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This dissertation explores how the strains of post-colonial nationhood manifest in the haunted homes and mad families of new Irish literature. It contends that these characters represent a series of national traumas integral to understanding the development of family structure. The document focuses on the role of the Irish Catholic church in shaping societal structures and the impact on Irish women, as well as the long-term effects of traumas like the recession. The study argues that a complete understanding of trauma in post-independence Irish literature requires examining the nearly equal presence of madness in these novels.
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A Changing Home: Displaced Trauma, Madness, and the Specter of Nation in New Irish Literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Danielle Loree Hammer Committee in Charge: Professor Michael Davidson, Chair Professor Amelia Glaser Professor Laura O’Connor Professor Andrew Scull Professor Nicole Tonkovich 2018
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For Rowan, Aoife, Joshua, Mom, GG, Mike, Pie, and those who have gone ahead— you haunt me in the best possible way.
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Signature Page………………………………………………………………….. iii Dedication……………………………………………………………………… iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………. v Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………….. vi Vita…………………………………………………………………………….. viii Abstract of the Dissertation…………………………………………………...... ix Introduction.......................................................................................................... 1 Part I. The Nation at Home...................................................................... 5 Part II. Displacement: The Cycle of Trauma and Repression................. 7 Part III. Literary Ghosts and Mad Figures in New Irish Literature........ 13 Part IV. The Chapters in Detail.............................................................. 19 Chapter 1. A Mad Silence: Trauma and Alternative Voice in In Peter Mullan’s Film The Magdalene Sisters and John McGahern’s Novel Amongst Women................................................................. ..... 30 Part I. Penitent Bodies: The Traumatic System of the Church................ 32 Part II. Non-Repentant Bodies: The Magdalene Sisters........................... 46 Part III. The Voice of Madness: Suffering and Self Expression.............. 61 Chapter 2. “Lubricate Your Soul:” Drunken Fools and the Expression of Trauma in Early twentieth Century Irish-American Novels............................ 70 Part I. Drunken Fools and their Songs...................................................... 73 Part II. The Bodies of Fools: Physicality and the Openness of Expression 81 Part III. Foolish Expression in Haunted Communities............................. 95 Chapter 3. Broken Playthings: Madness and Childhood Rebellion in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. ..................................................................... 104 Part I. The Novels in Time....................................................................... 108 Part II. Trauma in the Family................................................................... 114 Part III. The Ragged Path to “Adulthood”............................................... 120 Part IV. The Rebellions of Youth- Madness and Social Revision........... 126 Chapter 4. Lost Homes and Stolen Lives: Displaced Trauma and Social Change in Tana French’s Broken Harbor and Louise Phillips’ Last Kiss ...... 136 Part I. Troubled Land: Contested Spaces and Strange Homes................ 137 Part II. Noir and the Insidious Trauma of the Recession......................... 145 Part III. When the Monsters Come Home: Gothic Themes
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I have spent the last two years wandering through literary streets full of ghosts and the mad who scream for social change that never seems to come. The broken families and tormented souls of my work have filled so many of my waking hours that it is easy to sometimes forget how many flesh and blood people have been beside me every step of the way. You inspire me to do better, and I hope that what I have created here does justice to everything that you gave to make me who I am today. You are far from the ghosts and mad folks that I deal in, but you are still present in every word. I would like to thank my mentors for their unwavering support and generosity. I owe a deep thanks to Dr. Michael Davidson. You never let me settle for the easy answer, and your insights have led my work in directions that I had never anticipated. My thanks as well to Dr. Laura O’Connor. Your generosity with your time and expertise have set me on my path, and your help has been invaluable. Thank you to Dr. Nicole Tonkovich. Your honest answers and clear feedback made the strange world of academia seem a little less impossible, and your willingness to let me ply your classes with treats gave my nervous baking an outlet. Thank you also to Dr. Amelia Glaser. Your input and encouragement helped me to find direction in my second chapter. Finally, I want to thank Dr. Andrew Scull. You aided me in figuring out the all this madness. I also want to acknowledge my family. You make me want to be the best version of myself, and I owe you for your immeasurable support and love. Rowan and Aoife, you remind me to fight for what really matters. Joshua, you have always been there for me, and I am lost without your guidance. I also want to thank my mom, grandma, Mike and Pie. I couldn’t ask for
viii better parents. Lastly, I want to thank my father and grandfather. You didn’t live to see today, but you are here in these pages.
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A Changing Home: Displaced Trauma, Madness, and the Specter of Nation in New Irish Literature by Danielle Loree Hammer Doctorate of Philosophy in Literature University of California San Diego, 201 8 Professor Michael Davidson, Chair In this dissertation, I look at how the strains of post-colonial nationhood manifest in the haunted homes and mad families of new Irish literature. This nation is shaped by long years of struggle under a colonial force, and this imbalance of power marks the individuals in these post- independence works. Each symbolic strain indicates a traumatic mark on the national identity
xi itself. However, the manifestation of national trauma is rooted in the various gothic depictions of the home and family. I begin by looking at the supernatural, but my focus is truly on the social structures and traumatic moments that shape the families in each work. I assert that the traumas of this developing nation manifest in the gothic themes of the modernist inspired literature written in the decades after independence. The personal responses to these traumas appear in the literary depictions of haunting and madness. Here the ghosts signify both shared traumatic events and the personal trauma-related pains that are too socially taboo to express. In contrast, the symbolic presence of madness is a transgressive expression of the individual’s responses to a trauma. Authors use this literary madness to call out the social strains of the long process of reinventing a national identity after colonial occupation. The time period for the works ranges from publication dates in the 1940s to around 2016. Yet, the individual pieces are set as far back as the start of Irish independence. In effect, this is the Irish looking back on the moments that haunt them as a culture. The traumatic reshaping of a post-colonial national identity comes down to a matter of the family. Each individual in these works deals with the consequences of displacing the individual response to strain for too long, and the family and home are where this haunting realization appears.
the traumatic potential of this institution comes out clearest in the dynamic of the home. Likewise, a national strain like the recent recession seems like only a matter of money, until we see what misery the losses of the period created for so many families. Therefore, I look at how some shared traumas shape the family structure and ultimately transform it into something frighteningly new. This discussion of independence-related suffering requires that we first consider what a traumatic event is historically. A trauma, by definition, is a large-scale event that is so violent or out of the course of human experience that an individual is unequipped to deal with it. I discuss numerous types of stresses and pains throughout these chapters, but these events taken on their own amount to the mere difficulties that any individual might suffer from in an unequal social system. The little moments of pain combine to form something closer to what we understand as a traumatic event. These small aches represent how the struggles of a nation can trickle down to the home. Yet these insidious pains are only just becoming recognized as traumatic events. Historically, our understanding of trauma is associated with Jean Martin Charcot’s research on how the previously feminized concept of hysteria was actually a part of the physical and mental repercussions of a traumatic event. These are the large-scale events that we would traditionally understand as a trauma. Charcot found that what was considered to be a physiological issue actually had psychological roots. This is a part of the early link between external strain and the seemingly unrelated manifestations of symptoms in the individual. Charcot’s student Pierre Janet theorized that the individual’s responses to a traumatic event were directly linked to how this individual perceives the event. Sigmund Freud also followed Charcot’s work and came to the conclusion that these physical symptoms had psychological
roots. Both Freud and Janet concluded that one of the key tendencies of the traumatized individual is the reenactment of the original trauma in an attempt to change this past event. This reenactment of past suffering comes up in many examples of modern Irish literature. Throughout this dissertation, I focus on both the large and small moments of pain and suffering that are a collective part of the traumatic re-birth of a nation. The process of gaining independence after over 800 years of colonization is a shared cultural moment that is as full of violence and trauma as it is joy. I will hereafter refer to the smaller collective moments of suffering as insidious or daily traumas. I acknowledge that these moments on their own do not amount to a trauma, but when combined they form a strong argument for the damaging potential of the daily pains of a life lived in struggle and only small gains. In contrast, I refer to the more traditional traumatic events as overt traumas. I focus on the manifestation of pain in the family sphere, so the concept of historical trauma is also important here. This term typically refers to the long-term cultural effects of events like genocide. Yet the loss of culture that takes place with colonization is also a historical trauma. In effect, this shared strain can wound a culture for generations to come. One instance of extreme trauma can start a generational cycle of pain that includes child abuse, substance abuse, or even poverty. The grand emotional scope of both overt and insidious traumas manifest in physical, emotional, and mental responses that may not be obviously linked to the initial event. These expressions of pain are often culturally frowned upon, and this results in a repression of any physical or mental responses to the strain. A traumatic event is never processed enough by the individual to be consciously ignored; however, the individual’s responses to this pain can be repressed. I claim that this repression leads to a displacement, or relocation, of the personal responses to suffering. This displacement
Irish struggle for independence. Each mad response is a part of the movement away from older and highly binding social ideals The Nation at Home It might seem odd to include nation in a discussion of family trauma, but each grand scale movement of a country has a profound impact on the home. Ireland has struggled through both British colonial rule and the long fight to stabilize the newly independent land. Of course, not every pain in a family is necessarily related to the process of independence. However, these fictional families are broken in such substantial and symbolic ways that it is difficult not to see some larger traumatic force behind each novel. The concept of nation is a way of justifying the overabundance of unhappy and broken families in new Irish literature. Each work ultimately centers on damaged families that are caught up in the inherent traumas of a nation breaking free from a legacy of colonial rule. These works are all written after Irish independence and loosely related to the traumas of the nation, but I am choosing to group them according to literary trend, rather than date. The repercussions from a traumatic moment might not manifest in a given society or literature for years after the event, so it is difficult to pin down a specific historical date for this study. Instead, I refer to these works as “new” Irish literature. The actual span of time that I am looking at here ranges from publication dates in the 1940s to around 2016. However, the symbolic period of the works stretches back to the start of Irish independence. This literary trend focuses on how the pains of the recent Irish past shape identity and family structure in the present. Some of the tensions that I discuss are related directly to difficulties that came up in the years after
independence; however, I have also chosen to include some colonial influences that continue to traumatically shape modern Irish families. The clerical abuses in the Irish Catholic church are a key example of institutional trauma in new Irish literature. The Church is not wholly a product of colonialism, but it is difficult to argue against the idea that the rigid structure of Catholicism certainly made many Irish more tractable to British colonial rule. For instance, the rigid structure of the Church included strictly enforced gender roles that reinforced patriarchal rule and robbed Irish women of many of their traditional social rights. This streamlined the power structure so that the male heads of household answered primarily to the Church. Effectively, this reorganization meant that the British crown only needed to influence the Church to control the Irish people. The social strains and insidious traumas perpetuated by the Church have had a long-lasting impression in contemporary Irish literature. The Church’s role in structuring a system of repression needs to be addressed in any study of Irish trauma; however, the other traumatic influences that I focus on are rooted in specific historical moments. The years of widespread Irish emigration to places like America comprise one of the less definable but key periods that I focus on here. Irish emigration has been prevalent since the Great Hunger, but I look at Irish emigration to America in the years between 1920 and 1935. The emigrants in these years often left to find a better life away from the turbulence of the Irish struggle for independence. However, this period is traumatic because the American recession of 1929 effectively crushed any of these dreams of a better life. This period of emigration was a difficult one for the Irish who came to America, and it is an essential moment in Irish history that needs to be discussed in any current look at Irish trauma. Shared traumas are central to the damaged families and broken individuals in these works.
that is too painful for an individual to fully assimilate and acknowledge, so she or he continues to play out the painful moment through various personal responses. Essentially, this is a past moment that is revived, frequently with debilitating side effects, in the present (Caruth 6). Theorists like Cathy Caruth look at trauma as the series of seemingly unrelated emotional and physical responses that a person experiences after said event. However, Caruth points out that her discussion of traumas concerns primarily extraordinary or overt traumatic events. These are instances, like mass bombings or horrific train wrecks, that are far removed from the ordinary experiences of life. A trauma is hidden by definition, so these overt moments of suffering are feasibly represented in the haunting and madness of these new Irish works. However, the pains that I focus on tend to be far quieter moments that slowly creep into each novel. These small scale traumatic events that I focus on are more closely related to general prolonged strain than an overt trauma. The stresses range from physical and mental abuse to traumas like that of poverty. Lorraine Cates looks at this prolonged distress in the concept that she calls “insidious emotional trauma.” This variation on trauma is essentially the compilation of emotional strain that manifests in a similar way to other overt traumas. The key to this insidious emotional trauma is that the stress either continues for a prolonged period or is a part of the expected range of potential lifetime experiences. Cates positions the body as the storage site for the compiled emotional strains of the mind and shows how the long-term effect of emotional scars can have a physical manifestation. She focuses primarily on the harm that compounded emotional strains can cause, especially in young minds. However, I contend that insidious emotional trauma needs to be extended to also cover the emotional wounds created by more common physical strains like abuse. These long term bodily abuses are the most common kind of traumatic event present in the works that I discuss here, so I will mark these moments as slightly
different from Cates’ discussion of mental scarring and insidious emotional traumas by referring to the events that I study simply as insidious traumas. The small strains are far less grand-scale than more overt traumas, but the results can be very similar in terms of the impact on the individual and the society. In the novels that I discuss, the communal response is to repress the individual reaction to a traumatic event. This silencing ranges from the literal shushing of loud drunken figures to the more malevolent and communal act of ignoring clerical abuse. The repression of pain is a social pressure on the traumatized individuals to keep them from expressing their personal responses to any subsequent manifestations of trauma-related strain. Often, especially in the case of quieter and more prolonged events, the response to a trauma can be so subtle and devastating that it is just absorbed into the individual’s character as a matter of course and does not manifest itself as anything more unusual than something like anxiety. The important thing here is that the personal response does not just go away; rather, the individual unknowingly represses the physical and mental strains until they reappear in another form. The trend in trauma studies is heading towards embracing and exploring the pains of the past. A great deal of this work emphasizes advocacy and helping the victims of different traumas learn to represent themselves and see the past that has shaped them. I attempt this same self- awareness of the past in my work, but I focus instead on how repression of the past shapes the present. The response to a trauma can only be repressed until the act of repressing the event creates enough of a displaced response to pain that it can no longer be ignored by others in the society. As an example, in my third chapter I look at Patrick McCabe’s novel The Butcher Boy. The accumulation of unaddressed pain is what causes the young character of Francie to snap and murder his neighbor.
