‘The Citadel of Their Celibacy’: Masculinity, Celibacy and Marriage in Mary Lavin’s Short Fiction

Abstract

Throughout her oeuvre, Mary Lavin (1912–1996) engages with the nuances of “celibate moments” within masculine life cycles. This periodic sexlessness is often expressed through the complexities of strained or upended marital unions, as in “A Happy Death”, as well as the homosocial and fraternal relationships depicted in “The Joy Ride” and “The Becker Wives.” Within these overlooked narrative spaces, we can consider the relational implications of sexlessness, singleness and marital struggle on interpersonal relationships and the intimacies of masculine sexual identity in post-independent Ireland. In Lavin’s work, the short story is not a conclusive form, and celibacy is not always a permanent practice or observed behaviour. Instead, celibacy can be transient, often silent but equally charged with generative or destructive potential. This article will theorise male celibacy as part of Lavin’s commitment to silence and restraint and include this as part of her refusal of conventional romantic closures. Celibacy in this case takes on a significant positionality within interpersonal characterisations, not merely as a passive symptom of unhappiness or a given consequence of marital decline or spousal death, but as an active and at times frustrated response to hegemonic expectation. To conceive of masculine celibacy in these works, this article considers how celibacy functions within domestic short fiction and Lavin’s conceptualisation of everyday estranged intimacies.

1. Introduction

A pattern exists within the study of Irish literary masculinities that locates Irish manhood and male sexuality within primarily male-authored texts—particularly in the mid-twentieth century—with women’s fiction entering the discourse by way of a contemporary “post-Edna O’Brien” lens. The literary outputs by women in the pre-sexual liberation landscape were often considered valuable for their commentary on the patterns of inclusion and exclusion of women within the dynamics of public and private life, suffrage movements and political nationalism (Owens 2005; Weekes 2014). Commentary on the specific subjectivities of men, though present, was not a critical priority in the developing fields of Irish masculinity studies or women’s literary histories. This was despite the fact that mid-century women’s fiction was a valuable site for the exploration of a hierarchical structure, such as masculinity, that was not only dependent upon women for legitimisation but was constructed, as we know from Connell and Messerschmidt (2005), through an engagement with social processes that very much included the complexities of domestic life. However, despite “the everyday” and “the ordinary” being social and political categories that could mobilise various hegemonic, non-hegemonic and counter-hegemonic masculinities—including male celibate masculinities—they were often the reason women’s fiction in this period was devalued as a reliable source on men’s lives.

Despite being a discernible character across Irish fiction, the male celibate is a relatively ignored sexual pattern in Irish women’s writing. And while I would not say an extensive critical literature exists on celibacy within Irish men’s literature, there are several notable works, such as Sarah Green (2023) or Michael O’Sullivan (2009), that look at male celibacy outside a religious context and instead through the lens of desire, pleasure and seduction. Therefore, this article proposes to tackle male celibacy in women’s fiction that deals with celibacy in the context of intimacy. More specifically, this article will focus on the first three stories of Mary Lavin’s The Becker Wives (Lavin 1946): “The Becker Wives,” “The Joy Ride” and “A Happy Death”. Critical enquiry into Lavin’s celibacies tends to lean towards the widow or spinster stories where men feature within narratives of female celibacy but are not the celibate focus themselves (Wan-lih Chang 2015). This intervention is more in line with Seamus Deane’s work in Small World: Ireland 1798–2018 (Deane 2021), where he makes the point that celibacy can still be located within marital life and uses Lavin’s fiction to demonstrate how women’s writing could challenge the “strange ideal of celibacy” in Ireland (Deane 2021, p. 223). To further engage with this idea, this article focuses on the subject of male celibacy at narrative points where men still occupy some positionality—central or liminal—to marriage. As we will see, Lavin’s texts feature the complexities of heterosexual marriage and evolving masculinities in the post-independence period, when the family and therefore marriage were used to legitimise heteronormative gender and sexual ideals.

Historically speaking, celibacy was the definitive marker of the unmarried state, distinct from the disciplinary sexual practices of chastity or abstinence, which held different connotations along the lines of temporality, circumstance, economics and religiosity. However, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an entanglement of these terms by the efforts of various political and moral authorities to control and define sexuality, to the point where a married celibate was oxymoronic at the outset of the nineteenth century but a legible figure within romantic pairings by the time Lavin was writing (Cronin 2013). For this reason, I approach celibacy in line with Benjamin Kahan (2010) as a fluid and relational sexual formation that responds to the dynamics of one’s life course. In these narratives, celibacy constitutes a sustained engagement with what might be called “celibate moments”—instances of sexlessness, suspension, silence, inability or refusal that resist the inevitability of sexual closure commonly associated with the heteronormative masculine life cycle and the hetero-patriarchal realities of romantic narratives. This periodic sexlessness is often expressed through the complexities of strained or upended marital unions, as in “A Happy Death”, as well as the homosocial and fraternal relationships depicted in “The Joy Ride” and “The Becker Wives.”

By contextualising the issue of celibate temporality within the overlapping masculine and marital life cycles of these texts, we can consider how the experience of celibacy resists the teleological progress narratives of marriage and reproduction. In these works, celibacy is not part of a vocational practice or perpetual behaviour. Instead, celibacy is transient, often silent but equally charged with generative or destructive potential. For this reason, I approach celibacy within different relationship outcomes caused by marital dependency, procreation anxiety, separation and involuntary singleness. Here, celibacy takes on significant positionality within interpersonal characterisations—not merely as symptoms of unhappiness or an inevitable consequence of marital decline or spousal death, but as an active and at times frustrated response to hegemonic expectation. To conceive of masculine celibacy in these works, I consider how celibacy functions within domestic short fiction and Lavin’s conceptualisation of everyday estranged intimacies.

This article will offer a much-needed intervention into the dynamics of celibacy at work in women’s mid-century short fiction. As an inherently moveable form, domestic short fiction is intrinsically valuable to an intervention into the transient nature of the celibate sexual identity in Ireland. Furthermore, the relocation of the non-sexual man in short fiction, or rather a specific type of short fiction, will allow us to think about male celibacy outside of the lasting dichotomy of “celibate” or “definitely not celibate”. In other words, building on the temporary iteration of celibacy that Kahan (2010) identifies and placing it in dialogue with hegemonic masculinity will allow for the examination of celibacy as a subversive tool against homogenous assumption of the Irish male sex life. Moreover, this intervention will contribute to expanding discourse on the utility of Irish women’s short fiction in addressing the persistent gap in the sexual history of this period.

2. Good Celibacy, Bad Celibacy and Where We Look for It

The intangibility often cited at the outset of critical enquiries on celibacy doubles in the context of Ireland’s sexual history. As with many aspects of Irish social life pre-independence, sexuality was caught in the double bind of replicating English Victorian ideals around sexual behaviour, that according to Tom Inglis “penetrated into the Irish body and soul”, or confirming assumptions of promiscuity and deviance (Inglis 2005, p. 17). The critical opinion of Ireland after the so-called “emergence of sexuality” in the late nineteenth century frequently cited the country as deeply repressed, asexual, sexually anorexic, sexually stunted and occasionally sexually unique. However, as Diarmuid Ferriter’s (2009) work on Irish sexuality and Tony Fahey’s (2015) work on the Irish family attests, many now take the position that the sexual culture of Ireland post-famine through to the mid-twentieth century was not wildly different from its European or North American counterparts in terms of sexual morality but was intense in its surveillance of sexual behaviours in both public and private arenas of Irish life. Post-famine, the significance of sexual surveillance was bound up in the politics of the Devotional Revolution, wherein sexual morality centred in the efforts to create a new hierarchical and organised Irish Catholicism that stood, as Inglis would say, in opposition to pleasure (Inglis 2005). Under the dynamic of new devotedness, the functionality of marriage and, therefore, sex was attributed to the reproduction and care of Irish children. However, this concern for the family did not just begin at the point of marriage but rather was embedded in social politics of both pre- and post-married life. Generally speaking, sexual abstinence in both life stages protected the stability of real and future imagined families.

In Laura Kelly’s (2023) account of contraception in Ireland, celibate sexual practices and marriage were often discussed in relation to female sexual responsibility. However, celibacy was also integral to the regulatory discourses surrounding “productive masculinity” throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and this cult of male productivity was part of sustaining the institution of the Irish family. While inherently tied to the morality discourses of restraint, celibacy also regulated the productivity needed in the futuristic planning of Irish state building. It underpinned Catholic morality, traditional models of landownership and patriarchal breadwinning ideologies, respectively, meaning that there was an ideal male celibate or “manly celibate”, as it were, in all aspects of Irish life. The social and economic protection offered by celibacy could be differentiated across class structures in Ireland. In the context of middle-class farming families, male singleness allayed fears of inheritance and the disintegration of the land. In the case of the non-farming bachelor, strategic singleness functioned in terms of future class elevation, individual aspirations and “becoming bourgeois” (Inglis 2005, p. 15). However, even though celibacy undergirds these processes of regulation, it could quickly become a destabilising force for Irish manhood overall because suitable celibacy was always paralleled with the presence of sexual potential or the compulsory heterosexual timeline.

The pervasive existence of sexual potential within the conceptualisation of a non-sexual life is central in the configuration of the celibate Irish man. Benjamin Kahan dedicates an entire chapter of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Kahan 2010) to outlining how celibacy resists heteronormative time. However, the disruptive nature of celibate time is not entirely applicable to the Irish case as celibacy was often indicative of a normative sexual life of good catholic practice and economic family planning. However, the disruptive nature of celibacy can be pinpointed at the intersection of celibate time and sexual potential. In Ireland, sexual potential was enshrined in the ideologies of Muscular Catholicism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Cara Delay draws on the figure of the priest to best illustrate the dual presence of chaste and virile masculinity, saying that “there was some evidence of compatibility between the more refined priestly manhood and the more muscular manliness of sportsmen” (Delay 2020, p. 105). This compatibility was also recalled in the post-independence romantic, anti-modern discourses that aimed to reconstruct Irish manhood in relation to the virility of land and nation while trying to maintain the moral focus on sexual restraint (Nash 1996; Valente 2010; Beatty 2022). The main consequence of this clash of sexual timelines was the problematisation of permanent celibate states. The sexual abuse scandals perpetrated and covered up by the Catholic clergy—bastions of so called “manly celibacy”—as well as the visibility of “homosexuality within the dominant discourse of human sexuality” furthered assumptions of the pervasive nature of the male sex drive, whilst de-naturalising permanent celibacy as a normative sexual existence for Irish men (Cullum 2013, p. 622). A particular source of anxiety was felt around the aged bachelor. Although a privileged celibate figure, he is, as Madden (2019) points out, only conceived in relation to an underlying marriage plot. Therefore, because we do not tend to follow celibacy into the realm of matrimony, the “marriage clock” becomes one of the reasons why we lose track of celibacy in the context of male sexuality and masculinity.

In the post-independence Ireland in which Lavin wrote, celibacy was part of a handed-down sexual framework defined by Catholic sexual mores that hinged on self-restraint. Inglis refers to this relationship as the combination of “external constraints” and “internal control” (Inglis 2005, p. 17). Loic Wright (2025) makes a similar observation when stating that Irish sexuality was made up of multiple components that required different levels of institutional, community and individual regulation. The celibate component of the male sex life was predominantly discussed in relation to morality and as a disciplinary practice. Meaning that the intricacies of masculine celibacy were often clouded by clerical manhood and the rhetoric of sinning that articulated a clear formulation of appropriate sexual behaviour. Located firmly within the social code of upright and good moral living—as an example of vocational commitment, self-abnegation and virginal perfectionism—“good” male celibacy in Ireland maintained a conceptual distance from the body. However, similarly to how J. A. Mangan (1999) links the nude male body to high politics, the closer celibacy became associated with sex and desire for men, the more unruly it and men themselves could become. Under the parameters of good sexual behaviour, male celibacy could point to gender and sexual hegemony, so long as it remained part of the church and state-controlled parameters of celibacy that preserved the institutions of church and family. This would become difficult when, at the mid-point of the century, sex and reproduction changed hands and went from being a strict issue of morality to one of nation-building.

The biological reproduction of the nation, and therefore sex, was central to the Irish state-building agenda. During the 1930s, Fianna Fáil determined that women’s social and sexual mobility, encapsulated through emigration, or as Louise Ryan notes, “the loss of breeding stock,” was a threat to the survival of the Irish race (Ryan 2002, p. 51). This anxiety highlighted a change in the reproductive narrative for Irish men, who had previously dominated the virility triad of nation/church/state and were now newly absent from narratives of reproduction, protection and parenting. As a result, celibacy, no longer a temporary state, was pointing to a potentially celibate future that is, according to Kahan, “vastly indeterminate” (Kahan 2010, p. 62). In terms of the male body, the line of celibate non-normativity was most often drawn in relation to male homosexuality, but the asexual, overworked professional man and the ageing bachelor were also problematic, and at times counter-hegemonic figures to the manly celibate. This is because the stability of celibacy waivered in the presence of the overly sexed or unsexed body. “Bad” celibacy, a celibacy therefore linked to the male body through desire, queerness, disability, and even sterility, would become an expansive cause for concern in the Free State because this celibate man came into conflict with post-independent progression illusions and romantic nationalism’s promise of full hearths of Irish children.1

3. Celibacy and Form in Mary Lavin

Lavin herself was familiar with celibacy in the context of relationships. Her parents lived apart for some time when her mother returned to Ireland in 1921, and she was widowed in 1954 and again in 1991—a biographical point that is often raised in discussion of her so-called “widow stories” (Mooney 2019). While she did remarry in 1969, celibacy defined the early days of her relationship with her second husband, Michael Scott, who was a Jesuit priest for much of their friendship. It is also worth noting that the stories central to this article were written before Lavin’s experience with widowhood, and so the presence of celibacy in these texts cannot be explained by mere reference to this biographical data. This is not to overpresume the influence of these single periods on Lavin’s writing, but rather to give some grounding for the way celibacy is configured into her aesthetics of marriage life cycles and the struggle of non-sexual pairings. Lavin may have been writing within the values of her predominantly conservative Catholic community, but she was not a prude.2 Rachel Sealy Lynch (1997) addressed this most aptly when she counters previous critical assessment of Lavin’s novel The House in Clewe Street (Lavin 1945) that “assumes [Lavin’s] acceptance of the conventional bourgeois attitudes she depicts” (Lynch 1997, p. 336). Loic Wright (2023) also addresses the underexplored disruptive potential of Lavin’s first novel by theorising on the subversiveness of the failed masculine bildung in the context of the “cultural or restrictive conservatism that followed independence” (Wright 2023, p. 178). In other words, Lavin did not shy away from the subject of sex or the consequences of sexual behaviour in an Irish Catholic society.

Despite following a conservative pattern, celibacy for Lavin is also not a religious issue. Rather, as I will show, it is part of her conceptualisation of love and marriage. Permanent, temporary, desired and undesired celibacy forms a picture of realistic sexual life as opposed to a behaviour inherently associated with sexual morality or the silenced state of Irish sexuality. From a narratological perspective, Elke D’hoker’s (2023) work on silence within the history of the Irish short story allows us to think more about celibacy and intimacy in Lavin’s work. Importantly, she notes that silence is linked to dysfunctional marriages and cites Claire Keegan’s note on the short form’s ability to capture “the loneliness between people and the love that is there” (D’hoker 2023, p. 87). This deconstruction of silence in the context of interpersonal relationships speaks to the visibility of intimacy in the conversation of men and marriage at the time The Becker Wives was published. Michael Cronin accounts for the visibility of intimacy as the moment when “companionship and sexual fulfilment started to be given an equal place with child rearing in the discussion of marriage” towards the mid-twentieth century (Cronin 2013, p. 119). I argue that this is the marriage state in which we can locate and access the figure of the male celibate in these three Lavin stories.

To avoid replicating assumptions of celibacy as an absence or a permanent silencing of sexual desire, it is necessary to locate celibacy and silence further within the context of Lavin’s short form. The modern short story, the form predicated on the unsaid and the discipline of omission, is a fruitful place to examine the more nuanced aspects of celibacy’s temporality. Lavin deploys silence and absence as a means of communication and human connection—a potential noise within silence, a voice within the unspoken or alluded to narrative spaces of relationships and marital dynamics. Lavin scholars have remarked on the significance of connection in her work even in stories of isolation. Her dedication to the non-heroic, to failures and estrangements, rather than successes and transcendence, speaks to her methods of critique. Daniel Shea (2015) considers the lack of pattern in Lavin’s work and likens her approach to connection with “mystery” and the life unbeholden to “plot” (Shea 2015, p. 190). Of the stories covered in this article, each holds the potential for heterosexual romantic closures, for new and renewed passion, for sexual liberation and conquest, for sexual recuperation and transformation. It is in all these transformation plots that we so frequently see the functional generative side of love, sex, and the symbolic breakage of celibacy. However, all are denied by Lavin, and instead, the fleeting sexual state never transcends the celibate moment.

4. Questioning the Dysfunctional: Sexless Marriage and Male Dependency

The typical makeup of dependency in the context of mid-century Irish marriages is predominantly framed by the economic realities of the marriage bar, the single income wage and breadwinning ideology that inscribed labour to the social (and sexual) value of masculinity (Ferguson 2002). To be a family man was the dominant type of masculine currency throughout the twentieth century and defined the structures of hegemonic masculinity around the concept of the earner. It was through being a provider that men participated in the dynamics of respectable care while maintaining a certain distance from the idea of masculinity as inherently caring or nurturing (Hanlon 2012). In the same sense, masculinity that was depended upon by others was safe from accusations of dependency itself. As a counter to this masculinist model of care, “A Happy Death,” a marriage in crisis narrative, introduces dysfunctionality into the relationship between men, marriage and systems of care. In this case, Robert and Ella’s dysfunctionality can be contextualised at the intersections of celibacy and dependent masculinity. More specifically, I would argue that the sexual intimacy of their marriage is replaced by the different intimacies of the marital caring relationship, including rhythms of exhaustion, avoidance, hope and hopelessness that all portray a crucial moment of affective divergence from masculine hegemony.

Robert is a chronically ill man. Ella’s flashbacks to the earlier days of their courtship inscribe him to a level of delicacy that is consistent with a diaphanous disabled body. In the past, Robert’s delicacy held significant sexual potential. His white, hairless body that was “as fine as a girl’s” (Lavin 1946, p. 157) was attractive and promised a life in line with Ella’s aesthetics of attractiveness and the hope of social prosperity with a beautiful husband. She continues to think back to how Robert looked so much “cleaner than other men,” in “white shirts,” “white collars,” “dazzlingly white,” a not-so-subtle nod to her amalgamation of feminised, virginal and upper working-class potential (Lavin 1946, p. 159). However, within the postcolonial reality regarding bodies and commemoration, Robert is not a suitably disabled man—in other words, his dependency was not the result of revolutionary action. In the present, his delicate beauty has progressed into a disastrous delicacy that cannot sustain the demands of the breadwinning model because he can only partially engage in the labour market, with an “odd job now and then” (Lavin 1946, p. 159). Ella becomes the primary breadwinner by turning their home into a lodging house and disrupting the sexual potential of the marital space. The little money Robert does make, Ella ridicules and rejects, making him a husband incapable of contributing to the household in any meaningful way. It is important to note that while Lavin is not fully inverting the gender script in terms of labour and production—Ella is still cast in the feminine typical role of the carer—she does dismantle the image of the “productive Irish man”, which was pervasive in the discourse of 1940s respectability politics, by complicating the breadwinning and caring scripts.

Haywood and Mac án Ghaill (2003) suggest that a man’s role in the workplace is reflected in his position within the family dynamics. This expectation echoes Talcott Parsons’ (1959) “warm bath” analogy, wherein men would be rewarded in their home life for the efforts of their paid labour. In “A Happy Death,” where the productive and the sexual are inextricably linked, this promise of emotional and physical intimacy for a ‘hard’ working man is denied. Heather Ingram (2019), notes that Robert’s masculinity can be defined in many ways as purposeless because of his failure in the labour market but that his dependent state can be expanded on outside of passive laziness. So, while the patriarchal definition of marriage relies on the existence of dependency, Lavin locates this dependency outside of women’s circumstances and within the interpersonal consequences of care (Gilligan 2014). As a result of need and neglect, Ella and Robert’s interpersonal relationship becomes emotionally fraught with a powerful focus on their physical distance and the silence that is actively maintained between them. Robert is largely acknowledged through avoidant referentiality—“it was years since she had called him by his Christian name,” and he was “rarely called Father by any of the children” (Lavin 1946, p. 147). While in the home, he remains confined to the “darkest corner of the kitchen” while Ella controls both his visibility and the care he receives (Lavin 1946, p. 147). Their personal distance, along with Robert’s worsening health, points to a now celibate marriage.

At the beginning of the narrative, Ella avoids any proximity to bodies, including sight. She hides from her husband in the garden and fantasises about a time in the past when he was sexually appealing, and a time in the future when he might be favourably looked upon again. Here, the fantastic gaze is replicating a significant intimate act. A similar utilisation of the gaze happens when the youngest daughter, Nonny, expresses her desire for the “big-breasted” lodger to “go in to her father” (Lavin 1946, p. 150). We know that she just wants someone to check on her father, but there is still the undercurrent of a potentially curative intimate encounter within this moment. This would be achieved by channelling the gaze and restoring the heteronormative hierarchy within the house. Ella’s response—irritation, shame, jealousy—equally marks the moment as significant in the context of the relationship. Robert’s inability to perform his masculinity in line with hegemonic expectations means that he is estranged from any idealisations of the man of the house and is instead the man in the house, caught in a double bind of care and hegemonic expectation that disrupts the dynamics of “normative” marital intimacy.

The attempt at romantic closure is enacted by Ella in her will to revive Robert and to reconcile with him. Initially, she desires a “corporeal reconstruction” for her husband and focuses her efforts on the materiality and material of his body. His hygiene and manner of dress become objects that hold regenerative and curative potential for their married life. In other words, if he looks well, is attractive and respectable, they will “be well” again. It is conceivable to her that improvements to his appearance could also change his outcome in the labour market and restore his manliness to full function. Grubgeld (2020) argues that the dream of happy living in the post-independent reality could not be separated from the body. Meaning, therefore, that success in marriage was inextricable from individual well-being. Those bodies that did not conform to the “dream of futures past” therefore posed a serious threat and would eventually have to be abandoned. Following Robert’s removal from the house and eventual death, it is clear that Ella has failed in her attempt to create a curative aesthetic process. Here, Lavin shows us that the couple remains isolated both within and from the ideology of the functioning Irish family, instead showcasing its fragility and vulnerability when stacked against the realities of true marital dependency.

5. The Becker Brothers: Bachelors to Newlyweds and Procreation Anxiety

In “The Becker Wives,” the two younger Becker brothers, Theobald and Samuel, are positioned firmly within the realm of upper-class professionalism. In their case, the barrier to hegemonic masculinity comes in the form of pro-creation anxiety and the pressures to become a father. Fatherhood is an important part of breadwinning ideology and the structures of marital heterosexual hegemony (Rush 2004). Although the primary theme of this story is in fact rooted in the pressures and demands of artistic creation—largely placed on women—the foregrounding of couples within the family dynamics as opposed to one nuclear family unit produces a concurrent plot of pro-creation anxiety that is less addressed in the existing scholarship on gender in Lavin’s work (Meszaros 1982; Neary 1996). This issue of reproduction can be considered in relation to Kahan’s thinking, whereby a celibate plot co-exists “in parallel or simultaneously” to the marriage plot without cancelling each other out (Kahan 2010, p. 42). In Ireland, the permanent conceptual linkage of marriage with parenthood is well documented, and Irish masculinity has long relied on specific archetypes of the father as the symbolic head of all legitimate Irish families (McKeown et al. 1998; Calvert and O’Riordan 2024). However, how Irish men feel about being fathers is less often considered, particularly as de Valera’s 1937 constitution made clear, fatherhood was not a political priority in comparison to motherhood.3

Theobald and Samuel’s practice of celibacy is only fleeting in the context of the overall story, so much so that their bachelordom could be easily passed over. Though their time of blessed singleness is confined to the beginning of the narrative, their celibate desires remain throughout and manifest in the transition between bachelorhood and real or “self-made manhood” (Kimmel 1996, p. 13). This confrontation of celibate desire with the marital present represents a crucial point of instability that effectively leads to the collapse of potential heteronormative masculine self-hoods—but most importantly, fatherhood. Though frequently cited as an apolitical writer, the politics surrounding the Irish family are a cornerstone of Lavin’s work. Therefore, as filial duty is conceived within the paradigm of the Becker familial structure, it also extends into the dynamics of nation-building. While, as Yuval-Davis (1996) notes, the biological reproduction of the nation is an ideological project typically conceived in relation to women’s bodies, especially in a post-colonial context, the Irish state-building project is predicated on the national family allegory. Within this context, fatherhood and motherhood are relational and are only useful together.

The crucial moment of bachelorhood is captured in Theobald and Samuel’s walk home after a family dinner. As they walk, they turn the celibate inquisition towards one another, disguised by the “dangerous topic” (Lavin 1946, p. 25) of marriage and the importance of suitable matches. For Theobald, marriage has the sole purpose of conveying class elevation, and should this not be possible, chaste bachelorhood remains the greatest tool for social elevation. In the back and forth, we can see that they share an aesthetic celibacy but differ on the level of the social. Both men are described as living in rooms, but “not of course in the same locality” (Lavin 1946, p. 21). Samuel lives in “bachelor quarters” (Lavin 1946, p. 22) in town, presumably closer to the family home and business, while Theobald lives further out for the sake of his law practice. It is common in bachelor discourse for single men to be marked by others in terms of certain particularities that result in or from the lack of a wife—a penchant for isolation and an overcommitment to land/work, an overabundance of friendliness or sociability that points towards the decadent dandy (Madden 2019; Snyder 1999). It is clear that Theobald does not think of himself, socially speaking, as a bachelor. He stresses this point by belittling Samuel’s sociability, saying “one meets all kinds of people in public places” (Lavin 1946, p. 26), at which point Samuel lowers his chin and begins to blush. We can read this moment as a divergence in the two men, as Theobald senses that the citadel of Samuel’s celibacy “would not continue to stand much longer”, because he did not possess the requisite “stamina of the successful bachelor” (Lavin 1946, p. 25).

While bachelorhood is personally coveted by the brothers, it occupies an unstable place within the opinions of the Becker family and the wider society. On his deathbed, Bartholomew Becker expresses the dangers of singleness to a man’s soul and declares the “unmarried state” as “abhorrent” (Lavin 1946, p. 10). This patriarchal mandate calls the social value of his sons’ singleness into question and subsequently forces their attention towards the functionality of marriage and reproduction. Theobald removes himself from the realities of these institutions by focusing his attention on the other Becker wives and how they fail at being suitable matches for his brothers. His bachelorhood and that of Samuel maintain the honourable status of his family, not to mention the possibility of further social mobility. For him, there is more value in abstaining from the realness of married life “to ensure that the family interests would be fully safeguarded” (Lavin 1946, p. 9) than marrying for the sake of love. He is already installed as what Jacques Lacan would deem the “symbolic father”; as the only lawyer in the family, he must protect the firm and himself (Lacan 2013). He says to Samuel, that “the only hope we have rests in you, old man” (Lavin 1946, p. 24), signifying that there was a moment, though short-lived, when he hoped he would never marry.

This contraction between the symbolic and the real is clear when the two men relinquish their bachelordom in tandem. Theobald initially speaks of the ideal match in concrete terms of class mobility, but his articulation and attitudes contradict each other. Even when Samuel makes a financially advantageous match with Honoria, Theobald criticises the union and disparages Samuel’s choice despite the potential business merits. Meanwhile, his own match does not follow his initial concern for strategic class advancement. Instead, he produces a marriage of aesthetic dominance, entertainment, distraction, and most importantly, mimicry. Flora, who becomes the ideal bride for both brothers, is an artist and mime capable of softening the disorientation caused by the loss of the single life. Theobald’s choice of the artist echoes Henry James’s persistent coupling of the bachelor and the artist. However, in this case, they are not contained within the body of the one man but instead spread out within a triangular relationship that enmeshes the creative passion of the artist with the fertility and virility of the newlywed life stage.

Flora’s mimetic performances become the most tangible form of reproductivity in the couple’s newly married life—more an act of transference or possession than a simple act of mimicry. This act of creation becomes most apparent in the moments when Flora possesses Honoria, who, towards the latter half of the story, is pregnant. As Neary (1996) notes, feminine symbolic potential in the Irish literary tradition is tied to male action and is a motivation for masculine heroism. Pregnancy disrupts the one-way flow of symbolic potential and becomes proof of masculine hegemony. Samuel, therefore, has transferred successfully into manhood. For Theobald, however, Flora’s “emptiness” takes on a different meaning in the context of their marriage and his status as a fertile and virile man. We know that the wives believe that Flora is struggling or unable to become pregnant, attributing the constant possession of Honoria’s pregnant body as a sign of jealousy. At this mid-way point, it becomes clear that Theobald has disappeared from the narrative entirely and relinquishes the role of husband and father. Given that this action is all set at the outset of the marital life cycle, we can treat his disappearance as a grand moment of failed consummation.

6. Denying Conquest: Glimpse at the Incel in Purdy and Crickem

“The Joy Ride” amalgamates the pre- and post-marriage stages of the heteronormative and patriarchal life-script for men. Crickem, the younger of the story’s two male protagonists, represents the virgin who desires casual sex, while Purdy is an older man who, after separating from his wife, is unable to establish a successful sexual relationship in his post-marriage life. In their hierarchical homosocial pairing, these men exist in a liminal positionality to the marriage timeline and represent the masculine type of the involuntary single celibate. Neither man is content with his singleness and so identifies with the other’s inability to establish or re-establish a successful sexual relationship, which speaks to the duality of rivalry and mutual validity within homosocial pairings (Lucy 2024; Sedgwick 2015). While technically bachelors, neither man is part of the covenant of safe bachelorhood protected by wealth, upper-class bourgeois manhood, or the legacy of bachelor farmers (Snyder 1999). Their celibacy is not a strategic social or economic tool, nor are they protected by the status of marriage and fatherhood. Instead, their celibacy is a reminder of Irish patriarchal norms and social expectations, and the background narrative of sexual potential that defines bachelorhood. While at different stages of their lives, both Purdy and Crickem exist together in this unsafe celibate space, which is compounded by the intersections of class, age and self-efficacy. To heighten this instability and the potential of destruction, Lavin parallels celibate rage with class rage, which culminates not only in the destruction of said sexual potential but also the homosocial bond that maintains their masculine identities.

When addressed outside of the context of clerical masculinity, celibacy is often considered a consequence of the male working life. This hypothesis of celibacy as a symptom of professionalism is touched on by Heather Ingram (2019), who identifies Lavin’s problematisation of celibacy in relation to the issue of “overworking” and men being kept away from women on account of their public responsibility. As ranking members of the servant class, the role of the butler should hold some weight in the masculine self-conceptions of these men, but with no other staff on site, this traditional hierarchy cannot be legitimised. Not only is their isolation indicative of the larger “servant question,”—referring to the absence of domestic servants, particularly women, as a result of emigration and the changing structures of the upper-class domestic world—but also a move by Lavin to establish a veil of isolation and silence around the pair as they establish their sexual identities in relation to one another. In an empty manor house, with no other staff to legitimate their hierarchy, their masculinity is rooted in a quasi-domestic and potentially queer reality where duties are split by capability and not rank. Purdy, on account of his age, can only do the lighter labour, including laundry, while Crickem holds de facto power on account of his youth, better physicality and hypermasculine manner.

Eventually, the domestic/work environment cannot sustain their homosocial relationship, and they attempt to break the tension and their celibacy with a “day out”. The joyride quickly becomes a mission to secure their manhood by re-establishing a traditional heteronormative gender hierarchy, and for this, they need women. After eliciting a sexual response from a group of women and girls working in a field, Crickem declares, “what we want now—is two girls of our own” (Lavin 1946, p. 121). Their escapade then begins to mimic a narrative of escape in which they attempt to reroute their celibate futures by going on the prowl. As the younger man, Crickem is excitable, eager to fulfil his desire and saying repeatedly that “[they] must get a couple of girls. [They] won’t be right without them” (Lavin 1946, p. 122). It is the latter half of his declaration that speaks the most to the underlying timeline in the young man’s life and persistent draw of compulsory heterosexuality. Unlike Crickem, Purdy, who has a “poor opinion of women in general” (Lavin 1946, p. 101), is initially unsure about introducing women and therefore heterosexual sex to their dynamic.

The consistent queer potential of homosocial dynamics in Irish literature highlights that the introduction of sex ultimately disrupts homosocial comraderies (LaPointe 2008). In the case of Purdy and Crickem, this would mean the destruction of the interpersonal dynamic that was previously sustaining them. Purdy’s anxious positionality is reflected in the narrator’s subsequent warnings about the danger posed by “clusters of women” (Lavin 1946, p. 122) and the consequences of sexual success or failure. What occurs then is Purdy’s vision of the worst-case scenario; he imagines “the ignominy,” “derisive taunts” and “perhaps even of stones” that might be thrown in response to their advances (Lavin 1946, p. 122). Having his sexlessness confirmed to him in this way cannot be permitted, and the tone changes to one of self-consciousness, misogyny and fear more commonly associated with introverted involuntary celibate ideologies than their hypermasculine counterpart. By focusing on the collective desperation of these men and their uncertainty around sex, Lavin highlights how women are used as course corrective tools in the heteronormative masculine life cycle.

Despite their differences in sexual maturity, both men share a propensity for sexual violence. This extends past their surface displays of bravado and indifference and is arguably what allows them to maintain a partnership in what is a competitive environment. Purdy, though separated from his wife for twenty years, feels confident in his right to the alimony paid to her and therefore “had never lost his feeling of ownership over the tall and forbidding Amelia” (Lavin 1946, p. 101). However, the potential for violence is most visible in the moments of homosocial tutelage and homosocial breakage (Haywood et al. 2017). First, Crickem uses highly predatorial language to explain how best to approach their aim of securing women. Pointing out that women “know they’re safe with the crowd” (Lavin 1946, p. 123), he encourages the pursuit of pairs only. His logic is not only that they have a greater chance of manipulating two women on their own, but he also assumes that if women are alone or in a small group, they must also desire sex. This dehumanisation of women into non-sentient sexual objects is a dominant characteristic of “virile virginity,” and hegemonic attempts in the celibate lives of younger Irish men. Lavin uses the idealisation of their own sexual potential to critique the role of “hegemonic masculinity” in societies’ conceptualisation of “the good old days” and slowly what starts as hegemonic wish fulfilment leads to significant consequences on an interpersonal and community level that eventually stops their forward-moving temporality.

The frustrated celibacy of these two men dismantles the structure of traditional male celibacy and replaces it with a different conceptualisation of this ideology. One that can be considered a by-product of a toxic socio-sexual masculinity and not necessarily celibacy itself. In other words, even though a non-hegemonic masculine form in this particular case, I would argue that celibacy is not the cause of their mutual self-destruction. Their sexual failures and the burning of two great manors at the story’s conclusion are instead caused by their treatment of sexual potential as an anecdote to issues of their legitimacy and loneliness. In attempts to pin down patterns in Lavin’s work, many critics have pointed out her loyalty to love—the feeling of it, the lack of it, the loss of it, the reality of it (Hargreaves 1987; Tóibín 2013). As part of this reality, I believe Lavin makes a continuous effort to disrupt the gendered bias towards the responsibility of love and celibacy, and particularly how both are viewed as a woman’s burden (O’Brien 2012). In Irish communities, it was their responsibility to maintain the chastity of themselves and men by staying away from all matters related to the subject of sex. In an attempt to perhaps balance the scales, I would argue that in “The Joy Ride”, Lavin both critiques the hypermasculine and toxic male behaviour behind some single men and also challenges the gendering of the social responsibility to maintain celibacy itself. In fact, the female counterparts of Polly and Crissie, whom the men encounter briefly on the road, are little more than mirrors of Purdy and Crickem—keeping the responsibility for the potential sexual encounter with the two men.

7. Conclusions

What links these narratives is not merely that they are stories about relationships, but rather that they are defined by estranged intimacies. Each of these estrangements denies the romanticisation of love. For Lavin, the strategic refusal of reconciliation, transformation and conquest also means a denial of hegemonic masculinity dependent upon successful relationships and receptive women. As such, marriage in these three stories is not a site for the actualisation of the true breadwinner, or the ideal husband or the sexed-up bachelor. Instead, the discourses of pre-marriage, marriage and post-marriage become a space where Lavin can carry out her subversions of masculine authority and the national project of restabilisation using a variety of celibate masculinities. She combines celibacy within the core relationship plots that, when considered together, provide not only a picture of the masculine and marital life cycle but also offer insight into women’s perspectives of male celibacy in the context of their everyday lives.

What this article shows is that male celibacy is not configured around the parameters of sin, but instead the wider dynamics of masculine social expectation. In this case, men’s inability to engage in the labour market, receive masculine currency from professional life or fatherhood or re-route their own celibate futures signifies how celibacy, to borrow from Sarah Green, can show up in unlikely places or aspects of one’s life (Green 2023). Robert is ill and dependent on his wife for his care, is denied transformation and eventually dies. For Ella, his death catalyses the marriage in crisis into the post-marriage reality of widowhood. Theobald and Samuel are bachelors who have their celibacy disrupted by their respective marriages, and who struggle and eventually fail in their roles as husbands. Finally, Purdy and Crickem are the clearest representations of the involuntary celibate as we could hope to see in fiction from this period. Unlike Lavin’s widow narratives, celibacy in these stories relies on the cycle of virginal, single and partnered lives. To disrupt the romantic ideologies that underscore these phases, Lavin replaces them with her own realism, and the non-sexual, non-virile and romantically unsuccessful man becomes the masculine reality within each of these phases. These men are estranged from the potential of sexual prowess that clerical celibacy is responsible for restraining and therefore challenge the dominant narrative of the celibate man peddled by the church and state that predominantly taught the importance of celibacy through the “vagueness” of manliness.