Reflection, Anxiety and the Feminised Body: Contemporary Irish Gothic

Abstract

Contemporary Irish women’s fiction employs gothic motifs to negotiate a traumatic history where a fear of domestic failure exposes immediate dangers through the lens of the feminized body, suggesting specific concerns with reproduction and sexuality. The Irish woman’s body becomes the canvas for cultural change in a national literature haunted by the economic rise and fall of the Tiger, suggesting a loss inherent to present-day life that is no longer associated with colonial violence or the trenches of war but, instead, with financial decline and disaster. The gothic maintains roots in psychoanalytic theory and Ireland’s cultural production of female otherness and domestic isolation, and contemporary Irish women writers employ this history to demand a reconsideration of the traditional home. As Freud argues, the modern self is both familiar and unfamiliar because it is constantly searching for a home to which it can never return; a home that may not have existed in the first place; a home that originates in the female body. As early as the Celtic Revival, if not before, Irish fiction has imagined a national landscape that simply did not exist before the push to nationalism in the late nineteenth century. Contemporary writers like Emma Donoghue and Tana French show us how the gothic has been and still is a genre through which we can express the impossibility of fully reviving an Irish past.