History, Hunger, and the Construction of an Irish Homeland: Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder and Mary Gordon’s Pearl

Abstract

ABSTRACTSet in rural Ireland in the 1850s, the Irish Canadian writer Emma Donoghue’s latest novel, The Wonder (2016), is an alternative historiographical narrative of the Great Famine. Narrated from the perspective of a nurse who eventually becomes the rescuer of the famished heroine, the novel pulls out the problematic dynamics between the politics of remembering/telling and the historiographical discourse of the Great Hunger. In Mary Gordon’s Pearl (2005), however, the performance of hunger is adopted by the novel’s heroine Pearl as a political means to provide a voice for the silenced ones. Yet hunger as such is also an inherently Irish act of remembering, both politically and historically. By looking into these two contemporary novels that undertake the rewriting of the history of Irish hunger memories, this article attempts to address the politics of remembering hunger and the historiographical construction of homeland in the diasporic context of a national narrative.