Peig Sayers: Religious Subversions, Covert Withholdings, and Undaunted Mettle

Abstract

The autobiography Peig A Sceal Fein (1936) inaugurated a new breakthrough in Blasket Island literature. Only a few years after its original publication, the autobiography was usurped as a teaching tool by the nascent Irish Republic being shaped by the De Valera government. A school edition, carefully edited and sanitized, was published in the 1940s and Peig became a textbook incorporated every third year as part of the school Leaving Certificate. As part of an effort to explode a patriarchal, sanitized myth, I want to reexamine the life story Peig in the context of Sayers’s larger oeuvre, including An Old Woman’s Reflections (1939), and radio presentations for the BBC (1947). A fuller appreciation of these written and oral performances reveals a hidden and much more intriguing Peig Sayers who saliently invalidates the stereotype on three fronts: creatively manipulating her religious heritage to serve her own egocentric and duplicitous ends; demonstrating a proclivity for privacy that leads to strategic suppressions and covert maskings; contravening any image of pious docility when she repeatedly celebrates female rumbustious audacity and the pleasures of insurgency. The tales she selects to narrate, and her own actions within several stories, demonstrate an undaunted mettle as well as a predilection for passionate rebellion that should be spotlighted rather than suppressed or censored.