Figuring the Mother in Contemporary Irish Fiction

Abstract

‘Woman reigns as an autocrat in the kingdom of her home. Her sway is absolute’¹ — so wrote Mary E. Butler at the beginning of the twentieth century, thereby highlighting the theme of motherhood which was then ubiquitous in Irish culture, from sentimental popular songs to the Catholic Church’s veneration of the Virgin Mary. Subsequent decades witnessed an intensification of this national preoccupation with the maternal, culminating in the formal recognition in the 1937 Irish Constitution that a woman’s natural and proper place is in the home as a full-time wife and mother. Such national idealization of the mother inevitably engendered an unquestioning cultural acceptance that motherhood should be the goal of every Irish woman, a guarantor of social prestige and respect. Yet while analysts were quick to note the veneration of the mother in Irish family life, mothers themselves were relatively silent on both the rewards and restrictions of such veneration.² Until recent years, few Irish women spoke as mothers in popular culture or had a voice within the institutional structures of Church or state.