Memory and counter-memory in contemporary Irish historical fictions: Lia Mills’ Fallen (2015), Mary Morrissy’s The Rising of Bella Casey (2016) and Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars (2020)

ABSTRACT

The historical novel is frequently denigrated and misunderstood and has generated clashing assessments amongst its current Irish practitioners. Lia Mills’ Fallen (2015), Mary Morrissy’s The Rising of Bella Casey (2016) and Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars (2020) all centre on the period during or after the Easter Rising but consciously set out to displace, complicate, and feminise the narratives associated with it while delving into important historical events which are usually suppressed such as Irish involvement in World War One and the Spanish Flu epidemic. In concentrating on women, dead soldiers, and queer or abjected outsiders, they pointedly foreground subjects usually missing from historical texts. Romance and desire play shaping roles in the plots of these novels but simultaneously they indicate that losses, social disadvantage, and scenes of injustice in the past cannot be cancelled out. What counts as knowable and part of historical memory is weighed up against voided moments and the incoherence of counter-memory. History is at once reclaimed and also estranged in these novels.

KEYWORDS:

• Historical novel
• biofiction
• memory and counter-memory
• queer identity
• women and work
• pregnancy and illness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Anderson, “From Progress to Catastrophe,” for an account of the waning of the historical novel in the UK and its decline into a recessive form.

2. See Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, which puts forward a maternal genealogy of this genre and uncovers its feminist underpinnings.

3. On the intergeneric hybridity of historical fiction, see de Groot, The Historical Novel, 1–19.

4. References to these texts will be given in parentheses.

5. For the links between memory and imagination, see Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 21–55.

6. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 93–97.

7. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 15–69.

8. Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room, 1–15.

9. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 130–137.

10. Connolly, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829, 2–5.

11. Connolly, “The Secret of Castle Rackrent,” 663–675.

12. O’Connor, “Star of the Sea” and Lynch, “There’s No Such Thing as Historical Fiction.”

13. Crown, “Emma Donoghue.”

14. Layne and Tóibín, “Colm Tóibín.”

15. O’Connor, “On Writing Miss Emily.”

16. Moss, “We Need to Read about Trauma.”

17. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 67.

18. Heller, “The Contemporary Historical Novel,” 88–97.

19. Clarissa Dalloway’s impeded sympathy for the shell-shocked soldier, Septimus Smith, and his tragic suicide is rewritten in the relationship between Katie and Hubie.

20. Mills, “It Could Be You,” 123–124.

21. Mills, “Writing the Rising,” 150–155.

22. Martin, “1916,” 68.

23. McGarry, The Rising: Ireland: Easter 1916, 4.

24. Gregory and Pašeta, eds., Ireland and the Great War, 1.

25. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 5.

26. Bari, Dressed, 91–97.

27. On the carnage at Mount Street Bridge, see McGarry, The Rising: Ireland: Easter 1916, 173–174.

28. Mac Curtain, Ariadne’s Thread, 219.

29. Salis, “On the Brink of the Absolutely Forbidden,” 314.

30. Murray, Sean O’Casey, 33–38.

31. O’Casey, Drums Under the Window, 69.

32. Ibid., 138.

33. Ibid., 134.

34. Salis, “On the Brink of the Absolutely Forbidden,” 315.

35. Lackey, “Ireland, The Irish and Biofiction,” 113.

36. See note 34 above.

37. For O’Casey’s emotionally charged account of his sister’s death, see Drums Under the Window, 133–135.

38. Outka, Viral Modernism, 1–38.

39. Foley, The Last Irish Plague, 163–170.

40. On the atypical demography of this flu which affected young men and pregnant women more than the elderly, see Foley, The Last Irish Plague, 29–46. See Berlatsky, and “Emma Donoghue on Writing The Pull of the Stars” for an account of the genesis of the novel.

41. Brooker, “Reanimating Historical Fiction,” 174.

42. On Kathleen Lynn’s career, see Ó hÓgartaigh.

43. Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 227.

44. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 88.