‘Mother Macree ad nauseam’

Abstract

This chapter argues that narratives of female Returned Yanks emerge forcefully in Irish culture of the 1990s as a kind of imaginative counterpart to Irish citizens’ enforced confrontation with Ireland’s past at the same historical moment, particularly with respect to the collusion of Church and State in the oppression and, often, abuse of women and children. The protagonists of these texts – and I focus most attentively on works by Benjamin Black (John Banville) and Annie Murphy – literally return to Ireland, but they also visit, or revisit, upon Ireland some of the repressions of its past. They do so both thematically, by dramatising the issues of unmarried motherhood, forced adoption and Church intervention in the family; and formally, by revising previous and tenacious gendered mythologies of emigration and return.