Widowhood and Its Narratives – Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster

Widowhood is a word with its own well-known narratives. The shock of grief sets us up for a story of overcoming that grief. The loss of, in traditional societies and marriages, the guidance and expertise of the husband – who may, for example, have been entirely responsible for his wife’s finances – prepares us for a tale of growth into now-vacant spaces. Should the husband have been bad or later become recognised as such, we can have a story less about overcoming grief and more about becoming the person that the late partner never allowed one to be. Perhaps there might even be a new man – or woman – as confirmation of one’s new life instead of a grief-stricken stasis.

I mention these narratives not to say how the Irish writer Colm Tóibín subverts or ignores them in his novel of 2014 Nora Webster, for he largely does not. After the early death of her husband Maurice in late-sixties Ireland, Nora is visited daily by townsfolk who want to tell her how sorry they are. She grieves, and by the end of the book has largely overcome that grief. She grows a little, and not just into financial responsibility. Maurice does not turn out to be a bastard, but the life that Nora ends up leading does differ from the one they had and might have come to have had in several ways. Tóibín’s prose is every bit as considered and thoughtful as the gentle movements of his story. Conventional, predictable, a critic might say.

I am not sure, setting out on this post, how far I am one of those. Asking a book to be other than it is, is normally just a reflection of one’s own prejudices. What is true is that Nora Webster lives and dies by its details, which is unsurprising given Tóibín’s love of Henry James. It is the more nuanced growth that a reader can chart from such details that really makes the book much more interesting compared to the headline story of a woman getting over the death of her husband. How does she grow, whether this growth is entirely positive or not, and so on.

Maurice Webster took his time dying. During that time his wife nursed him, leaving their four children – Fiona and Aine, Donal and Conor – with relatives or studying elsewhere. For the prioritisation of her husband there’s the faintest suggestion of a reproach from the aunt who had taken in the two boys – “they stayed here. And it was silent. And they thought you might come and you never did.” Nora did not return calls, nor did she visit, and at the start of the book she gives herself another cause for guilt – she rashly sells the family’s holiday home to the first enquirer, even though it held wonderful memories for her children. Soon one more guilt is added – the reminder of a cruelty to a colleague some twenty-five years ago. Nora is not perfect by any means.

Besides guilt, another emotion Nora contends with is shame. One of her children has a stammer (and indeed, it stems from her abandonment during the period she nursed her husband) that she never gets round to organising a speech therapist for. Then there’s the matter of money, or rather her lack of it, which only partly explains why she sells the holiday house and does not organise the speech therapist. She has to accept an offer of employment with a local business she once worked for when still a teenager, for example, and discovers that many people she knows have done better for themselves than she has. “Nora had never heard her sister say the word “fabulously” before.” Her other sister also gets engaged without ever introducing her fiancé to Nora. Other challenges include the memory of a difficult mother, who never encouraged her to develop her musical talents.

Over the course of the book Nora does manage to address some of these emotions, but in many cases her success is limited. Her relationship to her children remains poor and distant throughout. It is his aunt who builds a darkroom for budding photographer Donal, not his mother, to whom he barely even shows his pictures. While relatives encourage (and fund) Donal to study at boarding school or Aine to go for a university in Dublin, Nora does the opposite, trying to cling on to these people without any result except furthering their mutual misunderstandings. It’s a curious marker of the novel’s structure that at the novel’s end she’s left alone with her youngest son, so that even though she has reached a kind of triumph in moving on from Maurice’s death, she has ended up in a situation is approaching desolate.

Still, in any case she has gained independence. Through music, through clothes, through haircuts and hair dyes, Nora finds a new way of representing herself. If early on in the novel her independence consisted of consciously choosing not to help with the dishes while being a guest at her sister’s home, thus going against how she had been taught to behave, later on she shows her personality through buying a record player, learning to sing, and buying some dresses. From a kind of negative freedom – a refusal – she moves to a private, affirmative one, even if it is one that is dependent upon her material conditions improving. (One of the ways time is marked in Nora Webster is the occasional comment that a recent budget has improved the allowance granted by the state to widows like herself.)

Finally, Nora even eventually turns that independence into an assertiveness. When one of her sons is moved down in class, unfairly in her view, she writes to each of the teachers declaring she will picket the school until the change is reversed. It certainly is independence, but whether it is maturity is another matter. This harms her daughter’s prospects of getting a teaching job and reveals a real thoughtless selfishness about her. When one of the teachers asks her to consider the other parents and children she simply says “I have no interest in the other parents”. She also never truly tries to understand why her son was moved down to begin with.

Maturity is important because one of the threads I most enjoyed in Nora Webster was the treatment of politics in the novel and its relationship to Nora’s changing perspective. Within the novel Nora grows up politically. Her husband was a significant figure within local politics with the Fianna Fáil party, but Nora herself lived in his shadow – I had the impression she hardly would have allowed herself to utter a thought contradicting his, even though the novel makes clear that on church matters she was more progressive than he, for example.

Politics, for a woman at home in a happy enough marriage, can sometimes arrive dulled. For a widow forced to take up work, it’s harder to avoid. Nora’s interest in her widow’s pension makes her aware of the finance minister responsible for her. Her work brings her into contact with the Haves, in the form of the Gibney family, and the Have-Nots, in the form of their workers. By working in the office of the Gibney daughter, Elizabeth, and through an acquaintance with her mother (who married into the family from a background closer to Nora’s), Nora’s position seems to be one aligned with an unassuming, unaware privilege.

Instead, however, Nora comes to shift towards the workers instead. Politics in Nora Webster is “elsewhere” but still available for those with eyes to see. In plain language: it’s on the telly. Just as in Marilynne Robinson’s Home, where the Civil Rights period comes to small town Iowa through a new television, in Nora Webster the early stages of The Troubles come to her through her own. But who notices besides her? At work it is only a lorry driver who responds to the violence of the British in Northern Ireland in an appropriate manner – “The baton charge on Saturday was serious. They were marching for civil rights. They were on their own streets. I am telling you now that is a disgrace”. Nobody else even seems to notice it.

Ultimately, Nora even joins the workers of the Gibneys’ business as they have a meeting to unionise. For Nora, this is an important milestone in her growing independence – “it was the idea that she had made a decision for herself, the idea that she had asked no one’s advice.” But what is interesting is that the narrative reflects a growing unease on Nora’s part. She’s shocked by how negatively the workers speak about the owners, and how positively about a colleague that Nora had not got on well with. Though Nora does end up joining the union, this long central chapter does not end there, but shows the reaction of the Gibneys when they find their employees have suddenly decided to unionise. While Elizabeth reports humorously that one of the brothers is busy complaining about the “Bolsheviks”, the narrative focus briefly lingers upon the head of the family, who “doesn’t want to see the place ever again. He has known some of the staff for forty years and some of them have been with the company even longer. They all stabbed him in the back.”

Industrial action is plenty more complicated than Tóibín can depict it here, but what’s important is Nora’s perspective. She sees the blindness of both the workers and of the owners, which gives her a kind of privileged position of maturity from which she could defuse any tension. I think this sense of clarity could have been explored much more in the book, for it is an area where Tóibín could really have emphasised Nora’s growth without simply falling back into these traditional narratives of overcoming grief or choosing an independent life outside of the memory of one’s husband. Sadly, this local politics is not pursued much further, and as for the country-level topics, Nora’s last word – where she declares that she would get a gun in her house if any of her children were shot at a march – rather suggests that the moral maturity I’ve spoken of is ultimately an illusion.

I think this is the most significant problem with the novel. Nora Webster is the story of a normal woman, quiet, self-effacing, in a time of relative unfreedom. Her opportunities are limited and perhaps we are supposed to praise her for whatever she does choose to do. But this crushing normality – her failures with her family, her mistakes – means that there is little in particular to like or be interested in about her. The opportunities for narratives that are more complex than just overcoming grief – through religion, through organised labour and a new perspective – are hinted at but ultimately never explored. Nora’s difficulties with her family are never resolved. She grows, in the sense of making friends and doing things, but not in the sense of moral growth or resolving deeper problems. We should be happy for her, but that doesn’t mean we should be happy to be with her.

In a certain sense, this novel is too long for what is ultimately just that standard narrative I named at the blog post’s start. It has that Chekhovian atmosphere of quiet failure about it, emphasised by that final image of Nora alone with her youngest son, in an emptied nest that is as much her own responsibility as that of her husband’s cancer. Too long in such a world is painful, rather than edifying. There were some very good moments – the final chapter is haunting (literally) and superb – but all this is not enough to unflatten for me what is ultimately a rather smooth book. I’m pained to write this since the whole reason I read Nora Webster was because, during a period of poor utilization at work, I watched quite a lot of Tóibín’s interviews and thought he was a lovely and very interesting fellow. I’m sure he is.

Temperamentally, however, I just didn’t like his book. Alas.