Edna O'Brien's Mother Ireland Revisited: Claire Keegan's "(M)other Ireland"

Abstract

Back in 1976 Edna O’Brien published a series of essays entitled Mother Ireland in which her aim was to portray an eternal and contemporary Ireland that seemed to be anchored in a line of ancestry and remembrance, legend and truth. This paper revisits that Mother Ireland of O’Brien’s fiction that has transformed herself into a (M)other Ireland best expressed through a new contemporary portrayal of her plights and predicaments. In Antarctica (1999) and Walking the Blue Fields (2007), short story writer Claire Keegan’s compelling fictional skills do not only offer a re-visioning of those eternal ideals of Ireland’s past. Among many other issues, Claire Keegan’s short fiction revisits O’Brien’s “Mother Ireland” and questions traditional and hegemonic approaches to this eternal Irish feminine within a new discourse of Ireland. Her fiction does not represent a commemoration of loss nor a return to nostalgia; but, rather, a celebration of a twofold newness in Irish society as a whole and in the role of the Irish woman in particular. Keegan delves into a sociological depiction of this new Ireland. Her short stories approach the Irish identity from within,  narrating the present from a close distance.