Edna O'Brien's Mother Ireland Revisited: Claire Keegan's

Abstract

En 1976 Edna O'Brien publica una colección de ensayos titulada Mother Ireland con la intención de acercarse a una Irlanda contemporánea y, a su vez eterna, que parecía estar anclada en un pasado de recuerdos, leyendas y tradiciones. El presente artículo reconsidera la Irlanda pasada descrita por O'Brien y cómo la transformación de la misma se expresa de una nueva forma. Así, la estrategia de ficción de la escritora de relatos Claire Keegan (Antarctica [1999] y Walking the Blue Fields [2007] no ofrece únicamente una reconsideración del pasado. Keegan cuestiona el "eterno femenino" irlandés dentro de un nuevo momento discursivo en Irlanda. Su ficción no representa una mera conmemoración de la pérdida de valores pasados, ni una vuelta a la nostalgia como estrategia estética, sino la celebración de una nueva Irlanda y de la mujer en la Irlanda del siglo veintiuno, ahondando en una representación sociológica de este nuevo país.

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.