A Female Fate in “Quare Name For A Boy”, by Claire Keegan

Abstract

Questions regarding the female gender – especially those that entail women’s role in society – are better understood once analyzed within a historical background. In the Irish patriarchal perspective, women were idealized as wife and mothers; motherhood was imposed as a social norm, and the domestic realm was sanctified as the basis of the family unit. This institutionalized version of womanhood, questioned initially by the 1970s feminist movements, is confronted by the transformations of Ireland after the Celtic Tiger Period, when the work environment was redesigned with the inclusion women as workforce. From the 1980s onward, Irish women demanded the revision of issues such as marriage, motherhood, abortion, sexual freedom and equal pay. In “Quare Name for a Boy”, published in Antarctica (1999), Claire Keegan presents the predicament of a woman who gets pregnant after a casual fling, returning home to reassess her place and fate, in comparison to those of her female relatives. This reading of Keegan’s story, in the light of studies by Pauline Jackson, Jacqueline Rose, and Pilar Argaiz on the social and cultural transformations that Ireland has undergone, intends to demonstrate how women are breaking the mold regarding female fate by opting for a more independent role in society.