Sexing the Changeling: Magic Realism and Queer Geography in the Oeuvres of Yeats and French

Abstract

Mulligan continues to chart the relations among political and bodily maps by reading Tana French’s murder thrillers In the Woods and The Likeness alongside the folk-belief-based and mythically realist tendencies of W. B. Yeats’s oeuvre. His poetry and drama conflate the physical topography of Sligo, his “homeplace,” with figures of woman-as-nation to address the horrific, alienating violence of the Great War, the War for Independence, and the Irish Civil War. Yeats’s frequent retreats into this Otherworld, enabled by his socioeconomic and gender privilege, are interrogated by both the revisionist mythology of French’s novels and the historical precedent of Bridget Cleary’s burning as a changeling. Throughout French’s work and Cleary’s life, Mulligan shows that the Otherworld ceases to be a contented, safe place, becoming instead the locus of death for women who dare to violate the borders enforced by patriarchal culture.