Violence, silence, and sacrifice: The mother-daughter relationship in the short fiction of Irish women writers, 1890--1980

My dissertation addresses the critical minimization of the influence of women writers upon the modern Irish short story. To address this miscalculation means revising critical theories of the genre, but also accounting for the attention women writers paid to the mother-daughter relationship. This work develops from the premise that twentieth-century campaigns for an Irish Republic conceived of motherhood, through the iconography of "Mother Ireland," as a woman's duty to the state. I argue that this construction of a selfless female identity thwarted the possibility of solidarity between mothers and daughters. After partition, the nascent political state continued to exploit the female body through physical and legislative violence, which reflected the cultural valorization of female suffering. Women writers responded to these discourses by revealing damaged mother-daughter relationships and by suggesting that the development of inter-subjectivity between women could repair this most important bond.;The short story collections of three key Irish women writers are studied here: George Egerton's Keynotes and Discords (1893, 1894); Dorothy Macardle's Earth-Bound. Nine Stories of Ireland (1924); and Mary Lavin's Tales from Bectice Bridge, The Long Ago, and Happiness and Other Stories (1942, 1944, 1969). These writers challenge the assumptions upon which Mother Ireland is founded, by attending to the psychological and interpersonal implications of mother-daughter relationships. In so doing, their work contradicts or problematicizes established critical theories which suggest that the short story reveals individuals in their aloneness, as typified by Frank O'Connor's implicitly masculine notion of individualism in his assessment that the short story is "by its very nature remote from the community---romantic, individualistic, and intransigent." Drawing on Luce Irigaray's notion of inter-subjectivity as "being two," I argue that the stories of these women writers promote an approach to selfhood that is conducive to ethical solidarity with other. I provide original readings of formally innovative stories that challenge conventional gender constructions of the relationship between women and the state. Critical movements within Irish Studies are beginning to rethink standard accounts of modern Irish women's writing. Ultimately, my project invites further scholarship which re-imagines the relation between the individual and the community in modern Ireland.