My Vocation, By Mary Lavin

BIOGRAPHY, by Maribel Mayorga

Mary Josephine Lavin wrote short stories and novels, and she is now regarded as a pioneer in the field of women's writing.

She is particularly noteworthy for her stories on the topic of widowhood, which are considered her finest.

Mary Lavin was born in East Walpole, Massachusetts, EUA, in 1912, the only child of Tom and Nora Lavin, an immigrant Irish couple. She attended primary school in East Walpole until the age of nine, when her mother decided to go back to Ireland. Initially, Mary lived in Athenry, in County Galway, in the West Coast. Afterwards, her parents bought a house in Dublin.

Mary attended Loreto College, a convent school in Dublin, before going on to study English and French at University College Dublin. She taught French at Loreto College for a while. As a postgraduate student, she published her first short story, "Miss Holland", which appeared in the Dublin Magazine in 1938.

In 1943, Mary published her first book, Tales from Bective Bridge, a volume of ten short stories about life in rural Ireland; it was a critical success and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction

In 1954 her husband died. Lavin, with her reputation as a major writer already well established, was left to confront her responsibilities alone. She raised her three daughters and kept the family farm going at the same time. She also managed to publish short stories, and she won several awards for her work, including the Katherine Mansfield Prize in 1961, Guggenheim Fellowships in 1959 and 1961, and an honorary doctorate in 1968. Some of her stories written during this period, dealing with the topic of widowhood, are her best stories.

In 1992, the members of Aosdána (an affiliation of creative artists in Ireland) elected Lavin Saoi (one of the highest honours in Irish culture) for achieving "singular and sustained distinction" in literature.
She died in 1996 at the age of 84.

MY VOCATION

My  Vocation was published in 1956 in the Atlantic  Monthly, a magazine in the USA, thanks to  a recommendation from J. D. Salinger (author of The Catcher in the Rye).

This is a story that talks about family, religion, life in Ireland, and about a daughter who was looking for her vocation: she was thinking of becoming a nun. One day she found in an ad in a newspaper that they were looking for applicants. She did not hesitate to write, and she received a telegram in answer to the application. She lived in Dorset Street and the best thing of Dorset Street was that it was like a big happy family, and everyone was proud of the idea of her going to the missions, although she did not like the idea of going with lepers. It was time for the interview: what did she decide for her future?

QUESTIONS

The “dowry”: does the tradition go on in the case of brides?
The smell of people: do you think people smell according their job? Have you read “The perfume”?
What do you know about Mary Magdalen? What is the irony in the story?
What are the Tiller Girls? And the Gaiety? What do you need to have to be a Tiller Girl?

What is the Seven Churches ritual? Is there something similar here?

In the story they say nuns don’t cough or sneeze because they are like angels. Here, when someone sneezes, we say “Jesus!”, or “Health!”, or, in catholic anglophone countries, “Bless you”. But usually in Great Britain, when somebody sneezes, he or she says “Sorry!” Do you know any different habits about sneezing, or yawning or belching?

What do you need to be a waitress, according to the story?

What kind of girl do the boys choose to get married to, according to the story? Do you know other clichés?

What do you know about Mary Alacoque?

What preparations did the mother do for the nuns visit? How did the neighbours help?

Our protagonist ties a knot in her handkerchief: What do you do when you want to remember something?

What do you know about leprosy and lepers? Have you seen the film “Sweet Bean”? And Papillon? What happened to Gaugin in the novel The Moon and Sixpence, by Somerset Maugham?

What is a Recruiting Officer?

Describe the two nuns that visit the protagonist’s house.

How did the meeting go?

On page 440, line 20, one of the nuns says: “Oh, we have to be ready for all the eventualities”. What do you think she means?

What cab did the girl order for the nuns? Describe cab, horse, cabby…

Tell us about the accident. Did the nuns get hurt?

At the end: is she going to be a nun? How do you know? What is Dollymount?

PREPARE YOUR SPEECH

 

What do you know (from your experience) about nuns? Did you study in a nun’s school? What do you think about your experience?

Tell us your experience about your call/vocation. Is it easy to know one’s call? An important number of students change studies after their first year: why is it so difficult to choose what one wants to be in one’s life? What would you do if you didn’t like your child’s call?

What do you think of Missions or NGOs? Do they really help the people they say they’re helping?

VOCABULARY

cut out, call, hopscotch, sniff, cheapen, sparky, scrub, hold with, hot jar, kneeler, tightly, dead keen, morosely, dowry, harp on one string, start the ball rolling, front, ram, lore, square meal, lug, return room, being any the wiser, raffle, stub, back out of, gorgeous, wear away, pickle, daft, flighty, cabby, bucket, caper