“Everyone wants a bit of me”: Historicizing Motherhood in Anne Enright’s The Gathering

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Notes

¹ According to Michael Parker, although between 1995 and 2001 growth in the industrial sector averaged fifteen percent, emigration dropped significantly, and unemployment fell to four percent, this wealth was not distributed equally (7). Most “beneficiaries” of this sudden wealth were “located in major cities and suburbs, and of a middle class persuasion” (7). As of 2007, twenty percent of the Irish population still remained below the poverty line.

² According to Heather Ingman, positive mother–daughter stories came late to Irish fiction: “The iconization of the mother-son relationship in both Irish Catholicism and Irish nationalism ensured that for a long time the mother-daughter story remained unwritten in Irish literature” (75).

³ David Lloyd’s crucial text Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (1993) theorizes the implicit violence of national identity formation and its explicit role within nationalism in post-Independence Ireland. Although Lloyd does not specifically address the political ramifications inherent in the production of female identity, I propose that his argument on the effects of decolonization can be applied to gender identity construction in the Republic.

⁴ In her discussion of the Citizenship Referendum of 2004, which voted to change the rules concerning the constitutional entitlement to citizenship by birth, Heather Ingman explains, “maternity continues to be the force through which the boundaries of the nation, now defined so as to exclude the threat of the pregnant immigrant body, are worked out” (25). The alteration means that people born in Ireland after the constitutional amendment took effect would not have a constitutional right to be Irish citizens, unless, at the time of their birth, one of their parents was an Irish citizen or was entitled to be an Irish citizen.

⁵ In an interview Enright herself comments on the difficulty of growing up during the tumultuous economic and cultural changes of the 1960s to 1990s: “For a woman of my generation, the break between the old and the new Ireland happened in my head: it was a confusing and disturbing time” (Maloney and Thompson 53–54).

⁶ For the purpose of this article, I will only address the victimization of women in The Gathering, not children and mental patients, although I do see Enright engaging in a national critique of all such groups rendered invisible in Irish historiography. For a more explicit analysis of Enright’s portrayal of social groups misrepresented in Irish history, see the discussion of child sexual abuse in Liam Harte and Carol Dell’Amico.

⁷ The notion of female asexuality coincides with Julia Kristeva’s discussion of Christianity and maternity. According to Kristeva, the mother participates in the symbolic community of Christianity, “not by giving birth to her children, but merely by preparing them for baptism” (146). Motherhood and female pleasure are only acknowledged enough to “imagine that she bears children, while censuring the fact that she has experienced jouissance in an act of coitus, that there was a ‘primal scene’” (146).

⁸ The terms “macro-level” and “micro-level” are used here to denote levels of analysis. I use “macro-level” as a placeholder for “domestic” or “intrastate,” emphasizing the nation-state as the scope of focus. Similarly, “micro-level” is meant to indicate a smaller unit of analysis, particularly the individual, as a subnational actor.

⁹ Irish word for parents, relatives, or folks.

¹⁰ See Article 41.2 Bunreacht Na hÉireann.

¹¹ According to Patricia Coughlan, in Irish postmodernity women’s liberation is an incomplete project: “cultural alternation is slow to take effect, but the nation’s sexual repressions, in-turned emotional culture, and misogynist containment of female sexuality were strongly affected by a remarkable series of painful events emerging from the 1980s onward” (176).

¹² Additionally, over the past thirty years, the positive correlation between the increase in premarital sexual activity, particularly among Irish youth, and the steep decline in the overall birth rate indicates the “widespread flouting of the teaching of the Catholic church on contraception” and points to the invigorated efforts to dismantle the subjugating political, social, and religious codes (Barry and Wills 1410).

¹³ As Anne McClintock has argued, “nations are frequently configured through the iconography of familial and domestic space” (McClintock 63). This sentiment is reiterated by Gerardine Meaney in her analysis of the 1937 Constitution: “the identification of the family as the basic building block of society is more than pious rhetoric in the Irish Constitution. In post-colonial southern Ireland a particular construction of sexual and familial roles became the very substance of what it meant to be Irish” (Meaney, “Sex and Nation” 233).

¹⁴ Definition borrowed from John Ruskin’s Victorian notion of “home” in “Of Queen’s Gardens” (Ruskin 68). As Irish society did not adopt Victorian ideology until after Independence, it is not unlikely that Ruskin’s definition is appropriate in the context of Irish domesticity.

¹⁵ Liam Harte explains that it is was not until the 1990s that “the endemic nature of sexual violence against Irish children surfaced into public consciousness” as a result of increasing media coverage and official inquiries into child abuse scandals, revealing how the public and private spaces of patriarchal, postcolonial Irish society were “fundamentally inhospitable to children’s welfare and well-being” (Harte 198).

¹⁶ As women’s duties in the home are constitutionally reinforced, “the most basic civil right, the right to life, is constitutionally compromised in the case of women” (Meaney, “Sex and Nation” 234). As Moynagh Sullivan explains, “the conflation of the feminine as woman projected as non-subject has been an impediment to the full achieving of political, social, and cultural participation of women in public symbolic systems” (247).

¹⁷ In her work Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation, Geraldine Moane cites C. S. Kasl’s phrase “internalized oppression syndrome” to describe the psychological mindsets of subordinates, in this case women. Borrowing from Kasl, Moane explains that the fundamental dynamic is a denial of the self and attunement to dominants, resulting in an inner duality or conflict: “the constant struggle between speaking out and being silent winds like a thread through the fabric of one’s existence” (64–65).

¹⁸ Borrowed from Timothy Bewes’s conceptualization of shame as a response “not merely for something we have done, but for who or what we are” (2).

¹⁹ Jennifer E. Spreng suggests that Catholicism as a communitarian principle of Irish society was a guiding hand in the formation of the Bunreacht Na hÉireann. Eamon de Valera wanted to draft a Catholic constitution for a Catholic country (43). In his eyes, the British had imposed the Free State Constitution on the Irish to preserve what was British in Irish society.

²⁰ As numerous scholars (Meaney “Identity”; Sullivan; Weekes) have cited, “it is particularly in relation to issues surrounding the female body, especially the reproductive body, that repression and regulation became most profound,” seen especially clearly in debates relating to abortion and the Citizenship Referendum (Cahill 5).

²¹ Irish literary censorship was more concerned with sexuality than anything else. See Censorship of Publications Act 1929, 1967.

²² According to David Lloyd, the nationalist inculcation of a domestic economy that occurred post-Independence is about “the reconstitution of the social formation and the establishment of the domestic sphere as the counterpart to an invigorated masculine public sphere of economic and political labor” (Lloyd, “Counterparts” 207). The effects of such a nationalist hyper-masculinized ideology often tied men to an over-determined sense of male sexuality.

²³ Between 1970 and 1971, the Fianna Fail government set up the first national Commission on the Status of Women and the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM) came into the public scene. According to Irish feminist journalist and activist June Levine, most people saw the IWLM as the women’s movement of the seventies, but its roots went back to 1967, “when the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women issued a directive to the International Alliance of Women’s Groups to ask their affiliates to examine the status of women in their own countries and, where necessary, urge their respective governments to set up a national commission on the status of women” (Levine 177).

²⁴ For example, in 1971 the “pill train” was a highly publicized event supporting a women’s right to choose, following the illegal transport of contraceptives by train from Belfast to Dublin.

²⁵ The institutionalization of feminine shame demonstrates the control of sexuality under the guidance of the Catholic Church. It “has been a central feature of Irish society since before the foundation of the present state, and provides a historical example of sexual exploitation in practice” (Smyth 1992; cited in Moane 52). As Tamar Mayer expands: “Nationalism becomes the language through which sexual control and repression is justified and masculine prowess is expressed and exercised” (Mayer 1).

²⁶ Veronica’s internal division between conservatism and liberation is indicative of the cultural backlash women faced while attempting to change their roles and self-concepts. While progress was made in the name of cultural change during the 1970s, the “1980s saw the Catholic Church and the Right expend considerable energy in an attempt to contain women within their traditional role” (Meaney, “Sex and Nation” 231). This feminine repression still manifests itself today as the “idealized image of Irish woman as virgin may be less powerful in contemporary writing now we are aware of its artifice,” it remains “pernicious with the continued stigmatization of sexually active single women as ‘sluts’” (Bacik 101).

²⁷ The idea for this line of argumentation comes from Dr. Robert Brazeau’s essay, “Troubling Language: Avant-Garde Strategies in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian,” on gender and embodiment in the work of Medbh McGuckian.

²⁸ Susan Cahill notes “recourse to the body is often the means by which contemporary Irish novelists structure engagements with the past”; however, Irish Studies as a discipline tends to “avoid explicit focus on the corporeal” (1–2). Enright’s attention to the various constructions of the female body is an attempt to understand feminine corporeality in its wholeness.