Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper

Post-nationalist literature? The Family Always has a political meaning in Ireland

1937 Constitution defined the “norm” as . . .

Patriarchal Catholic church weighs in as well . . .

Family regulates sex

What relation of fathers to daughters? Rather than chronicling a move away from the sort of traditional family exalted in de Valéra’s Ireland—the sort of family that Doyle strives to reject—The Snapper actually shows the Rabbittes strenuously trying to integrate themselves into this conservative structure.… Doyle reveals the power of middle-class norms toward which the family strives. . . . [A]s Jimmy assumes the role of father the text connects with the past and endorses the ersatz incestuous model of Irish society that Doyle would resist. What do you think about Jimmy sr.’s relationship to Sharon? Creepy?

Nothing to worry about? Why does McGlynn say “incestuous”?

Consider Jimmy’s relation to Sharon

Sharon’s relation to the other kids Does The Snapper undermine or promote the traditional “norms” of family? Family in The Snapper

Is it at least nominally patriarchal?

How does Jimmy Sr. change in relation to the kids?

How does Jimmy Sr. change in relation to Veronica? The Village The Family

The Individual Review of the film in Commonweal

Talk all you want about global villages or information superhighways, in Barrytown everyone knows which village really matters. It's the one right outside the window. Unlike The Commitments, which found vitality and even kindness in every comer of Doyle's world, The Snapper, a more claustrophobic film, portrays the neighborhood as a trap. If you accept the way it defines you, you're sunk.

Conversely, the family situation in The Snapper, for all its noise and mess, is portrayed more lovingly than in The Commitments. Precisely because the world outside is so ready to judge and sneer, it is only in the family that a person can get support and even a chance to grow. This is most true for Dessie, who, after getting past his anger, becomes a kinder father, a joyfully expectant grandparent, and, comically yet believably, a better lover to his wife when he stumbles upon some sex tips in the back of a prenatal handbook. Barrytown The Commitments (1987)

The Snapper (1990)

The Van (1991)

The Barrytown Trilogy

Kilbarrack Kilbarrack in the 1980s 60% male unemployment

What the dole does for gender roles

“The Town I Loved So Well”

To what extent does the Working Class family defy the Irish “norm”?

Consider “space” and privacy Is privacy a good or a bad thing? Class dynamics Corporal punishment (p. 109)

Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder’s Michelle Remembers (1980)

“Moral panic” of the 1980s

Attack on daycares/defense of “traditional” family structure In the early months of the crisis, the allegations involved working-class families, who were confused, bewildered, and angry at being accused of sexually abusing their children, but they were powerless against middle-class professionals with the authority, power, and legal sanctions to support their actions. Gradually, however, the allegations began to involve middle-class families who were highly educated, employed in professional occupations, and with access to legal and political advice and to the media. They were to use such powerful allies to considerable effect. From a sociological perspective, therefore, the events in Cleveland could be seen as a punitive form of middle- class oppression of working-class families by middle-class professionals and an imposition of middle-class values on the working classes. Some aspects of the Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Scandal have been likened to a mediaeval witch-hunt by at least one author. Irish identity Raven Arts Press (1979) in Finglas

They saw Dublin not as some ancient colonial backwater full of larger- than-life ‘characters’ boozing their heads off in stage-Irish pubs, but as a troubled modern entity, plagued by drugs, unemployment, high taxes, disillusionment and emigration… a Dublin that was being choked by the modern world, its youth in turmoil and its older citizens crippled by despair.

Doyle and Neil Jordan publish stories with Raven Arts