“Stories last a long time after you go”: female solidarity in Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars and Elaine Feeney’s As You Were

ABSTRACT

This article explores Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars (2020) and Elaine Feeney’s As You Were (2020) within the context of the Celtic Phoenix (2013–the present) particularly in relation to the political discourses of recovery from the Great Recession (2008–2013), recently carried out national referendums, constitutional changes, the reports on the systemic abuse in Magdalene Laundries and The Mother and Baby Homes, and contemporary feminist hashtag activism. Set in hospital wards, both novels depict Irish women’s struggles with their health problems to address a variety of social, cultural, political, legal, and economic impediments they face throughout Ireland’s traumatic history and emphasise shared compassion and care that reinforce the experience of communal beingness and solidarity among them. These hospital wards can be regarded as matrixial borderspaces that transform its inhabitants by means of female bonding. This article argues that both novels challenge the neoliberal discourses of recovery in the Celtic Phoenix period by deploying the discourse of illness to expose violence, injustices and inequality against women and present the female body as a site of collective empowerment, emotional support and empathy.

KEYWORDS:

• Communal beingness
• Elaine Feeney
• Emma Donoghue
• empathy
• female body
• matrixial borderspace

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Frawley, “Introduction,” 2.

2. Ibid., 3.

3. Ibid., 5.

4. O’Toole, “Waking the Feminists,” 144; 135–6.

5. Barry and Conroy, “Ireland in Crisis,” 205.

6. O’Toole, “Waking the Feminists,” 148–9.

7. Ibid., 136.

8. Fogarty, “Memory and Counter-Memory,” 10.

9. Casserly, “Exhibiting Éire,” 239.

10. “Let’s keep the recovery going!” was the slogan of Fine Gael, then the largest party in a coalition government with Labour, in the 2016 Irish general election.

11. See, for example, Nelson and Kaminsky, “History Repeated”; Yazgünoğlu, “Quarantine Time”; Lee, “Emma Donoghue’s Pandemic Novel”; Thompson-Walker, “Don’t Believe History Repeats”; and Pierce, “Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars.”

12. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1.

13. The 1937 Constitution is often cited for placing restrictions on the women, and how the female body was subsequently treated in Ireland is observable through the fraught and controversial history of abortion. The Eighth Amendment, which gave women and the unborn equal rights to life, was added to the Constitution in 1983. The amendment on the right to travel outside the State for abortion passed in 1922. In 2012, the death of Savita Praveen Halappanavar, due to sepsis, after being denied an abortion caused great protest and in 2013, the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act was signed into law, allowing for abortions where a woman’s life was deemed to be at risk to be implemented in certain circumstances. Finally, the Eighth Amendment, with the support of a huge campaign, was repealed by referendum in 2018 with 66.4% majority of vote.

14. Dr. Kathleen Lynn (1874–1955) was a medical doctor and an active participant in the suffragist, nationalist and socialist movements. She was a rebel in 1916 Easter Rising, served in Irish Citizens Army, treated the wounded in the War of Independence, joined Sinn Féin and was elected as vice-president. She founded St Ultan’s Children Hospital (1919) with her life-long companion, Madeline French-Mullen, and they both devoted their lives to fight with poverty and diseases in Ireland.

15. Donoghue, Pull of the Stars, 23–4.

16. Ettinger, “Trans-Subjective Transferential Borderspace,” 223.

17. Donoghue, Pull of the Stars, 58.

18. Ibid., 84.

19. Ibid., 88.

20. Ibid., 222.

21. Ettinger, “Metamorphic Borderlinks,” 165.

22. Donoghue, Pull of the Stars, 180 (original emphasis).

23. Ibid., 144.

24. Ibid., 83.

25. Pollock, “Editor’s Introduction,” 85.

26. Feeney, As You Were, 120.

27. Costello-Sullivan, “Trauma and Recovery,” 407–8. (original emphasis)

28. Feeney, As You Were, 77.

29. Ibid., 118.

30. Pollock, “Editor’s Introduction,” 24.

31. Costello-Sullivan, “Trauma and Recovery,” 409.

32. Falci and Reynolds, “Introduction,” 5.

33. Ibid., 6.

34. Donoghue, Pull of the Stars, 230.

35. Ibid., 285. (original emphasis).

36. Ettinger, “Metamorphic Borderlinks,” 125.

37. Elaine Feeney is one of the founding members of the Tuam Oral History Project (2019–2023) at the University of Galway, which aims to archive oral histories of Tuam survivors, provide access to this archive via digitalised and print material, and produce creative and academic publications, podcasts, seminars, conferences, documentaries and exhibitions about the personal memories of individuals connected to the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home. (For more information, see “Tuam Oral History Project.”

38. Feeney, As You Were, 180–1.

39. Donoghue, Pull of the Stars, 253.

40. Ibid., 254. (original emphasis).

41. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 30.

42. Barr, “Repealing the Eighth.”

43. Ettinger, “Trans-Subjective Transferential Borderspace,” 224.

44. Donoghue, Pull of the Stars, 240.

45. Ibid., 248.

46. Ibid., 250.

47. Donoghue, “Tough Times.”

48. Feeney, As You Were, 335.

49. Ibid.

50. Wills, “Coda,” 301.

51. Kenny, “Enda Kenny’s State Apology.”

52. See note 50 above.

53. Ibid., 302.

54. See note 48 above.