“The Colonization of Psychic Space”: Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You and Ireland’s Great Hunger

Abstract

As I argued in the chapter on House of Splendid Isolation, the republican anticolonialism of Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain was deformed through partition and the power of the Roman Catholic Church into a conservative, patriarchal nationalism that particularly constrained women’s agency and sexuality. In O’Brien’s novel, the “big house” of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy is metaphorically assumed by the Irish state. Although I am reading both that novel and Nuala O’Faolain’s 2001 novel My Dream of You as postbig house novels in which gender and sexual identity play a central role in imagining Irishness, the novels are extremely different in-style and historical imaginary. Whereas Josie and McGreevy are enmeshed in discourses of Irish nationalism and mythology, O’Faolain’s narrator, 50-year-old Kathleen de Burca, has spent her life fleeing Ireland and Irishness. The novel enacts her belated transformation from colonized consciousness to subjectivity and agency. A travel writer living in self-imposed exile from Ireland, Kathleen sets out to research and write what would be a big house novel, based on the 1847 historical Talbot divorce case given to her by her English lover Hugo. After her experiences during the novel, Kathleen says, “I couldn’t see any way of writing about Marianne Talbot that wouldn’t be like bad costume drama” (MDY 446).1