Longing for Loneliness

“Bella Fleace Gave a Party” is a story of contrasts and unexpected events placed in an Irish country town that from the way in which the author takes us to it suggests isolation and oblivion. It is interesting how a modern English writer could observe and reproduce the Irish features of an Irish town. He insisted on the Irishness of the region and then of the town in two ways: directly, by saying that Ballinger is a “typical Irish town” while Fleacetown is in a “typical Irish country” and indirectly, by using Irish names (Mulligan, Flannigan), by referring to Irish history “Celtic lettering of a sort is beginning to take place of the Latin alphabet …” and by referring to the religious conflict between the Protestants (The New English colonists) and the Catholics (The Irish and the Old English colonists). Waugh’s interest in Ireland and its history might be connected to the fact that he was interested in history and that he converted to Roman Catholicism. His decision was not a normal one for an English writer and it suggests his feeling isolated in or different from his society.

The first part of the story is a descriptive one reminding of the realistic detailed descriptions and aiming at introducing us to the Irish context. Following the way of the author we seem to move far away in space  from Dublin to Fleacetown  and backwards in time from a contemporary society which contrasts British and Irish features to a time when Irish features were dominant. The focalizing technique Waugh uses makes the space get narrower and narrower until the protagonist’s house is described and only after that Bella Fleace is introduced to the reader in the next paragraph. The way in which the author describes the house suggests the decline of the Irish people’s condition. The house where Bella Fleace lived was a happy accident, which implies isolation again:

“Its roof was intact; and it is the roof which makes the difference between the second and the third grade of Irish country houses. Once that goes you have moss in the bedrooms, fern on the stairs, and cows in the library, and in a very few years you have to move into the dairy or one of the lodges. But so long as he has, literally, a roof over his head, an Irishman’s house is still his castle.” (p. 810)