Ellen McWilliams

New perspectives on women and the Irish diaspora

Joseph Horgan’s 2008 collection of poems Slipping Letters beneath the Sea offers a careful exploration of the private and public histories of Irish immigrants in midtwentieth-century Britain and is especially concerned with the challenges their children face in forging a relationship with home. It is, where it needs to be, fearless in calling attention to the amnesiac tendencies of the Irish politician, for whom, for too long, the emigrant remained, as Eavan Boland writes in ‘The Emigrant Irish’, ‘out the back, of our houses, of our minds’.Horgan imagines women migrants, in the colloquial language of the 1950s, as ‘slips of girls, slipping away’. The image of the Irish woman migrant ‘slipping away’ is all too appropriate; as recently as the 1990s, she remained the mysterious ‘great unknown’ of Irish emigrant history. The flourishing of Irish diaspora studies and of the study of women in the Irish diaspora has ensured that this lacuna has been addressed in important ways, but this special issue comes at a moment when it would seem a new chapter in the history of Irish migration is being written. With that in mind, a number of the following articles raise questions about the new wave of emigration from post-‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland, and how this frames the experience of the Irish woman migrant, while others look back to earlier moments in the history of Irish migration, or make case studies of spheres of culture in which larger concerns about the place of women in different diasporic settings are examined. In ‘Compare and Contrast: Understanding Irish Migration to Britain in a Wider Context’, Louise Ryan explores the potential of a comparative approach to migration and the possibilities that lie beyond the study of migrant groups in isolation. She points to different forms of historical myopia that have impeded comparative work and examines how the same processes of elision have sometimes skewed the representation and understanding of the experience of women migrants. Drawing on her research across Irish, Polish, Muslim and French migrant groups, she weighs up the usefulness of comparative analysis and, in particular, in her consideration of research on Irish and Polish women, its value to understanding their distinctive experiences. Breda Gray investigates the potential gains of a different kind of comparative work in ‘“Generation Emigration”: The Politics of (Trans)national Social Reproduction in Twenty-first century Ireland’ by examining the modes and methods of communication that dominate in the present moment alongside earlier gender-based studies of migrant networks in the 1990s. She looks closely at personal testimonies from The Irish Times’ ‘Generation Emigration’ forum, an online platform established in 2011, that has sought to capture new and emerging conversations

Irishness and the culture of the Irish abroad

Introductory article from a special issue of Irish Studies Review about the Irish diaspora.

Maeve Brennan and James Joyce

Abstract As a New York writer, Maeve Brennan forges a relationship with Ireland as home that speaks to the separation and imaginative return so strongly associated with James Joyce while at the same time putting a careful distance between her work and Joyce’s formidable influence. Drawing on archival material at the University of Delaware and the New York Public Library, which amplifies our understanding of some of the intentions and motivations in Brennan’s work, this essay examines how Brennan transforms Joycean modes and motifs in her careful mapping and writing of New York in her essays for The New Yorker. Written under the pseudonym “The Long-Winded Lady”, Brennan’s essays for the magazine break imaginative ground in the city that she lived in for most of her life and expand outwards from the self-contained domestic world of Cherryfield Avenue so central to her Dublin stories. The main concern here is with Brennan’s adaptation of Joycean motifs and the different ways in which she positions herself in a direct line of inheritance to Joyce as she negotiates her position as a transatlantic writer in the middle of the twentieth century.

‘A sort of Rathmines version of a Dior design’: Maeve Brennan, Self-Fashioning and the Uses of Style

Abstract This article explores the politics of style in the writing of Maeve Brennan. Brennans concern with style, subjectivity and power is strikingly visible in her short stories and ‘Talk of the Town’ essays for the New Yorker. While in some of her short stories published in the New Yorker in the 1950s, Brennan seems to offer an extended critique of dandyism, elsewhere in her writing self-fashioning takes on an altogether more positive value and is steeped in the political as well as literary commitments of her work. The article argues that Brennans interest in the politics of style, both personally and in her writing, is informed by the different strategies she deployed as an Irish woman writer establishing her place amongst a New York literary elite in the mid twentieth century.

Adaptations of Joyce in the Fiction of Patrick McCabe

Patrick McCabe’s fiction has a complex relationship with literary predecessors and his work interacts in especially revealing ways with the writing of James Joyce. McCabe’s oeuvre demonstrates a sustained engagement with Joyce in the way that it adapts a number of Joycean frameworks, methods, and motifs. In Flann O’Brien’s final novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964), Joyce is discovered serving behind the bar of a pub in Skerries, Co. Dublin, with no apparent knowledge that Ulysses has taken the literary world by storm. Following a comparative discussion of various contemporary Irish writers’ reactions to Joyce, this essay will argue that the encounters with Joyce to be observed in McCabe’s writing can be seen as striking a similarly knowing and playful position to O’Brien’s regarding Joycean influence, as well as being placed productively in a counter-revivalist tradition that takes cues from Joyce’s commitment to unsettling totalizing narratives of Irish national identity.1

Reading the contemporary Irish novel 1987–2007

Stepping Stones of having ‘no sense of outsiderishness’ (24); his expression of frustration with the stereotypical depiction ofNorthern Protestants following theWidgery report (164); and his account of the Kingsmill massacre in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The application of theoretical perspectives here is also rather loose. Reading Heaney in terms of Nietzschean ressentiment, it is unclear whether Heaney has read Nietzsche, and whether this matters for Auge’s argument and evidence base. “Kavanagh’s intimations [ . . . ] bear a resemblance to the thought of Philip Sheldrake” (51), while “the Eucharist offers something akin to what Jacques Derrida, in another context, refers to as an ‘undetermined messianic hope’” (98). Auge highlights resemblances of and “echoing[s]” (124) from the work of, among others, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Caputo and Emmanuel Levinas in modern Irish poetry but the range of perspectives summoned and the manner of their application do little to make visible deeper layers of poetic meaning. The book’s main critical dialogues are with critics based in the United States – Helen Vendler, Henry Hart and Daniel Tobin (Michael Parker is the exception here) – and no doubt it will introduce US audiences to some of the engagements with Catholicism found in modern Irish poetry. A Chastened Communion is likely to prompt further debate about the meaning and value of religion and theology in modern Irish poetry, neglected themes in contemporary criticism that certainly warrant closer examination.

Women, Forms of Exile and Diasporic Identities

The last 30 years have seen an exponential growth in studies of diaspora and diasporic identity and, within this, there is an established body of work on the Irish diaspora, its history and cultural legacies. This chapter will survey these developments to set the scene for the author-based chapters that follow; it will pay special attention to the growing body of work on women and the Irish diaspora. The primary argument of the book is that a shift is discernible around the middle of the twentieth century: before that, representations of Irish emigration were largely, although not exclusively, male-centred, and the female figure demoted to an ancillary function in portrayals of the male emigrant experience; later in the century, this pattern is vigorously contested and the female experience becomes crucial, even defining in the work. Close attention to this work reveals that it speaks eloquently to some of the most pressing concerns of Irish feminism, and in some cases pre-empts many of the insights afforded by recent examinations of women in the Irish diaspora, and the larger field of Diaspora Studies. With that in mind, the later sections of this chapter offer my own, brief account of Irish female diasporic history; they do so with a view to building on feminist critiques of the history of woman as muse in the Irish literary tradition and, by association, the dilemma of the Irish woman writer who finds herself ‘outside history’, to borrow Eavan Boland’s phrase (1995, p. 123).

Architectures of Exile and Self-Exile in William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey and The Story of Lucy Gault

Much as the world of ‘Great Meadow’ in McGahern’s Amongst Women shapes the lives of its inhabitants even from afar, William Trevor’s fiction shows a striking concern with the spaces that house experience and with how those spatial structures interact with the subjects that they contain, enclose and even imprison; these spaces contribute to the meaning of Trevor’s work in ways that go beyond serving simply as backdrops for experiential and psychological dramas. This chapter will focus on Trevor’s special concern with Irish women and exile, a concern that highlights the importance of both architectural and spatial structures and the socio-historical specificities of the lives of the women in his novels. Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey (1994) and The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) dramatize two different forms of exile, but with a common purpose. Felicia’s Journey charts the progress of a young Catholic Irish girl who is, to some extent, on the run from history. Her progress is articulated most vividly in the spaces that she comes to inhabit in the course of the novel, and these spaces represent both her marginalization in Irish society and, later, her isolation and alienation as an Irish woman in exile in England.

Relative Visibility: Women, Exile and Censorship in John McGahern’s The Leavetaking and Amongst Women

In Kate O’Brien’s novel Pray for the Wanderer (1938), published almost a decade after the Censorship of Publications Act (1929), Matt Costello, a writer of some acclaim, returns home after a long absence, on a visit that is made fraught by the fact of his work having been banned in Ireland. His sojourn at home is short-lived as Ireland, predictably, proves to be an impossible place for the Irish artist to flourish. In an exchange with a friend early on in the novel, in which they debate whether Ireland has truly produced any great writers, they come to an inevitable conclusion about the fate of the Irish artist on home territory: ‘“We’ve only produced one native giant so far … we’ve only got Joyce to measure against the immortals up-to-date. And his great spring seems to have dried up on him now.” “He’s banned, too.” “Oh, but naturally”’ (1951, pp. 48–9). The jaded ‘Oh, but naturally’ in reply to the news of the banning of James Joyce is a sigh that echoed through mid-century Ireland as the effects of the Censorship of Publications Act, which followed the establishment of the Orwellian ‘Committee on Evil Literature’ in 1926, left its mark on generations of writers.

‘Ireland is Something That Often Happens Elsewhere’: Displaced and Disrupted Histories in Anne Enright’s What Are You Like? and The Gathering

In Catriona Moloney and Helen Thompson’s Irish Women Writers Speak Out: Voices from the Field (2003), a collection of interviews with some of the most important women writers in the contemporary Irish canon, Anne Enright pauses in the middle of a conversation about the Irish writer’s relationship with home, to echo Joyce’s famous claim in A Portrait that ‘the shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead’ (1992a, p. 273, italics in original); she ruefully asserts that ‘the airport road is the most important road in the country’ (2003, p. 53). In her own writing, Enright’s interest in emigrant lives takes a number of different forms, from the nineteenth-century exotic adventuring in The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002), to a concern with more recent migrant histories in What Are You Like? (2000) and The Gathering (2007). While discussions of migration during the Celtic Tiger years were dominated by conversations about return migration and immigration to Ireland, Enright’s novels tap into a more familiar history of Irish emigration in ways that respond to the past, whilst simultaneously reflecting the present moment.