Gothic Inheritance and the Troubles in Contemporary Irish Fiction
Page 3 ‘Give it Welcome’: Gothic Inheritance and the Troubles in Contemporary Irish Fiction Matthew Schultz On April 10, 1998, the British and Irish governments signed the Good Friday Agreement, marking the official end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland––though not the cessation of violence. A year earlier, Jeffrey Glenn, a 46 year old librarian in Ballynahinch, County Down, submitted an essay for a retrospective collection, Children of The Troubles: Our Lives in the Crossfire of Northern Ireland . In it, he recalls the pangs of terror he regularly experienced while growing up in a Belfast suburb in the 1950s: As a young child, I used to look carefully under my bed every night before saying my prayers. The Irish Republican Army campaign of the fifties was in full swing and I was checking for bombs. Even if I couldn’t see one, I still lay quaking with fear for what seemed like hours every night.(1) Glenn’s variation on this common childhood anxiety of ‘monsters under the bed’ highlights the particular paranoia caused by Irish paramilitary violence that threatened to erupt into domestic spaces. Glenn was a prisoner in his own “suburban stronghold.”(2) Outside, he recalls, “Buses, trucks, cars, and construction equipment formed blazing barricades and groups of angryfaced men were busy hijacking more.”(3) Later, Belfast was to be divided by more permanent ‘peace lines’ constructed of iron, brick, and steel, and topped with metal netting that reached a height of twentyfive feet. These barriers separated Catholic from Protestant neighborhoods,
[Show full text]