Edna O’Brien’s Real Feminine Mystique

It’s understandable why Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, was ignored by feminists, even though the film was screened in March, which is Women’s History Month. Blue Road was shown not as part any feminist program, but as a feature in the annual Irish Film Festival at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater outside of Washington, D.C.

The film doesn’t fit in the typical feminist syllabus because Edna O’Brien, despite being one of the great female writers of the 20^th century, was too brilliant, too funny, and too complex to be considered an orthodox feminist. As David Rooney put it in his review of Blue Road for the Hollywood Reporter:

While her early novels chimed with the nascent 60s feminism, O’Brien, like Doris Lessing, was ‘no darling of the feminists,’ as she put it. Instead, she insisted that what she regarded as the fundamental differences between the sexes most interested her as a writer: ‘Of course I would like women to have a better time but I don’t see it happening, and for a very simple and primal reason: people are pretty savage towards each other, be they men or women.’

You won’t hear that kind of talk at Brown or Harvard.