Abstract
In the last decade, the Magdalene Laundries scandal has revealed endemic problems of Irish society. From 1765 to 1996, these asylums run by female religious congregations became prisons for prostitutes, single mothers, abused girls or young ladies allegedly prone to seduction. Forced into these institutions, those women had to work under pseudo-slave conditions. Drawing on the materials compiled by Justice for Magdalenes, we examine their verbalised experience from a critical discourse analysis angle. We thus aim to identify the ideologies that the metaphorical patterns used by the victims reflect, as they awaken to the trauma of their past. This analysis can help us to understand their construal of redemption and remorse, the blame attributed to the Catholic Church, their conception of womanhood, and their portrayal of cruelty and violence.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See, for instance, Cullingford (2006), Shield (2006), Luddy (2007), Makarushka (2012); Sebbane (2012), MacAlinden (2013), Pine (2013), Cismas (2014), Ördén (2014), Simpson et al. (2014), Evans and Pierpoint (2015), Killian (2015) and Wecker (2015). For a comparative examination of a similar situation in Canada and Australia, see Andrews (2011), Robinson (2012) and Kay (2015).
- 3.
See Mary Norris Cronin’s story narrated by McDonald (1999).
- 4.
- 5.
In Patsy McGarry (2011), we find figures, taken from a ledger found during the exhumation of the bodies in Drumcondra, which contradict this view: ‘An entry for Áras an Uachtaráin, dated March 2nd, 1981, lists a bill of £10.84 while one for Guinnesses, dated March 23rd, 1981, lists a bill of £10.89. The Department of Fisheries was billed £3.25 on March 16th, 1981, while the Department of Agriculture was billed £6.92 on February 9th, 1981. The Department of Justice was billed £20.28 on January 19th, 1981. Some of the larger bills are for hotels with the Sutton Castle billed £88 on December 15th, 1980 and Buswells £69, on the same date. Portmarnock Golf Club was billed £2.84 on December 2nd, 1980 while that for Clontarf Golf Club on November 17th, 1980 was £7.59. The Gaiety theatre was billed £4.65 on January 12th, 1981’.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
For further information, see the following papers on metaphor and medicine: Sontag (1989), Shafer (1995) and Semino et al. (2004). On metaphor and religion , see Soskice (1985), and Campbell and Kudler (2003). On metaphor and computer science, see Armour (2001) and Leyton-Brown et al. (2003). On metaphor and media, see Kennedy (2000), Musolff (2004) and Johnson (2005). On metaphor and politics, see Howe (1988), Chilton and Ilyin (1993), Chilton (1996), Mio (1996), Romaine (1996), Santa Ana (1999), Charteris-Black (2005) and Ahrens (2009).
- 13.
According to Cameron (1999), a list of conditions for metaphoricity must include domain incongruity, coherent interpretation, topic–vehicle combination, attitudinal impact, explication, familiarity, cognitive demand, metaphorical intention, connotative power and systematicity.
- 14.
See the ‘Catalogue of Interviews’, available at http://www.magdaleneoralhistory.com/Magdalene%20Oral%20History%20Catalogue_03-03-16.pdf, accessed 30 December 2015.
- 15.
See http://www.magdaleneoralhistory.com/Topic%20Guide_Survivors.pdf, accessed 30 December 2015.
- 16.
See http://www.magdaleneoralhistory.com/JFM%20Questionnaire_Key%20Informants.pdf, accessed 30 December 2015.
- 17.
We will refer to interviews using the code assigned them by the interviewers (e.g. MAGOHP57).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to express our warmest thanks to Katherine O’Donnell, not only for granting access to the materials analysed in this paper, but especially for having first shared her enthusiasm and commitment with us. Our gratitude goes as well to Mick O’Donnell for his support with some technical difficulties we encountered during the corpus annotation process.
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Benítez-Castro, MÁ., Hidalgo-Tenorio, E. (2018). ‘We Were Treated Very Badly, Treated Like Slaves’: A Critical Metaphor Analysis of the Accounts of the Magdalene Laundries Victims. In: Villar-Argáiz, P. (eds) Irishness on the Margins. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74567-1_6
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