Daughters on Hunger Strike
This essay explores the embattled interactions between mothers and daughters in the stories by Edna O’Brien, Mary Lavin, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and Mary Leland. This conflict involves an underlying distorted intimacy between women within a patriarchal Irish context. The daughter in the stories seeks to r...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses
2008-03-01
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| Series: | Estudios Irlandeses |
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| Online Access: | http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/pdfAnnWan-lihChang.pdf |
| Summary: | This essay explores the embattled interactions between mothers and daughters in the stories by Edna O’Brien, Mary Lavin, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and Mary Leland. This conflict involves an underlying distorted intimacy between women within a patriarchal Irish context. The daughter in the stories seeks to rebel against the ‘choking love’ of the tyrannical ‘patriarchal mother’ through a symbolic anorexia, in which the daughter rejects the mother’s food or the food associated with the mother. The mother is also shown to feel ambivalent and resistant towards the daughter’s attempt to break from her dependence upon the mother. The conflict and resistance between mothers and daughters in these stories can be evaluated against the framework of the patriarchal context in which women as mothers are silenced and made powerless in front of the ‘Father,’ and therefore, this resistance can be interpreted as a reaction to this patriarchal ideology and its framework in Irish society. The lost bond between older and younger women needs to be rediscovered and restored by a realisation of patriarchal ideology and furthermore, identification with female subjectivity. This identification between women seems to act as a source of redemption for women of different generations, which results in both liberating themselves from the patriarchal dogma. |
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| ISSN: | 1699-311X 1699-311X |