Bernadette Devlin: The Price of my Soul

 Word Count: 445

From The Price of my Soul by Bernadette Devlin

 “A year or two later, from the same feeling of defiance, I wore a tricolor pin oin my coat precisely because the Northern Ireland Falgs and Emblems Act forbade it. Only once did a policieman ask me to remove it. ‘You remove it,’ I said, but as his hand came out to take the badge, I added: ‘If you touch me without a warrant, Ill have you in court for assault!’ He just laughed and said, ‘Go on there, you troublemaker!’ I trotted on, feeling very proud I had won, But once I discovered I could get away with it, I lost interest in the badge” (189).

Bernadette Devlin was a very strong willed and defiant woman. However, before she attended her school, she was not this way. She said that she was timid and almost intimidated by the people in the school. But even as a child she felt the need to be defiant. She says, “A year or two later, from the same feeling of defiance, I wore a tricolor pin oin my coat precisely because the Northern Ireland Falgs and Emblems Act forbade it [...] once I discovered I could get away with it, I lost interest in the badge” (189). This is not the only instance that she purposefully defies authority. She also confronts her principle telling her that she is a bigot and when the principle gets mad, she doubles down and sticks to her opinion.

This defiance, while already in her, was brought out more because of her school, friends and teachers. She talks about her two teachers, Mother Benignus and Mrs. Bradley, who were both very strong willed, opinionated and insistent women. Bernadette saw how they acted and how her friends acted and learned to have strong opinions on things. Mother Benignus was very strict and narrow minded and attempted to enforce certain rules but not others, such as punishment for eating a lollypop in public but fighting would simply receive a smack on the hand. She tried to enforce typical gender roles but didnt enforce the things that actually matter. I think Bernadette saw that as a fault of hers and fought against those ideas. In that way, she accidentally taught Bernadette defiance but also leadership. Bernadette and her friends took leadership roles in their school and in some ways, did the teachers job by bringing discipline to the students and it solved many issues. But even Bernadette fell to some societal expectations. She said, “As a result we are among the clumsiest, most useless females ever God produced” (189) because she never took the sewing and cooking classes. Ultimately though, this story is characterized around defiance of people and rules, especially the ones that were damaging or inefficient.