Green Fields and Blue Roads: The Melancholy of the Girl Walker in Irish Women’s Fiction

The natural world behaves in unexpected ways in twentieth-century Irish women’s fiction about girlhood. Girls are at once reduced to natural resources, ripe for exploitation, and instructed relentlessly in their social duties, which more often than not require they resist their ‘natural’ urges. The...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Critical survey (Oxford, England) England), 2017-03, Vol.29 (1), p.90-104
Main Author:	O'Connor, Maureen
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	1900-1999 20th century Analysis Artistic representation (Imitation) Authors Boylan, Clare British & Irish literature Criticism and interpretation Depression (Mood disorder) Depression, Mental Dialectics Down by the River ecocritical approach Ecocriticism Ecofeminism English Literature Erotica Exploitation Fate female sex roles Females Fiction Folklore Girl Characters Girls Heroism & heroes Holy Pictures Irish literature Literary characters Literature melancholy Misogyny Narrative techniques Nature Ni Dhuibhne, Eilis (1954- ) novel Novelists Novels Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne-Almqvist, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne-Almqvist, Éilís ('Eilis Almquist', 'Elizabeth O'Hara') (b.1954) O'Brien, Edna Plot (Narrative) Portrayals Social role The Dancers Dancing Twentieth Century Walking Women women novelists Womens literature
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Summary:	The natural world behaves in unexpected ways in twentieth-century Irish women’s fiction about girlhood. Girls are at once reduced to natural resources, ripe for exploitation, and instructed relentlessly in their social duties, which more often than not require they resist their ‘natural’ urges. The novels considered here – Holy Pictures by Clare Boylan, Down by the River by Edna O’Brien, and The Dancers Dancing by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne – feature girls moving towards the assumption of the roles of wife and mother they are expected to play as mature women. The girls walk roads of many colours through green landscapes that inspire contradictory responses of rebellion against and weary acceptance of their culture’s messages about a woman’s ‘natural’ place in post-Independence Ireland.
ISSN:	0011-1570 1752-2293 1752-2293