Re: [Marxism] Institutionalised Child Abuse: Past and Present

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://wsws.org/articles/2003/sep2003/madg-s01.shtml
The heartless of a heartless world
The Magdalene Sisters, written and directed by Peter Mullan
By Joanne Laurier
1 September 2003

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a 
heartless world”—Marx

Five years ago in Dublin, Ireland, an order of nuns sold off part of its 
convent to real estate developers. On that property the remains of 133 
women buried in unmarked graves were discovered. It turned out that the 
women had been incarcerated by the Catholic Church to work as virtual 
slave laborers in institutions known as Magdalene Asylums.

The asylums were a network of laundries named after Mary Magdalene, who, 
according to Christian theology, was a prostitute turned devout follower 
of Christ. The Magdalene Asylums were set up in the 19th century, first 
as homes to rehabilitate prostitutes and then as industrial orphanages 
in response to the growth in the number of abandoned children resulting 
from the devastating Potato Famine of the middle and late 1840s. By the 
early 20th century, their role was expanded to function as workhouses 
for women who in a variety of ways had offended the country’s moral 
code. Run by the Sisters of Mercy in Ireland, the asylums functioned as 
commercial laundries, financing the order’s operations.

Under pressure from the Church and its archaic mores, families sent 
daughters who were deemed wayward to the asylums. The girls were 
brutalized and worked long hours every day but Christmas, for no pay. 
The choice of work was not accidental. Called “Magdalenes,” or 
penitents, the inmates were intended to scrub away their sins by 
scrubbing clean the dirty laundry from orphanages, churches, prisons and 
local businesses. Many of the women were so broken in spirit and 
isolated from the outside world that they chose asylum labor over 
leaving the institutions, some remaining until they died. The Catholic 
Church in Ireland indentured more than 30,000 women and girls in the 
Magdalene Asylums. Amazingly, the last one was not closed until 1996.

Inspired by a British television documentary aired in 1998, called “Sex 
in a Cold Climate,” Scottish actor-director Peter Mullan (lead performer 
in Ken Loach’s My Name is Joe and director of Orphans) wrote and 
directed The Magdalene Sisters.

Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2002 Venice Film Festival, the film 
predictably caused a stir at the Vatican and among Italian cinema 
industry officials. The right-wing Berlusconi government had recently 
overhauled the Venice festival, aiming to prevent the rewarding of 
antiestablishment works that would generate controversy. One Catholic 
media figure commented: “It’s a bizarre signal that the first festival 
of the center-right government has chosen to honor a professedly 
anticlerical film.”

The Magdalene Sisters is a semi-fictionalized, composite account of the 
stories of four inmates. It opens in 1964 at an Irish wedding with a 
priest coiled around a drum, furiously banging away. The shaman is 
musically transfixed. His sweaty-collared appearance suggests that he 
may also be engaged in some manner of soul cleansing, no doubt involving 
an element of sexual release. Concurrently a young woman, Margaret 
(Anne-Marie Duff), is being raped by her cousin. When she reenters the 
wedding room, word of her violation round-robins through the crowd. The 
next morning, Margaret’s father ships her off to the Magdalene Laundry.

Rose (Dorothy Duffy) has just had a child out of wedlock. Priest and 
parents rip the baby from her breast, force her to sign adoption papers 
and send her to the laundry.

Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is reaching adulthood in St. Attracta’s 
Orphanage. When she innocently flirts with the local factory boys, she 
too is sent to the laundry.

The three sack-clothed girls are met by the convent’s Mother Superior, 
Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), the provider of the “earthly means to 
help cleanse your very soul.” “All men are sinners ... therefore all men 
are open to temptation,” croons the diabolical head nun as she berates 
the girls for being “temptation” incarnate. Simultaneously, this Bride 
of Christ is greedily counting rubber-banded rolls of money in front of 
a photograph of the late President John F. Kennedy.

In the laundry, supervised by the semi-mad Katy—a 40-year veteran of the 
institution—the girls meet Crispina (Eileen Walsh), a mentally 
handicapped girl who refuses to wash priest collars. Crispina, whose 
real name is Harriet (the girls are routinely renamed by the nuns) has 
had a child out of wedlock, the father an anonymous soldier. Father 
Fitzroy, the asylum priest, is also sexually molesting the innocent, 
feeble-minded girl.

In one sadistically graphic scene, naked girls are lined up in the 
shower room as two nuns mock and compare the girls’ body parts. 
Apparently, this does not fall under the sinful category of lust or 
“impure thoughts.”

Bernadette incites the others to consider an escape, insisting “that all 
the mortal sins in the world would not justify this place.” But the 
consequences of a failed attempt can be grave. Director Mullan himself 
portrays a crazed father who brutally pummels his daughter in the asylum 
dormitory after an aborted escape.

A Corpus Christie celebration in town provides the girls with a short 
respite from their grueling life. But while officiating at the mass, 
Father Fitzroy is exposed before all as Crispina’s seducer through an 
avenging act by Margaret (both victim and victimizer come down with an 
irritating rash). With unabashed cruelty, the nuns send Crispina to an 
insane asylum, where she dies from anorexia at age 24.

Some years later, Margaret is released through her brother’s efforts, 
but not without one last humiliation at the hands of Sister Bridget. 
Bernadette, fearful of becoming a “lifer” like Katy, daringly leads Rose 
out of the convent, threatening to bludgeon with holy artifacts any nun 
who stands in their way. A postscript intimates that life after the 
asylum was grim for the three remaining Magdalenes.

Mullan’s film is an angry, direct work that displays an abundance of 
commitment on the part of both its creator and actors. The film depicts 
a society that up until only a few years ago tolerated Church-sanctioned 
torture and extreme levels of exploitation. One reviewer likened the 
“Magdalenes” to the Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

Mullan deserves plaudits for his sledgehammer attack on the Church, 
uncompromising in its dramatization of the “Holy Mother’s” medieval 
grotesqueries. One senses that all involved in the project drew from 
harsh, deeply-embedded experiences. “We’re talking about 
institutionalized sadism which in any century, in any context, is 
inhumane and unforgivable,” said Mullan in an interview with 
FutureMovies.co.uk.

In the same interview, the director speaks about the collusion between 
the Church and the Irish state and the fact that the surviving 
“Magdalenes” are being denied compensation because they had entered the 
institutions “voluntarily.” Mullan also discovered during the course of 
a question and answer session at the New York Film Festival that 
Magdalene Asylums existed globally: “It was a 1,300-seater and there 
were loads of women jumping up at the end saying: ‘I was a Magdalene!’ 
And I figured they were émigrés from Ireland, but these women were from 
Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Sydney and Rio de Janeiro.”

In another interview, Mullan speaks about the film’s timeframe: “The 
1960s were awful for women in Ireland because it was the Church’s last 
gasp. It tried to turn back the clock.” When asked by Movieweb.com why 
the laundries were eventually shut down, Mullan replied: “Economics. 
They ceased to be economically viable around the late-70s, early 80s. It 
coincided with the domestic washing machine, and the very slow 
beginnings of the Celtic Tiger Economy ... the Capitalists moved there. 
There was money to be made there. And on the other hand, you’ve got this 
labor intensive laundry business.... The modern Celtic Tiger Economy is 
based upon child slave labor. Because, when you add together the 
Magdalene asylums and the industrial schools, it’s an enormous unpaid 
workforce of kids.”

Several reviewers suggest that the prison genre employed by Mullan tends 
to dilute the complicity between society and the Church, by limiting 
physically and socially the scope of The Magdalene Sisters. There is a 
certain validity to a criticism of the film’s narrow focus. But it is 
not so much that the genre and its attendant clichés eclipse the larger 
social connections. The problem is a more general and complicated one, 
how to invest particular moments and characterizations with a broader 
and more objective significance.

Powerful as it is, the work undeniably suffers from a certain lack of 
texture. Part of this is no doubt due to Mullan’s genuine horror and 
outrage at the history he uncovered, which perhaps overwhelmed somewhat 
his more sober instincts. (Orphans, an imperfect work, does not suffer 
from this particular difficulty.) In a sense, the film is more advanced 
emotionally than it is intellectually or artistically.

The director is determined that the spectator not miss his message, to 
an extent that was probably unnecessary. The one-note effect of many of 
the laundry scenes tends to deaden slightly the overall impact. And 
Geraldine McEwan’s approach to the monstrous Sister Bridget is 
enthusiastic and lively, but again makes the nun so diabolical or 
one-dimensional that the film teeters occasionally on the edge of 
caricature.

The sequences outside of the asylum—in particular the opening wedding 
scene—stand out and allow for a more deliberate and complex examination 
of the social and psychological processes at work, in the given social 
milieu, in the Church, in Irish society.

In any event, Mullan deserves congratulation for taking on the entire 
Church and state hierarchy in Ireland, and exposing one small, but 
telling piece of the filthy historical truth.

As the director told BBC.films: “In bringing the subject of religious 
oppression to a wider audience, I didn’t just want to kick the Catholic 
Church, but to poke a finger in the throat of theocracy and let it be 
known that people shouldn’t tolerate this anymore.”

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu