Books

How Irish lesbian writing has developed over centuries

A new study argues lesbian literature has expanded parallel to real-life lesbian identity

Anna Charczun
Tue Dec 28 2021 - 06:28

Why are we still writing books about Irish lesbians in the 21st century? Since the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in Northern Ireland in 1982 and in the Republic in 1993, the introduction of a civil partnership in 2011, which was later replaced by same-sex marriage in 2015, is there much left to write about? It turns out that there is plenty.

Irish lesbian fiction and politics have undergone a magnificent transformation, especially in the last 30 years. And although the spotlight was mainly on gay sexuality, women played an important role in improving the visibility of lesbians in the public arena. Irish Lesbian Writing Across Time is a reflection of these efforts by Irish women authors, and an attestation that lesbian existence has been permeating the pages of Irish writing for over two centuries – whilst gay men may have their Oscar Wilde, it is of an upmost importance to stress that lesbians are not shy of their literary representatives either.

References to lesbian desire can be found in Irish women’s prose from as early as the beginning of the 19th century, with this presence only becoming more prominent with time. Inasmuch as there is a growing interest in lesbian literatures, with new research projects appearing more and more frequently, it struck me that there was not a single body of work entirely dedicated to Irish lesbian fiction, where lesbian sexuality played a central role. At the same time, I also noticed that many existing studies either treated lesbians as mere research subjects or approached the fiction from the viewpoint of an (in)visibility of lesbians in the national discourse.

Nowadays, with the influence and impact of interdisciplinary studies, literature cannot be perceived merely as a fictional creation, neither should it be studies from a strictly analytical point of view. For we must remember the people, the authors, feminist and lesbian activists, whose own lived experiences prompted them or other writers to share with us their perspectives and views of the world – if we relied only on historical and theoretical knowledge, we would never truly experience the compelling and multiple works of art that comprise literature.

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Hence the leading argument in my book is that the evolution of the literary, metaphorical lesbian character is in a considerable measure concordant with the development of a real-life lesbian identity, regardless of whether the said transformation occurs within one work, or whether it stretches out over the course of a few novels/short stories/plays.

The stages of transformation that I put forward in my monograph are a reconceptualisation of a developmental model by Vivienne Cass, “Homosexual Identity Formation”, supported by close textual and historical analyses of the texts, where I do not concentrate solely on the development of Irish lesbian narrative per se, but also verify how the presence of lesbian desire is determined by historical antecedents and the state of (lesbian) politics in a given time period. I pay close attention to symbolism, textual techniques, and experimentation, in order to observe some distinctive patterns indicative of each stage. I also propose a new framework, as promised in the title, within which each text can be contextualised theoretically.

The chapters of the book, consecutively, are set out to chronologically portray this transition. Beginning with the investigation of the 18th-century romantic friendships between women, I look closely at the historical antecedents preceding the emergence of lesbian desire in early-19th-century New Woman literature, and later examine to what extent women’s performativity of female masculinity in selected fin-de-siècle writings by Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Katherine Cecil Thurston and Rosa Mulholland can be read as nuanced references to female-female passion.

This is followed by an investigation of the narrative’s emphasis on lesbian continuum in works of Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane and Kate O’Brien, and exemplify Bowen’s adolescent lesbian characters “bracketing” heterosexually-centred narratives, which is mainly achieved with a variety of narrational techniques to demonstrate the development of lesbian narrative in the early 20th century.

As the focus of the analysis shifts to post-war fiction, Irish Lesbian Writing Across Time reveals the notion of lesbian existence in prose written by Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien, and discusses how postmodernism aided Irish women’s authors in writing texts in which lesbian love occupies pivotal spaces. With an advancement of lesbian politics at the end of the twentieth century, authors began to centralise lesbian characters and desire in an explicit manner, which is mainly seen in novels and short stories of trailblazers such as Emma Donoghue and Mary Dorcey.

Emigration is a big part of Irish history. Indisputably then, writing from diaspora deserves a place in the study of Irish literature. Thus, the penultimate chapter of the book focuses on diasporic Irish lesbian writing from England, Canada and Trinidad and Tobago, by Anna Livia, Emma Donoghue and Shani Mootoo respectively, demonstrating that with the influences of globalism and transnationalism, the development of Irish lesbian fiction in diaspora represents another dimension of lesbian writing and lesbian politics.

Similarly, despite the predominance of the texts from the Republic, my work would not be a true reflection of Irish writing without an inclusion of the narrative from the North, and it certainly would not be inclusively lesbian had it not encompassed trans identities. The last chapter, therefore, looks at prose and drama from the six northern counties by Hilary McCollum, Jaki McCarrick, Stacey Gregg and Shannon Yee, reflecting the development of the narrative and examining a multiplicity of factors that contributed to open expressions of lesbian desire in the popular culture.

I believe that my work may aid future researchers, as well as readers, to consider Irish lesbian writing from three perspectives. Firstly, lesbian fiction of Ireland is presented as an ever-changing process, always in flux. Although the final stage of the developmental process is nearly complete, I believe that the uncertainties of belonging and expressions of sexualities created by modern-day politics could add to a proliferation of works from a range of styles and disciplines, creating an entirely new canon of lesbian writers.

Secondly, Irish Lesbian Writing Across Time offers an alternative way of systematisation, as it proposes a possibility of cogitating separate periods of time from the point of view of the developmental stages. This grants an understanding of lesbian fiction in terms of not only periods in time, but also enables an examination of the separate lesbian-specific stages signified by those periods.

Most importantly, however, the use of a developmental model invites a similar analysis of lesbian texts from other countries, as this would undoubtedly give an overall view of the evolution of lesbian fiction across the world and incite an emergence of a comparative set of cultural and radical lesbian studies.
Irish Lesbian Writing Across Time: A New Framework for Rethinking Love Between Women by Anna Charczun is published by Peter Lang