“You Ought to Take Up Writing”: Story, Place, and Gender in the Fiction of Mary Lavin

Abstract

To be considered an Irish writer is to invite any number of expectations of identity: rural or urban, nationalist or (post-) colonialist, a Tomas O’Crohan or a Samuel Beckett. While the complexity of these expectations only adds to the vitality and richness of Irish literature, it can also add an unspoken demand on the author’s work: either to participate in the observed tradition or to stand out through a distinction of style. Critics have long attempted to codify the essence of Irish literature with varying degrees of success, and the “Irishness” of the author is ultimately used as a kind of cultural capital toward the creation of an aesthetically defined Ireland, a trend initiated by Yeats and the other Irish Renaissance cultural nationalists. As many scholars have noted, though, this particular Ireland is a feminized concept with Cathleen ni Houlihan as the most recognizable avatar. The aesthetic re-imagining of the country as a coherent and identifiable whole, furthermore, like the authors’ characteristics that shape it, reveals a desire for commodified art and artists through which “Irishness” is negotiated. Within this context, it is no surprise that Mary Lavin’s fiction plays such a complicated and understated role. In a field dominated by male authors and capitalist demands, Lavin’s writing engages the gendered expectations underlying this translation of art into capital. One of her earliest stories, “A Story with a Pattern,” a response to Lord Dunsany’s suggestion that her fiction show more of a “well-defined plot,” presents a female author faced with the demand of a reader for stories that have discernable plots and tidy endings. The critic’s clear equation of a sense of plot with masculine writing places the narrator in the uncomfortable position of being unable to justify her participation in the literary world