Magdaline Sisters

1 1 Keith Benson Diversity and Oppression Professor Tamara Thompson Reaction Paper The Magdalene Sisters, a film adapted from multiple accounts of women’s experiences at the Magdalene Convent in Ireland, illustrated the various methods and manifestations of oppression suffered by its young women. While popular notions of convent-life have most assume that all of the young women enrolled in convents voluntarily, this movie graphically shatters that myth. In religiously conservative Ireland, the women in this movie were being punished merely for being human. More specifically, the women of the Magdalene asylum were forced by either their parents, or by the state to take up residency at the asylum. What resulted from these women’s experiences at the convent was consistent with everything we have read relating to people’s response to prolonged periods of oppression. In this paper I will comment on the multiple stages of oppression the women endured, while tangentially referring to Bobbie Harro’s “Cycle of Socialization” and how it related to the troubling film In the beginning of the Magdalene Sisters, we are introduced to three main characters and how they came to be forced into the Magdalene Convent. One of the women was raped by her cousin during a wedding, and in turn, was forced into the convent by her father. Another young lady lived in a orphanage and was seen flirting with boys and was sent to the convent, followed by a young woman who bore a child out of wedlock. What is significant about the circumstances that landed the women in the asylum correlates to Bobbie Harro’s Lens of Identity; where people find themselves in a

2 2 constricting environment where expectations and traditions are already in place. These women made no active choice to violate the “rules” of their society. A young woman being raped, a teenage girl flirting with boys, and for a teen bearing a child do represent cognizant resistance toward their conservative traditions. But what was clearly communicated in the movie through parental, societal responses was that the young women’s actions were wrong and morally corrupt; and therefore needed to be socialized according to the expectations of a religiously conservative society. The result of the young women’s “sinful” acts, was an effective, muli-tiered socialization process which led to Harro’s Lens of Socialization and Teaching. Socialization, as Harro describes, is “taught on a personal level by parents, relatives, teachers, and people we love and trust-shapers of expectations, norms, values, roles, rules, and models of ways to be and sources of dreams.” Through being forced to live in the Magdalene Convent, women deemed “throw-aways” or wayward, were conditioned and oppressed daily. Representing the Irish Catholic Church, the convent effectively used religious edicts to stigmatize and dehumanize their female tenants. Sister Bridget dismissed the women’s birth names, and renamed them “good Catholic names” as way of fragmenting the women sense of identity and control of their lives. The specific scene when Sister Bridget renames one of the women, personally reminded me of a scene from Alex Haley’s Roots, where the overseer whipped Kunta Kinte until he accepted the Anglo name, Toby, as his own. The nuns in the convent also cut the hair off of women they believed to be rebellious and resistant, reminiscent of what we covered in the reading about how White Americans cut Native Americans’ hair when attempting to socialize them. Perhaps most humiliating however, was the instance where we see the nuns force

3 3 the young women to exercise naked while critiquing their naked bodies. The nuns inspected the women as if they were Africans in an 18th Century slave auction. In this scene, we witness young women being forced into nude-ness in the presence of fully clothed nuns. What resonates with me is the reading (?) where the author explains how slave masters forced their servants to remain naked while serving them to instill to the slaves that they were not completely human, and therefore had very little control over their own bodies. Finally the Lens of Experience as described by Harro, manifested itself after the years of oppression the women in the asylum suffered. Similar to what was witnessed and Blue Eyes, and North Country, the target group in Magdalene Sisters had been oppressed for such an extended period of time, that most lost the will to defend themselves and others in the same circumstances. Harro explains that dissonance, silence anger and internalized subordination often results within this Lens. An example of the confusion, uncertainty, and overall subordination internalized within the women was illustrated when one of the women had the opportunity to free herself, but instead of running away from the oppressive convent, the woman, already outside of the convents gates, returns to the place that had been the source of her grief and pain. This woman, in my eyes, had become what Morgan Freeman described in the Shawshank Redemption, “institutionalized”; afraid to leave the institution even though the institution is so oppressive. Interestingly enough, I won’t hesitate to suggest that many of the other women in the convent had become institutionalized in a like manner. The convent hadn’t any armed guards, barbed wire fence, or security system that could have effectively prevented a determined individual from escaping. The only separating the oppressive

4 4 Magdalene Convent from the freedom of outside world, was a short stone wall and, perhaps infinitely more challenging to negotiate, the women’s shattered sense of self and sense of hope. In conclusion, Magdalene Sisters presented a prototype of how horizontal oppression looks when utilized to sustain and protect vertical oppression; something I hadn’t seen in the other films. The target female nuns abused other target females to preserve an order of vertical oppression where agent men actively oppress women. I witnessed how the Irish Catholic Church was vertically oppressive in that the men were perpetual agents who were omnipotent in the affairs of not only men, but also women. And, as a result, it is the women who suffered marginalization, stigmatization, and oppression far more than the men. This was one of the most troubling films I’ve seen in some time.