Irish Women Evicted: The Rural Home and the Gendered Politics of Economic Morality in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields

Abstract

At first glance Claire Keegan’s collection of short stories Walk the Blue Fields, published during the tail end of the Celtic Tiger, seems out of place. While her contemporaries situate their counter-narratives of wealth disparity, gender identity crisis, and familial demise within urban high-rises, impoverished slums, and brooding cityscapes, Keegan’s priests, farmers, and housewives inhabit a seemingly timeless rural Ireland filled with sprawling farmlands, Protestant estates, and ancient cliffs. However, Keegan destabilises and re-appropriates traditional Ireland, making the rural a resource for challenging the gendered hierarchy of spatial, and by extension, economic relations in contemporary Ireland through the image of the home. In both ‘The Parting Gift’ and ‘Night of the Quicken Trees’, not only does Keegan position women in precarious relationships to land, property, and the rural home to identify the unequal social impact of economic morality for women, but also to illuminate the ways in which the continuing dependence on traditional precepts of gender and national belonging are employed to regulate what the prevailing power structures of the state conceive as a threatening femininity in contemporary Ireland. Underneath the rhetoric of hostile femininity, Keegan reveals the regressive and unequal gendered moral logic present within a neoliberal ‘new’ Ireland.