Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction

Ellen McWilliams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230285767
• eBook ISBN: 9781137314208
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction examines how contemporary Irish authors have taken up the history of the Irish woman migrant. It situates these writers' work in relation to larger discourses of exile in the Irish literary tradition and examines how they engage with the complex history of Irish emigration.

1

Women, Forms of Exile and Diasporic Identities

Emigration, exile and diaspora

The last 30 years have seen an exponential growth in studies of diaspora and diasporic identity and, within this, there is an established body of work on the Irish diaspora, its history and cultural legacies. This chapter will survey these developments to set the scene for the author-based chapters that follow; it will pay special attention to the growing body of work on women and the Irish diaspora. The primary argument of the book is that a shift is discernible around the middle of the twentieth century: before that, representations of Irish emigration were largely, although not exclusively, male-centred, and the female figure demoted to an ancillary function in portrayals of the male emigrant experience; later in the century, this pattern is vigorously contested and the female experience becomes crucial, even defining in the work. Close attention to this work reveals that it speaks eloquently to some of the most pressing concerns of Irish feminism, and in some cases pre-empts many of the insights afforded by recent examinations of women in the Irish diaspora, and the larger field of Diaspora Studies. With that in mind, the later sections of this chapter offer my own, brief account of Irish female diasporic history; they do so with a view to building on feminist critiques of the history of woman as muse in the Irish literary tradition and, by association, the dilemma of the Irish woman writer who finds herself ‘outside history’, to borrow Eavan Boland’s phrase (1995, p. 123). I then go on to look at more recent responses to this history and to examine how they are imbricated in a range of different woman-centred emigrant and diasporic discourses. In this, the book seeks to extend the enquiry of one strand in Irish feminist criticism, by attending to how the female figure is made to bear male-centred meanings fundamental to the history of imagining the male exile. At the same time, it resists an overly neat narrative by foregrounding ruptures in that same tradition, which, as will become clear in the later chapters, serve as important presages for the more recent swell of interest in a feminist perspective on the Irish diaspora.

This chapter is also concerned with the means by which theorists, literary critics and writers have sought to define terms such as ‘exile’, ‘emigrant’ and ‘diaspora’, and so it is perhaps appropriate, and even necessary, to begin by returning to a germinal moment in the broader field of Diaspora Studies. In his 1986 essay ‘A New Field of Study: Modern Diasporas in International Politics’, Gabriel Sheffer sets out the basic terms of the field as ‘the study of networks created by ethnic groups which transcend the territorial state’ (1986, p. 1).

From this early and straightforward definition, the study of migration and diaspora has been extended to encompass many complex possibilities for reading and interpreting such networks. The same discussions and debates will be sketched in the following pages and will frame the readings that make up the main body of the book; in this, the book is especially interested in how historical and literary narratives interact with, and are shaped by, each other. While the later text-based chapters will be led by the key questions and concerns foregrounded in the novels under discussion, critical and theoretical ideas from the fields of Migration and Diaspora Studies provide an especially illuminating framework for thinking about the representation of the emigrant experience in Irish literature. At the same time, there is no one theoretical model that can be applied to the study of these works, as the eclecticism of the works chosen for discussion belie such a monolithic approach. Nonetheless, theoretical and historical work in the field provides a crucial point of entry for situating these texts in relation to the chapter of social history from which they emerge or with which they engage.

Any discussion of diaspora and differentiated but closely related questions about emigration, exile from, and real or imagined return to, home, must also take account of the relationship between the different but related fields of Migration Studies and Diaspora Studies. In drawing on diaspora theory, this study seeks to use it as a starting point in exploring literary representations of the Irish experience of departure, transition, settlement and acculturation and, on arrival in the hostland, the ongoing and changing process of identifying and negotiating with the homeland, whether the subject is recognizable (or self-identifies) as an emigrant, exile or émigré. All of these processes, and what James Clifford calls ‘moments, tactics, practices, articulations’ (1994, p. 310) in the emigrant and diasporic experience, are present in the literary works to be examined. But what distinguishes them is that all of the novels in question examine such processes specifically in relation to Irish women, a commitment that, for reasons that will be explored in the final sections of this chapter, calls attention to a different and distinct set of coordinates and meanings.

In sounding a cautionary note about the need to maintain a clear distinction between Migration Studies and Diaspora Studies, Sudesh Mishra in Diaspora Criticism lands on what he sees as a critical oversight on the part of theorists and critics who treat ‘migration’ and ‘diaspora’ as if they were completely interchangeable (2006, p. 171). Mishra makes an important point here – one that the present study is mindful of – and yet for a number of social scientists and historians of Irish emigration, there is no easy or natural separation of these fields. In Women and the Irish Diaspora, Breda Gray draws attention to the inevitable overlap between these categories of meaning: ‘By embracing diaspora as a key category, I do not mean to conflate migrancy and diaspora. Indeed, the immediacy of the migrant experience, memories of and ongoing relationships to the country “of origin” mark migrant belongings out from diasporic belongings. Yet, these belongings overlap, as migrancy and diaspora are deeply interrelated categories’ (2004, p. 9, italics in original). An openness to the possibility of such overlapping is further echoed in recent policy documents on Irish migration, one of which asserts that: ‘Thinking about “diaspora” rather than “emigration” brings into focus new kinds of relationships. It draws attention to the ties between Ireland and the different communities abroad – through visits, remittances, phone calls, assistance to new arrivals, cultural exchanges. These ties can also cross between different overseas communities – Britain and the USA, Canada and Australia’ (Walter et al., 2002, p. 3). Writing in 2003, Sheffer expands on his early work and, in doing so, acknowledges that ‘there is still no satisfactory answer to the closely related question of why and when migrants form new diasporic entities or join existing ones’ (2003, p. 16).

The present study will consider the literary works to be examined here in terms of both emigration and the different but often closely related category of diaspora, particularly in describing the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) distinctions between emigrant, exile, expatriate and émigré. What I will argue variously throughout is that the novels to be examined themselves insist that we interrogate these different categories and their meanings, and provide the most penetrating commentary on the same. In another important early essay on diaspora, theorist William Safran ends with a series of ‘Open Questions’, one of which gets to the heart of these matters:

How long does it take for diaspora consciousness to develop, and what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for its survival? Does such consciousness weaken with the passage of decades or centuries, as the relationship with the real homeland is lost, or conversely, does the homeland focus become more deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of a minority as concrete experience is replaced by myth? (1991, p. 95)

Several of the authors to be discussed in this book – perhaps most strikingly John McGahern and Colm Tóibín – demonstrate a particular interest in the development of what Safran here calls ‘diaspora consciousness’ in the Irish emigrant and reveal that consciousness to be fluid and changing according to time and distance from the homeland, as well as being underpinned by differences in class, religion and gender.

In their attempt to capture the essential meaning of diaspora through tracing the etymology of the word to its Greek origins, Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur emphasize how the term captures a double meaning in describing it as ‘a term which literally (and on an historical level, negatively) denotes communities of people dislocated from their native homelands through migration, immigration, or exile as a consequence of colonial expansion, but etymologically suggests the (more positive) fertility of dispersion, dissemination, and the scattering of seeds’ (2003, p. 4). The apparent contradiction of loss and gain is one that is all-important to the novelists under discussion here, as such losses and gains receive particular attention in the narratives to be examined, especially in the figuring of the creative process of the Irish woman artist and writer at work.

In expanding on the different experiences associated with this process of departure and dispersal, in ‘Reflections on Exile’ (1984), Edward Said stages a helpful intervention in the ongoing effort to distinguish between the different experiences embodied in exile, refugee, expatriate and émigré:

Although it is true that anyone prevented from returning home is an exile, some distinctions can be made among exiles, refugees, expatriates, and émigrés. Exile originated in the age-old practice of banishment. Once banished, the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider. Refugees, on the other hand, are a creation of the twentieth-century state ... Expatriates may share in the solitude and estrangement of exile, but they do not suffer under its rigid proscriptions. Émigrés enjoy an ambiguous state. Technically, an émigré is anyone who emigrates to a new country. Choice in the matter is certainly a possibility. (2001, p. 181)

Gerry Smyth takes up this question in The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction, and reframes the terms of it by arguing that ‘exile’ is, in fact, a productive catalyst in Irish postcolonial discourse:

The exile differs from the emigrant in that the latter – in the case of Ireland, usually the victim of colonial mismanagement or post-colonial insularity – is likely to bring all the traditional oppositions with his/her other baggage. Even if in time the condition of expatriatism reflects back on the original category of Irishness, emigration is no guarantee of the distance necessary to escape the deadly prison house of colonialist modes of thought. Neither is exile, of course, but in its willingness to introduce another voice into the English-Irish exchange, it represents the beginnings of an enabling post-colonial discourse, one in which both Irishness and Englishness can be seen for the contingent, mutually implicated categories that they are. (1997, pp. 42–3)

But ‘exile’, for all of its apparent dominance, is not the final word in Irish literature and culture. In an essay ‘Whose Diaspora? Whose Migration? Whose Identity? Some Current Issues in Irish Migration Studies’, Piaras Mac Éinrí and Brian Lambkin offer a cogent summary of the changing function of ‘exile’ in Irish histories of migration:

The upsurge of interest in emigration which coincided with an increase in emigration itself in the late 1980s was followed by the ‘Robinson years’ (the period 1990–97, when Mary Robinson held the Irish Presidency) and the introduction, only partly successful, into popular Irish discourse of the term ‘diaspora’. The period can be characterised in terms of a shift between the earlier emigrant/exile paradigm and newer, more fluid processes of negotiated identities and more frequent returns. (2002, p. 134)

Nevertheless, it is no accident that exile is the determining descriptor of choice in the title of this book. The idea of exile has a particularly prized if at times problematic place in the Irish literary imagination. It is manifest in many different ways, and generates a range of meanings, which are underwritten by questions about language, and local and regional identity, as well as the more immediately recognizable meaning of exile as removal from the homeland. In choosing ‘exile’ for the title of this book, I do so with a view to exploring how representations of women and exile in contemporary Irish fiction depart from, as well as appropriate and adapt, the set of meanings associated with exile in relation to formidable forebears and a largely male-centred Irish literary tradition.

While the study of the postcolonial dimensions of Irish literature and culture is a fully fledged enterprise, it remains complicated and, at times, open to challenge for a number of reasons. Clare Carroll offers an analysis of this in an essay on ‘The Nation and Postcolonial Theory’:

Ireland, because part of the West, both geographically and culturally in Europe, is seen by some as a transgressive site for postcolonial theory that has been generated from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia. But by the same token Ireland was the first of England’s colonies, the training ground for the colonists to North America, and the context of the first English discourse on why and how to conquer and colonize. (2003, p. 3)

In his landmark 1995 study Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, Declan Kiberd explains the near exclusion of the Irish from Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s seminal The Empire Writes Back (1989), on the grounds that ‘the authors find these white Europeans too strange an instance to justify their sustained attention’ (Kiberd, 1996, p. 5). And yet, in Global Diasporas, the first edition of which appeared in 1997, Robin Cohen places the Irish diasporic experience in his taxonomy of common characteristics of diaspora without any apprehension. Most suggestive is that in classifying diasporic experiences as falling into one of the following broadly defined categories – Victim, Labour, Imperial, Trade, Deterritorialized – Cohen identifies the Irish as examples of the first, with characteristics in common with the Jewish, African, Armenian and Palestinian diasporas, although he takes pains to emphasize that more than one of these prescriptions may apply in any given case (2008, p. 18). By his own admission, Cohen’s categorization of the common features of diaspora paints in broad brushstrokes, but nevertheless offers an illuminating starting point.

Drawing on key works on diaspora in the 1980s and 1990s, Cohen modifies and expands William Safran’s earlier working definition of diaspora to develop a taxonomy of characteristics and features that includes: ‘Dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically, to two or more foreign regions’; ‘Alternatively or additionally, the expansion from a homeland in search of work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambitions’; ‘A collective memory and myth about the homeland’; ‘An idealization of the real or imagined ancestral home and a collective commitment to its maintenance, restoration, safety and prosperity, even to its creation’; ‘A strong ethnic group consciousness’; ‘A troubled relationship with host societies’; and ‘The possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in host countries with a tolerance for pluralism’ (2008, p. 17).

The exploration of diasporic identity in a number of the novels to be examined in the following chapters is illuminated by some of the tenets of Cohen’s taxonomy more than others, but collectively, these novels represent a corpus of work that immediately speaks to Cohen’s account in that they are fundamentally concerned with dispersal from the homeland, in some cases temporary, in others permanent, in a number of different contexts – from the Italian sojourn of Julia O’Faolain’s The Irish Signorina (1984) and the émigrée’s retreat to Spain in Tóibín’s The South (1990), and the more familiar territory of emigration, more often than not to Britain and America, as an economic necessity, and brought about by forces beyond the subject’s control, in the work of McGahern, Tóibín, Trevor and Enright. The power of collective memory and myth, and the idealization of the real or imagined ancestral home is strongly felt in these novels – particularly in novels such as O’Brien’s The Light of Evening (2006), McGahern’s Amongst Women (1990), Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey (1994) and Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) and, at the same time, sometimes within the same text, myths of home are tested and put under pressure. The ‘strong ethnic group consciousness’ noted by Cohen also asserts itself in several if not all of the novels, as does, at times, the feeling of cultural unease in the host society. And finally, perhaps of most relevance to the Irish woman writer, the ‘possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in host countries’ is given complex treatment in both Edna O’Brien’s aspiring writers and in the self-improving heroine of Tóibín’s Brooklyn, one that finds resonance with the Joycean tradition of creative exile, but also sets out to adapt the same in ways most meaningful to a woman-centred experience.

The coordinates identified by Cohen provide a useful sounding board for reading these novels in relation to the history of women migrants, although the key elements identified in his taxonomy appear more often than not in more complicated forms and so offer complex variations on the same themes identified by Cohen. In the range of work to be examined, the Irish woman migrant can be found positioned variously within the Irish diaspora and interacts with a number of the key elements that he identifies. Cohen’s indicators are also relevant to the lived experience of several of the authors examined here, as well as their literary representations of the experiences of the Irish woman emigrant. The indicators also contain inherent, though sometimes positive, contradictions – for example, in some cases, the troubled relationship with the host society coexists with the creative possibilities that come from living in a host country demonstrating what Cohen describes as ‘a tolerance for pluralism’.

However, one strand of Diaspora Studies contests simple notions of the journey to and from, and relationship between, homeland and hostland, in favour of a more complex view of these relationships. In his survey of the history of diaspora criticism, Mishra expresses a wariness of categories of meaning that place a heavy emphasis on the subject as caught in the tension between homeland and hostland or, as he puts it, a tendency towards readings of diaspora solely in terms of ‘dual territoriality’ (2006, p. 24). As will be examined later, more recent work in diaspora theory is as interested in the different influences that encounter each other in what Avtar Brah calls ‘diaspora space’ in her influential 1996 study Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Women, Forms of Exile and Diasporic Identities
• 2 ‘Outside History’: Exile and Myths of the Irish Feminine in Julia O’Faolain’s No Country for Young Men and The Irish Signorina
• 3 Negotiating with the Motherland: Exile and the Irish Woman Writer in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy and The Light of Evening
• 4 Relative Visibility: Women, Exile and Censorship in John McGahern’s The Leavetaking and Amongst Women
• 5 Architectures of Exile and -Self--Exile in William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey and The Story of Lucy Gault
• 6 The Refusenik Returnee and Reluctant Emigrant in Colm Tóibín’s The South and Brooklyn
• 7 ‘Ireland is Something That Often Happens Elsewhere’: Displaced and Disrupted Histories in Anne Enright’s What Are You Like? and The Gathering
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index