Counting the dead as "one" and "one again" in the fiction of twentieth-century Irish women novelists Open Access
Chase, Elizabeth (2012)
Abstract
Abstract
Counting the dead as "one" and "one again" in the fiction of
twentieth-century Irish women novelists
In the aftermath of twentieth-century civil strife, Ireland's dead have been used in myriad ways. "Counting the dead as 'one' and 'one again' in the fiction of twentieth-century Irish women novelists" contends that for Elizabeth Bowen, Jennifer Johnston, and Deirdre Madden, each of the ways in which the dead have been understood, represented, and memorialized falls short. Historically, commemoration is a masculine field: it is traditionally soldiers' memories that shape collective memory; furthermore, the masculine narrative of war often corroborates and reifies the nationalist narrative of the state. The nature of traditional remembrance is problematic for female Irish novelists who recognize that understanding Ireland's dead through the lens of the state will only beget further violence. I contend that their novels are therefore interventions in the historical record, offering new, feminine forms of remembrance that reinsert the experiences of women, and an ethically charged focus on the lived lives of victims, into Ireland's commemorative practice.
As these novelists show, the violence of the Troubles happened on the scale of the domestic, and therefore requires memorials that exist on a similar scale. These writers probe the geography of commemoration when consensus as to cause for which the dead fought and died is not easily forthcoming. This study fosters an understanding of how Irish women writers alter and expand the human scope of our relationships to history, memory, and commemoration. Their work has shaped the stories Irish fiction tells about twentieth-century conflicts, and their novels seek to transform the way communities in Ireland and Northern Ireland view the past and the ethics of public commemoration. Examining their novels--The Last September, Shadows on Our Skin, The Old Jest, The Railway Station Man, Fool's Sanctuary, Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness, and Molly Fox's Birthday--yields a more nuanced understanding of women's engagement with historical violence and reveals a long-standing history of female-authored writing about commemoration that challenges and redefines our map of Irish fiction.
Table of Contents
Counting the dead as "one" and "one again" in the fiction of twentieth-century Irish women novelists
Table of Contents
Introduction...1
Chapter One:...24
Resisting the urge towards magnitude - commemoration, ethics, and
the Irish novel
Chapter Two:...65
The "uneasy rustle of remembrance" in Elizabeth Bowen's The Last
September
Chapter Three:...118
Embodying the "indelible reality" of the past in the novels of
Jennifer Johnston
Chapter Four:...172
"The horror of little details" - Remembering the Troubles in the
work of Deirdre Madden
Epilogue...223
Works Cited...235
Non-Print Sources Cited...249
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