“The excitement”

“The excitement” is Frank McCourt’s recurring euphemism for sexual arousal, a phrase that joins bodily experience to the religious rules and shame through which he understands it. As Frank moves from adolescence into a relationship with Theresa Carmody, the expression changes in context but keeps its central tension: desire is at once a private experience and something judged against the Catholic moral language surrounding him.

Meaning and Religious Context

At thirteen, Frank thinks that his mother and Laman Griffin are experiencing “the excitement” in the loft. The phrase gives him a name for what he suspects, even as his younger brother Malachy does not understand why their mother sometimes remains upstairs. For Frank, the household’s nighttime sounds become part of a larger education in sexuality that happens without explanation or privacy.

Frank also connects “the excitement” to his own sexual awakening. Dreams of American girls in swimsuits at the Lyric Cinema lead him to wake aroused, and he wonders whether an experience in a dream can be sinful. His uncertainty reflects the reach of religious instruction into private life: at school, Mr. O’Dea has taught the boys to understand the Sixth Commandment as covering not only adultery but impure thoughts, words, and deeds. A Redemptorist priest intensifies that lesson by warning that impurity makes the Virgin Mary weep and injures Christ. Against this severe language, “the excitement” is an evasive, everyday term for an experience Frank cannot separate from guilt.

Privacy, Poverty, and Repetition

The phrase recurs in settings where Frank has little privacy. At home, the family must keep quiet when Laman returns to read or sleep, and the children spend evenings in the streets before coming inside to sleep. Frank’s private thoughts therefore develop amid crowded rooms, restricted movement, and the need to remain discreet. The euphemism makes desire speakable without naming it directly, while the surrounding religious vocabulary repeatedly recasts it as sin.

Even moments of imagined solitude do not escape that moral pressure. Alone at Carrigogunnell, Frank associates the castle heights with temptation and immediately considers his conduct a sin he could not confess. The imagined possibility that someone might see him brings further excitement, but also the fear that exposure would make him responsible for leading another person into sin. The scene extends the phrase’s double meaning: it signifies desire, yet arrives inseparably accompanied by self-surveillance and religious dread.

From Private Euphemism to Intimacy

Frank later uses the same word for his encounters with Theresa Carmody, whom he meets while working as a telegram boy. At her home, a plate of bread and jam and two cups of tea remain untouched as the encounter develops on a green sofa. Frank’s thoughts combine desire with fear of sin, iodine, illness, and the shilling tip associated with his visits. When Theresa is injured, he mistakes what has happened and applies iodine; she tells him that he is innocent and was not supposed to use it on her that way.

The relationship continues over the following weeks. Sometimes Theresa and Frank experience “the excitement” on the sofa; on other days, he notices her cough and weakness. Although the post-office boys tease him about Theresa and the tip, Frank does not tell them that he has stopped taking the money. Nor does he tell them about the sofa. What he keeps private is not only their physical intimacy but also his concern for her: when he sees her looking weak, he wants to make tea and sit with her. The repeated phrase thus covers an emotional change as well as desire, though Frank’s account continues to place both under the same euphemism.

Hunger, Images, and the Language of Sin

The euphemism also enters Frank’s ordinary efforts to manage hunger and find something to read. When fish-and-chip shops close, he waits at their doors for burnt chips or scraps of fish, sometimes given to him wrapped in paper. He favors the banned News of the World, smuggled from England for its provocative pictures and stories of divorce and adultery. Frank wants to look up the meaning of adultery in the library, still unsure how it differs from the school’s broad category of impure thoughts, words, and deeds. Reading beneath the blanket, he turns the paper and its images into part of the same private ritual of desire that the phrase names. The euphemism does not dispel the moral judgment: Frank understands the experience as a mortal sin, even as he returns to the material that excites him.

Confession and the Limits of the Euphemism

When Frank later confesses to Father Gregory, “the excitement” is not an isolated transgression but one element in a much wider burden of grief, anger, and shame. He tells the saint about his dead siblings, his father’s drinking and failure to send money from England, his experiences with Theresa and the green sofa, and what he did at Carrigogunnell. He also recalls exclusion from religious opportunities, his damaged eyes, and the tears in his mother’s eyes after he slapped her. The confession places sexual guilt within the same inventory as family deprivation and personal failures. Father Gregory grants absolution and tells Frank that God forgives him and that he must forgive himself, offering a response different from the sermons that have taught him to fear impurity.

Confession and the Limits of the Euphemism

When Frank later confesses to Father Gregory, “the excitement” is not an isolated transgression but one element in a much wider burden of grief, anger, and shame. Frank tells the saint about his dead siblings, his father’s drinking and failure to send money from England, his experiences with Theresa and the green sofa, and what he did at Carrigogunnell. He also recalls exclusion from religious opportunities, his bad eyes, and his mother’s tears after he slapped her. Sexual guilt appears alongside bereavement, family deprivation, and personal failures, not apart from them. Father Gregory grants absolution and tells Frank that God forgives him and that he must forgive himself, offering a response different from the sermons that taught him to fear impurity.