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 upon seeing some expensive jewelry on her, is misled into believing she has money and views her as a potential financial partner. Although she finds him a trifle “common” Judith Hearne tempers her dreams with a certain amount of realism and realizes that Madden is her last chance to fulfill a desperate desire to be loved. What follows is a tragedy of errors and when the awful realization of the situation dawns on Judith Hearne she turns first to drink as a way of escape and then to the church where the priest mismanages her cruelly. The novel reaches its climax when Judith Hearne attacks the sanctuary in her desperate crisis of faith and collapses in a scene of total degradation and despair. The novel ends with Judith Hearne in a sanitorium having lost her dignity and her faith-a rather bleak future.
That essentially is a synopsis of the story line. What may be useful, however, is if I give you an idea of what each of these cities was like in the 1950s. It is important to realize that the novel Judith Hearne very much reflects Moore’s feelings about the city. This novel and the two novels that followed was his attempt at trying to exorcise Belfast out of his system and there are various passages in the novel which highlight the isolation and alienation felt by the Nationalist community and it was from this he trying to escape. But in trying to escape he couldn’t shake off this feeling of terrible loneliness and this is one of the main themes running through the novel.
Looking at the make up of Belfast it is easy to understand these feelings. Belfast was, unlike Dublin, an industrial city. I’m sure that when you think of Belfast you think of the sectarian conflict and the murals but one of its enduring images is the big shipping gantries with H and W on them. In fact those little link films on the BBC shows a group of boys skateboarding with those gantries behind them. The message is probably lost on most of the population but this was intended to show a more positive image of Belfast, an industrial, prosperous city that built the Titanic. But this is a very Protestant image and Belfast is a very Protestant city.
Protestants believed that they had created Belfast through hard work and enterprise, a triumph over mud and water, the result of successive merchants, engineers and entrepreneurs. The Nationalists on the other hand, believed that Belfast had always been theirs and that the land had been taken from them. Furthermore they were excluded from the job market. Belfast in the 50s saw Protestants quite powerful and Catholics very isolated and marginalized. Belfast was an unhappy, fragile city where violence seethed below the surface.
So what about Dublin? Can it compare with Belfast? Well, Dublin, having achieved independence from the British Empire and then endured a very bitter civil war was under the control of a politician who still believed in Mother Ireland and who attempted to maintain a rural way of life. The laws of Ireland were entwined with the Catholic church which resulted in a highly conservative, restrained and many would say oppressed nation Its relations with Britain were extremely poor, where embargoes were imposed by Britain causing a collapse in the economy and massive unemployment. Ireland’s position of neutrality in the Second World War if anything worsened relationships and it would be fair to say that Ireland was the sick man of Europe – high unemployment and huge emigration.
Let’s have a look at the first clip which covers the opening of the novel. I’ve included some extracts for you to read in order to compare the two scenes. In the novel, I believe Moore was quite keen to portray Middle Class Belfast in decline and to give a sense of its isolation and decline through its shabbiness. Moreover, Moore wants to present us with a middle aged, unattractive, snobbish and desperately lonely spinster who is herself kept out of the most powerful institution upheld by the Catholic Church and that is the woman seen as the wife and the mother and the heart of the home. Judith Hearne fails to achieve the role expected of her and as a result she is only ever a visitor to those domestic spaces normally assigned to women. This is what we see in the first clip. Incidentally, I’ve included in the novel’s extracts Judith Hearne’s reaction to Bernard Rice, the landlady’s son. She is a woman who feels the pressure to view every man as a potential suitor but I do find the director’s interpretation rather interesting.
FIRST CLIP
Perhaps what the Catholics do have in common in both cities is this repressive apparatus of the church and the family which dominates their lives. You will see that Moore’s characters are very much determined by Catholicism. Its strictures dictate the attitudes, behaviour and beliefs of the Catholic community both in Belfast and in Dublin. Freedom within such a structure is merely an illusion and any attempt to live outside its tenets or indeed question its ideology can result in psychological distress. This is exactly what happens to Judith Hearne, her whole existence is dependent upon the church and her faith and when this faith is shaken and she begins to question the very existence of God she has also to question her very reason for being, which leads to a breakdown. This we’ll see in one of the later clips.
The main difference, I can see between Belfast and Dublin is this feeling of being at once locked out and hemmed in. There is no doubt that the Nationalist community suffered feelings of dislocation after Partition and that the Unionists’ endeavours to keep them essentially ghettoized and poor led to feelings being locked into small spaces. Hence the use of the Bed and Breakfast as a backdrop, where as Moore puts it all the houses are partitioned off. This is very much a statement Moore was making about the Nationalist community in Belfast.
The way many Nationalist writers coped with these feelings was through nostalgia and an abiding involvement with the past. This we can see in the first clip when Judith Hearne unpacks her photograph of her dead aunt and the oleograph of the Sacred Heart. She continually returns to the past to seek some comfort which is in fact exactly what Moore is doing.
I included the first meeting between James Madden and Judith Hearne just so you could see the relationship develop. For Hearne, Madden represents that opportunity to become part of that role assigned to women.
But to the first question which is does it really matter that the film is changed to an entirely different city? Does it work?
In the second clip, which is about 15 minutes long we see the fourth date between Judith Hearne and James Madden and this rather unfortunate misunderstanding between the two characters which results in the start of Judith Hearne’s breakdown. I have included two important passages from the book which have been totally removed from the film but are of some significance to Moore’s novel as a whole. The first takes place at the end of the movie they’re watching which clearly situates the action in Belfast. As does the second which follows the couple through the city centre of Belfast as opposed to a bridge across the Liffey in Dublin which is what we see in the film.
If you read those two passages and maybe we could open a debate over whether their exclusion is a problem.
The second issue is the latent violence which lies beneath and throughout the novel. This violence will become obvious as you watch the clip and I’ll be interested to here what you make of it because again there is a very good reason why Moore included this scene in the novel but I’m not sure if it is fully explored in the film because of changing the location.
SECOND CLIP
So basically, does it work, does it really matter or does the basic story line lose something fundamental? The two passages from the novel highlights the stark difference between the Catholic and Protestant communities and these passages seeks to highlight the feeling of separateness and isolation felt by the Nationalist community within Belfast, a feeling which is taken one step on with Judith Hearne as she is further isolated within her own community. This aspect is demonstrated quite well in the film version, when we see the scene in the landlady’s sitting room but without Moore’s own reference to the Belfast community it could be argued that this theme of isolation and loneliness somewhat loses its impact. That’s the first issue.
The second issue is one of this latent violence which surfaces several times throughout the novel. It reflects this sectarian violence which existed and spilled out of Belfast throughout the twentieth century but which did not exist in Dublin. We are only ten years or so before the start of the Troubles and there are plenty of remarks made by characters in the novel which reflect this growing unrest. Moore intended the rape scene to signify a spilling of this frustration and suppressed violence within the city. Otherwise, left in isolation as it is in the film it is just the disgraceful actions of a dirty old man. What the film does do quite carefully is chart the parallel disintegration of both Hearne and Madden.
The third clip shows the climax of the whole story. The reality of her situation hits her with full force and in her desperation she turns to the one place of refuge and if you like the only male with whom she has ever had a lasting relationship-Christ. The Church that could always offer comfort and forgetfulness within the context of the Mass cannot cope with an individual crisis. Faced with Judith Hearne who is driven to alcoholism, degradation and total despair it fails her horribly, as we will see in the scene with the priest. There then follows an attack on the sanctuary which I think is quite shocking but which reflects her overt crisis of faith.
THIRD CLIP
The scene between the priest and Judith Hearne is Moore’s criticism of its role and its grip on the community. Hearne is rejected at a critical moment by someone whose spiritual obligation it is to dispense charity and guidance not platitudes or patronizing admonitions.
The second scene which is a really harrowing scene again glosses over what obviously has sexual connotations, which are more obvious from the text. This scene is like some of the others contains this overtone of violence which lies repressed within this Belfast society. But when the tabernacle doesn’t open it is another level of rejection suffered by Judith Hearne. If set in Dublin then it is reduced to the rejection of a very plain middle aged woman. What Moore had in mind is rejection and isolation at different levels-
First the isolation and rejection of one community by another,
Then the isolation of an individual by the community
And finally the isolation of an individual by the very institution that drives that community.
The film tackles two of those themes but cannot include the third by locating outside Belfast.
Therefore whilst it works on a superficial level, it misses much of what Moore intended in the novel.
I want to finish on a rather different note which might give some food for thought! It has to do with the novel rather than the film.
Some of the issues raised in the novel resonate on issues we are dealing with today.
Effectively, we have two separate communities living side by side with very different cultural aspirations where over time this latent hostility erupts into violence.