For love and country: queering nationalism in Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle and Farewell Spain

Abstract

ABSTRACT Considering Irish writer Kate O’Brien in the context of sapphic modernisms might seem misguided as her fiction is traditional in form. Still, revisiting her writing has illuminated its play with modernist themes, and her radical establishment of transnational feminisms in her juxtaposition of Ireland and Spain. Referencing theories by Nira Yuval-Davis and the work by Jane Garrity that map the intersection of gender, sexuality and citizenship, this article argues that O’Brien presents alternative possibilities for women’s relationship to nationhood in her representations of Spain in her 1936 novel, Mary Lavelle, and her 1937 Farewell Spain. The travelogue, chronicling O’Brien’s sojourn in Spain accompanied by Mary O’Neill, her life partner, is an elegy to her experiences of a country ravaged by Franco’s fascist forces. Tracing the sapphic erotics that course through her love letter to the “femme fatale among countries,” from the language of ecstatic pleasure in her description of bullfights, and her adoring depictions of gendered, anthropomorphized towns, O’Brien presents a love of Spain in sapphic terms that is itself an object of queer devotion. As a result, her relationship with Spain revises perceptions of women’s connection to nationhood, even if temporarily, and opens new spaces for a queer nationalism.