CC BY
0THE SPIRITUAL STATE OF THE AGING MOTHER OF ANNE
ENRIGHT'S "THE GREEN ROAD" *Umida Salievna RAKHIMOVA, 2Baxtiyorova Shohzodabegim Alisherovna
teacher of Urgench State University, Foreign Philology Faculty, Uzbekistan umida1976@list.ru 2Student of Foreign Philology Faculty, UrSU https://doi org/10.5281/zenodo. 11109536
Abstract. Anne Enright's novel queries the side-lining of older women in Western culture in general and Irish society in particular and probes what ageing may mean when experienced by women. Focusing on the lived and material experiences of aging in The Green Road, Enright 's texts engage in critical gerontology and question the traditional associations of aging with wisdom, ripening or completion. The Green Road also revisits the issue of aging by connecting the life of Rosaleen, its central protagonist, with other time scales, understood in geological and historical terms. In the novel, many negative images related to the old woman and the mother are collected in order to study and dissect them. The way in which ageing causes both a difference within a person as well as a difference between people cross-generationally is also explored. Recalcitrance and a discomfiting realization of the unfinished are fundamental characteristics of the aging maternal Others that populate Enright's work.
Keywords: critical gerontology, spiritual state, aging mother, symbolic maternity, the unfinished.
Аннотация. Роман Энн Энрайт ставит вопрос об отстранении пожилых женщин в западной культуре в целом и ирландском обществе в частности, а также исследует, что может означать старение, переживаемое женщинами. Сосредоточив внимание на жизненном и материальном опыте старения в «Зеленой дороге», тексты Энрайта затрагивают критическую геронтологию и ставят под сомнение традиционные ассоциации старения с мудростью, созреванием или завершением. «Зеленая дорога» также вновь обращается к проблеме старения, связывая жизнь Розалин, ее главной героини, с другими временными масштабами, понимаемыми в геологических и исторических терминах. В романе собрано множество негативных образов, связанных со старухой и матерью, с целью их изучения и анализа. Также исследуется то, каким образом старение вызывает как различия внутри человека, так и различия между людьми между поколениями. Упорство и неприятное осознание незавершенного — фундаментальные характеристики стареющих материнских Других, населяющих работы Энрайт.
Ключевые слова: критическая геронтология, духовное состояние, стареющая мать, символическое материнство, незавершенное.
This article is devoted to the research of the novel by Irish writer Anne Enright The Green Road was published in 2015. Stubbornness, incomprehension and reminders of incompleteness are the main characteristics of an aging mother in Anne Enright's novels. She captured old age not through images of wholeness or frailty but through gaps and incomplete metaphors. The Green Road, more than any of her works to date is dedicated to the problem of portraying the elderly woman. Thus, this role in the novel gives the old woman a greater role than in her other novels.
Old women have more work to do culturally than old men this is the case with Enright's novel The Green Road which shows Rosaleen Considine to be both a cult figure and an isolated fictional character. The Green Road is the story of four Madigan siblings when their mother Rosaleen decides to sell the family home on Christmas Day 2005 to vent her grief over her abandoned fortune. In addition, The Green Road revisits many of the quintessential images of the Irish novel in relation to families, intergenerational bonds, property, mourning, alcoholism, misunderstandings, shadows of the flesh, apart from the emotional realm and the hearths of the long-suffering but afflicted mother figure. Yet, as with all of her work, Enright challenges and reshapes our understanding of such familiar imagery, striving for the realism of new designs and the linearity she often uses. Indeed, The Green Road is remarkable not only for its significant role of mother, but also for the fact that it touches on all the problems of symbolic motherhood in Western culture and Irish society. Paradoxically, Rosaleen is a receptive opposite and many conflicting archetypes of femininity: an obsession with guilt, a selfless Irish mother, a proud mother, the embodiment of disturbing myths about artificial power and Mother's power. Rosaleen meets both the great mother, symbolizing female power, and the reordered female form as a symbol of the novel of Ireland, and the imperfect heroine, and the psychological embodiment of a woman in modern Europe. Crossing this Rosaleen's symbolic line represents a destructive force, obsessed with her temper of involvement, which ruthlessly dominates the lives of her children, especially cruelly towards her eldest daughter, who is in many ways a consequence of her. This patchwork quilt is assembled by Enright to reveal widespread myths about femininity and aging, as well as events in the psyche of an older woman in contemporary Europe, with every characteristic she can imagine.
Enright's novel explores the effects of aging as a difference between and within subjects. The various inconsistencies and differences surrounding Rosaleen and her aging are explored in The Green Road from the perspective of her children and herself. The plot of the novel is sequentially told by individual family members, suggesting that the Madigans' story is collaborative and can only be told together. However, it is fragmented and lacks coherence in its own way. The first four chapters, in turn, are Hannah's memories of her childhood in County Clare in 1980, Dan's migration during the AIDS crisis in New York in 1991, Constance's trip for a mammogram and breast cancer biopsy in Limerick County in 1997 and Emmett's experience as a humanitarian worker in Segou, Mali, 2002. Although they all tell their mother's story, Rosaline's point of view appears in the symbolic middle of the novel in the fifth chapter. Her story is replaced by that of her children, but is nonetheless important and moves the novel forward, as it formally ends the fragmented first part of the novel and speeds up the more fragmented second half of the text at the climax when everyone comes together at Christmas to announce the sale of the family home. The narrative of the family history in terms of the conflicts of the five Considines gives way to eleven chapters with different titles that show the growing confusion in the narrative. the second half of the novel, but also reveals events under the pressure of Rosaline's demoralization. The structure and narrative technique of The Green Road is clearly modernist. The story is often told from the perspective of a sardonic and flustered narrator that blends in with the individual characters' points of view. Enright captures the various mental rhythms and quirks of these family members and describes their inner world and stream of consciousness. But she, like other modernist writers, seeks orderly mechanisms that are inhuman and shockingly impersonal.
Indeed, space and geographic coordinates determine the competing principles of the novel's temporal structure. Enright begins his list of storytelling locations with Ballinahown, one of the actual locations where he worked on the novel. Thus, the author imagines himself as something external to his text, but at the same time located in its natural landscape and environment. The feminist appropriation of the modernist form is both distant and intimate, ironically removed and materially connected, meticulously executed yet emotionally captivating.
The landscape of Clare Burren County is more than just a backdrop or setting for a novel. Rather, it is experienced as an ancient landscape that provides multiple temporal and geopolitical dimensions that collide with and expand the human dimensions. Rosaleen's sense of suffering due to her own experience of aging is measured and judged in terms of the ancient rocky landscape she inhabits and the various geological and historical layers within it. In fact, the breakdown of the narrative shows that there are splits, cracks, lines in the limestone rocks that make up the Burren as a whole. The green road is a trail left in this landscape of construction projects meant to help provide jobs for the starving Irish. She also satirically raises the issue of Irish ancestry and purposefully alludes to repressed aspects of Ireland's past and modern Ireland, including hunger, poverty, social inequality, mental retardation, and emigration. The green road also indicates a new direction. Enright's stories, especially Rosaleen's, are home-centered and involve family, the past, memory. Traveling by car is a free and basic activity that makes housebound old Rosaleen and her eldest daughter Constance shine the most. In addition, the green path is associated with the dual need for a personal and non-human perspective and a corresponding inner turn. The most important coastline of North Clare, where Rosaleen was wrecked, is the Atlantic Ocean, as well as Galway bay and the Aran islands. In tracking her main character to this austere but redolent location. Seeing her protagonist in this raw but flavorful place, Enright interprets the metaphysics of aging while suggesting the importance of self-awareness, but a more radical rejection of selfish needs, as a necessary step towards the perfection of old age. In this sense, Rosaleen's unfinished story and her search for a place in the material scale of things and space suggest that The Green Road is a mature novel. But maturity for Enright is not a fixed state, but an aspiration, and therefore her aging protagonist remains restless, changeable and contradictory to the end.
The issue of aging seems to be more serious for the women in the novel due to their mothering and caring role. Rosaleen's youngest daughter, Hannah, fails in her dreams of becoming an actress, struggles with alcoholism and postpartum depression, and experiences motherhood as another loss of self-worth and constant conflict with her child as "fight they wrapped in a cloth" . Constance laments motherhood, "with no gap—or none she could discern—between breastfeeding and breast cancer, between tending and dying" level "thinks of speeding up the passage of time. The social roles played by women, accelerating its passage, leave no room for metaphysical retribution with age. The social roles fulfilled by women do not allow space for a metaphysical reckoning with age while speeding up its passage.
Frustrated, Rosaleen leaves the family after Christmas dinner and gets lost on the green road. Her journey which she begins in the afternoon by car and then on foot, is also an ambiguous suicide move, a pilgrimage to her past, a return to her former state, a desire to unleash archaic powers, to cast aside mythical motherhood into the favor of an elderly woman, a journey into the dark legacy of famine. and complacency: This is why Rosaleen had come up here, to this wild place. She had come to cleanse herself of forgetfulness and of fury. To shout it loud and leave it behind. Rosaleen's journey to the ancient landscape marks a positive change in her character. After
considering her past life and especially her comprehensive spiritual connection with her husband, she naturally passes into an animal state: Rosaleen's head was hanging low like an old horse, she was on all fours and the stones hurt her knees [. . .] but she couldn 't turn back, she had no confidence in the road, she thought it might be disappearing behind her. This is where Rosaleen was now. She had fallen into the gap. The gap into which she fallsl is material and historical, but also a dream and a delusion. Its historical decline, its poverty and its vulnerability are reminiscent of the hardships of the Irish famine of 1845-1849, but also of an entirely different order. The safe haven that Rosaleen crawled into was a hungry cottage:
There was a little ruin of a house up here, and she would be safe inside [. . .] but first she had to cross the hungry grass in front of the doorway [...] of course, after she crossed the hungry grass then she would be hungry for ever. That was the curse of it.[1]
Despite the terrible nature of the weed ban, Rosaleen finds solace in the hut, realizing the poverty of life, the animal-human nature in which everyone is involved, the greed of all living things, the claims of the hungry Irish in the past and the feelings of a depressed Irish in the present. Even though Rosaleen in effect dies on this journey of self-discovery, she is rescued by her children who rediscover their affection for her and restore her to life.
The remnants of the story symbolize the difference in age, motherhood and the repressed aspects of the body in general. These gaps in the landscape serve as an eternal reminder of simplicity, the need to reckon with the past and the constant desire of man to penetrate into the nature of being.
Rosaleen moves from a traditional family home steeped in history to a modern home for her daughter, Constance; her ultimate ambiguous realization takes place in a temporary country house where she encounters the global and rootless nature of modern life. By allowing her character to experience her own mortality, Enright exposes the emotionally complex aspects of aging, but insists that aging, according to critical gerontology, is a process of open error and error that cannot be equated with wisdom or serenity, as traditionally accepted. Enright argues that the absence of a mother is a symptomatic feature of fiction, and therefore the inclusion of a mother in the novel represents a "strange, unusual, and difficult return"[2]. Thus, in the novel The Green Road, two plots return - the mother and the old woman - which violate the character of the work and interfere with its established formal forms. Enright's text aims to deconstruct and change the symbolic associations of the Irish mother and woman as an old woman, and to emphasize the importance of reflecting on the material and metaphysical aspects of motherhood and the old woman.
In the text, Rosaleen is forced out of her destiny by a tightly controlling mother and a pillar of her children's lives, reinventing herself as an aging subject in her ongoing struggle to come to terms with her own flaws and imperfections and understand the world. The novel begins with one of his minor medical crises: 'Go on up to your uncle 's for me, will you? 'she said. 'Get me some Solpadeine.' 'My head's a fog, 'she said. 'And ask your uncle for amoxicillin, will I spell that for you? I have a chest coming on.' [1] The novel begins with Rosaleen saying that she needs medicine, trying to explain away her unresolved physical ailments. She states her needs in the first words of a direct speech and sends her daughter Hannah to buy Solpadein and Amoxicillin for her headache. The final words of the novel are also spoken by Rosaleen, but this time she points to the elimination of her discontent and the abandonment of worries: "I have paid too little attention,' she said. 'I think that's the problem. I should have paid more attention to things" (310). First of
all, attention is defined as an important aspect of moral-philosophical thinking, as well as aesthetic creativity. Thus, through the supposed final realization of Rosaleen, Enright's work expresses the harmony between the activity of her readers and her search for a central symbolic character. At the end of the novel, we are left not with a comprehensive assessment, but with a frustrated understanding that points in a new direction and also addresses unfinished business.
Thus, in The Green Road, Enright introduces us to aspects of the old woman as a fictional character and as a focal point around which many thematic issues of the text are organized. Hunger and satiety are the two main metaphors of the novel, showing the impossibility of satisfaction even for the protagonist. Rosalina's fate, or the problems she presents, cannot be resolved. On the contrary, the old woman is depicted as inferior, hopeless, resigned, and imperfect, which should be paid more attention to artistic and cultural terms.
References:
1. Anne Enright, The Green Road (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015)
2. Anne Enright, 'When Mother Leaves the Room', The New York Times 8 May (2015): P. 37.
