Mothers in Contemporary Irish Literature : Kaleidoscopic Reimaginings

The turn of the twenty-first century revealed the almost endemic presence of violence, cruelty, abuse,
trauma and secrets in clerical and state Irish institutions and the familiar unit. These disclosures came to contradict idealised versions of the nation permeating political and social discourses for decades while they released at one time “the burden for Irish people (...,) this reputation of Ireland as virtuous, saintly scholarly, family oriented, and all this stuff, [... since] reality, of course, [was] quite different” (Dunne 37). With history and reality closely scrutinised, many skeletons in the closet were made visible. This is how the figure of the Irish mother and the (problematic) relationship she may have not only with herself, but also with her daughter(s) and son(s), and the Irish father achieved importance in discussions around the institutionalised and celebrated construct of the Irish family.

Either carried out in contemporary fiction or in the solid corpus of feminist theory based on psychoanalysis and social learning theory - to mention but two of the possible approaches - these contemporary discussions were not by any means new but they were rather accelerated by globalisation, capitalism and change. Nonetheless, it was already in the wake of 1970s when the second wave of feminism left the figure of the Irish mother vulnerable to figurative dissection for her involvement in the preservation and consolidation of the patriarchal tapestry, carefully knitted by the corporatist partnership between the Church and the State over several decades, an unswerving bond well highlighted by Anne Enright’s words at the beginning of this text.

In bothIrelands, the durable patriarchal system was built upon strong structures of power/disempowerment and repression functioning in relation to gender and transgenerational regulations. These and other recent perspectives, such as Palko’s on the cultural negotiations of the definition of a “good mother”, articulate the role of the Irish mummy in isolation, and in relation to the individualisation, emancipation, autonomy and the regulation or restriction of her daughters and sons’ sexualities, and attempt to understand both sides of the dyad, their motivations, their actions and silences, their joys and their traumatic experiences. The present study attempts to be encompassing despite its limited nature, motivated as it is by the flourishing contemporary Irish literature and artistic creativity of these later decades. The chronology of this project aims at covering the contemporary literary perspectives on motherhood in works written either by male or female, Irish or foreign authors since the 1990s up to contemporaneity, in nowadays post Celtic Tiger era.