Water as Salvation and Destruction?

In a lot of the Heaney poems we read, there was a very strong evident and strong connection that he (and his family before him) felt to the earth. The roots that were planted in his head by his father awoke in him a connection to the elements that fill Ireland. I don't have the book of poems in front of me, but I at least remember that there were several poems about his connection to the water (or the shoreline) and the land of his ancestors. The presence of elemental connections in his poems tie him to the past, but also discovers that they make up who he is.

In "Girl Is A Half Formed Thing," we can trace a theme of elemental connections throughout the novel. The strongest ones are the motifs of suffocation (a lack of air), and drowning (or being cleansed) in water. There are also roots here, except they're broken roots in the brother's  head. Throughout the first parts of the book, there are also quite a few times when the girl refers to her and her friends in relation to the muddy, sloppy earth. In the last section (page 194), there is the long passage about the dream she has that ties her (and every human) to the earth and their ultimate return to it in death.

Using these themes, I'm going to argue that Irish people are being portrayed as "nature" itself. Their relation to the earth and the elements have strong Pagan ties,  but there is a strong presence of Christian dominance in both Heaney and McBride. In Christianity, water is meant to cleanse us of our sins and provide us with hope for forgiveness. For the Irish "pagans," however, water is the opposite of hope because it cuts them off from the rest of the world, symbolizing the encroaching flood and destruction of their beautiful land (at the hands of the Christian invaders). In "Girl," as religion suppresses her natural self (the grandfather, the mother), she looks for salvation in the earth and the water. Instead, it ends up being her demise, just as it will be Ireland's.

GIRL post 2

      Sometimes, I read this book and I confuse it for a satire for the sole reason that it seems to always be reaching for that next level of absurdity. Every time I think I just got to the weirdest past, it turns out that it always gets more strange. And that's not even the aspect that bothers me the most about the book. The thing that plays most in the forefront of my mind is my reluctance to tolerate the main character. I find it nearly unbearable to force myself to get through the recount of her near constant sexual endeavors and her general indifference for the woes of everyday life. Her lack of interest and emotion makes the stream of her consciousness sort of tedious to read, and the only reason I keep going is to see what messed up thing this girl will do next.
      One of the passages I feel that I understood the best was from page 105 to 106, the one that started with "I met a man." I think it holds a lot of relevance to the story but not in the way that it lists all the different men she encounters in her sexual escapades. The end of the passage contains the line "I met a man and many more and I didn't know you at all" as she addresses her brother internally. A line that can get buried by the length of the list, I think its significance lies in the fact that it essentially summarizes the girl's inability to connect with anyone emotionally. Although she loves her brother, and has this kind of obsession with what he thinks about her, she is unable to know him because she barely has any emotions (at least in what we read. She talks about crying, but we don't really see any of it). This isn't meant to suggest she has incestuous ideas about her brother (although there is still another hundred pages, so maybe?), I just think she has this desire to connect with him emotionally and is unable to because all she knows is sex and physicality. In this same passage, she pinpoints this emotional distance by highlighting her acceptance of his money but never saying thank you. She claims "I don't really know what I was up to," in which the reflective narration shows that she now sees how awful she was and that she was emotionally distant from anyone that was good to her.
     Despite my distaste for this girl narrating the story, I find myself wrapped up in the plot that is unfolding. It sort of reminds me of how I felt reading Nabokov's Lolita: unable to put it down because of the genius and the power of the writing. It takes a lot of talent on the part of these authors to make us want to keep reading a book focused on characters we don't particularly like.