Negotiating with the Motherland: Exile and the Irish Woman Writer in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy and The Light of Evening

Abstract

If what Andrew Gurr calls the ‘flight into exile’ (1981, p. 15) is central to a tradition of imagining the Irish writer, Edna O’Brien’s response to the same in her signature novel The Country Girls, as well as in her more recent fiction, can be seen as part of a greater creative and critical call to arms in rethinking the relationship of the woman writer with established models of exile in Irish literary culture. The Stephen Dedalus archetype examined in Chapter 1 is taken up and tested in various ways by O’Brien, and her refashioning of the image of the Irish writer engages with Ireland as ‘motherland’ and ‘homeland’ in important and revealing ways. As noted in Chapter 1, the artist-as-hero in Maurice Beebe’s seminal Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce — and the only study of its kind to attempt a totalizing narrative of the artist — is closely patterned on the Joycean archetype:

Narrative development in the typical artist-novel requires that the hero test and reject the claims of love and life, of God, home and country, until nothing is left of his true self and his consecration as artist. Quest for self is the dominant theme of the artist-novel, and because the self is almost always in conflict with society, a closely related theme is the opposition of art to life. The artist-as-hero is usually therefore the artist-as-exile. (1964, p. 6)