"The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne" Novel betrayed by the film

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The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Does a film set in an alternative location from the novel compromise the storyline? And is it possible to represent the characters in the way the author may have originally perceived them?

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne was written by Brian Moore and set in pre Troubles Belfast in the ’50s. When Jack Clayton decided to make a film of the book in 1987 he decided to move the location to 1950s Dublin.

At first these seems quite a strange thing to do, they were obviously two very different cities in, one could argue, two different countries. By setting it outside Belfast, the director is making a conscious decision to simply eradicate the major section of a community which must have some implications upon the integrity of the story line and character development. This is what I would like to discuss tonight.

Furthermore the portrayal of the major characters has definitely been altered. Part of this can be put down to the director’s own interpretation but it cannot be ignored that he has deliberately changed the personality of some of these characters.

Now, I am going to assume that none of you has watched this film and not many of you have read this book. But what I am assuming is that everybody has a basic idea of the situation in the North.

I propose therefore to first of all give you a broad outline of 1950s society in both Belfast and Dublin so that we can open a discussion comparing the two. And then I’m going to choose three or four passages taken from the novel and show the clips in the film. In this way you get a rest from me! And, if you don’t mind doing a little bit of reading, it makes for a more informed discussion.

Let me first tell you something about Brian Moore. He was born in 1921, which was a very important year for Ireland as a whole. First of all they established independence from the British Empire and secondly we had partition in the North. Moore was one of nine children. His father was a surgeon and on the whole the family experience was a happy one. Moore attended St. Malachay’s, a grammar school where, according to Moore they “were beaten all the time…So you could go through the entire day being beaten on the hands, day in, day out, everything was taught by rote. This was a Catholic school in a predominantly Protestant milieu; therefore we had to get better marks than the Protestant schools. We were then beaten and coerced into achievement, and we weren’t really taught anything.” Moore left St. Malachay’s without the leaving cert because he failed his Maths. He experienced the Second World War as a volunteer coffining dead bodies but was then hired by the British Ministry of War Transport to go as a Port Official to Algiers, North Africa.

After one brief visit to Belfast after the war, Moore finally emigrated to Canada where he worked as a reporter. Belfast, which he considered a claustrophobic backwater trapped in the nightmare of history, left him feeling angry and bitter. It was at this stage that he felt the need to try and write Belfast out of his system “and look for a new world in which I and my characters could live.” It was at this point that he began writing The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne which was published in 1955.  

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The reasons for Moore writing Judith Hearne and the themes highlighted within the novel do call into question the decision to situate the film in Dublin. Briefly, the story centres on middle-aged Judith Hearne who moves from one bed and breakfast to another. Having devoted the best years of her life to the welfare of a severely demanding maiden aunt she has little respite in her life other than romantic dreams and the communal fellowship of Sunday Mass. As if in answer to a prayer, James Madden comes on to the scene, her landlady’s brother and recently returned from America. He ...

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