Architectures of Exile and Self-Exile in William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey and The Story of Lucy Gault

Abstract

Much as the world of ‘Great Meadow’ in McGahern’s Amongst Women shapes the lives of its inhabitants even from afar, William Trevor’s fiction shows a striking concern with the spaces that house experience and with how those spatial structures interact with the subjects that they contain, enclose and even imprison; these spaces contribute to the meaning of Trevor’s work in ways that go beyond serving simply as backdrops for experiential and psychological dramas. This chapter will focus on Trevor’s special concern with Irish women and exile, a concern that highlights the importance of both architectural and spatial structures and the socio-historical specificities of the lives of the women in his novels. Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey (1994) and The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) dramatize two different forms of exile, but with a common purpose. Felicia’s Journey charts the progress of a young Catholic Irish girl who is, to some extent, on the run from history. Her progress is articulated most vividly in the spaces that she comes to inhabit in the course of the novel, and these spaces represent both her marginalization in Irish society and, later, her isolation and alienation as an Irish woman in exile in England.KeywordsIrish WomanIrish SocietyDomestic SpaceProtestant WomanSensitive ProtagonistThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.