Green fields and blue roads: The melancholy of the girl walker in Irish women’s fiction

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dc.contributor.authorO'Connor, Maureen
dc.date.accessioned2017-09-18T09:08:15Z
dc.date.available2017-09-18T09:08:15Z
dc.date.issued2017-03-01
dc.date.updated2017-09-14T17:54:55Z
dc.description.abstractLawrence Buell has observed that ‘Ecology as green … perpetuates the implication of binary nature-culture separation … and understates the potential for self-intoxicated fetishization of greenery’. The fetishization of greenery has unique connotations for cultural production in Ireland, a country inevitably identified with the colour and with romanticized landscapes. This essay will examine the establishment and maintenance of the myth of ‘natural’ and pure womanhood, a fetishized commodity central to constructions of twentieth-century Irishness, as represented in novels by three contemporary writers, Clare Boylan, Edna O’Brien, and Éilís Ní Dhuinhne. The discussion will focus on the figure of the girl walking through the Irish landscape, a setting against which the girl appears both as a ‘natural’ reproductive resource to be cultivated for exploitation and as an embodiment of the contradictions subtending her position caught between ideas of the cultural and the natural. These Irish women’s texts, to borrow Joe Kennedy’s phrase, ‘puncture the pastoral’, often by complicating notions of the countryside as retreat and haven, a challenge with implications for women’s place in imagining Irish national identity. The girls’ relationship to the landscape through which they travel is a traumatised one. At once captured and troubled by their own reduction to the ‘natural’, their valuation as reproductive resource, they are drawn to the ‘green’ world, even as they recognise the dangers it represents.en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionAccepted Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationO'Connor, M. (2017) 'Green Fields and Blue Roads: The Melancholy of the Girl Walker in Irish Women’s Fiction', Critical Survey, 29(1), pp. 90-104. doi:10.3167/cs.2017.290106en
dc.identifier.doi10.3167/cs.2017.290106
dc.identifier.endpage104en
dc.identifier.issn00111570
dc.identifier.issued1en
dc.identifier.journaltitleCritical Surveyen
dc.identifier.startpage90en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/4705
dc.identifier.volume29en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherBerghahn Journalsen
dc.rightsThis is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedited version of an article published in Critical Survey. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/cs.2017.290106en
dc.subjectEcocriticismen
dc.subjectEcofeminismen
dc.subjectEcotheoryen
dc.subjectEnvironmental humanitiesen
dc.subjectEnvironmentalismen
dc.subjectIrish fictionen
dc.subjectIrish women’s writingen
dc.subjectMaterial ecocriticismen
dc.titleGreen fields and blue roads: The melancholy of the girl walker in Irish women’s fictionen
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)en
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