Irish Girl Research Articles

Racial Prejudice and Marginalisation of the Irish Female Migrants in The Irish Girl in America by Mary Anne Sadlier through the Standpoint Theory

Racial Prejudice and Marginalisation of the Irish Female Migrants in The Irish Girl in America by Mary Anne Sadlier through the Standpoint Theory

Not Just a Wild Irish Girl: Marcella Grace and the Female Allegory of Ireland

Not Just a Wild Irish Girl: Marcella Grace and the Female Allegory of Ireland

Lugubrious Victorians, Ludicrous Narratives:

Given the socio-economic circumstances of the Victorian Era, one of its unassailable facts was that the conservative and solemn spirit of the time created a claustrophobic social atmosphere for some of its occupiers. Victorian, as well as Neo-Victorian novels register an exigency for laughter partly as a response to this solemnity. As a successful representative of the latter, Jane Harris’ debut novel, The Observations (2006) narrates the dolorous life of an Irish girl, Bessy Buckley who is taken on as a maid in a Scottish manor and is asked to perform strange duties assigned to her by the mistress of the house. This study attempts to unearth The Observations’ versatile approach to the notion of comic on three functional levels by resting on Alexander Bain’s notion of ‘ludicrous degradation.’ Firstly, the study scrutinizes comicality arising out of situations in which clashes of value and meaning occur. Secondly, it explains how ludicrous degradation turned into humour allows for psychological release. Thirdly, it looks at how Bessy’s sense of humour works as a coping mechanism and an antidote for Victorian pathos apart from being a literary source of amusement.

FIDELITY TO IRISH IDENTITY: ALLEGORY OF THE OUTSIDER IN JULIA O'FAOLAIN'S “FIRST CONJUGATION” AND JOHN MONTAGUE'S “AN OCCASION OF SIN”

Julia O’Faolain’s “First Conjugation” and John Montague’s “An Occasion of Sin” are contemporary short stories that have received critical attention. The authors’ attempts to renovate stylistic qualities of short story writing and to experiment with thematic issues in Irish literary tradition are main sources of this attention. This article examines the impact of outsiders who suddenly appear in a contemporary Irish setting in both works. Traditionally, Irish writers of fiction have pointed out a sense of isolation and solitude dominating the mind of Irish characters, which results in a network of dark and gloomy social relationships. The intervention of outsiders, however, renders this critical analysis exceptional in that outsiders disrupt social formations resulting in an identity crisis. O’Faolain’s “First Conjugation” introduces outsider image in the form of an Italian instructor who challenges the worldview of a young Irish girl, an insider in this setting. Depicted from the perspective of the Irish protagonist, the story illustrates how easily outsider challenges Irish identity. On the other hand, Montague’s “An Occasion of Sin” narrates outsider’s experience among Irish characters. The conflict between outsiders and insiders illustrates the urgent need for a renewal of Irish perceptions. Both texts focus on the aftermath of the arrival of outsiders among insiders leading to a climactic point of collision. Accordingly, this article reviews the relationship between outsiders and insiders in the selected works and argues that both texts appoint outsider as an allegory of questioning. Furthermore, the article concludes that outsider is a means of self-questioning that faces traditional notion of Irish identity and that eventually a solution to this inner conflict appears once again in the form of traditional fidelity.

‘A National Unity of Interests and Affections’: frameworks of the Union in the Early Brazilian Novel

UK novelistic fiction has been consistently acknowledged as a major repository of narrative paradigms for the incipient Brazilian novel. Genres originally offering a narrative solution for tensions embedded throughout the social life of the United Kingdom would cross the Atlantic and, by mid-nineteenth century, be rendered instrumental for structuring local experience. Among these genres, arguably, was the national tale. National tales aimed to bridge the social dilemmas inherent to a multicultural state like the United Kingdom and, more broadly, the British Empire. Works such as The Wild Irish Girl (1806), by Sidney Owenson, Marriage (1818), by Susan Ferrier, and The Absentee (1812), by Maria Edgeworth, engendered sentimental plots of star-crossed lovers who stood for the divergent UK nationalities, allegorically and didactically overcoming the perceived English prejudice against the Irish and the Scots. Circulating in Brazil for at least five decades, national tales purveyed a narrative framework whereby the unsolvable contradiction between colonial heritage and postcolonial nationalism could be fictionally negotiated in an intercultural erotic union. Indianist novels like José de Alencar’s O Guarani (1857) may have re-enacted such framework.

Epiphylogenetic Memory as Disorientation in Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

This article investigates Eimear McBride's novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing in the light of Bernard Stiegler's concept of disorientation. As a technical development, disorientation manifests itself in the girl's non-syntactic language and the gradual evolving linguistic repertoire as she matures. The article argues that McBride's usage of the idiomatic language and stream of consciousness is part of the narrator's tertiary memory or epiphylogenetic memory. The young protagonist-narrator cannot reach a state of equilibrium between her developing consciousness as an Irish girl and her technic of writing herself as the epiphylogenetic memory, hence her disorientation. The technics in the Irish context can include not only the Irish English, but also the theological and political technics which engulf the subject to form her or him to their image. Technics is a technical term used by Bernard Stiegler as the horizon of human existence. Technics, often used as a singular noun, is juxtaposed with episteme in order to highlight the ignorance of Western philosophy about the significant role it plays in the human evolution and consciousness.

Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820. Ed. David O’Shaughnessy.

<i>Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820</i>. Ed. David O’Shaughnessy.

FindingThe Irish Girl: Race, displacement, and the aesthetic promise of portraiture

AbstractAesthetic considerations have often been ignored, or even derided, when it comes to discussions of race in the 19th century. A disregard for aesthetics and the genres that arise from aesthetic experience has prevented critics from seeing how crucial such questions are to thinking about racial formations. This essay argues for the necessity of taking aesthetic practices and effects seriously in contending with questions of Irishness and anti‐Irish racism in Victorian Britain. In attending to Pre‐Raphaelite fellow‐traveler Ford Madox Brown'sThe Irish Girl(1860), this essay demonstrates how formal approaches not only allow us to observe how racial formations come to be in aesthetic terms but also teach us how to fully see the subject of the painting herself. Thinking about the painting according to the conventions of portraiture is significant for understanding the strategies by which minoritized racialized subjects—and particularly women and girls—make themselves visible.

The Silence of the Land: Antiquarian Gothic and Ireland, 1790–1831

This article argues that romantic-era antiquarian writing from Ireland threatened to disclose evidence of historical violence inflicted upon the Irish by the English, and to engender retaliatory violence in the present day. Even when Irish landscapes appeared inscrutable, their impassiveness peculiarly confirmed, rather than disproved, a violent imperial past. Beginning with a consideration of Edmund Burke’s emphatic but little studied contempt for antiquarian history, the article proceeds to explore how James Hardiman sought to recuperate Ireland’s history from its forcibly erased landscapes. The essay concludes by arguing that in The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Sydney Owenson compares her Irish setting to a dizzying array of British overseas colonies and strategic holdings, so that Ireland functions as a dark mirror of insatiable imperial ambition.

ИРЛАНДСКАЯ СКАЗКА СИДНИ ОУЭНСОН

The article for the first time considers the "Irish fairy tale" by S. Owenson as the kind of a literary fairy tale that has its own ideological-thematic specifics. The authors show that the novelist had a peculiar perception of the historical chronotope. She constantly talked about the present with an "eye" on the past, designated certain thesaurus keys in the form of an ancient legend, the Irish people, the names and surnames of the representatives of famous Irish clans. In the fairytale novels by Owenson a specific "Irish world" was formed as the world based on a national tradition based on Irish history, on historical reality in legends and fairy tales. In all the novels, the author introduces the reader to the world of legend, linking the heroic past of Ireland with the humiliated present of its indigenous population and not forgetting about the elements of the fantastic author's speculation "relying" for fairy tales. The thesaurus "freedom" becomes central to the aesthetics of the novelist, who seeks to understand her contemporaries through a historical cross-section, to show the world of the Irish people as a world full of goodness, peace, and loyalty to national traditions. The novel "The Wild Irish Girl: a National tale" (1806) is about it. The authors of the article for the first time acquaint the domestic reader with the fairy-tale novels "O'Donnell: a National Tale" (1814), "The O'Briens and the O'Flaherty: A National Tale” (1827) showing the real life of the Irish peasantry. The article contains the analysis of the novel "Florence Macarthy: an Irish Tale" (1818), which reflected the contradictions in the author's views and her doubts in the strength of the Irish spirit. The material of the Irish fairy-tale novels by S. Owenson is relevant, because it still raises socio-political questions concerning the independence of the Irish people and opens up for the researchers an undeservedly forgotten name of the famous Anglo-Irish authoress of the first half of the XIX century.

Transatlantic Railroad

Transatlantic Railroad Mary Burke (bio) This story was first published in the Irish Times on 18 May 2018, immediately prior to the referendum on the Eight Amendment, and is reprinted with permission by the author and original publisher. It has been revised here for publication in Éire-Ireland. Set in 1992 and told through the first-person perspective of a young woman who is pregnant, the story narrativizes a little-known transatlantic journeying that Irish women made to the United States in the later stages of the twentieth century. Organized by Catholic organizations, women with unplanned pregnancies were sent to stay with Catholic host families for the duration of their pregnancies, and after birth the babies were then subsequently adopted in the United States. "Transatlantic Railroad" thus contributes to the historical accounting of the many exilic journeys that women have had to make from Ireland as a direct result of the illegalities of abortion services and the absence of comprehensive reproductive health care and medical services there. ________ It is 1992. Too late in the century to be running away for the reason I am running and too late to be running so far. 500 years after Columbus and 400 years after the first university on Irish soil, from what I'm reading in the in-flight magazine. You'd think both Ireland and America would know better by now than to be transporting young women in my situation. And I am 20. You'd think I'd know better by now than to have agreed to being transported. Up the pole. Bun in the oven. In trouble. I'm making a list in the journal the agency wants me to keep of all the vague terms the Irish have for unwanted pregnancy. The journal has a picture of the Virgin Mary on the cover with her hands clasped [End Page 159] and her eyes thrown up to heaven, looking like this whole sorry business was sheer embarrassment. Never has a spokeswoman been so badly matched with her charity. ________ A "host family" the agency called them. They are the host and I am the parasite. The foolish single Irish girl who got herself knocked up. (Knocked up. I must add that one to the list.) The Catholic agency that arranges for holy shows like me to hide out with a pious family until the baby has been quietly born and adopted by another Catholic family gave me a choice of available hosts: a farming family in Cavan or an Irish American family in Connecticut. Some local Catholic charity in Connecticut would take care of my expenses. ________ Connecticut. In America, no less. ________ Jesus Christ! Did they really think I'd choose a farm in Cavan over some place in America? I think I know Connecticut from the telly. Near New York. Rich. Big cars. Mansions. Macy's and Blooming-dales on the main streets of fancy towns. ________ My hosts are Mr. and Mrs. Murphy. "Welcome, Orla," Mrs. Murphy says at Arrivals, with what seems to be genuine warmth. Maybe this is going to be okay. But my heart sinks as they drive me from JFK Airport. With every few miles northward, we seem to get farther and farther from the possibility of department stores. We pass what they tell me with obvious pride is a large and famous Connecticut public university, but it is in the middle of nowhere. There are cows grazing in fields around the campus. In the name of God, where were the nightclubs and pubs that always huddled close to campuses? They talk at length about the Catholic church in their neighboring town. It seems I will be brought there every Sunday. I begin to see tractors on the road as we approach what they called their hometown. I had travelled thousands of miles to get away from tractors on the road and seeing cows up close. Why hadn't I looked up Connecticut in the World Book Encyclopedia at home? And that word "hometown" that they keep using. Once we approached the place I can see that this wasn't what I would've called a "town." If you call something...

‘Mama, he treats your daughter mean’: Reassessing the narrative of British R&amp;B with Ottilie Patterson

AbstractThe phenomenon of British R&amp;B is most often understood in terms of young, white, middle-class British men turning to the ‘down-home’ sounds of black American men for musical motivation. This article offers a revision to this dominant narrative by reinserting ‘slim, lively Irish girl’ Ottilie Patterson, the UK's most popular blues singer before 1963. I analyse the content and context of Patterson's 1961 album, Rhythm and Blues with Ottilie Patterson, drawing from contemporaneous mass-media discourse as well as Patterson's own notebooks held at Britain's National Jazz Archive. Patterson's performances captured on this record demonstrate how R&amp;B was first publicly (re-)presented and understood in the UK. I argue that Patterson's work challenges the assumptions that (a) British R&amp;B began with the formation of Alexis Korner's Blue Incorporated and (b) the R&amp;B revival was predominately motivated by the appropriation and vicarious expression of African-American hypermasculinity.

A New ‘Rhetoric of Darkness’: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, John Connolly and the Irish Gothic

The relationship between Ireland and the Gothic goes back to the early days of the genre, when the Sublime, as identified by the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, became central to the aesthetic concepts which would abound in the articulation of the Gothic as a literary form. The “dark, desolate and stormy grandeur” of the perception of Ireland which was held by the English reading public in the late eighteenth century was readily adaptable for the use of the island as a kind of pre-Enlightenment wilderness which, when combined with its linguistic, religious and cultural “otherness”, provided a fertile territory for the growth of a literature which favoured the supernatural, the uncanny and the numerous features which unite to make up the genre. As early as 1771, Elizabeth Griffin’s "The History of Lady Barton" contains elements of the Gothic, and the huge popularity of Waterford-born Regina Maria Roche’s "The Children of the Abbey"gave a definitive boost to the genre with regard to Irish writers. The success of Sydney Owenson’s "The Wild Irish Girl", and that of Charles Robert Maturin with "The Milesian Chief" and "Melmoth the Wanderer" helped foster a tradition which would be continued throughout the nineteenth century by writers such as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, L.T. Meade and Bram Stoker. It is Le Fanu who, arguably, was the first writer to merge the Gothic with crime fiction. For Begnall, his works “oscillate between the poles of supernatural horror and suspenseful detection”, and, in short fiction such as “The Murdered Cousin” and “The Evil Guest” and novels including "Uncle Silas" and "Wylder’s Hand" Le Fanu consciously merges the emerging format of the murder mystery with the lugubrious labyrinths of the Gothic. Le Fanu’s influence was, of course, international, but the paths he trod were also followed by numerous Irish writers. One of the most successful of these is John Connolly who, since the introduction of Charlie Parker with the publication of "Every Dead Thing" in 1999 has, in the eighteen novels which have appeared to date, successfully revised the concepts and tropes which make up the Irish Gothic. In this paper these works will be analysed with reference to their debt to the Irish Gothic tradition and, most specifically, to the writing of Le Fanu.

A Story of Two Cultures in Doreen Finn’s Night Swimming (2019)

Doreen Finn’s novel Night Swimming (2019) is set during the summer heatwave of 1976 Dublin. The story is narrated by the nine-year-old Irish girl, Megan, who lives in a large Victorian house with her mother (Gemma) and grandmother (Sarah). An American family rent their downstairs flat, and this encounter of two cultures provides the framework for the entire story in which American and Irish sensibilities, mentalities, stereotypical features, and cultural markers are set against each other. The motif that permeates the entire work is the metaphor “night swimming”, which highlights the notion of going against the expected norms set by society. The loss of innocence involved envelops all the characters one way or another, and to which all must react in their own way. In the end, all the characters are forced to “grow up” and come to terms with their lives and their environment.

The Wild Irish Girl Diet

Sydney Owenson’s bestselling 1806 novel, The Wild Irish Girl, not only functions as an apologia for Irish culture but also powerfully demonstrates that Ireland’s cultural heritage and production—as well as the Irish people’s hope for survival—are intimately related to Irish diet. For Owenson, Irish agriculture, often of a subsistence variety, produces and sustains Irish culture and Irish bodies. Written at a transitional point in Irish political and literary history, the novel counters agricultural reformer Arthur Young’s portrayal of Irish agriculture as the lowliest link on a chain ascending to the British state. Owenson instead focuses on the local world of peasant agriculture and the mouths it feeds, as well as the cultural production and appreciation that this agriculture sustains.

“Celticism, ballad transmission, and the schizoid voice: Ossianic fragments in Owenson, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett”

ABSTRACTThis essay surveys responses to Macpherson’s Ossian in Irish literature, alongside analysis of the development of literary Celticism. Despite being a key text behind the development of Celticism in Irish writing, Ossian is consciously rejected in Irish Romanticism and in the Celtic Revival. However, Ossian becomes a symbol of literary recycling and mental fragmentation in Irish Modernism. Texts studied in this essay include Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Beckett’s Murphy.

In which a devout Irish girl decides to fast, and a sceptic English nurse is called to watch over her; or, The Wonder

In which a devout Irish girl decides to fast, and a sceptic English nurse is called to watch over her; or, The Wonder

Your body is our black box: Narrating nations in second-person fiction by Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Egan

Abstract For a century, the disorienting effects of second-person narration have seemed peculiarly well suited to representing the experiential confusions and political contradictions of inhabiting a female body in times of national crisis. This essay examines such effects in Edna O’Brien’s A pagan place and Jennifer Egan’s “Black box,” very different narratives that similarly exploit the deictic and ontological uncertainties of second-person address. Second person in O’Brien’s novel participates in its depiction of a sexually naïve rural Irish girl confronting the conflicting pressures of enforced chastity and reproductive futurism in the name of the Irish State. Emphasis is placed on the narrative’s unusual use of past-tense second-person narration and its intriguing overlap with O’Brien’s nonfictional writings. In Egan’s story, the protean and multivocal second person suggests a sinister fusion of individual and governmental agency, effected through the protagonist’s cybernetically-enhanced body. The result is a deceptively simple critique of post-9/11 American foreign policy as an extension of paternalism and patriarchy in the domestic sphere. The patterns investigated in this paper shed light on other recent uses of the second person in other experimental narratives concerned with identity, self-formation among disenfranchised individuals, and resistance to political and cultural oppression.

Girls and the formation of modern Ireland

ABSTRACTImages of the ‘ideal’ Irish girl and woman were mobilized through a range of dominant discourses in Ireland from 1831 to 1931: biological, educational, religious and political. Female education was firmly located within the domestic sphere. This paper critically explores the interwoven gender discourses in education that were fashioned within the ideological, religious and political context of the period and then moves on to analyze gender subjectivities and gender agency in performativity. Methodologically, it draws on uncharted archival sources such as national school books, teacher manuals, medical and religious discourse and published journal articles.

Staging the Revolution: Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and Sydney Owenson’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys

Staging the Revolution: Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and Sydney Owenson’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys Matthew L. Reznicek Sydney Owenson’s place in Irish literature in the Romantic period need not be defended; her novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) remains a foundational iteration of the genre we know as the national tale. As Claire Connolly and others have shown, Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl occasioned an important cultural event that allowed its author “both the opportunity and the means to manipulate the culture market of early nineteenth-century Dublin.”1 The success of The Wild Irish Girl, Julia Wright observes, establishes the dominant pattern that shapes Owenson’s career as a novelist and gives shape to the genre of the national tale.2 The power of the national tale lies, in Ina Ferris’s words, in its “performative notion of itself: representation as less a portrayal of something than a presentation to someone.”3 In Ferris’s formulation, the national tale presents to the audience the “potential emergence of a new public,” which recalls April Alliston’s argument about the establishment of “fictional communities” that not only are imagined “as alternatives to both family and nation,” but more stridently understood to “specifically transgress and replace” those national bonds.4 This understanding of the national tale—as providing an alternative imagining of the community—raises two significant starting points that shape this argument. First, Ferris draws attention to the performativity of this representation, suggesting that the staging of the national community is powerful precisely because it enables an audience to imagine an alternative. Second, Alliston’s claims [End Page 109] regarding a transgression and replacement of the nation enables a shift in our understanding of the national tale; we can understand it participating in, and offering a cosmopolitan alternative to, the strictures of the nation-state. Highlighting the performative staging of an alternative to the nation-state calls attention to a characteristic concern shared in both Romantic national tales and in Romantic opera: the fundamental tension between “the personal sexual and affectional issues,” on the one hand, and the “setting of national struggle and ‘public duty,’” on the other.5 These twinned tensions between personal affection and public duty dominate such national tales as Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), The Missionary (1811), and The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827). Similarly, in Romantic Operas like Bellini’s Norma (1831), Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), and Rossini’s Mosé in Egitto (1818), Tancredi (1813), L’italiana in Algeri (1813), and, most notably, Rossini’s final opera, Guillaume Tell (1829). Thematic and narrative similarities suggest that there is a relationship between novels and operas written in the early part of the nineteenth century that has, for the most part, gone unremarked upon by scholars of opera and literature. In both the Romantic national tale and the Romantic opera, there is a preoccupation with an attempt, to combine Ferris and Alliston, to present the potential alternative community based on a sympathetic relationship between the audience and the potential, transgressive alternative. This conception of a transgressive alternative mirrors the theatrical project of Denis Diderot, who argues, in his De la Poésie Dramatique (1758), that the audience “will escape the wicked men whose company they keep; . . . they will find those with whom they would live.”6 This conception of the theater “enables the formation of an idealized community,” bringing about a social alternative.7 The Romantic opera and the Romantic national tale both attempt to articulate and to stage alternative, transgressive, and cosmopolitan communities. Both of these aesthetic forms achieve this through the literary mechanism of sympathy, which in turn demands action. However, the privacy of the novel—in contrast to the shared space of the theater—ultimately troubles the polyvocal potentiality that characterises the Romantic opera’s presentation of the imagined community. [End Page 110] Notably, Owenson’s political commentary becomes more direct in her travelogues France (1817), Italy (1821), and France in 1829–30 (1830).8 Not only do these political and continental writing lay the groundwork for her final Irish...