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Riding the Tiger: Ireland 1990–2011 in the Fictional Families of Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle

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Riding the Tiger: Ireland 1990–2011 in the Fictional Families of Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle Riding the Tiger: Ireland 1990–2011 in the Fictional Families of Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle Danielle Margaret O’Leary 20726267 B.A. (Hons), Curtin University, 2009 This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia School of Humanities English and Cultural Studies 2015 Dedication and Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge and thank my supervisor, Professor Andrew Lynch. Your guidance and encouragement have been vital. I will miss our meetings full of your inspiring intelligence and AFL analysis. Acknowledgements also to the Graduate Research School Coordinator Professor Kieran Dolin and all members of the English and Cultural Studies Department at the University of Western Australia; to the staff at the Reid Library and the staff at the Graduate Research School at the University of Western Australia. Furthermore I would like to acknowledge the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures; the staff at T.L. Robertson Library at Curtin University; the staff at the Boole Library at the University College Cork; Russell Library at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth; and James Hardiman Library at the National University of Ireland, Galway. I would also like to thank for their inspiring writing and advice, Margaret McIntyre, Dr. Stefanie Lehner, Dr. J. Edward Mallot and Dr. Cormac O’Brien. My love and thanks to Ray Monahan and Michael Campion for helping me to understand the Irish economy; to Jack O’Connor for loaning me a book that became vital to my thesis; to all of my Irish families, especially the Monahan and Punch families, for looking after me during my research trip in 2011; to my friends who have supported me throughout this process. To Liz Byrski – thank you for your advice and precious friendship. To Lynda O’Leary – thank you for your support and love. To Jonathan Wall – thank you for your love and for making me so happy. This doctorate is dedicated to my parents, Gerard and Gerardine O’Leary. You are the most incredible people that I know. Thank you for moving to Australia, giving me two places that I call home. Table of Contents Abstract ………………………………………………. v Declaration …………………………………………… vi Introduction …………………………………………... 1 Chapter One …………………………………………... 35 Chapter Two ………………………………………….. 98 Chapter Three ………………………………………… 145 Chapter Four ………………………………………….. 208 Aftermath ……………………………………………... 300 Reference List ………………………………………… 305 iv Abstract This thesis examines selected prose fiction of three major writers – Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín – in relation to societal and economic change in Ireland in the prelude, duration and aftermath of the boom called the ‘Celtic Tiger’. In particular, the thesis discusses how their representations of Irish families trace major shifts in the nation’s life and consciousness over this period, and engage with broader questions of history, memory and national identity. The theme of the family has a long tradition in Irish fiction. It offers writers an opportunity for a rapprochement with the past that registers recent and contemporary developments: dissatisfaction with traditional nationalism and the rise of historical revisionism; the declining status and influence of religion, with associated changes in laws and community customs; sudden economic prosperity and decline, leading both to new levels of consumerism and to widespread unemployment; and the social challenge of greatly increased immigration. Other specific issues, such as the clerical sex abuse scandals of recent years, domestic violence, inter-generational conflict, and non-standard relationships are also articulated through the medium of their domestic narratives. The thesis examines a range of novels by Enright, Tóibín and Doyle from the 1990s to 2011, and also considers the significance of their collective turn to the explorative short story form as the boom declined. Overall, it concludes that the hectic circumstances of the Celtic Tiger’s rise and fall drew from these writers a major reassessment of the formerly accepted co-ordinates and goals of Irish society, saw them assert the necessity of a break with existing cultural visions, and challenged their imagination to provide new visions for the future. In their family narratives – often observing new forms of inter-relation between fathers, mothers and children – these writers have offered a conspectus of both continuity and change in the wider Irish social context. v Declaration This thesis does not contain work that I have published, nor work under review for publication. Student Signature ________________________________ vi Introduction Irish people, it may be said, are amongst those who are, at one and the same time, deeply archaic and immediately contemporary.1 – Robert Welch In October 2010, this satirical advertisement was stapled onto a makeshift wall of an abandoned shop on Shandon Street, Cork City, Ireland: 2 1 R. Welch, Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing, London, Routledge, 1993, p. xi. 2 Personal Photography, 22 October 2010. 1 Ireland, it seemed, was for sale; the idea of Ireland, anyway. According to the poster, Ireland was in a state of poverty and despair through the policies of the then Finance Minister Brian Lenihan and (unnamed) Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Surrounding the poster were a large number of photocopied newspaper articles, outlining the state of the nation. Spray paint and offensive language were not required to mark the wall and express contempt; the current newspaper articles were deemed insulting enough. The makeshift wall of information served as a canvas on which the frustration of the nation was represented. The years leading up to the creation of this poster, however, were very different. The ‘Celtic Tiger’ – an appellation created by a London-based economist, Kevin Gardiner, who used it in a report for his employers, the investment bankers Morgan Stanley, on 31 August 19943 – was the period of unprecedented economic growth from 1994 to 2008 in the Republic of Ireland. It took three years for the phrase ‘to take off’4 and it then become synonymous with accelerated change in almost every aspect of Irish life. Transcending its original economic boundaries, the Celtic Tiger became the hegemonic signifier for all that changed in the social and cultural world of the mid–late 1990s in Ireland. During this time, the literary representation of Ireland was transformed by a flourishing of activity that projected a strong sense of national consciousness which was, simultaneously, confident and confused. For all the heady novelty of the Celtic Tiger years, the uncertain national mood that it represented was in some ways familiar, recalling Daniel Corkery’s sentiments in 1931: ‘[o]ur national consciousness may be described, in a native 3 L. Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2008, Oxford, John Wiley & Sons, 2013, p. 6. 4 H. Shaw, ‘What is the Celtic Tiger?’, in A. Higgins Wyndham (ed.), Re-Imagining Ireland, Charlottesville & London, University of Virginia Press, 2006, pp. 16–18, p.16. 2 phrase, as a quaking sod. It gives no footing.’ 5 It has been said that the Irish national consciousness as represented in literature, the characteristic text of the nation, must always be understood as ‘a process, unfinished, fragmenting’.6 The social and fiscal transformations experienced in the Celtic Tiger resulted in an extreme contemporary transitional period: a pseudo-transformational, liminal space that continually offered the hope for a prosperous future without ever providing a rationale for that hope. In the words of Liam Harte, the Celtic Tiger was ‘paralleled by an uncommon flourishing of literary and artistic creativity’.7 This flourishing literature in and around the Celtic Tiger period is the subject of my inquiry in this thesis. I analyse selected fiction from 1990 to 2011 by Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín, examining and evaluating three major literary voices that enhanced, challenged and redefined Ireland in a series of differing representations that capture this tumultuous period. Their narratives, while significantly different in content, all implicitly or explicitly work to reconfigure the relationship between the nation’s past and present conditions, by ‘renegotiating received meanings of nationality and creating spaces for a revised rhetoric of Irishness’.8 In this recent and still developing period of rapid change, the past has proven no longer a powerful guide to understanding of the present, and the traditional preoccupation with the nation’s history has been re- evaluated. This articulation of change ‘is an on-going negotiation that seeks to authorise cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation’. 9 The transformation of Ireland has offered writers the chance to re-situate the nation in 5 D. Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature: A Study, Cork, Cork University Press, 1931, p. 14. 6 D. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation, London, Vintage, 1995, p. 120. 7 Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2008, p. 1. 8 Ibid., p. 3. 9 H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, New York, Routledge Classics, 2010, p. 3. 3 history, or to recast the history of the nation within the contemporary context. In order to understand the impact of ‘the angular, discontinuous, spliced-together nature of contemporary Irish reality’,10 the decades that preceded its growth must be examined. The Robinson Effect The growth of contemporary Ireland can
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    Table of Contents Introduction Literary Context and Critical Background Page 1 Political Hinterland Page 5 Literary Hinterland Page 13 From the Historical to the Contemporary: Shifts in Perspective Page 20 Modern Critical Receptions Page 25 Lawless, Fiction and Socialization Page 39 Chapter I Hurrish: Representations of Violence through Character and Landscape Political and Literary Context Page 50 An Iron Land Page 62 Ideology and its Characteristics Page 71 Character and Landscape Page 79 Common Victims: Hurrish, Maurice and Alley Page 86 Patriotism and Nationalism Page 91 Peasant Squalor and Individual Human Value Page 96 Hurrish as Social Critique Page 103 Narratives of the Self: A Comparative Reading of Hurrish and A Drama in Muslin Page 108 Chapter II Historical Fiction Part I. With Essex in Ireland The Personal in History Page 117 Romance and Anti-Romance Page 126 Ideology and Revelation Page 138 The Feminine: Mistress, Mother and Crone Page 144 Narrative Form and Textual Experience Page 153 Chapter III Grania: Darwinism Biological Variation and New Woman Page 166 Darwinism and Literature Page 171 The Novel‟s Opening: Adapting to Environment Page 180 Stock and Pedigree: Honor and Grania Page 185 Stock and Pedigree: Murdough and Grania Page 192 Individual Promise and Social Revelation Page 201 The Struggle for Self-Assertion Page 209 Degeneration: Individual and Communal Page 222 Chapter IV Historical Fiction Part II. Maelcho National Tale and Historical Novel Page 234 Fiction and Stadialism Page 240 Temporal Otherness Page 254 Racial Theory: Lawless and Contemporary Discourse Page 266 Historical Realism: Fiction and Historiography Page 277 Conclusion Lawless and Subjectivity Page 286 Socialization and Alienation in Lawless Page 295 Bibliography Page 304 For my mother Brigid Stewart Prunty.
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