The Wren, the Wren

In these chapters, Nell and Carmel both come to the end of their romantic relationships. While Carmel weighs the level of commitment she is willing to give to the man she is seeing, Nell briefly engages with the possibility of becoming a mother herself.

Nell’s pregnancy anxieties are a prelude to the end of her relationship with Felim. She experiences an arc of progression and comes close to accepting the possibility of having Felim’s baby when the attention she gets on her post about sperm validates her feelings. This reinstates a sense of control in her life, which is quickly frustrated when she experiences her period. To accept the reality that she isn’t having Felim’s baby means to undo the mental effort and emotions she has already experienced. This arc recurs when Felim visits Nell’s apartment to break up with her. He ostensibly arrives for another sexual encounter but completely shifts the tenor of their conversation with a sobering question about their relationship. Nell is once again robbed of her agency and control, especially as she is left to wonder how Felim has been reflecting on their relationship.

Enright focuses Nell’s confusion on a single word that previously had no relevance in her relationship with Felim. This complication builds on The Attempt to Define the World Through Language as a theme. Nell feels alienated when Felim calls her “babe” because he has never done so before. This turns Nell’s fixation on language and translation against her because it suggests that Felim could have used that pet name for someone else. In that case, Felim’s drunkenness might mean that he doesn’t want to break up with Nell. Enright chooses to leave Felim’s motivations ambiguous because of how it frustrates Nell’s interpretations of the incident. The way through Nell’s arc does not lie in resolving things with Felim. Nell even entertains this line of thinking by taking pictures of herself, mimicking the activity that she and Felim engaged in before their breakup. She does not send these pictures, however, because of the futility of the exercise. Hence, she decides that the only way forward is to distance herself from him.

Carmel, on the other hand, explores a romantic relationship for the first time. All her previous relationships were short-term and disinterested, leading Carmel to believe that she simply was not inclined to enter a long-term relationship. This relationship finds an unlikely obstacle in Nell, however, who challenges her for Ronan’s attention. Carmel values Ronan’s presence because he is so gentle, which puts him at odds with the major figures of her life, namely Imelda and Phil. Because Carmel wants Ronan’s attention all to herself, she unwittingly becomes jealous whenever he offers it to Nell. Indeed, after Nell and Ronan form a relationship of their own, the cloying aspects of his behavior soon appear. This echoes the arc that Nell’s relationship with Felim takes. Carmel experiences her annoyance with Ronan once the charm of first love has fallen away. Tellingly, Nell never references Ronan in her adult life, either signaling that she has forgotten him or that their relationship was never as significant as Carmel’s perspective makes it out to be. Carmel effectively funnels her anxiety around her relationship into Nell as a proxy antagonist. This allows the author to further develop The Fraught Love of Mother-Daughter Relationships.

What adds to Carmel’s annoyance is Ronan’s obsession with Phil. It is ambiguous whether Ronan pursues the relationship for Carmel’s sake or because of her association with Phil. In either case, this makes Ronan’s fixation an unintended source of pain for Carmel. He may recount famous incidents that mythologize Phil’s behavior, unaware that the same story may evoke something traumatic from Carmel’s perspective. This dynamic develops another theme, The Private Lives of Public Personalities. Carmel doesn’t formally end the relationship. Rather, she abandons him in a manner that echoes Phil’s departure from the family. This foreshadows the moment she takes her frustration out on Nell, abusing her in ways that replicate her abusive childhood.

In both chapters, the poem “River Talk” recurs, first as the source of Nell’s tattoo and then as a poem that Ronan recites from memory during his walks with Carmel along the River Dodder. The poem’s key line, “love is a tide,” resonates with the ebb and flow of affection and complication in Nell and Carmel’s lives. When Nell gets the tattoo, it challenges Carmel to repurpose her relationship to the poem. Although she associates it more with Ronan, she validates Nell’s choice to get it as a sign of support for her agency, which continues to explore the dynamic mother-daughter relationship throughout the text.