Queering Irish Women's Writing in the Twentieth Century
This dissertation examines the haunted quality of Ireland’s modernity through the fiction of mid-twentieth-century Irish women writers Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane. Seeking out the ghosts of modern Ireland, I turn to queer ways of reading, paying attention to the marginal and the disavowed. This new reading queers the archive of twentieth-century Ireland, disrupting common-sense narratives of modernity and modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Irish women’s writing is entangled in reductive narratives of modernisation that create a feel-good account of contemporary Ireland, disavowing the structures of domination and exclusion that continue to define the country. Ireland’s modernity is haunted; bad feelings cannot be banished to the over-and-done-with past, but instead erupt in chaotic and disturbing ways in the modern nation. Contending with the violence of the official archive, a particularly vexed issue in the context of Ireland’s legacies of institutional abuse, this dissertation argues for a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings as a form of narrative resistance. In their improper responses to the imperatives of the post-independence state, Bowen, O’Brien, Keane and Macardle dwell on bad and backward feelings that disrupt the forward-moving, feel-good temporality of modernity. Where the state valorises the progressive time of reproduction, family and nation, these writers indulge in illicit, unrespectable affects. Bringing resources from queer, trans and postcolonial theory into dialogue with feminist criticism, this queering of Irish women’s writing delves into the shadow side of Irish modernity. Chapter One reads Dorothy Macardle’s middlebrow gothic novels for their critique of the postcolonial carceral state. Macardle’s (re)publication history shows how women writers haunt the mainstream, but are themselves haunted by the violences enacted on racially and sexually Othered subjects. Her republican intransigence combines with a deep attraction to the supernatural in novels that depict a haunted vision of twentieth-century Ireland. Chapter Two explores Kate O’Brien’s anxious and defensive formulation of the queer holy woman in her fiction. Drawing on archival research and queer theories of (stone) butch sexualities, I seek out the stigmatised, pathologised, racialised and unrespectable forms of deviance that haunt her construction of a modern Irish queer identity. Chapter Three considers the Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen’s melancholic attachments, tracing her method of coming ‘unstuck’ from temporality backward through her post-WWII and wartime writing. I argue that moments of failure, loss, disloyalty and unhappiness in her work express a queerly generative critical relationship to modernity. Chapter Four reads Molly Keane’s fiction as a camp commentary on the bad feelings of post-independence Ireland, from the vantage point of the declining colonial class. Closetedness and wilful ignorance disrupt modern mechanisms of disavowal, expressing a queered relationship to the haunting undercurrents of violence that define twentieth-century Ireland. This dissertation intervenes in Irish studies and queer studies, offering a provocative re-reading of Irish culture in the twentieth century and demonstrating the power of queer reading to carve out space for those dissenting, untimely subjects made ghostly by the operations of modernity.
Ireland, queer, twentieth-century, women's writing
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