Five Irish Women: The Second Republic, 1960–2016 by Emer Nolan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Five Irish Women: The Second Republic, 1960–2016 by Emer Nolan Conor Carville Five Irish Women: The Second Republic, 1960–2016, by Emer Nolan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, 232 p., hardcover, €80) The Irish literary studies turn to theory that began in the 1990s has seemed somewhat to stall over the last decade, in Ireland as elsewhere. There are many reasons for this change: the so-called war on terror and the felt need to respond to it, neoliberal restructuring of the university, the imposition of austerity, and not least the opening up of many important literary archives—all combined to encourage a return to more securely historicizing, often Marxian, ways of thinking. Indeed in recent years the heady discourse once dismissed by Edna Longley as a fashionable cocktail of Derry and Derrida sometimes seems like a blip that has been succeeded by business as usual. There are many who would like to think so. Emer Nolan is not one of them. She is well known for her groundbreaking work James Joyce and Nationalism (1995) and more recently for her retrieval of several fascinating Irish writers from the nineteenth century in Catholic Emancipations (2007). Her newest book, Five Irish Women: The Second Republic, 1960–2016, carries a bold historical claim in its subtitle. But it is still a remarkable contribution to the theoretical analysis of contemporary Irish writing, clearly building on her previous work. The great strength of this survey of the life and work of Edna O'Brien, Sinéad O'Connor, Bernadette McAliskey, Nuala O'Faolain, and Anne Enright is the lightness with which it carries its conceptual tools. It is an exemplary case of an academic translating hard-won ideas into accessible, elegant prose, finding well-known, easily recognizable, yet radical figures to analyze. The fact that all five such figures are women, and that it would be well-nigh impossible to find five men upon which to successfully carry out a similar operation is significant in itself. Each chapter examines one of the women listed above, and the book proceeds in a broadly chronological fashion, beginning with O'Brien and ending with Enright. One of the ways in which Nolan continues the preoccupations of earlier Irish cultural criticism is by examining what it means to speak from a particular subject position, or as a particular identity, or with a particular voice. In Irish Studies, as has often been pointed out, the position, identity, or voice is often understood first and foremost as Irish, at the expense of other factors, such as whether the voice is that of a woman, or a rural laborer, or a person of color. And yet the attempt, by a critic, to hear that voice as black or working class has its own problems and unexamined assumptions. In her introduction Nolan addresses this issue head-on, saying that in the book she is drawing on Simone de Beauvoir's universalism, as filtered through Toril Moi, rather than the particularism of second-wave feminism. That is to say the book posits—implicitly for the most part—what must be a neutral ground or frame on or in which more discrete identities inscribe themselves. [End Page 153] One slight niggle is that the nature of this ground or frame is never made clear. Are we talking, as the reference to de Beauvoir in the introduction implies, about the bedrock of a shared "humanity"? Or is it something more rarefied and fluid than that, a kind of constitutive gap or absence that frames performances of identity? The first essay, on Edna O'Brien, seems to suggest the latter. Nolan unsparingly attends to the contradictions and controversies surrounding some of the writer's pronouncements, and draws on Judith Butler to see these as a kind of chaotic and ambivalent performance of female identity. On the other hand, for Sinéad O'Connor there is, according to Nolan, an attempt to escape from feminine identity and the expectation that she sing "as a woman" in order to "transcend the category of woman." One wonders in what this transcendental space consists. The longest chapter is on Nuala O'Faolain, which is apt, for Nolan teases...