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Women on the Move: Mobility in Evelyn Conlon’s Fiction
Abstract
This article explores the representation of women’s mobility in Evelyn Conlon’s fiction and focuses on texts in which the female protagonists are depicted as “women on the move” and coded as transgressors and trespassers. The article discusses Conlon’s fiction of mobility in the light of patterns of displacement and dislocation which are recurrent in the novels and stories analyzed. Although the writer consistently disrupts unified patriarchal narratives of “at-homeness”, the article argues that her works expose also the need for connection and continuity and, thus, embody a reformulation of more open forms of belonging and a proposal for more inclusive identity paradigms.
This chapter provides a critical overview and a theoretical introduction to Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak . Drawing on a wide range of perspectives and considerations on silence through a broad diversity of themes and functions, this introductory essay reclaims an unprecedented attentiveness to the unspoken in today’s Irish fiction. The chapter argues that in Irish contemporary writing silence features as multivalent and multifaceted: it can function as a form of resistance, a strategy of defiance, empowerment and emancipation, but also a way of covering up stories which remain untold and invisible, thus distorting or directly concealing inconvenient truths from the public eye. Ultimately, as the book itself demonstrates, for contemporary Irish writers, the unspoken is not just a constraint but a productive site of enquiry, a silence that “speaks”.
This chapter approaches Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky as an imaginative retrieval of a silenced and untold episode of the Irish Famine and looks at the novel as a text that not only translates the past into the present (since it bestows visibility on an unspoken historical event) but also perceptively foregrounds connections between translation, mobility and memory. The chapter suggests that Not the Same Sky functions itself as a “memory site” and, thus, becomes an astute reflection on the complexities attached to events and discourses concerned with the cultural reconstruction of knowledge. In this respect, the chapter argues that Conlon’s novel lends itself to be analysed as an inquiry into the concept of translation and the unsolved ethical dilemmas attached to the debate on voice and voicing which often accompany translational acts.KeywordsSilenceEvelyn Conlon
Not the Same Sky
Irish FamineTranslation
In this chapter, Zamorano Llena examines Evelyn Conlon’s historical novel Not the Same Sky and her critical engagement with forced migration as represented by an understudied chapter in the history of Irish diaspora, namely the Famine orphan girls migration to Australia as part of the Earl Grey’s assisted migration scheme. This chapter considers how Conlon’s novel foregrounds transnational mobility and the transcultural migration of memories interconnecting nineteenth-century Irish migration with contemporary transnational mobility in the post-2008 financial crisis. Zamorano Llena contends that the migration of memories, transformed under the influence of the present vantage point from which they are revisited, contributes to redefining past lieux de mémoire as “noeuds de mémoire,” thereby challenging inherited narratives of Irish national identity.KeywordsEvelyn ConlonIrish diaspora
Noeuds de mémoire
Transnational mobilityNational identity
Irish female-authored fiction is reputed for its subversion of the Irish patriarchal system. Yet, thus far, there seems to exist no feminist study which paid attention to Louise O’Neill’s fourth novel, The Surface Breaks. This dissertation analyses this novel from a feminist perspective. Drawing on Kate Millett’s theoretical insights about male domination and the way it should be subverted, the analysis of O’Neill’s subversive portrayal of her mermaids and mer-men, and their relations with one another reveals the processes of internalisation of patriarchal ideology and the destructive effects of this ideology on females, which range from self-denial to marginalisation and objectification. Also, this subversive portrayal engages the female reader’s interest in economic, educational, and political empowerment and invites readers to ban male violence, to transcend femininity, and join forces as sisters. While this research does not cover all of O’Neill’s works and remains within the scope of Millett’s theory of male domination, it does situate The Surface Breaks in Irish feminist fiction and argues that it exposes and defies patriarchal ideology.
Keywords: Patriarchy, internalisation, The Surface Breaks, Irish women fiction, women empowerment
En el capítulo sobre la poeta Julia de Burgos, me propongo analizar algunas líneas maestras de su poesía, siguiendo el curso de una analítica del yo, de
la duplicidad de la identidad, y , en fin, de un rebelde imperativo
estético, donde todo se enmarca y se resuelve. Tratare de analizar
algunos de los modos en que se construye un yo lírico, a través de
cuya construcción se logra el milagro estético de transformar una
experiencia privada no necesariamente la plasmada en el poema,
sino la expresada. A través de la construcción del poema, en un
objeto universal.
Almost coinciding with the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger economic story of success, recent decades have witnessed how politicians, scholars, and writers started to vindicate the contributions of the Irish diaspora and, by extension, those of Irish emigrant women in the construction of Mother Ireland. The chapter attempts to illustrate how the contemporary Irish short story written during these years was depicting disheartening or happy-ending stories about emigration, exile, and return, being at times regressive in its outlooks, and at times setting the stories of their heroines in the here and now. Here, due to the readings of these creative works, a more nuanced picture of Irish women's emigration is offered and this goes beyond the conceptualizations of those women who left the Irish shores as vulnerable, ignorant, poor, pregnant, or sexually deviant, while the phenomenon of immigration itself is understood in relation to variables such as class, age, education, nationality, and religion.
La obra de Evelyn Conlon ha sido analizada frecuentemente bajo una perspectiva feminista. Sin embargo, su estilo polifacético e ingenio irónico distan mucho de haber sido analizados en profundidad. Este artículo examina dos relatos de Conlon titulados «The Park» y «Birth Certificates». Estas historias fueron publicadas en Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour en 1993, y reimpresas en Telling (2000). En este trabajo, aplico la concepción interdisciplinar del discurso satírico de Dustin Griffin que se basa en la interrogación retórica, la retórica de la provocación, la retórica de la representación y la retórica de la exposición. La obra de Conlon no es sólo formalmente experimental, sino que también posee variedad retórica. Conlon ofrece nuevas perspectivas sobre los temas que trata haciendo un uso muy hábil de la ironía, la paradoja, el ingenio y el humor sardónico. Su dominio de la retórica de la sátira le permite contar verdades incómodas sobre las vidas de las mujeres en Irlanda y denunciar el modo en que se percibía a las mujeres en Irlanda en esa época.
This book maps the development of second wave feminism in Ireland, as a social movement, using textual and visual images. A number of neglected themes in the analysis and documentation of Irish feminist politics are advanced in this unique and comprehensive volume. 'Documenting Irish Feminisms' focuses on the emergence of Irish feminist organizations and services; reproductive rights; lesbian activism; violence; cultural politics; Northern Ireland; social policy, family and the law; and class, education and community. The range of sources available for the study of feminism in Ireland are highlighted in the analysis of each theme and each chapter is illustrated with photographs, documents and other images. This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers in the fields of history, sociology, politics, Irish studies and women's studies.
In the latter half of the twentieth century many in the social sciences and humanities gleefully proclaimed the demise of a set of traditional assumptions about cultural identity. Notions of wholeness, teleological development, evolutionary progress, and ethnic authenticity were said to have been dismantled forever. A few lamented their passing, but most scholars energetically grappled with brave new theories of hybridity, network theory, and the complex “flows” of people, goods, money, and information across endlessly shifting social landscapes. But as the new century unfolds, it has become increasingly clear that the bodies of the deceased have refused to stay buried: those who thought to have bid farewell once and for all to the heavily guarded borders of the nation-state and to the atavistic passions of religious and ethnic identity find themselves confronting a global political landscape in which neither nationalism nor identity politics shows any intention of disappearing. While the older conceptions of rootedness and autochthony seem intellectually bankrupt, the heady theories of creative metissage have run aground upon the rocks of contemporary reality.
There is an urgent need to rethink fundamental assumptions about the fate of culture in an age of global mobility, a need to formulate, both for scholars and for the larger public, new ways to understand the vitally important dialectic of cultural persistence and change. This dialectic is not only a function of triumphant capitalism, free trade, and globalization; it is, as we hope to show, a much older phenomenon.
The post-national novel: Since the mid-1980s, the rapid transformation of the Republic of Ireland's domestic and international profile has been accompanied by a heightened political engagement in Irish fiction. With a confidence bolstered by the 1990 election to the Irish presidency of a female reformist lawyer, Mary Robinson, the Irish began to face up to their position as modern Europeans who had 'not so much solved as shelved the problem of creating a liberal nationalism'. Where political culture led, writers followed, and in the publishing boom of the 1990s, the Irish novel repeatedly highlighted the institutional and ideological failings of the country, tracing the halting progress of Ireland's cultural, sexual and economic evolution, and foregrounding its voices of dissent. The works categorised by critic Gerry Smyth as the 'New Irish Fiction' were distinguished by a sociological purpose, which, with a few noteworthy exceptions, bypassed philosophical abstraction. 'Less of an intellectual and more of an artisan', wrote Smyth, 'the new Irish novelist is concerned to narrate the nation as it has been and is, rather than how it should be or might have been'. © Cambridge University Press 2006 and Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Since the mid-1990s the commemoration of Irish migration – specifically that related to the Famine of the 1840s – has achieved remarkable visibility in the public sphere. This essay explores how the practice of community Famine commemoration may be read as an index of competing commemorative concerns, as appeals for heritage recognition and genealogical affiliation combine with narratives of both ethnic difference and essentialism. In particular, the popularity of megalithic reproduction and imported “pieces of Ireland” reveals continuity with older forms of commemoration yet evidences new transatlantic relationships. By contextualizing a modest community memorial project within wider Irish and international memory practices, this essay argues how the Famine's commemoration may be understood as both “mirror” and “lamp,” alternatively reflecting and constructing social beliefs and behaviors.
This introduction to the special issue explains how the intersections between memory, diaspora, and identity formation are addressed in six articles which focus on the Irish Famine diaspora around the Atlantic and the Pacific rim. It argues for a comparative, transnational approach toward the collective experiences of the Famine Irish in terms of their community and institution building; cultural, ethnic, and racial encounters with members of other groups; and especially their patterns of mass migration, integration, and remembrance of their traumatic upheaval by their descendants and host societies.
Women and the Irish Diaspora looks at the changing nature of national and cultural belonging both among women who have left Ireland and those who remain. It identifies new ways of thinking about Irish modernity by looking specifically at women's lives and their experiences of migration and diaspora. Based on original research with Irish women both in Ireland and in England, this book explores how questions of mobility and stasis are recast along gender, class, racial and generational lines. Through analyses of representations of 'the strong Irish mother', migrant women, 'the global Irish family' and celebrity culture, Breda Gray further unravels some of the complex relationships between femininity and Irish modernity(ies).
THE problematic of new states and of nationalism has a particular and terrifying currency in Europe today. The period after ‘independence’ is sometimes called post-colonial, but whatever the semantic choice, the transition thus represented, often abrupt, is never total. Any decolonizing project inherits its subject and must engage with its past Although we may be exhorted to ‘forget it’, the role of the past in any national configuration needs to be recognized. It is now a perilous and pressing issue, though one which most of western Europe has recently preferred to ignore. By contrast, our sense of the past in Ireland has been, almost notoriously, as active as a trapped nerve. It has kept the body politic awake and gnawing on its contested revisions.
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