Literature: Twentieth-Century Women Writers

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Twentieth-Century Women Writers

The overriding twentieth-century question for both the newly independent Irish state and the six counties that remained united with Britain was that of national identity. While politicians charted public perspectives, writers presented varied possibilities, some mirroring the dominant models, others projecting liberating roles. Although excluded from many public arenas, Irish women were present in nationalist, suffragist, and literary circles. Their early twentieth-century literature reflects women's responses to national questions but also expresses their neglected concerns, revealing that women's identities transcended definition by a male-dominated state or by male writers. The educational and social advances that followed the economic reforms of the 1960s liberated women as well as men to imagine and create new possibilities and opportunities, which in turn resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of writers.

Women's Position in the New Nation

Lady Gregory's position as codirector and founder of the important national literary endeavor the Abbey Theatre (1904) evidences her interest in national identity. A student of Irish legend and history as well as the Irish language, she, like her contemporaries in the Irish Renaissance, aimed to replace the picture of Ireland current on the British stage with that of the Irish people speaking for themselves, reflecting both historic and contemporary concerns. Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), her first major work of folklore, reintroduces and interprets this legendary character as a dignified and idealistic hero. Lady Gregory wrote more than forty plays, most with nationalist themes. One of them, Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), cowritten with William Butler Yeats, celebrates Ireland as an old woman rejuvenated by the blood of young men who fight and die for her. Controversial and influential, this concept of Ireland has been criticized by feminist scholars as concealing the concerns of actual women. The 1912 play Grania suggests more concern with female identity, as Gregory remains true to the myth but underscores approvingly Grania's ability to take control of her own life.

Variations on Lady Gregory's nationalistic concerns were presented by women involved in the national struggle such as Alice Milligan and Maud Gonne, but increasingly, women's issues took center stage. The plays of Teresa Deevy and Maura Laverty focus on the conflicts that faced women particularly. Deevy's plays, produced between the 1930s and 1950s, critique the institution of marriage even as the Irish Constitution of 1937 foresaw no other identity for women. The King of Spain's Daughter and Katie Roche, produced by the Abbey in 1935 and 1936 respectively, underscore the gulf between male and female marital expectations: Katie Roche's husband finds marriage a threat to his autonomy, and Katie discovers therein neither the opportunity of emotional communion nor independence. In a brief career Katherine Cecil Thurston examined many aspects of Irish and English life, notably exposing, in The Fly on the Wheel (1908), the fragility of Irish Catholic middle-class identity. First-generation middle-class characters, male and female, dare not deviate in their choices of job and spouse from the narrow confines tacitly approved by their class—confines that neither religion nor love can breach.

Over the course of a long career Kate O'Brien dissected and analyzed the middle class, revealing its consolidation at the expense of women's independence and happiness. In Without My Cloak (1931), an Irish Catholic myth of origin, the principal male characters refuse to help their sister to escape a loveless but socially approved marriage, prompting the omniscient narrator to remark that it would never occur to them to set their sister's happiness above their own surname, thus underscoring their perception of the fragility and threatened nature of their position. In this novel the heroine dies giving birth to a son needed to continue the dynasty; a generation later, the son's lover, a beautiful daughter of unmarried parents, is ruthlessly dispatched to America, her "illegitimate" status still a threat to the family's social position. Women often sacrifice other women to male interests (which often parallel class interests) in O'Brien's novels: In her dying moments, a mother arranges her irresponsible son's marriage to her competent nurse in The Anteroom (1934); college education is seen as a waste for women in Mary Lavelle (1936); a young woman's education would be sacrificed for her brother's in The Land of Spices (1941). Women in O'Brien's novels are denied autonomy both before and after marriage, and marriage fails to provide emotional fulfilment; but O'Brien also depicts enlightened figures, such as an Irish bishop and an English nun in The Land of Spices, who see the benefits of an educated, responsible female populace.

Women's position in upper-class Anglo-Irish society is addressed by Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane. In The Last September (1929) and A World of Love (1955), Bowen charts the coming-of-age of young women in disintegrating Anglo-Irish society. Bowen's women look to the past as Edenic but also burdensome; in The Last September, set during the Irish Civil War, characters are caught between their sympathy for a rebel family, whose circle is both dangerous and exciting, and their ties to their own class, which are depicted as passionless and enervated. The "Big Houses" of the Anglo-Irish families are themselves characters in Bowen's novels, reflecting the glorious and scarred histories of their inhabitants. Molly Keane's first novels are affectionate views of the disintegrating Anglo-Irish society that focus on plucky, unconventional girls who participate compulsively in what are depicted as the almost inter-changeable, exciting, beautiful sports of fox- or manhunting; servants and non-Anglo-Irish characters are practically ignored. Conversation Piece (1932) introduces the first of a series of awful Keane mothers—vicious elderly women who prey on, or dominate, the young. Janet McNeill sets her work in bourgeois Belfast; her Tea at Four O'Clock (1956) dissects the ceremonies of gracious living to reveal onerous demands on the youngest daughter. McNeill's characters lack the viciousness of Keane's, but her women, too, are implicated in preserving the patriarchal order at the expense of their daughters.

Religious bigotry and its consequences play a role in the work of Margaret Barrington, Anne Crone, and Nora Hoult. Crone's Bridie Steen (1948), her most complex novel, addresses the mystery of how children learn and play together, then become Protestant and Catholic adults denied any social interaction. Barrington's My Cousin Justin (1939) sees religious fears as rooted in centuries of repression of the Catholic Irish and, more importantly, twentieth-century repression of the working class.

Exorcizing Myth, Introducing Mother

Despite the recurrence of the "Troubles" in the 1960s, women writers turned confidently to their own neglected concerns, introducing mother-daughter relationships into a national literature that had ignored them. Mary Lavin's short stories focus sympathetically but unsentimentally on the minutiae of women's lives, the beautiful prose awakening the reader to the human drama inherent in the mundane. Her final stories concentrate on the complex relationships of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters. In her Irish-language poetry Máire Mhac an tSaoi, like Lavin, turns to the drama of the urban housewife. Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls (1960) introduces the author's series of abused, dispirited, and often manipulative mothers—these characters become more complex in her later work, including Time and Tide (1992), which reveals a daughter's inheritance of the very manipulative traits she resents in her mother. Mother-daughter relationships have been explored at length by many other authors, too, often in works that expose the daughters' exploitation, including Caroline Blackwood's The Stepdaughter (1976), Helen Lucy Burke's A Season for Mothers (1980), Jennifer Johnston's The Christmas Tree (1981), Clare Boylan's Holy Pictures (1983), and Mary Rose Callaghan's The Awkward Girl (1990). Eavan Boland's poetry often speaks of the loss of the mother's story; on the other hand, the poetry of Mary Dorcey and Paula Meehan deals with the mystery of filial inheritance, the continuing presence of the mother in the psyche and personality of the daughter. Deirdre Madden's Birds of the Innocent Wood (1988), Johnston's The Railway Station Man (1984) and The Illusionist (1995), Boylan's Last Resorts (1984), Maeve Kelly's "Orange Horses" (1990), and Catherine Dunne's The Walled Garden (2000) all depict the mother's pain that results from the child's rejection or lack of communication. Mary Morrissy's Mother of Pearl (1996) investigates maternal desire; Marina Carr's play The Mai (1995) examines sororal and maternal relationships.

Embracing and reinterpreting traditionally negative female images, the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Rita Ann Higgins, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill presents female consciousness actively revising and overturning conventional formulations of women to expose the reality concealed by the myth. Eavan Boland exorcizes traditional mythic images, which she blames for concealing the experiences of real women. The most minute aspect of nature is cause for wonder in the poetry of Biddy Jenkinson; another close observer, Moya Cannon, finds maternal comfort both in the neglected but resonant Irish language and in nature. The Irish-language poetry of Ní Dhomhnaill and Caitlin Maude has been translated and is very popular, but Jenkinson has refused English translation.

Sexuality

Irish women were not encouraged to explore their sexuality even in literature, but unhappiness owing to repressed sexuality was apparent in the works of even early writers. Molly Keane's second series of novels, beginning with Good Behaviour (1981), satirically contrasts the desires of undesirable girls with their fates in a dying society. The title of an Eithne Strong volume of poetry, Flesh—The Greatest Sin (1980), captures the repressive atmosphere. Remembering the child who died alone birthing a baby by a statue of Mary, Paula Meehan reveals the consequences of the ignorance that accompanies repression. Positive depictions of female sexuality appear in the 1980s work of Julia O'Faolain, and the poetry of Medbh McGuckian celebrates female sexuality. The Dancers Dancing (1999), an experimental novel by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, charts female coming-of-age, joyfully, in a Donegal Gaeltacht. The possibility of a lesbian relationship, which might offer more than traditional (heterosexual) arrangements, is hinted at in Bowen's The Last September, whereas Molly Keane caricatures such relationships. Kate O'Brien presents the first extended lesbian portrait in Mary Lavelle (1936), albeit a negative one. In her last novel, As Music and Splendour (1958), O'Brien parallels the joys and difficulties in both heterosexual and lesbian relationships; the sense of joy and emotional closeness in the latter suggests that it is a richer relationship. In 1989 Mary Dorcey's collection of short stories, A Noise from the Woodshed, marked a new maturity in Irish fiction. In stories that focus on aging or class struggles, lesbian characters love and fight, their relationships now an authorial given that requires neither explanation nor defense, although the characters are frequently forced to address their identities in response to the ignorance or prejudices of other characters. Dorcey's Biography of Desire (1997) explores the many faces of love, chiefly between women, as does her volume of poetry The River That Carries Me (1995). Emma Donoghue's Stir-fry (1994) is a lesbian bildungs-roman, and her Hood (1995) portrays the pain of a young woman who cannot reveal that her dead friend was her lover.

Social Problems

Irish women writers investigate many social problems; several reflect actual 1980s court cases that revealed that incest was more widespread than many believed possible. Leland Bardwell's "Dove of Peace" (1987), Dorothy Nelson's In Night's City (1982), Jennifer Johnston's The Invisible Worm (1991), and Edna O'Brien's Down by the River (1996) focus on the pain and shame of young girls molested by their fathers; Nelson's novel also reveals the mother's anger and confusion, as she, like the father in the O'Brien novel, blames her daughter for the ensuing pregnancy. This crime crosses social boundaries—those affected include: a distinguished Catholic politician married to a Protestant descendant of the ascendancy in Johnston's text, and a Traveller, a member of a distinctive and neglected nomadic culture, in Maeve Kelly's "Orange Horses."

The indignities that face working-class women are frequent subjects in the poetry of Rita Ann Higgins, Mary Dorcey, and Paula Meehan, and in the fiction of Frances Molloy. Evelyn Conlon captures both the drabness and the humor of middle-class women who are often confined to the company of children. Maeve Kelly moves to the twice-disprivileged world of women Travellers. Discrimination against, and the fears of, the elderly are featured in Clare Boylan's Beloved Stranger (1999) and Mary Lavin's "Senility" and "A Family Likeness." Patricia Brogan explores the lot of "Magdalen women," pregnant and unmarried women, practically imprisioned in laundries run by nuns in her play Eclipsed (1994); Emma Donoghue's novel Slammerkin (2000) moves from a house of prostitution to a Magdalen home. Marie Jones's Lay Up Your Ends (1983) depicts the hardships of Belfast mill workers. Ronit Lentin uncovers the racism in late twentieth-century Ireland in Songs on the Death of Children (1996), as does Clare Boylan in her humorous Black Baby (1988). The separation and subsequent problems of the characters in Anne Enright's highly experimental novel, What Are You Like? (2000), spring from Irish social conditions and contribute to Irish-immigrant identity concerns in the hightech worlds of New York and London.

The "Troubles": A Secondary Subject

Writers in the Republic initially responded to the "Troubles" by setting them in an historic context. Arguably, Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974) and The Old Jest (1979), set during World War I and the Irish Civil War respectively, may be seen as attempts to contextualize the conflict. Later Johnston novels set during the "Troubles" focus on personal rather than national relationships, as do other works. Julia O'Faolain's 1980 novel No Country for Young Men bridges two periods of "Troubles" through the unreliable consciousness of an elderly nun whose memory of the troubles of the 1920s is stirred by contemporary TV footage; Mary Leland's works The Killeen (1985) and Approaching Priests (1991) condemn a nationalism based on violence; Edna O'Brien's The House of Splendid Isolation (1994) looks at the reception in the 1990s of the North and Northeners in the South. Northern writers make distinctive contributions: Frances Molloy's No Mate for the Magpie (1985) presents the Northern Irish situation as an insult to common sense. Class and gender, Molloy's plucky heroine comes to see, are as restrictive as politics. Mary Beckett's A Belfast Woman (1980) and Give Them Stones (1987) depict the difficulty of raising a family in the midst of violence and prejudice. The heroine in Deirdre Madden's Hidden Symptoms (1986) imagines the violence as the acts of a madman tearing his flesh. The dramatist Anne Devlin exposes the abuse of women within paramilitary groups in Ourselves Alone (1986), and presents a more optimistic view of women's possibilities in After Easter (1994); Devlin's short stories, particularly "Naming the Names" in The Way-Paver (1986), are unforgettable accounts of the horrors of urban violence. Christina Reid focuses on a group of Catholic unemployed teenagers in the topical play Joyriders (1987); her Belle of Belfast City (1989) explores the divisions in Unionist families. Members of the experimental Charabanc Theatre Company cowrote many plays between 1983 and 1990; writer-in-residence Marie Jones produced A Night in November (first published in 1995) in 1994, focusing on sectarian hatred. The experimental poetry of Medbh McGuckian often comments obliquely on the conflict, while Eavan Boland overtly exposes political violence in the North and South, past and present.

Texts by twentieth-century Irish women writers have not only represented women characters, women's concerns, and women's perspectives absent in earlier works by male writers; many of these authors have moved beyond mimesis, envisioning alternative futures. In so doing, they have altered the way in which Ireland itself can be read.

SEE ALSO Arts: Modern Irish and Anglo-Irish Literature and the Arts since 1800; Drama, Modern; Fiction, Modern; Poetry, Modern; Primary Documents: "Scattering and Sorrow" (1936); "Inquisitio 1584" (c. 1985); "Feis" ("Carnival") (c. 1990)