Irish Women Writers

An Uncharted Tradition

Ann Owens Weekes

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813184722
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the legendary poet Oisin to modernist masters like James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Samuel Beckett, Ireland's literary tradition has made its mark on the Western canon. Despite its proud tradition, the student who searches the shelves for works on Irish women's fiction is liabel to feel much as Virginia Woolf did when she searched the British Museum for work on women by women. Critic Nuala O'Faolain, when confronted with this disparity, suggested that "modern Irish literature is dominated by men so brilliant in their misanthropy... [that] the self-respect of Irish women is radically and paradoxically checkmated by respect for an Irish national achievement."

While Ann Owen Weekes does not argue with the first part of O'Faolain's assertion, she does with the second. In Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition, she suggests that it is the critics rather than the writers who have allowed themselves to be checkmated. Beginning with Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and ending with Jennifer Johnston's The Railway Station (1980), she surveys the best of the Ireland's female literature to show its artistic and historic significance and to demonstrate that it has its own themes and traditions related to, yet separate from, that of male Irish writers.

Weekes examines the work of writers like E.OE. Sumerville and Martin Ross (pen names for cousins Edith Somerville and Violet Martin), Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Mary Lavin, and Molly Keane, among others. She teases out the themes that recur in these writers' works, including the link between domestic and political violence and re-visioning of traditional stories, such as Julia O'Faolain's use of the Cuchulain and Diarmuid and Grainne myths to reveal the negation of women's autonomy. In doing so, she demonstrates that the literature of Anglo- and Gaelic-Irish women presents a unified tradition of subjects and techniques, a unity that might become an optimistic model not only for Irish literature but also for Irish people.

1.Seeking a Tradition

Irish Women’s Fiction

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.

—Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”

AN IRISH literary tradition is, of course, a given, is perhaps the one unchallenged cliché about Ireland and its people. “I must be talking to my friends,” Yeats has the country “herself” cry, and through long centuries the Irish people have talked and sung their tears and joys.¹ The recitation began with Oisin, poet of the mythical Fianna, was taken up by the bards who entertained and abused the ancient high kings, and then concealed itself in Gaelic from the colonizer. We can hear the recitation today in the music of the seanachie, the storytellers who linger in isolated parts of the country. Indeed, library shelves stocked with Yeats, Joyce, Beckett—to name but the most illustrious—bear witness to this tradition; many more shelves groan beneath volumes of exegesis, classification, and definition. From the mundane to the esoteric, Irish literature would seem to have been separated, classified, and analyzed in every meaningful division. And yet the student who searches the shelves for works on Irish women’s fiction—surely, one thinks, an obvious subdivision—feels very much as Virginia Woolf did when she searched the British Museum for work on women by women. The most determined researcher detects only a few slim volumes. Thus one is forced to ask whether Irish women have written fiction; and if so whether this fiction has any artistic or even historic value; and finally whether this fiction differs sufficiently from that of Irish men to merit the recognition of yet another category.

A recent critic confronted with this problem suggested that “modern Irish literature is dominated by men so brilliant in their misanthropy . . . [that] the self-respect of Irish women is radically and paradoxically checkmated by respect for an Irish national achievement.”² The brilliance and misanthropy of Irish men’s writing is not in question; the latter half of the hypothesis is. But critics, I suggest, not Irish women, are, or have allowed themselves to be, checkmated. Despite centuries of oppressive conditions, Irish women have written, initially in Gaelic and English and latterly chiefly in English, and judging by what survives of their writing, they have written well.³ The problem lies not in their work but in the single lens with which critics have traditionally viewed most fiction, Irish included.

Analyzing the neglect of women’s writing in 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.”⁴ Approaching texts with expectations about the appropriateness of ideas and treatments, critics validate and perpetuate traditional subjects and techniques. Unable or unwilling to recognize the value in difference, they perhaps thus ignore women’s work. Indeed, Frank O’Connor’s 1963 criticism of Irish fiction validates Woolf’s insight. Men have written the literature of the Irish renaissance, O’Connor argues, because politics (which usually in Ireland entails war) is the stuff of literature. In such a climate, a woman must act like the Girl at the Gaol Gate; that is, she must bring food to, or serve, the men actively engaged in the fight. In support of his own argument on the subject of literature, O’Connor notes that the Irish man reading Mary Lavin’s work is lost when the revolution “practically disappears” to be replaced by a “sensual richness” quite foreign to him.⁵

The cavalier dismissal of Irish women’s writing is not surprising given the similar treatment until recent times of women’s literature in general. Consider, for example, the long absence of Mary Shelley from the section on romanticism in that bible of orthodoxy, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, or the inclusion, with little attempt to distinguish gender differences, of George Eliot with the male Victorians. Even in the United States, where scholars have long fought to integrate women’s work into rigid curricula, acceptance is grudging and minimal. Susan Hardy Aiken remarks on the progress after two decades of feminist criticism: “Many professors will add a woman here and there to their syllabi, but all too few move on to question how and why the system into which she is introduced has by its very presuppositions about such categories as ‘literature,’ ‘greatness,’ and ‘significance’ inevitably excluded her and her sisters.”⁶

Similarly, critics of Irish literature fail to distinguish difference, or the marks of gender, in women’s writing, but rather they view the whole spectrum through a single lens fashioned by male dictums of “literature,” “greatness,” and “significance.” Even contemporary critics who note the importance of the woman’s perspective in certain female-authored texts fail to consider the deeper implications of this perspective. The failure to recognize the possibility of real difference between women’s and men’s depictions of women may have reached its zenith in a recent study of the Irish short story; a critic unattracted by the work of recent women writers nevertheless welcomes it as providing much-needed sisters for Molly Bloom. In the case of American and English women’s literature, however, Ellen Moers, Elaine Showalter, Nina Baym, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have begun optimistic and often beautiful excavations and interpretations. Irish writers have been included in some of these studies, notably Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic.⁷ My study differs from earlier ones, however, in its quest for a specifically Irish women’s tradition.

In attempting to sketch uncharted territory, one is naturally guided by reflection on the known territory, on the texts that, for whatever reason, show themselves and whose features we can identify. Of the women’s texts in print today, a few have retained a long popularity, being steadily reprinted over the centuries. Others have been retrieved and reprinted by Virago (the British publisher that specializes in women’s work), and still other, more recent works have captured an immediate, if limited, audience. The earliest texts considered in this study are those that stand out distinctly on the literary horizon and thus demand to be included in any map of the territory. The limited number of early works makes those choices simple, but recent texts are more numerous; here we must select, rather than include all the distinctive, rich work. A comprehensive approach, while eventually desirable, would make this exploratory work unwieldy and properly awaits critical recognition of the women’s tradition in Irish literature.

More important, perhaps, are the forgotten writers of the nineteenth century, the women whose valuable work may remain hidden beneath the surface of acknowledged literature. An intrepid diver must rescue them. This diver’s work will be easier, however, if a blueprint, however hazy, exists, enabling her to recognize some of the salient features.

That differences in male and female perspectives exist is a commonplace; what are important here are the implications of these differences in positing a tradition of Irish women’s literature. Psychologists and psychoanalysts trace gender difference to the earliest years, suggesting that men and women reared to expect and seek different sources of fulfillment routinely develop different perspectives. But if a woman, as the father of psychoanalysis suggests, is no more than a blighted man—one who must adopt uncomfortably to her castrated second-class status, one who must accept her inferior and secondary sexual organs and role, one whose natural sphere is the devalued one of childbearing and care, one who is, in fact, no more than an adjunct to man—critics might be justified in applying the only logical criteria of value, that of the male perspective, or in charitably ignoring her work. The work of the brilliant and influential anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss also seems to support the Freudian thesis. Based on examinations of tribal societies, Levi-Strauss’s work suggests that the system of exchange of words, gifts, and women is the beginning of the social state as distinguished from the natural one. The rules of exogamy in earliest societies attest, he claims, not to concern for biological dangers inherent in consanguineous marriage but to the social value of the exchange itself. This social value, attained by the giving of the most precious gifts, one’s daughters, is, he argues, the essential basis of human culture.⁸

The problem of exclusion, then, extends beyond male dominance of the academies to dominance of the disciplines that define human conditions, the disciplines upon which the academies draw. But feminist critics have been quick to note that what Freud and Levi-Strauss present are descriptions of the ways in which culture has repressed women rather than valid empirical evidence of women’s inferiority or of the exchange of women as a necessary basis of culture. Indeed, a recent critic notes that the whole system of nature versus culture is itself a product of culture and, as such, is suspect.⁹ We could say that Freud and his followers, Levi-Strauss included, made intellectually respectable the neglect, ascribed by Woolf to myopia if not chauvinism, of women and their works.

Their own experience, however, and education that allows them to articulate this experience cause twentieth-century women to reject the Freudian cripple. Margaret Mead was one of the first anthropologists to suggest that the differences in women’s and men’s temperaments were not the results of biology but of culture. Like Levi-Strauss, Mead based her assertion on observation and analysis of several tribal societies. She noted that when the allocation of activities that in the Western world are viewed as male or female is reversed in certain societies, reversals in temperaments also take place, and men adopt attitudes traditionally associated in Western culture with women.¹⁰ Mead’s work thus implied that not biology but culture is responsible for observed and alleged attitudinal differences in men and women. This being the case, a complete picture of human culture is more likely to emerge from an empirical consideration of all human experience, from, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, an analysis of the becoming of a woman as well as the becoming of a man, than from acceptance of male-generated biological theories that, whatever their inspiration, attempt to explain and justify inequalities. Such a picture, of course, can most readily be drawn by women.

Psychologists and anthropologists have responded to Mead’s challenge of the biology/destiny theory, and theoretical models based on women’s experiences have been constructed over the past twenty years. Building on her predecessors’ work, Nancy Chodorow presents a clear, well-documented picture of the development of female personality defining “itself in relation and connection to other people more than masculine personality does.” In the first place, Chodorow notes, this development is not the result of “parental intention,” but of the human child’s habit of internalizing perceived patterns and relationships. This of course makes identification and analysis more difficult: because the patterns are intuited, we have no overt evidence of the culturing, and the fact that small children conform to “untaught” patterns seems to suggest that the patterns are those of nature. But Chodorow examines the usual process of early parent-child interaction. The separation and individuation from the mother that takes place during a child’s first years is experienced differently by male and female children, she notes. Some sociological evidence suggests that mothers identify more with their daughters than with their sons, and hence they tend to perpetuate the primary identification with the one and hasten the separation from the other, thus establishing “gender personality differentiation” even before gender identity.¹¹

Because in Western society women tend to be almost exclusively responsible for the care of young children, the young boy becoming conscious of gender must learn to identify with the role, not the person, of the absent father, identifying “masculine” in the negative sense of what is not his mother’s, what is not feminine. This identification entails the rejection of what he perceives to be feminine, then, in himself and in outside society and is the basis, Chodorow argues, of the universal devaluation of the female sphere. The female child, however, need not totally reject the primary identification: often restricted to the kitchen, or at least to the house, she is exposed to adult women and consequently identifies with the person as well as the role of the mother. Neither do all psychoanalysts accept Freud’s model of female penis envy; the daughter’s transference of sexual preference from the mother to the father is seen as gradual rather than sudden. “It is erroneous to say that the little girl gives up her first mother relation in favor of the father,” Chodorow quotes Helene Deutsch. “She only gradually draws him into the alliance, develops from the mother-child exclusiveness toward the triangular parent-child relationship and continues the latter, just as she does the former, although in a weaker and less elemental form, all her life.”¹² Ultimately, as a result of this relational model, women form closer emotional and relational ties with other women than men form with members of their sex.

Purposeful training and socialization are imposed at a later age on the largely unconscious, internalized organization. Boys are encouraged to form their own separate groups; girls are encouraged to become members of the often intergenerational female group and to partake of its activities. Self-reliance and achievement is stressed in boys’ training, nurturance and responsibility in girls’. This results in men’s perceiving and describing their experiences in “agentic” terms and women’s perceiving and describing theirs in “communal” terms. Chodorow uses David Bakan’s definitions here; the terms agency and communion define the essential duality he remarks in human personality. Agency is used, he explains, “for the existence of an organism as an individual, and communion for the participation of the individual in some larger organism of which the individual is a part. Agency manifests itself in self-protection, self-assertion, and self-expansion: communion manifests itself in the sense of being at one with other organisms. Agency manifests itself in the formation of separations: communion in the lack of separations.”¹³

Indeed, Chodorow notes, society itself adopts these terms, describing women relationally and men by the jobs they perform. Although her study has been questioned, Carol Gilligan’s results seem to confirm many women’s experiences. Separate training, Gilligan asserts, affects men’s and women’s moral perspectives. Men tend to base their judgments on objective factors, as they have learned to do in the games they play as equals, while women tend to base their judgments on the expected results of an action, the effect on the community, and the context. The real danger for women in overidentification, Chodorow and others note, is the loss of self that results from the mother’s allowing no room for difference between herself and her child and in the child’s attempt to escape by projecting whatever she perceives to be “bad” in herself onto her mother. The loss of ego boundaries that results from this overidentification infuses mothers and daughters with guilt, shame, and embarrassment for the other’s actions.¹⁴

In essence, then, women’s experiences—the results of their early training and the perspectives this training engendered—will be different from men’s and as such would seem to demand recording. But in fact, as anthropologists note, women’s experiences are in every instance denigrated in comparison to men’s. Referring to Mead, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo notes that however different were the descent, property arrangements, or labor divisions in the tribes she studied, the “prestige values always attach to the activities of men.” Rosaldo concludes that even when traditional roles are reversed, value is assigned to those activities performed by males.¹⁵ The value, we must presume, lies in the actor, not in the deed.

Given this almost universal cyclopsic perspective, it is hardly surprising to find sensitive and astute literary critics studying literature through a single, limited lens. Indeed Gilbert and Gubar suggest that male authors and critics alike, equating the penis with the pen and imagining the author as pregnant with his text, have reserved both the origin and the nurturance of texts for themselves, have, we may say, devised an unnatural dynasty of texts sired, conceived, and borne by fathers. Harold Bloom, for instance, traces both poetic achievement and “anxiety” to a bitter struggle “between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites” in a history that is one of “sonship.” But anxiety about one’s inheritance, Gilbert and Gubar counter, is preferable to the madness that confronted the female who, given the metaphor, foolishly and grotesquely attempted to employ the male tool. The very theorists to whom we turn for help in articulating the “monocentrism” and “ethnocentrism” that have dominated Western literature fail to recognize their own androcentric exclusion of women. Edward Said, for example, insists on the ever-present “central patriarchal text” and asserts the author’s legal and material assumption of the role ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Seeking a Tradition: Irish Women’s Fiction
• 2. Maria Edgeworth: Domestic Saga
• 3. Somerville and Ross: Ignoble Tragedy
• 4. Elizabeth Bowen: Out of Eden
• 5. Kate O’Brien: Family in the New Nation
• 6. Mary Lavin: Textual Gardens
• 7. Molly Keane: Bildungsromane Quenelles
• 8. Julia O’Faolain: The Imaginative Crucible
• 9. Jennifer Johnston: From Gortnaree to Knappogue
• 10. Irish Women Writers: The Experience of the Mass
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index