The Danger of the Domestic in Ireland: Bridget Cleary, Big House Modernism, and Tana French

ABSTRACT:This article examines the ways in which Irish women writers have employed the Irish domestic interior as a representation of the female body in national politics from the late nineteenth century through the present. Using The Burning of Bridget Cleary, Angela Bourke’s classic case study of the murder of a nineteenth-century woman, to introduce the biopolitics underlying the modern Irish female body as a metaphor for the Irish nation, this article shows how that metaphor continues to resonate in twentieth-century texts written both during Irish independence and the massive economic changes of the Celtic Tiger years. Comparing work by Elizabeth Bowen and Pamela Hinkson to the contemporary detective fiction of Tana French, I argue that both the modernist era and the period after the fall of the Celtic Tiger, particularly after the great recession of 2008, were transformative times in Ireland where discussions of Irish feminine subjectivity offered hybridized understandings of gender and power during moments of great change for the nation. The textual reverberations of the Bridget Cleary story show us how a woman’s body can become a metonymical symbol for both progress and oppression in modern Ireland, exposing the tense relationship between modernity and tradition in Irish culture that is the backbone of Irish identity throughout much of the twentieth century.