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Definitive themes of Irish literature: Perspectives on contemporary Irish Culture and society: Overarching themes in Irish Literature: -

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The interrogation or reinvention of national identity. Often, this entails the debunking of the received stereotypes that underpin traditional notions of Irishness. Sometimes, it leads to an emphasis on the fabrications and fractures of national identity. A willingness to engage with social realities that were formerly edited out of authorised versions of the nation (mental illness, child abuse, poverty). Often, this leads to dystopic literary representations of the nation, what one critic has termed ‘black pastoral’ (Nicholas Grene). A willingness to engage with the disjunctions, hypocrisies, delusions and deceptions that characterise the national psyche and culture. Views of Ireland as a hybrid space in which competing dimensions and discourses uneasily co-exist. A concern with the relationship between cultural imperialism, language and national identity; ‘a discovery of confidence in our own ground, in our place, in our speech’ (Seamus Heaney). A desire to negate the power of the past to determine the present and future, which sometimes mutates into a desire to escape completely the imperatives of history and tradition. A concern with the problematic relationship between femininity, masculinity and nationalism. A recourse to the family as a microcosm of wider social, cultural and national concerns. Several writers use the family unit as a lens through which to focalise issues of power and authority. At a stylistic level, an interplay between realism and allegory.

Can these works be read outside of the Irish context? - We can trace this course to 1916 the rebellion against British rule, it led to the partition of Ireland and the emergence of a partially independent Irish state. These works are influenced by such history. - There was a struggle between liberalism and conservatism. - 1990 is a interesting date, it marked the beginning of a new generation of Irish writers who were unafraid to discuss taboo and dark histories. De Valera is a key figure in the making of modern Ireland, he is regarded as the founder of post-colonial Ireland. He fought in the 1916 Easter rising, he was influential in shaping the irish nation. ‘The Ireland which we have dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to things of the spirit; a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.’ - Taoiseach 9amon de Valera, St Patrick’s Day radio broadcast, 1943 Stresses Ireland’s rural and spiritual character, there is an emphasis on family and respecting older generations. - He was succeeded by Sean Le Mass, and he moved away from a rural self-suffcient nation to one of modernisation, he enacted the celtic tiger period. - The Troubles represented the ongoing constitutional nature of Ireland. The 1960s was a decade of social and economic change. In place of de Valera’s vision of a rural, self-sufficient nation, his successor as taoiseach, Sean Lemass (1899-1971), sought to modernise Ireland by transforming it into an industrialised, entrepreneurial, outward-looking society. Mary Robinson’s election as Ireland’s first female president in 1990 was widely seen as a symbolic milestone in Irish women’s painful journey towards full and equal citizenship. Her credentials as a liberal, left-leaning lawyer encouraged those who wished to see Ireland become a more liberal, secular, pluralist society Changes in Irish fiction came through in Irish fiction. - Due to the Celtic Tiger immigration to Ireland increased. The economic crash let to emigration which shows the cyclical nature of Irish society. ‘Ireland was a cold harsh environment for many, probably the majority, of its residents during the earlier half of the period under remit. It was especially cold and harsh for women. All women suffered serious discrimination.

Women who gave birth outside marriage were subject to particularly harsh treatment. Responsibility for that harsh treatment rests mainly with the fathers of their children and their own immediate families. It was supported by, contributed to, and condoned by, the institutions of the State and the Churches. However, it must be acknowledged that the institutions under investigation provided a refuge – a harsh refuge in some cases – when the families provided no refuge at all.’ - Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (2021), p. 1. In Ireland Women’s bodies became a king of battlefield for the contentious beliefs surrounding abortion and divorce. - 1983 67% voted in favour for allowing abortion in Ireland. A clear victory for the forces of conservatism. Since the country achieved (partial) independence in 1922, the meaning of Ireland and Irishness has been contested by various factions and forces. In the Republic, the most fractious and protracted struggles have been those between the forces of tradition and modernity, social conservatism and social liberalism, nationalism and historical revisionism. In Northern Ireland (a.k.a. the North of Ireland, a.k.a. the Six Counties, a.k.a. Ulster), the violent political contest between the forces of unionism/loyalism and nationalism/republicanism has eclipsed other social issues and cultural phenomena for decades. The literature of post-independence Ireland is characterised by a dialectic between, on the one hand, the romanticisation of the anti- colonial struggle and the idealisation of rural Ireland, and, on the other hand, a desire to de-romanticise the nationalist past and highlight instead the complex and diverse nature of Irish history. Those who adhere to the first of these positions tend to be regarded as traditionalists and are often associated with views that are politically and socially conservative. Those who adopt a more critical attitude towards nationalism tend to be seen as modernisers or liberals who espouse a version of republicanism that is secular, pluralist and sympathetic to the values of socialism and feminism. After the upheavals of the modernising 1960s and 1970s, the tensions between traditionalists and modernisers grew more intense. Old values and certainties began to be challenged and a history that once appeared to offer people a stable sense of identity was opened up to radical questioning, not least by a group of historians and intellectuals who came to be known (and often demonised) as revisionists. Revisionism refers to a form of historiography that rejects the traditional nationalist interpretation of Irish history as an 800-year-old struggle against British domination and replaces it with a view of the past which emphasises discontinuity, diversity and the complex nature of Britain’s influence on the development of Irish culture and society. The legacy of censorship meant the public’s access to seminal works was limited- this deemed Irish culture as insular and simplistic. De Valera emphasised Ireland rural and spiritual character as he opposed anti-materialism and modernism. - The national vision was appealing but was at odds with normal life of unemployment. 2001-2002 Ireland was classed as the world’s most globalised country. There is a dark side to patriarchal Catholicism. To be Irish before the 21st century meant to be Catholic not English. The Anti-colonial struggle was about creating a distinction between Irish and English national identity. Amongst Women ‘John McGahren’: Critical reception: ‘Amongst Women is a millimetre away from perfection.’ Seamus Deane, Sunday Tribune, May 1990 ‘Amongst Women is the most important Irish novel of the late twentieth century.’ Joseph O’Connor, The Independent, May 2006 Amongst Women was ranked third behind James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) in a 2003 Irish Times readers’ poll to determine the greatest Irish novel. McGahern on Amongst Women ‘When I came to write Amongst Women I thought I was writing a novel about that lost Irish generation of the 1950s and 1960s, a lost generation that disappeared into England. They included most of my family and most

of the people I went to school with. I worked in England myself as a young man and again after the banning [of The Dark] and the dismissal [from his job as a primary schoolteacher]. The first images of Amongst Women are a park near London and a couple in it. It was near the docks. Long-distance lorry drivers used to sleep opposite the park, and in the winter the leaves would disappear off the trees and you could see as far as an artificial lake, the swings and the deer. In the summertime it was a wall of green. All that English experience, which must have been about two hundred pages, got pushed out by that Irish family, the Morans, and the London scenes with which the novel began were completely marginalized.’ - John McGahern in interview, in Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy, ed. ClTodhna NT Anluain (2000), p. 149. Began as a novel about those who disappeared. ‘Amongst Women glorifies nothing but life itself, and fairly humble life. All its violence is internalised within a family, is not public or political; but is not, therefore, a lesser evil. If the novel suggests anything, it is how difficult it is for people, especially women who until very recently had no real power at all in our society, to try to create space to live and love in the shadow of violence. How they manage to do that in the novel becomes their uncertain triumph.’ - John McGahern, ‘The Solitary Reader’, in Love of the World: Essays, ed. Stanley van der Ziel (2009), pp. 94-95. ‘I think the closest we have to a society in Ireland is the family. I see the society as made up of thousands of little republics called families, and I think that the family is an interesting halfway house between the individual and a larger society.’ - John McGahern in interview, in James Whyte, History, Myth, and Ritual in the Fiction of John McGahern (2002), p. 233. Irish society does not have a stable sense of development. Narrative Structure This chapterless novel has a circular form. The novel opens in the fictive present, a short time before Michael Moran’s death. It then segues into the past on p. 8, taking the reader back to the last Monaghan Day in Great Meadow, an annual day of personal remembrance for Moran and his friend and former IRA colleague, McQuaid, with whom he fought during the Irish War of Independence (1919-21). The novel continues in flashback mode until very near the end (p. 177), when the narrator returns the reader to the fictive present that was left behind on p. 8. Having come full circle, we then move forward in time to witness Moran’s last days, death, funeral and burial. Private day of remembrance. ‘The muted circular form of the narrative, the return in the closing episode to the time period of the opening episode, is a hint that the conundrum of time and eternity, the mystical wheel, is at the heart of McGahern’s vision here as in all of his fiction.’ [Time is foregrounded through form. Interplay of a sense of timelessness within Great Meadow.] The place will have an afterlife without him. Denis Sampson, Outstaring Nature’s Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern (1993), p. 220. ‘The temporal structure of Amongst Women is cyclical. The repeated incantation of the rosary and the recurrence of very familiar domestic scenes foreground how time moves in circles, something that is echoed in the perennial round-trips to and from England in the later stages of the novel.’ - Ellen McWilliams, ‘Homesickness in John McGahern’s Short Stories "Wheels" and "A Slip-up“’, Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 53 (2009), p. 3. Themes: dense with layers of thematic suggestiveness. The opening episode of the novel (pp. 1-8) introduces the novel’s governing themes. There are three interrelated thematic strands that we might want to identify, as follows: 1. The gendered psychological dynamics of power, fear and love in a mid- twentieth-century rural Irish Catholic family. The timeframe is not definitive, broadly in the 1950s/60s. The patriarchy is weakening. ‘As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters’ (p. 1): the novel’s opening sentence suggests that Michael Moran and his family are, and have long been, bound together in a complex symbiotic relationship. As he nears death, Moran needs to know that he is still the primary focus of his three daughters’ lives, that he still matters to them, that they still care. The following two sentences supply the answer: ‘This once powerful man was so implanted in their lives that they had never really left Great Meadow, in spite of jobs and marriages and children and houses of their own in Dublin and London. Now they could not let him slip away’ (p. 1). Not only do Moran’s daughters care about their dying father, they are incapable of not caring. Roots are deeply seeded in them. ‘They were so bound together by the illness that they felt close to being powerful together. Such was the strength of the instinct that they felt that they could force their beloved to remain in life if only they could,

together, turn his will around. Since they had the power of birth there was no reason why they couldn’t will this life free of death. For the first time in his life Moran began to fear them.’ Amongst Women, p. 178. 2. The centrality of memory and remembrance. A novel about personal, private and national memory, surrounding the origins on the state. Moran’s daughters wish to sentementalise the past, Moran refuses this. ‘The decision to open and close the novel with the same event means that, above all else, Amongst Women is a novel about memory.’ Robert F. Garratt, ‘John McGahern’s Amongst Women: Representation, Memory, and Trauma’, Irish University Review, vol. 35, no. 1 (2005), p. 130. From the start of the novel, a subtle battle is enjoined over the recollection and rendition of past events and their power to alter the present. Moran’s daughters wish to redeem the past – and in the process rejuvenate their father – by sentimentalising and sanitising it, whereas their father bluntly demythologises history and refuses to sentimentalise it. Moran’s aversion to reminiscence is linked to his deep and enduring disenchantment with post-revolutionary Ireland, whose independence he fought for in his youth. ‘“Don’t let anybody fool you. It was a bad business. We didn’t shoot at women and children like the Tans but we were a bunch of killers. We got very good but there was hardly a week when some of us wasn’t killed. Of the twenty-two men in the original column only seven were alive at the Truce. We were never sure we’d be alive from one day to the next. Don’t let them pull wool over your eyes. The war was the cold, the wet, standing to your neck in a drain for the whole night with bloodhounds on your trail, not knowing how you could manage the next step toward the end of a long march. That was the war: not when the band played and a bloody politician stepped forward to put flowers on the ground. What did we get for it? A country, if you’d believe them. Some of our own johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishmen. More than half of my own family work in England. What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod.” [...] “For people like McQuaid and myself the war was the best part of our lives. Things were never so simple and clear again. I think we never rightly got the hang of it afterwards.”’ Amongst Women, pp. 5-6. - Powerful denunciation of the failure of the post-colonial nation to live up to the expectations of the anti-colonial struggle. Looking to England for Economic security. Those moments were clarifying and the best in this life. The rest of his life is lived in the shadow of this. 3. The formative effects of war, militarism and traumatic memory on the articulation of masculine identity in a postcolonial context. Moran’s experience as a guerrilla combatant in the War of Independence is shown to have had a profound and lasting influence on his psyche and personality. Having been ‘a guerrilla fighter from the time he was little more than a boy’ (p. 163), Moran’s subjectivity has been moulded his early exposure to guerrilla warfare or what we might think of as intimate killing. So too has the personality of his former lieutenant, McQuaid, as their Monaghan Day recollections reveal. McQuaid recounts his acts of guerrilla efficiency with particular relish, savouring the sense of omnipotence he derived from being able to look his unsuspecting target in the eye in the moment before he killed him. The veterans’ joint recital of ‘the days of their glory’ (p. 14) during this first, strategically positioned flashback sequence is thematically important, therefore, because it raises questions that cut to the heart of the novel: - What are the legacies, for self and society, of masculinities weaned on revolutionary violence and guerrilla combat? - What happens to the martial imagination after the war is over? Moran’s imagination is formed around war and the colonial struggle. - How do minds shaped by idealistic certainties adapt to the inevitable compromises and power struggles of peacetime? Idealisms mean that people are unable to adapt. - How does the psychological trauma of harrowing events play itself out in this afterlife? These questions feed into larger issues the novel broaches, including: Novel speaks to national concerns. - The relationship between patriarchy and patriotism: is the former derived from the latter? Both with the same root, is this a good thing- what about the fate of women if this is the case. - The relationship between patriarchy and Catholicism: is the maternal symbolically displaced by the paternal? Is Moran blessed amongst women? - The cult of the family in Irish life: are close family bonds a force for good or ill, empowerment or disempowerment? Defining spiritual quality of the family is undermined in this novel through scrutiny.

- Can, or should, the novel be read as an allegory of postcolonial Ireland? Moran has long remained unwilling to speak about his war experiences. Even with McQuaid, part of him is angry ‘at any baring of the inviolate secrecy he instinctively kept round himself’ (p. 19). Such narrative details suggest an element of unspeakability that is consistent with traumatic neurosis. This, coupled with the way the unresolved past intrudes on Moran’s present – as shown in the jackdaw incident (p. 7) – provides grounds for reading Amongst Women as a narrative of traumatic haunting. Moran is not forthcoming. Here is a protagonist who carries unprocessed memories of his devastating capacity for deadly intimacy, an unreconstructed outlaw who knows at some deep level that the experience of intimate killing can excite feelings of exhilaration as well as anguish. Subtle clues, such as his remark that ‘”The closest I ever got to any man was when I had him in the sights of the rifle and I never missed”’ (p. 7), suggest Moran is a war veteran disturbed by the allure of human assassination and tormented by his inextricable abhorrence and admiration for his lethal handiwork. To be intimate in order to kill. - Darkness is a feature of this text, this darkness is metaphorical as he is haunted by memory. Trauma is understood by psychoanalytical theorists and practitioners as a delayed, often involuntary, response to an overwhelming event or series of events, which can take the form of intrusive dreams, flashbacks or hallucinations. Cathy Caruth argues that ‘the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. […]. The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history with them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history ...