brennan’s Herbert’s Retreat Stories. New Hibernia Review. Vol. 11, n. 4 (Winter, 2007). Pp. 73-91. Acesso por meio do site JSTOR em janeiro de 2020.
PETERS, Ann. A traveler in residence: Maeve Brennan and the last days of New York. Women’s Studies Quarterly. Vol. 33, Nº ¾. Gender and Culture in the 1950s (Outono – Inverno, 2005) Pp. 66-89. Acesso por meio do site JSTOR em fevereiro de 2020. 
TÓIBIN, Colm. Brooklyn. Enniscorthy: Viking Press, 2009. 
VILLAR-ARGAIZ, Pilar. Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.