The Mother-Daughter Plot in the Short Fiction of Claire Keegan

• Main Author: D'hoker, Elke
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: O'Connor; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/handle/123456789/321201

In this paper I propose a thematic and formal analysis of the short fiction of Claire Keegan, one of Ireland's most promising new writers. Keegan has won critical acclaim and several prizes with her two story collections, Antarctica (1999) and Walk The Blue Fields (2007), and her recent 'long short story', Foster, which came out as a separate publication in 2010. Because Keegan sets her realist stories in a seemingly timeless rural Ireland, peopled with farmers and priests, authoritarian fathers and suffering mothers, she has often been compared with such male masters of the Irish short story as Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain and John McGahern. While her work is indeed different from the urban, postmodern, feminist stories of contemporary women writers such as Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Anne Enright or Emma Donohue, she nevertheless tackles themes that have been broached by Irish women writers since the late 1960s. One such prominent theme in her work is the so-called 'mother-daughter plot'. Several stories in Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields, as well as the recent Foster, are first-person narratives of a young girl, young woman and deal with her position in the family and her search for an identity. I propose to analyse these stories in the light of those of other Irish women writers who mostly depicted the mother-daughter relation as fraught with tensions and characterised by the daughter's resentment of the mother's powerlessness (see studies by Fogarty 2002, Shumaker 2001, Ingman 2007). In several of Keegan's stories, to the contrary, the daughters are inspired by small acts of rebellion on the part of the mother or substitute mother. In this way, Keegan's stories do register change in a seemingly timeless rural Ireland and move beyond the anger and advocacy that characterised Irish women's writing in the 80s and 90s. In a similar way, the form of these stories moves beyond the symbolic realism of McGahern's stories to which they are often compared. In her daughter-stories, Keegan uses the first-person present tense to do away with the distance between narrating self and experiencing self that characterises retrospective narration, thus cancelling the disappointment of 'hope that has come to nothing' which is so typical of McGahern's stories. status: published