Sexual Figures and Historical Repression in 'The Dead

ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries, 2014

This paper explores the ways in which some of the best and most representative Irish women fiction writers of the twentieth century responded to the exigencies of Catholicism in their selected works. It also attempts to demonstrate how the treatment of Catholicism in Irish women’s fiction changed throughout the century. The body of texts that are examined in the paper span almost seventy years, from the early years of the independent Irish state to the turn-of-the-century Ireland, during which time both Irish society and the Irish Catholic Church underwent fundamental changes. How these authors tackle the relationship between the dominant religion and the shaping of woman’s identity, how they see the role of woman within the confines of Irish Catholicism, and to what extent their novels mirror the period in which they are written are the main issues which lie in the focus of the paper.

2015

2006

Postcolonial Text, 2009

2015

The Ironies of Widowhood: Displacement of Marriage in the Fiction of George Eliot By Catherine A. Civello I am master of you. Romola (483) He observed with pleasure that Miss Brooke showed an ardent submissive affection which promised to fulfill his most agreeable previsions of marriage. Middlemarch (87) She had been brought to accept him in spite of everything-brought to kneel down like a horse under training for the arena, though she might have an objection to it all the while. Daniel Deronda (365) <1> Literary critics from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar to Barbara Hardy to Allison Booth have observed that George Eliot's novels raise doubts about the desirability of matrimony; as discontented wives, Romola, Dorothea, and Gwendolen resist their husbands' objectification of them. This, however, does not tell the whole story. In Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, Eliot strategically ironizes each marriage by deliberately constructing a widowhood that surpasses the marriage in, at least, the promise of happiness and productivity. The renewed sense of agency of their widowed protagonists unsettles Victorian expectations. In the essay that follows, I will argue that George Eliot foregrounds widowhood instead of marriage in her three major novels, deploying a feminist irony that disrupts both cultural and literary idealizations and raises questions about assumptions regarding the configuration of irony in women's fiction. <2> Eliot repeatedly writes from a feminist position as she exposes the desirability of marriage and the dread of widowhood. Set in Renaissance Florence, Romola features the intelligent daughter of the blind scholar, Bardo, who meets Tito, a stranger who ingratiates himself into her family. As he dupes the ignorant country girl, Tessa, into believing that they are married, he actually marries Romola. Their marriage is a nightmare. Death, however, intervenes. After Tito's father murders him, Romola nurses a village through pestilence, seeks out Tessa and her children, and supports them-financially and psychologically-for the rest of her life. Like Romola, Dorothea Brooke is devoted to learning, and frustrated with the limited scope of an unmarried woman's life. Just as Tito feigns good character, Casaubon exaggerates his scholarship. Upon marrying him, Dorothea despairs of happiness. But, as widow, Dorothea abandons her aversion for traditional domesticity and, to all appearances, finds happiness in her remarriage. Finally, the spirited Gwendolen Harleth vows not to marry and then recants in order to save her family from poverty. The marriage is a battleground between Gwendolen's will and Grandcourt's attempts to break it. Grandcourt's drowning, however, catalyzes Gwendolen to assume responsibility for her actions, as she changes not so much her way of life as her frame of mind. <3> The demise of each husband releases the surviving spouse from his authoritarianism and, in varying kind and degree, from his abuse. Destabilizing matrimony, which is pivotal in her three most powerful works, places Eliot at odds with Victorian cultural assumptions. Joseph Allen Boone, however, has uncovered a "counter-tradition," in both structure and theme, to the Victorian marriage ending. Boone places the writer's gender in the background, as he discusses such diverse authors as James, Eliot, Melville, Woolf, and London, whereas I will treat gender difference as crucial to the endings of these novels. The strategy that George Eliot uses to obviate the criterion of marriage-as-ending is irony.(1) When Rachel Blau DuPlessis questions Dorothea's marriage to Will at the end of Middlemarch, calling it "contradictory" and a "discrepancy," she does not mention the ironies involved. Marianna Torgovnick's work more

Race in Irish Literature and Culture, 2024

Representations of race are intimately bound to representations of the struggle for freedom and autonomy, made more complex by focusing on novels written by women. These representations of race in Irish women’s literature challenge the ability of Irish women to achieve independence alongside rather than against the colonized peoples of the nineteenth-century Irish literary landscape.

The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 2004

Studies, 2007

مجلة وادی النیل للدراسات والبحوث الإنسانیة والاجتماعیة والتربویه, 2021

This paper examines the crisis of three Irish young men whose lives are devastated by both their motherland and blood-mother. The discussion of this paper will be into three areas. First, how Ireland itself is portrayed as a fragile, subjugated female figure in several Irish literary works. Second, the attributes of three Irish mothers as mirroring the image of Ireland itself. Third, the dilemma of three Irish young men as products of both motherland and blood-mother. The scope of discussion will be on Cormac in O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men, Willie in Trevor's Fools of Fortune and Cal in Mac Laverty's Cal. Irish people have been victims under the heavy hand of British colonialism. The merciless hand of the arrogant colonizer turned Irish people against each other, with an inner inclination towards sectarianism and animosity. Throughout such bloody history of occupation Ireland has been pictured by both British imperialists and Irish nationalists as a helpless, poor and humiliated female or a mother who is completely overwhelmed by her perpetual miseries, who needs help to be saved. While the British portrayal of Ireland as a weak female seeks to keep Ireland in subjugation, the Irish description of Ireland as a humiliated female aims to motivate the Irish people to defend their country. Such features of mother Ireland are transferred into the blood mothers in the three selected texts. Grainne, Cormac's mother in O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men, is responsible for Cormac's escape where she cares more

2018

The George Eliot Review, 2016

2016

Take a woman\u27s head, stuff it with a smattering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false notions of society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every day, and serve up hot in feeble English, when not required . (Eliot 1992:305) \u27Silly Novels by Lady Novelists\u27, George Eliot\u27s vitriolic overview of popular novels of the 1850s, which is the source of the mock-recipe above, was published in 1856, shortly before Eliot started writing her first work of fiction, \u27The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton\u27 . More than ten years then passed before she began work on Middlemarch, her fifth novel, so it would certainly be far-fetched to assume that there is a direct connection between the opinions she voiced in \u27Silly Novels\u27 and the composition of Middlemarch. However, in my essay I am going to argue that the plot of George Eliot\u27s masterpiece can in fact be seen as a reaction against stereotypical novelistic plot devices which she h...

2011

The writers he describes may well have had good grounds for their negative assessment of Christianity. Certainly, in the course of the twentieth century, it is hard to find too many Irish novels which grapple in a searching manner with questions of Catholic faith as such we never came close to producing, for example, a Francis Mauriac or a Graham Greene. More typically, there are denunciations of superstitious religiosity and unflattering portraits of priests who are for the most part concerned with power and prestige rather than any real spiritual quest.