Rewriting the Home(land):Greta’s Journey through Space and Time in After Easter

Abstract

As a Belfast native, Anne Devlin depicts the questions of personal and national memory in histories of Ireland. In After Easter, Greta undergoes literal and spiritual journey through space and time, which enables her to become reconciled with and rewrite her ``home`` as well as her ``homeland``. To forget and, at the same time, to rewrite her dislocated identity, Greta needs to remember and revisit all the jumble of emotions back at home. Her experience of exile in England has been one of invisibility and instability made twofold by her gender; she is yet to produce her own meaning. Greta`s mysterious visions or dreams, each representing her symbolic birth, purification, and death both empower and prepare her for her painful journey. ``Her fall through space and time`` signifies that, once she overcomes her fear of rewriting her identity, she will be no longer haunted or bounded by the limitation that geographic spatiality imposes on her and will be no longer be restrained by her past memories. Her journey entails the renegotiation of concepts of home, family, motherhood and Mother Ireland as they are all components of her personal and national history. After the journey, Greta relocates her ``home`` in her soul, which will not be affected by a spatial limitation and it ultimately empowers her to narrate her own story.