“It’s a lot of work”: reading domestic labour in Anne Enright’s The Green Road

ABSTRACT

Through reading forms of domestic labour undertaken by the two daughter figures of Anne Enright’s 2015 novel, The Green Road, this article contends that the novel not only captures the everyday texture of contemporary Irish gender norms but also reveals the interdependency between constructions of Irish womanhood and labour as signified by Article 41.2 – the infamous “women in the home” article – of the Irish Constitution. In this way, the types of domestic labour foregrounded in the novel – predominantly consumerism, cooking, and child care – provide a means of exploring the shifting role of women in contemporary Ireland. Eschewing a straightforward generational reading of the mother and daughter figures of the novel, this article instead focuses on descriptions of domestic labour (characteristic of a mode Susan Fraiman has termed “shelter writing”) performed by the characters of Constance and Hanna Madigan. In focusing on the labour of these Celtic Tiger-era housewives, more often understood as depoliticised, if not outright apolitical figures, this article argues that The Green Road mounts a tacit political critique regarding the individual, familial, and cultural functions of domestic labour, a critique which has been overlooked due to Enright’s attention in this realist novel to description and domestic labour itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Anne Enright
• Article 41.2
• domestic labour
• housework
• women and the home
• shelter writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Enright, Making Babies, 2.

2. Enright, Wig, 82; Enright The Gathering, 36; and Enright, Waltz, 13.

3. Federici, “Wages Against Housework,” 194; Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 437; Munford and Waters, Postfeminist Mystique, 71; and Hollows, “The Feminist and the Cook,” 33.

4. Beaumount, “Women,” 183.

5. Laird and Penney, “Issues,” n.pag.

6. Clear, “Women, Work and Memory,” 191; Scannell, “The Constitution,” 72.

7. Coughlan, “Irish Literature,” 175.

8. Valiulis, “Virtuous Mothers,” 102–03.

9. Redmond and Harford, “The Marriage Ban,” 649.

10. Fine-Davis, Gender Roles, 16.

11. Ging, “All Consuming Images,” 66.

12. Kennedy, “Celtic Tiger Economy,” 107.

13. Fisher, “What is Hauntology,” 16; Nolan, Five Irish Women, 187.

14. Enright, The Green Road, 9. Further references to The Green Road will be given parenthetically.

15. Sydora, “Historicizing Motherhood,” 239.

16. Barros-Del Rio, “Fragmentation and Vulnerability,” 41.

17. Fraiman, Extreme Domesticity, 9.

18. Bal, “Over-writing as Un-writing,” 571.

19. Riffaterre, “Descriptive Imagery,” 125.

20. Beaujour, “Some Paradoxes,” 47.

21. Wall, The Prose of Things, 13.

22. Fraiman, Extreme Domesticity, 30.

23. Bowlby, “Domestication,” 87: “consumption has been intimately bound up with the changing forms of domestication” since the nineteenth century.

24. Schwartz-Cowan, More Work, 4.

25. Bowlby, “Domestication,” 86–87.

26. Nolan, Five Irish Women, 192.

27. Negra, What a Girl Wants?, 9; Hollows, “Can I Go Home Yet?” 108.

28. Genz and Brabon, Postfeminism, 51.

29. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 487.

30. Bowlby, “Domestication,” 85.

31. Fraiman, Extreme Domesticity, 17.

32. Enright, Like, 234: Anna’s mother is described as making lists through “things that she shifted around the kitchen; the tea cosy placed on the table for more tea, the lid of the bread bin propped open for flour […] The whole room was a reminder to her.” See also, Enright, “Ennis, Armagh, Howth and Ballymun,” in Enright, No Authority 103: Enright begins an essay reflecting on her time as Laureate for Irish Fiction with a consideration of listing. She writes: “Last year, a student writer told me that novelists are not supposed to use lists; ‘but you do it all the time.’ […] I am prone to a list.”

33. Ibid., 233: “Hanna was too miserable to help and Emmet did not see the need for it […] Dan did not do dishes.”

34. Ibid., 189: “He got upset if there was a scratch on something […] if there were used tea bags on the kitchen counter.”

35. Ibid., 193; McRobbie, “Sexual Contract,” 726.

36. Patton and Choi, Home Sweat Home, xiv-xv.

37. Schneider, Anne Enright, 3; Nolan, Five Irish Women, 170.

38. Enright, The Green Road reading, January 2018.

39. Moloney, “Anne Enright,” 55: Enright suggests that “Irish prose tends to cling to the world in an underconfident way. This is a table, this is a chair. The table is not going to sprout wings and fly out the window. The world should be very ordinary and not be doubted;” Meade, “Interview,” n.pag. Enright notes: “they say it’s typical of the fiction of an East Anglian graduate that […] everyone will sit down and have a cup of tea. Well I’m an East Anglian graduate and the first cup of tea I ever had in a book was in The Gathering. I never boiled a kettle in prose until then.”

40. Nolan, Five Irish Women, 188.

41. Ibid., 179.

42. Fraiman, Extreme Domesticity, 3.

43. Sehgal, “Mothers of Invention,” n.pag.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the 2020-2021 Pyle Postgraduate Bursary; a Trinity College Dublin Studentship (1252) award.