Sexual identity and mourning in the novel Nora Webster

Abstract

Colm Toibin’s novel Nora Webster took him 13 years to write during which he completed several other novels including Brooklyn which won the Costa Book Award. He explained he struggled writing Nora Webster because it was so closely based on his personal experience of loss and grief. Toibin was 12 when his father died and Toibin recalled he felt numb and unable to put any feelings into words. But he was clearly a most observant young fellow. This novel is a beautifully written account of a woman’s emotional experience following her husband’s traumatic death and being left with two young boys and two older girls. It is the interiority of Nora’s experience and the depth of understanding of her grief that makes this a remarkable book, a testimony to Toibin’s sensitivity and empathy. As a youth he may not have had words but as an adult he eloquently conveys his mother’s experience of bereavement. Nora undoubtedly struggles with mourning. She abandons her two boys during her husband Maurice’s excruciating dying in hospital. She arranged for the boys to stay with her aunt and made no contact with them during the 2 months Maurice was dying. In this way she projects aspects of her experience of loss into them, particularly, as we later learn, the earlier loss which this experience revived about the death of her own father when she was in her teens. After Maurice’s death, faced with limited finances she feels the pressure to manage the practicalities of her family responsibilities and find some work to makes ends meet. She can only manage by putting her grief aside and discouraging any discussion of her own or the children’s feelings, a form of splitting sometimes necessary in order to survive. During her trials to establish a secure financial footing she reflects on the impact of the loss of Maurice on herself and her children. She comes to appreciate the effect on the boys of her abandonment of them during Maurice’s dying. She revisits the death of her father, and the later death of her mother with whom she had a poor relationship. These earlier, probably unmourned deaths give some clues to sources of her difficulties in mourning Maurice. Three years later when Nora has made a secure life for her family, as she begins decorating a room of her own, she experiences the full impact of her grief. She collapses and is nursed to recovery by her aunt. In a state of physical and emotional exhaustion Nora hallucinates Maurice being present and talking to her. Nora remains troubled by Maurice’s insistence in the conversation that there was