Meggie Cleary Character Analysis

She was yanking inexpertly at a large knot when the dreadful thing happened. Off came the hair, all of it, dangling in a tousled clump from the teeth of the comb. Above Agnes’s smooth broad brow there was nothing; no head, no bald skull. Just an awful, yawning hole. Shivering in terror, Meggie leaned forward to peer inside the doll’s cranium. The inverted contours of cheeks and chin showed dimly, light glittered between the parted lips with their teeth a black, animal silhouette, and above all this were Agnes’s eyes, two horrible clicking balls speared by a wire rod that cruelly pierced her head.

Meggie was curled into a little heap, with her thumb in her mouth and her rag-decorated hair all around her. The only girl. Fee cast her no more than a passing glance before leaving; there was no mystery to Meggie, she was female. Fee knew what her lot would be, and did not envy her or pity her. The boys were different; they were miracles, males alchemized out of her female body. It was hard not having help around the house, but it was worth it. Among his peers, Paddy’s sons were the greatest character reference he possessed. Let a man breed sons and he was a real man.

“We’re poor, Meggie, that’s the main reason. The nuns always hate poor pupils. After you’ve been in Sister Ag’s moldy old school a few days you’ll see it’s not only the Clearys she takes it out on, but the Marshalls and the MacDonalds as well. We’re all poor. Now, if we were rich and rode to school in a big carriage like the O’Briens, they’d be all over us like a rash. But we can’t donate organs to the church, or gold vestments to the sacristy, or a new horse and buggy to the nuns. So we don’t matter. They can do what they like to us.”

When Meggie saw her mother, she felt as if an awful weight settled upon her being; maybe a leaving-behind of childhood, a presentiment of what it was to be a woman. Outwardly there was no change, aside from the big belly; but inwardly Fee had slowed down like a tired old clock, running time down and down until it was forever stilled. The briskness Meggie had never known absent from her mother had gone. She picked her feet up and put them down again as if she was no longer sure of the right way to do it, a sort of spiritual fumbling got into her gait; and there was no joy in her for the coming baby, not even the rigidly controlled content she had shown over Hal.

Pain was forgotten, Church was forgotten, God was forgotten. He found her mouth, forced it open hungrily, wanting more and more of her, not able to hold her close enough to assuage the ghastly drive growing in him. She gave him her neck, bared her shoulders where the skin was cool, smoother and glossier than satin; it was like drowning, sinking deeper and deeper, gasping and helpless. Mortality pressed down on him, a great weight crushing his soul, liberating the bitter dark wine of his senses in a sudden flood. He wanted to weep; the last of his desire trickled away under the burden of his mortality, and he wrenched her arms from about his wretched body, sat back on his heels with his head sunken forward, seeming to become utterly absorbed in watching his hands tremble on his knees. Meggie, what have you done to me, what might you do to me if I let you?

“You’d better marry me, Meghann,” he said, eyes soft and laughing. “I don’t think your brothers would approve one little bit of what we just did.”

“Yes, I think I’d better too,” she agreed, lids lowered, a delicate flush in her cheeks.

“Let’s tell them tomorrow morning.”

“Why not? The sooner the better.”

“Next Saturday I’ll drive you into Gilly. We’ll see Father Thomas—I suppose you’d like a church wedding—arrange for the banns, and buy an engagement ring.”

“Meghann, I’m an old-fashioned man,” he said.

She stared at him, puzzled. “Are you?” she asked, her tone implying: Does it matter?

“Yes,” he said. “I believe that when a man and woman marry, all the woman’s property should become the man’s. The way a dowry did in the old days. I know you’ve got a bit of money, and I’m telling you now that when we marry you’re to sign it over to me. It’s only fair you know what’s in my mind while you’re still single, and able to decide whether you want to do it.”

“I don’t like Meggie. But if you really dislike Meghann so much, I’ll call you Meg.” […] “Come on, Meg, kiss me. It’s your turn to make love to me, and maybe you’ll like that better, eh?”

I never want to kiss you again as long as I live, she thought […] Meggie had grown up with men who never removed a layer of their clothes in the presence of women, but open-necked shirts showed hairy chests in hot weather. They were all fair men, and not offensive to her; this dark man was alien, repulsive. Ralph had a head of hair just as dark, but well she remembered that smooth, hairless brown chest.

“Do as you’re told, Meg! Kiss me.”

The grizzling scrap of humanity responsible for all this lay in a wicker bassinet by the far wall, not a bit appreciative of their attention as they stood around her and peered down. She yelled her resentment, and kept on yelling. In the end the nurse lifted her, bassinet and all, and put her in the room designated as her nursery.

“There’s certainly nothing wrong with her lungs.” Archbishop Ralph smiled, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking Meggie’s pale hand.

“I don’t think she likes life much,” Meggie said with an answering smile. How much older he looked! As fit and supple as ever, but immeasurably older. She turned her head to Anne and Luddie, and held out her other.

Oh, dear God, dear God! No, not dear God! What’s God ever done for me, except deprive me of Ralph? We’re not too fond of each other, God and I. And do You know something, God? You don’t frighten me the way You used to. How much I feared You, Your punishment! All my life I’ve trodden the straight and narrow, from fear of You. And what’s it got me? Not one scrap more than if I’d broken every rule in Your book. You’re a fraud, God, a demon of fear. You treat us like children, dangling punishment. But You don’t frighten me anymore. Because it isn’t Ralph I ought to be hating, it’s You.

Because at last he understood that what he had aimed to be was not a man. Not a man, never a man; something far greater, something beyond the fate of a mere man. Yet after all his fate was here under his hands, struck quivering and alight with him, her man. A man, forever a man. Dear Lord, couldst Thou not have kept this from me? I am a man, I can never be God; it was a delusion, that life in search of godhead. Are we all the same, we priests, yearning to be God? We abjure the one act which irrefutably proves us men.

From the moment she set eyes on him, Justine adored her baby brother. Nothing was too good for Dane, nothing too much trouble to fetch or present in his honor. Once he began to walk she never left his side, for which Meggie was very grateful, worrying that Mrs. Smith and the maids were getting too old to keep a satisfactorily sharp eye on a small boy. On one of her rare Sundays off Meggie took her daughter onto her lap and spoke to her seriously about looking after Dane.

“I can’t be here at the homestead to look after him myself,” she said, “so it all depends on you, Justine. He’s your baby brother and you must always watch out for him, make sure he doesn’t get into danger or trouble.”

Fee laughed. It came out as a snort, but it was a genuine laugh. Grown pallid with age and encroaching cataracts, her eyes rested on Meggie’s startled face, grim and ironic. “Do you take me for a fool, Meggie? I don’t mean Luke O’Neill. I mean Dane is the living image of Ralph de Bricassart.”

“Each of us has something within us which won’t be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that’s all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, it’s driven to. We can know what we do wrong even before we do it, but self-knowledge can’t affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it’s the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don’t you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.”

“Don’t you want to get married?”

Justine looked scornful. “Not bloody likely! Spend my life wiping snotty noses and cacky bums? Salaaming to some man not half my equal even though he thinks he’s better? Ho ho ho, not me!”

“I’m going to be a priest,” said Dane. “I’m going to enter His service completely, offer everything I have and am to Him, as His priest. Poverty, chastity and obedience. He demands no less than all from His chosen servants. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to do it.”

The look in her eyes! As if he had killed her, ground her into the dust beneath his foot. That he should have to suffer this he hadn’t known, dreaming only of her pride in him, her pleasure at giving her son to God. They said she’d be thrilled, uplifted, completely in accord. Instead she was staring at him as if the prospect of his priesthood was her death sentence.

Dane’s eyes, yet not Dane’s eyes. Looking at her; bewildered, full of pain, helpless.

“I have no son,” he said, “but among the many, many things I learned from yours was that no matter how hard it is, my first and only allegiance is to Almighty God.”

“Dane was your son too,” said Meggie.

He stared at her blankly. “What?”

“I said, Dane was your son too. When I left Matlock Island I was pregnant. Dane was yours, not Luke O’Neill’s.”

The tension began to leave her; the worst of it was over. “What I like—no, love—about you the most is that you give me such a good run for my money I never do quite catch up.”

His shoulders shook. “Then look at the future this way, Herzchen. Living in the same house with me might afford you the opportunity to see how it can be done.” He kissed her brows, her cheeks, her eyelids. “I would have you no other way than the way you are, Justine. Not a freckle of your face or a cell of your brain.”

She was yanking inexpertly at a large knot when the dreadful thing happened. Off came the hair, all of it, dangling in a tousled clump from the teeth of the comb. Above Agnes’s smooth broad brow there was nothing; no head, no bald skull. Just an awful, yawning hole. Shivering in terror, Meggie leaned forward to peer inside the doll’s cranium. The inverted contours of cheeks and chin showed dimly, light glittered between the parted lips with their teeth a black, animal silhouette, and above all this were Agnes’s eyes, two horrible clicking balls speared by a wire rod that cruelly pierced her head.

Meggie was curled into a little heap, with her thumb in her mouth and her rag-decorated hair all around her. The only girl. Fee cast her no more than a passing glance before leaving; there was no mystery to Meggie, she was female. Fee knew what her lot would be, and did not envy her or pity her. The boys were different; they were miracles, males alchemized out of her female body. It was hard not having help around the house, but it was worth it. Among his peers, Paddy’s sons were the greatest character reference he possessed. Let a man breed sons and he was a real man.

“We’re poor, Meggie, that’s the main reason. The nuns always hate poor pupils. After you’ve been in Sister Ag’s moldy old school a few days you’ll see it’s not only the Clearys she takes it out on, but the Marshalls and the MacDonalds as well. We’re all poor. Now, if we were rich and rode to school in a big carriage like the O’Briens, they’d be all over us like a rash. But we can’t donate organs to the church, or gold vestments to the sacristy, or a new horse and buggy to the nuns. So we don’t matter. They can do what they like to us.”

When Meggie saw her mother, she felt as if an awful weight settled upon her being; maybe a leaving-behind of childhood, a presentiment of what it was to be a woman. Outwardly there was no change, aside from the big belly; but inwardly Fee had slowed down like a tired old clock, running time down and down until it was forever stilled. The briskness Meggie had never known absent from her mother had gone. She picked her feet up and put them down again as if she was no longer sure of the right way to do it, a sort of spiritual fumbling got into her gait; and there was no joy in her for the coming baby, not even the rigidly controlled content she had shown over Hal.

Pain was forgotten, Church was forgotten, God was forgotten. He found her mouth, forced it open hungrily, wanting more and more of her, not able to hold her close enough to assuage the ghastly drive growing in him. She gave him her neck, bared her shoulders where the skin was cool, smoother and glossier than satin; it was like drowning, sinking deeper and deeper, gasping and helpless. Mortality pressed down on him, a great weight crushing his soul, liberating the bitter dark wine of his senses in a sudden flood. He wanted to weep; the last of his desire trickled away under the burden of his mortality, and he wrenched her arms from about his wretched body, sat back on his heels with his head sunken forward, seeming to become utterly absorbed in watching his hands tremble on his knees. Meggie, what have you done to me, what might you do to me if I let you?

“You’d better marry me, Meghann,” he said, eyes soft and laughing. “I don’t think your brothers would approve one little bit of what we just did.”

“Yes, I think I’d better too,” she agreed, lids lowered, a delicate flush in her cheeks.

“Let’s tell them tomorrow morning.”

“Why not? The sooner the better.”

“Next Saturday I’ll drive you into Gilly. We’ll see Father Thomas—I suppose you’d like a church wedding—arrange for the banns, and buy an engagement ring.”

“Meghann, I’m an old-fashioned man,” he said.

She stared at him, puzzled. “Are you?” she asked, her tone implying: Does it matter?

“Yes,” he said. “I believe that when a man and woman marry, all the woman’s property should become the man’s. The way a dowry did in the old days. I know you’ve got a bit of money, and I’m telling you now that when we marry you’re to sign it over to me. It’s only fair you know what’s in my mind while you’re still single, and able to decide whether you want to do it.”

“I don’t like Meggie. But if you really dislike Meghann so much, I’ll call you Meg.” […] “Come on, Meg, kiss me. It’s your turn to make love to me, and maybe you’ll like that better, eh?”

I never want to kiss you again as long as I live, she thought […] Meggie had grown up with men who never removed a layer of their clothes in the presence of women, but open-necked shirts showed hairy chests in hot weather. They were all fair men, and not offensive to her; this dark man was alien, repulsive. Ralph had a head of hair just as dark, but well she remembered that smooth, hairless brown chest.

“Do as you’re told, Meg! Kiss me.”

The grizzling scrap of humanity responsible for all this lay in a wicker bassinet by the far wall, not a bit appreciative of their attention as they stood around her and peered down. She yelled her resentment, and kept on yelling. In the end the nurse lifted her, bassinet and all, and put her in the room designated as her nursery.

“There’s certainly nothing wrong with her lungs.” Archbishop Ralph smiled, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking Meggie’s pale hand.

“I don’t think she likes life much,” Meggie said with an answering smile. How much older he looked! As fit and supple as ever, but immeasurably older. She turned her head to Anne and Luddie, and held out her other.

Oh, dear God, dear God! No, not dear God! What’s God ever done for me, except deprive me of Ralph? We’re not too fond of each other, God and I. And do You know something, God? You don’t frighten me the way You used to. How much I feared You, Your punishment! All my life I’ve trodden the straight and narrow, from fear of You. And what’s it got me? Not one scrap more than if I’d broken every rule in Your book. You’re a fraud, God, a demon of fear. You treat us like children, dangling punishment. But You don’t frighten me anymore. Because it isn’t Ralph I ought to be hating, it’s You.

Because at last he understood that what he had aimed to be was not a man. Not a man, never a man; something far greater, something beyond the fate of a mere man. Yet after all his fate was here under his hands, struck quivering and alight with him, her man. A man, forever a man. Dear Lord, couldst Thou not have kept this from me? I am a man, I can never be God; it was a delusion, that life in search of godhead. Are we all the same, we priests, yearning to be God? We abjure the one act which irrefutably proves us men.

From the moment she set eyes on him, Justine adored her baby brother. Nothing was too good for Dane, nothing too much trouble to fetch or present in his honor. Once he began to walk she never left his side, for which Meggie was very grateful, worrying that Mrs. Smith and the maids were getting too old to keep a satisfactorily sharp eye on a small boy. On one of her rare Sundays off Meggie took her daughter onto her lap and spoke to her seriously about looking after Dane.

“I can’t be here at the homestead to look after him myself,” she said, “so it all depends on you, Justine. He’s your baby brother and you must always watch out for him, make sure he doesn’t get into danger or trouble.”

Fee laughed. It came out as a snort, but it was a genuine laugh. Grown pallid with age and encroaching cataracts, her eyes rested on Meggie’s startled face, grim and ironic. “Do you take me for a fool, Meggie? I don’t mean Luke O’Neill. I mean Dane is the living image of Ralph de Bricassart.”

“Each of us has something within us which won’t be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that’s all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, it’s driven to. We can know what we do wrong even before we do it, but self-knowledge can’t affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it’s the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don’t you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.”

“Don’t you want to get married?”

Justine looked scornful. “Not bloody likely! Spend my life wiping snotty noses and cacky bums? Salaaming to some man not half my equal even though he thinks he’s better? Ho ho ho, not me!”

“I’m going to be a priest,” said Dane. “I’m going to enter His service completely, offer everything I have and am to Him, as His priest. Poverty, chastity and obedience. He demands no less than all from His chosen servants. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to do it.”

The look in her eyes! As if he had killed her, ground her into the dust beneath his foot. That he should have to suffer this he hadn’t known, dreaming only of her pride in him, her pleasure at giving her son to God. They said she’d be thrilled, uplifted, completely in accord. Instead she was staring at him as if the prospect of his priesthood was her death sentence.

Dane’s eyes, yet not Dane’s eyes. Looking at her; bewildered, full of pain, helpless.

“I have no son,” he said, “but among the many, many things I learned from yours was that no matter how hard it is, my first and only allegiance is to Almighty God.”

“Dane was your son too,” said Meggie.

He stared at her blankly. “What?”

“I said, Dane was your son too. When I left Matlock Island I was pregnant. Dane was yours, not Luke O’Neill’s.”

The tension began to leave her; the worst of it was over. “What I like—no, love—about you the most is that you give me such a good run for my money I never do quite catch up.”

His shoulders shook. “Then look at the future this way, Herzchen. Living in the same house with me might afford you the opportunity to see how it can be done.” He kissed her brows, her cheeks, her eyelids. “I would have you no other way than the way you are, Justine. Not a freckle of your face or a cell of your brain.”