Disciplined Bodies: The Magdalene Spectacle in Contemporary Irish Cultural Texts

Abstract

This article explores women’s corporeal repression in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries as represented in Marita Conlon-McKenna’s novel The Magdalen (1999) and Aisling Walsh’s film Sinners (2002). Women were sent to those institutions, which operated in Ireland until the mid 1990s under the rule of several religious orders, for a variety of reasons: showing dissolute manners, becoming pregnant out of wedlock, being victims of rape, having a mental disability or simply extremely good looks, among others. To expiate their “sins”, the inmates suffered various schemes of corporal mortification that revealed an intricate ethos of national, religious and gender elements. My contention is that the two texts describe how the different assaults upon the Magdalenes’ corporeality entailed the corruption of a system that exploited their bodies as the apparatus of expiation of wider social fears and bigoted understandings of female virtue and justice.