“Do you think Mammy’s alright?”- A interdisciplinary exploration of themes of Irish Motherhood in Anne Enright’s The Green Road.

Roisin Freeney and Orlagh Woods

This paper places the three distinct depictions of motherhood in Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015) in a historical and cultural context to expose how the social construction of Irish motherhood can shape the perceptions of mothers across generations. Enright’s novel spans forty years in the lives of the Madigan family of West Clare, and centres on the experience of the matriarch, Rosaleen Madigan, who has summoned her offspring home for Christmas with the news that she is selling the family home. The construction of motherhood in Irish culture has a very particular legacy, placed, as it was, at the helm of a post-colonial, nation building project that was extremely Catholic and conservative. Enright adapts Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play with notoriously vexed understandings of gender, sexuality, and the body. By putting Shakespeare in dialogue with the Irish Mammy, Enright interrogates the limiting archetypes that are destructively cast onto women and considers what happens when a woman seeks an articulation of self beyond these conventions. This paper draws on two distinct fields of literary criticism and cultural sociology to explore the Enright’s nuanced representation(s) of Irish motherhood. This is an important endeavour as the voice of the Irish Mother is one that has been muted in Irish culture and she has been constantly defined, represented and even impersonated by male entertainers and artists.

Gestation, childbirth, and the horror genre have often gone hand in hand, as seen in popular films and novels such as Rosemary’s Baby, The Brood, and Alien. The inherent unknowability and invisibility of the fetus growing inside the pregnant body as well as the sometimes animalistic and unpredictable changes the pregnant body goes through in the process of gestation gives ripe opportunity for narrative speculations in corruption, contamination, and morally subversive iterations of the otherwise naturalized and romanticized processes of gestation and childbirth.

In this paper, I will discuss two horror novels depicting pregnancy and childbirth, Doris Lessing’s 1988 novel The Fifth Child and Naomi Booth’s 2017 novel Sealed. I will consider how they each draw on horror tropes such as suspense and explicit gore to represent the strangeness and unknowability of pregnancy in written form and consider how the lack of visual references in the textual form of the novel works to support this sense of horror. In a comparative analysis, I will consider how each novel, by virtue of its historical and geographical context, imagines the relationship between the inside and the outside of the pregnant body in terms of where the potential danger is situated and how it moves through the body. Finally, I will consider how these novels, and the broader trend of horror-depictions of pregnancy and childbirth imagine and negotiate the choice to have children or not to have children in our contemporary society as well as the gendered work of gestation, childbirth, and care.

The rewriting of ancient myths has a profound historical lineage. Authors from antiquity onwards transformed and supplemented mythical narratives, offering their own variations on mythical characters. These narratives predominantly bore a masculine imprint, both in terms of the authors' gender and the worldviews they espoused. However, in the 20th century, with emergence of second wave of feminism, drastic changes took place.

Women authors started to focus on rewriting myths to rehabilitate women, liberating them from the constraints of a male-dominated world and allowing them to narrate their stories and experiences from their point of view. As a result, masculine perspectives and ideas about women were reimagined, also constructing the modern woman and her attitudes towards the mythical situation.

This paper will examine the character of Clytemnestra, known already from Homer's epics as the unfaithful wife and husband`s murderer, but later in reception reimagined primarily as the mother who has lost her children due to a man`s ambition and eventually met her demise at the hands of her own son.

Contemporary literature of the 21st century continues to engage in the rewriting of ancient myths. Framed within the purview of feminism, this paper offers an analysis of the 2023 novel “Clytemnestra” by Costanza Casati (1995– ), scrutinizing the evolving portrayal of Clytemnestra's character. It explores the nuances of her image, evaluating the extent to which it departs from or aligns with antiquity's depictions, specifically how Clytemnestra`s role as a mother is reconceptualized in 21st-century feminism.

The presentation is based on the research which attempts to combine the studies of motherhood and literary urban studies (Finch 2021: Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It, Routledge; Ameel 2022: The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies) for to investigate how urban space and places participate in the representation of motherhood in contemporary Lithuanian women's poetry, in the work of Lina Buivydavičiūtė, Jurgita Jasponytė, and Giedrė Kazlauskaitė.

Feminist literary criticism raised the issue of a city in women’s writing in 1980-ies (e.g., Squier 1984: Women Writers and the City, The Un. of Tennessee Press) and criticized a city as "a place made by men and for men" (Sizemore 1992: "Masculine and Feminin Cities", in: Frontiers: A Journal for Women Studies, vol. 13). However, the question of motherhood was not considered in this context, though the issues of maternity in relation to a city changes the perception of urban space much more radically than in women's literature in general. The mother's relationship with a city is passed through the filter of the child's interests which limit, separate, isolate her from usual everyday communication. Texts which reflect mothering testify to the emergence of new urban practices or their regimes, dictated by the daily routines of mothers. The purpose of the paper is to draw the poetic map of Vilnius in regard to the issues of motherhood and to show the new meanings of urban space which evolve from this perspective.