ABSTRACT
The decision to focus my study of Irish women’s fiction on the theme of women and the nation arose directly from my reading of Irish women’s writing. It seems to me that much Irish women’s writing, from all parts of the twentieth century, implicitly or explicitly deals with women trying to find a place for themselves within the narrative of the Irish nation. Ireland is, at the start of the twenty-first century, a country undergoing a period of rapid change. The old rigid forms of nationalism are giving way to a more heterogeneous and multicultural vision of the nation. There is an as yet unresolved argument between revisionists and the socalled new nationalists as to whether this new pluralism is the result of bowing to globalization and market forces or genuinely arises from strands of resistance and progressive thinking already present in Irish culture (see Kirby, Gibbons, Cronin, 2002). If it is the case, as I believe it is, that tendencies towards heterogeneity have always been present in Irish society, it seems an appropriate moment to look back and examine the extent to which women, who have frequently been positioned as the other in the Irish nation, have contributed to the formation of this new Ireland. Ann Owens Weekes’ book, Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition (1990) was, as the title suggests, the first full-length study to bring together Irish women writers of fiction and employ feminist theory in order to determine whether there could be said to be such a thing as a distinctive Irish women’s tradition of writing. Weekes pinpointed certain themes specific to Irish women’s writing such as the link between domestic and political violence, the move towards an independent heroine and the revision of the myths, both Judeo-Christian and Celtic, which entrap women. Weekes’ book deals with only six women writers and it appeared before much of the recent, ground-breaking work on Irish women’s history, on which I have drawn for this introductory chapter, was published. Feminist theory in general has not stood still and Weekes’ book pre-dates 1990s writing on nationalism and gender which can be so illuminating in an Irish context. Moreover, largely due to the setting up of feminist publishing houses in Ireland, there has been a substantial increase in the number of Irish women’s novels published during the 1980s and 1990s. All these factors suggest that there are compelling reasons to look again at Irish women’s fiction. Unlike Weekes I have limited my study to the twentieth century, partly because it establishes a convenient narrative framework but partly because of the recent explosion of Irish women’s writing which provides a larger number of texts for
study than were available to Weekes. My book differs also from Christine St. Peter’s recent survey of contemporary Irish women’s fiction, Changing Ireland: Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (2000). While providing a useful first reading of a range of contemporary women’s novels, St. Peter deliberately eschews an overarching thematic focus such as I have tried to bring to this study. However her volume does highlight the richness of contemporary Irish women’s fiction, a richness which suggests that the time is ripe for a new study of Irish women’s writing in the twentieth century incorporating novels from the 1980s and 1990s as well as recent developments in feminist literary theory. In these days of the deconstruction of gender roles it may seem naïve and even retrogressive to deal with women writers as a separate category. I believe however that there is still some value in a strategic essentialism for political purposes. If it is ‘painfully premature’ to talk of post-nationalism in an Irish context (Maley, 1999, 20), so, in an Irish context where, with one or two exceptions, women’s fiction has rarely been examined on its own terms, it seems similarly premature to talk of post-feminism. It is arguable that while Irish women’s history has proceeded apace, feminist literary criticism in the Irish context has lagged behind. In her article, ‘Feminism, Postmodernism and the Subject of Irish and Women’s Studies’, Moynagh Sullivan laments the prolonged inability of Irish studies to listen to ways in which feminist theory might have an impact on our reading of Irish women’s literature and its place in the canon (Sullivan, 2000, 243-51). Irish women’s writing has too often been subsumed, and thereby swallowed up, in an Irish literary canon and an Irish critical tradition constructed mainly by male scholars, as the under representation of female authors in the first three volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature attested. To speak of women’s difference may not always be essential or even desirable but, as Elaine Showalter argued thirty years ago, when women writers are studied as a group we may discover recurrent patterns, themes and images which are almost impossible to perceive if women are discussed only in relation to male writers (Showalter, 1977/1978, 11). Christine St. Peter makes a similar point in her introduction to Changing Ireland where she defends her decision to treat women writers as a separate category by demonstrating, in the light of the separate social conditioning of women, the importance of establishing a specific women’s tradition of writing in order to foster women’s creativity (St. Peter, 2000, 8-9). The argument extends back as far as Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and has been used since by women writers from many different cultures, notably by Alice Walker in her essay ‘In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens’. The necessity of establishing a tradition of women’s writing is picked up in an Irish context by Eavan Boland in Object Lessons, a series of essays published in 1995 tracing her development as a poet and her struggles with a national poetic tradition which marginalized the female poet. As a young poet, Boland felt hampered by the lack of a tradition of women’s poetry-writing in Ireland: ‘I was a poet’ she says, ‘lacking the precedent and example of previous Irish women poets’ (Boland, 1995/1996, 151). In her effort to establish the everyday lives of ordinary women as a suitable subject for Irish poetry, Boland had to look outside the Irish poetic tradition – to the American poets Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich – for inspiration.
The point about the separate social conditioning of women is especially relevant in the context of nationalism since feminist research, such as Nira YuvalDavis’ study, Gender and Nation (1997) and Tamar Mayer’s Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (2000), has revealed that rigid gender constructs are often crucial to the building of a nation’s identity. In Gender Ironies of Nationalism, Mayer argues that many nations construct their identity around fixed concepts of gender. One gender, usually male, becomes empowered at the expense of the other with the result that, whatever rhetoric of equality may be employed, the nation becomes the property of men. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theories of gender performance, Mayer argues that through repetition of accepted gendered behavior, men and women help to construct the identity of their nation; at the same time, this repetition reinforces gendered constructs. Men become the nation’s protectors, women its biological and ideological reproducers guaranteeing the nation’s purity. Hence: nationalism becomes the language through which sexual control and repression (specifically, but not exclusively, of women and homosexuals) is justified and masculine prowess is expressed and exercised. (Mayer, 2000, 1). In the case of Ireland, fixed concepts of gender became institutionalized in its juridical structure and women’s position after 1922 saw a gradual erosion of their political rights. When considering the topic of Irish nationalism there is therefore a case for regarding women as a separate group and asking the question: did and do Irish women participate in the national project differently from men? As early as 1988, John Wilson Foster put forward the suggestion that feminist theory with its stress on difference might provide ‘a third force, a third Irish identity’, capable of destabilizing the binaries (Catholic/ Protestant, nationalist/ unionist) on which Irish identity has long been built (Foster, 1991, 246). Foster does not mention Julia Kristeva by name but it will be one of the central arguments of this study that her writings provide a framework for exploring and understanding this destabilizing force. In Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics (1991), Geraldine Meaney argues that Irish feminism must engage in dialog with Irish nationalism if women are not to remain marginalized within the life of the nation:
