Stubborn Modes, Stubborn Problems, Stubborn Women
Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing
Paige Reynolds
As Anne Enright has noted, fiction by Irish women writers in recent years has been characterised by a ‘resurgent modernism’.[1] In a 2015 tweet posted by Tramp Press, she cited as examples Eimear McBride’s feted A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), a harrowing first-person account of a teenager’s sexual abuse set in late twentieth-century Ireland, and Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (2015), an evocative set of contemplations by a young woman who electively retreats to the west in the wake of the 2008 economic crash. 2015 also saw the publication and positive reception of similarly modernist-leaning novels that featured Irish characters, among them Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither, Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells and Anakana Schofield’s Martin John. Each offered readers an isolated and alienated central character, a narrative heavily inflected by stream of consciousness, and formal tactics ranging from non-linear plots to broken syntax to unconventional punctuation, among the various other aspects of style, tone, form and content that collectively telegraph the mode of modernism.
My new book, Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines this twenty-first-century phenomenon. Further, it demonstrates that an express engagement with modernism informs not only these recent novels but also a surprising array of Irish women’s fiction from both the South and the North written from the immediate aftermath of the movement’s early-twentieth-century prime into the present day. The book constructs a new literary history of Irish writing that reveals how and why modernist experiment so powerfully inflects the work of the writers mentioned in this essay, as well as others including Kate O’Brien, Mary Lavin, Maeve Kelly, Evelyn Conlon, Deirdre Madden, Emma Donoghue, June Caldwell and Louise O’Neill. In fits and starts across the past century, these women have rehearsed and refashioned aspects of Euro-American modernism, employing in their fiction features easily recognisable from the movement’s forms and themes, its canonical texts and authors.
Recent decades in Ireland, both North and South, have been characterised by a dizzying array of political and social transformations. Across these years, from some perspectives, the Republic can appear to have moved from the conservative and insular economic and political gestures of the mid-twentieth century to a more open-armed embrace of globalism and progressive social policies in the twenty-first, while, following the violence of the Troubles, the North has achieved a measure of peace and stability with the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, even as Brexit threatens to undermine those hard-won achievements. My analysis of women’s fiction deepens and complicates such sweeping historical narratives, to illuminate their hidden features as experienced and understood by individual female characters. By attending closely to fictional depictions of female interiority across these years, this study explores how women writers have employed the modernist mode to depict the understanding of and response to such conditions. This includes those specific to Ireland (such as wartime neutrality or the Troubles) as well as those more general (such as emigration or class struggle), both positive (such as first love or the pleasures of summer camp) and pernicious (such as childhood sexual abuse or political violence). Such an approach can help to explain how and why certain literary frameworks persist across almost a century of Irish women’s writing, as well as why certain cultural conditions across these years, good and bad, appear intractable. The methodology seeks to provide readers a useful feedback loop: we can understand contemporary conditions better when we isolate a particular body of work; we can understand a particular body of work better when we isolate contemporary conditions.
Strikingly, the ‘new’ modernism that seemingly distinguishes this body of fiction looks much like the ‘old’ modernism of the early twentieth century. For these authors, modernism is a mode: a pliable and portable set of features readily and broadly identified as ‘modernist’ by readers. The mode, in the words of Fredric Jameson, is ‘a particular type of literary discourse … not bound to the conventions of a given age’ and, as the many scholarly accounts of the ‘melodramatic mode’ have demonstrated, the mode can move among not only historical periods but also genres, media, national traditions, settings and audiences.[2] Amid these travels, the mode remains recognisable because it adheres tightly to its original conventions. But it is also adaptive, and may resist or exceed those conventions.
The mode, and the history it accrues, can generate a kind of interpretive friction for readers familiar with its norms, one that helps to showcase certain cultural fault lines, particularly those historical problems that persist into the present moment. For example, the quiet allusion to W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1920) in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) reminds readers of the feeling of impending catastrophe conveyed by this poem, which was written in the midst of violent political conflicts and the 1918 flu pandemic; a similar anxiety about the future appears throughout Rooney’s novel, written a century later, which considers various present-day crises and concludes during the Covid-19 pandemic. Likewise, by reimagining Katherine Mansfield’s biography and adapting her impressionistic style, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s short story ‘Summer’s Wreath’ (2013) invokes Mansfield’s modernism to elucidate the changed textures of sexual shame in contemporary culture, while Deirdre Madden’s Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) revamps the work of Virginia Woolf to think about the emotional legacies of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. In both, the modernist mode underscores the surprising traction of certain personal and societal challenges, as well as showing how they morph with time.
But if the mode is already defined by its durability and portability, by its detectable appearance in different moments and venues, why add the descriptor ‘stubborn’ when thinking about modernism in contemporary fiction by Irish women? To be stubborn, the dictionary tells us, is to refuse to change one’s position or attitude, to be likened to a mule or a child. It is a strategy of repetition and adamancy, of overstaying your welcome, of demanding to be acknowledged. Often gendered, such behaviour undergirds disparaging tropes like the nagging wife, mutton dressed as lamb, the aggressive career woman, and the entitled Karen. Such stubbornness, for many female protagonists in Irish women’s writing, has real costs. Think, for instance, of ‘stubborn’ Eily, the teenager who follows her desires, becomes pregnant out of wedlock, and finds herself consigned to an adult fate of madness and drugged obeisance in Edna O’Brien’s short story ‘A Scandalous Woman’ (1974), or of The Mai, an accomplished professional who, despite repeated counsel, cleaves to her faithless husband until her tragic death in Marina Carr’s play The Mai (1994).
A public and political stubbornness also represents for oft-silenced women a means of advocating and forging necessary if unwelcome change. Such a logic is reflected by the feminist rallying cry ‘Nevertheless, she persisted’, repurposed from a dismissive putdown when Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2017 refused to cede the floor during a debate in the United States Senate. In a case from the other side of the American political spectrum, when Nikki Haley, the former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, refused to suspend her campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, members of her party quickly moved from celebrating her ‘adaptability’ to bemoaning her stubborn refusal to ‘step aside for the good of the country’ and ease Trump’s path to victory.[3] These examples are not meant to erase obvious particularities, but instead to demonstrate the pervasive gendered deployment of ‘stubbornness’. Similar examples abound in Irish writing and practice. A deliberate recalcitrance imagined as productive social intervention characterises the position of the speaker in Eavan Boland’s poem ‘Mise Éire’ (1987), who insists ‘I won’t go back to it’ and refuses to recapitulate the feminine tropes used to justify and promote the Irish national project, and the efforts of the real-life historian Catherine Corless, celebrated in 2021 by Taoiseach Micheál Martin as a ‘tireless crusader of dignity and truth’ for her relentless investigation of the records of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam.[4]
Irish women writers using the modernist mode are among this cohort. Many regarded modernism as too inward-focused, too reluctant to embrace its potential to activate social change. In a 1944 essay for The Bell, Elizabeth Bowen eulogised her childhood friend Mainie Jellett, noting that their last conversation centred on the work of Dorothy Richardson, ‘whose strain of genius has not yet been enough recognized by the world’.[5] She read Jellett’s essay ‘An Approach to Painting’ (1942) as confirmation of her belief that ‘an artist’s natural place is in the heart of human society’.[6] She further cited Jellett’s contention that the artist’s ‘gifts are vitally important to the mental and spiritual life of that majority. Their present enforced isolation from the majority is a very serious situation and I believe it is one of the many causes which has resulted in the present chaos we live in.’[7] Iris Murdoch was another who was notoriously dismissive of the principles that would come to define literary modernism, asserting that ‘The work of the great artists shows up “art-for-art’s sake” as a flimsy frivolous doctrine. Art is for life’s sake … or else it is worthless.’[8]
Many works of fiction that use the stubborn mode suggest that high modernism can correct the past, as well as provide a relevant tool to represent the present. There is a deliberate knowingness baked into the use of modernism by Irish women writers, one insisting that the assimilation of its more well-known features does not preclude but rather enables its interventions. The stubborn mode helps to remind readers of the sweep of history, using literary form and content to accentuate certain ongoing cultural problems as well as to spotlight remedies previously imagined for such stubborn problems, whether the outcomes of those interventions have proved to be successful, unsuccessful or (more likely, as seen across time) a measure of both. Many women writers neither eschew nor evade the pre-packaged quality of high modernism to accomplish this end; they neither disavow their complicity in the literary marketplace nor perform the calculated irony often associated with postmodernism. Instead, the writers I study call to attention the inherent aesthetic and social potential of a commodified and popularised modernism, laying bare the deep work the movement’s tenacious surface gestures might provoke in the present day.
The persistence of Irish women writers using the modernist mode surfaces in other ways. For example, there are plenty of good reasons they should have shed such experimentation as mere imitation, as outmoded (to indulge the obvious play on words). My book is rich with striking examples of writers being neglected and even demeaned for their invocation of modernism past its perceived ‘sell-by’ date. In the review of a special issue on women’s writing published in 1954 by Irish Writing: The Magazine of Contemporary Irish Literature, a critic for the Irish Times took particular exception to the work of the, even then, critically venerated Bowen, dismissing her innovative representation of modern temporality as merely ‘a reductio ad absurdum of that of the well-known male author, Henry James’.[9] In another example, Edna O’Brien explained in a 1975 interview that, for employing recognisable modernist tactics in her fiction, ‘in Dublin, I have a nickname among some of the intellectuals. It’s “the bandwagon.” It’s supposed to mean that I climb on bandwagons, that I’m a whore.’[10] The metaphor of ‘the bandwagon’ dismisses O’Brien’s experiments, suggesting that she is uncritically following rather than setting aesthetic trends, and to call her a ‘whore’ announces, in overtly sexual and sexist terms, that she has compromised literary experiment for material gain.
Such examples manifest that the portability of the stubborn mode often has provided an excuse to label the modernism found in Irish women’s fiction imitative or derivative, even morally suspect. Nonetheless, these writers demonstrated over and over the particular suitability of the modernist mode to the representation of female experience in contemporary Ireland. Sara Ahmed has explored the consequences of bodies, language, gestures and affective registers that refuse to accommodate surrounding norms and expectations, among them the ‘feminist killjoy’ who speaks uncomfortable but necessary truths. The stubborn mode represents a literary manifestation of similar recalcitrance, one marked by its anachronistic aesthetics and uneven history. The interpretive challenges the stubborn mode of modernism poses, even today, demand that readers work harder to identify and understand certain intransigent socio-cultural problems still before us, as well as to attend closely to those characters who encounter, assess and seek with uneven success to solve them.
There are certain practical benefits to this strategy. The stubborn mode can be an easier sell in the contemporary moment: like the coffee drinker who seeks out Starbucks in an unfamiliar city, many readers welcome the overt deployment of modernism in contemporary fiction. Such familiarity is not inherently and inevitably a liability. Instead, it suggests that the disruptive potential of these books rests not always in radical formal innovation but instead in the creative adaptation of old forms to convey aspects of female experience that are upsetting and unsettling – and marketable to large audiences curious about the complex interior lives of such characters as well as able to decipher modernism’s codes. Read in such a materialist context, these novels might be interpreted as product, with their refashioning of modernism the literary equivalent of upcycling, the creative reuse of old materials.
A contemporary manifestation of the modernist objet trouvé, the stubborn mode seems to resist the planned obsolescence that typifies the consumer market, its value stemming from the apparent artistry that transforms an old object into a particularly desirable new one constructed from salvaged forms. Just as the recycled object has become a political statement with a certain social value, so too has a recycled modernism in contemporary writing – in part by similarly refusing the ever-quicker cycles of planned obsolescence. Readily recognisable, the modernist mode nonetheless continues to pose interpretive challenges: ones that, like the problems it represents in these books, require readers to attend carefully to what stands before them, despite having seen it many times before.
Today, Irish women writers do not lack for critical accolades when they use the stubborn mode, as evident in the Booker Prizes awarded to Enright’s The Gathering in 2007 and Anna Burns’s Milkman in 2018. The current enthusiasm for these authors and books has been enabled by recent structural changes supporting female artists more broadly: women have enhanced access to institutions that encourage them to produce, publish and promote their work; new technologies enable cheaper printing, targeted print runs and more expansive marketing strategies for lesser-known talents; gender equality initiatives, such as VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and Time’s Up, have pulled the spotlight to women artists internationally. As the most recent chapter in a long history of feminist literary activism, grassroots initiatives in Ireland such as Waking the Feminists and Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon have drawn global attention to the inequities that plague women theatre makers and poets. Marketing and celebrity have a role to play as well. Perhaps most notoriously, Rooney’s best-selling novels have been championed by millennial celebrities including Lena Dunham and Taylor Swift on platforms such as Instagram.
But we still have a long way to go. Women might be stubborn, but so too are the systems, beliefs and practices that seek to marginalise their achievements. For example, if the expansiveness of the ‘new modernisms’ as a critical approach created a pathway to take seriously the contributions of Irish women writers to the modernist tradition, current conceptions of the ‘global novel’ might threaten once again to erase their contributions, given that their fiction so often is focused tightly on the experiences of Irish women and set in the Republic or Northern Ireland. Yet to denigrate Irish fiction that piggybacks on familiar (and marketable) aspects of national identity, to denounce it because it focuses on characters who stay home and are plagued by the same old problems, and therefore seem untouched by certain contemporary crises, is to refuse to see how such labels elevate certain types of writers and subjects, and necessarily preclude others. That Irish women for so long fell victim to critical biases that charged them with parochialism or traditionalism or crass commercialism is troubling. That they now seem to be so neatly avoiding those same charges invites us to consider how and why this pattern changed. By turning to the past, Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode documents aspects of the fascinating history that precipitated this dramatic transformation. But it also looks to the future by asking how we – as scholars, teachers and readers – might sustain the current momentum by identifying, calling out and seeking to solve the stubborn problems that thwart these writers and diminish their contributions.
Paige Reynolds
[1] Tramp Press (@TrampPress), ‘Anne Enright: “since the crash a lot has been disrupted. There’s a resurgent modernism in writers like Eimear McBride and @emollientfibs”’, 8 March 2015, 11:23 a.m., tweet.
[2] Fredric Jameson, ‘Magical narratives: romance as genre’, New Literary History 7 (1) (autumn 1975), 135–63: 142.
[3] See Michael Kruse, ‘Nikki Haley is turning her biggest criticism into a campaign strategy’, Politico, 29 September 2023; Dylan Wells and Marianne LeVine, ‘Far behind Trump, Haley confronts prospect of first South Carolina loss’, Washington Post, 24 February 2024.
[4] Megan Specia, ‘Report gives glimpse into horrors of Ireland’s mother and baby homes’, New York Times, 12 January 2021.
[5] Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Mainie Jellett’, in Allan Hepburn (ed.), People, places, things: essays by Elizabeth Bowen (Edinburgh, 2008), 115–20: 116.
[6] Bowen, ‘Mainie Jellett’, 116.
[7] Bowen, ‘Mainie Jellett’, 117.
[8] Iris Murdoch, ‘The sublime and the good’, in Peter Conradi (ed.), Existentialists and mystics: writings on philosophy and literature (London, 1997), 205–20: 218.
[9] Thersites (Thomas Woods), ‘Private views’, Irish Times, 31 July 1954.
[10] John Corry, ‘About New York: an Irish view of city’s charms’, New York Times, 10 January 1975.