A Life of Their Own: Women’s Mid-life Quest in Contemporary Irish Women’s Short Stories

This essay focuses on the motif of quest, as initiated by older or middle-aged women and depicted in stories by Clare Boylan, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Stella Mahon, Mary Dorcey and Marilyn McLaughlin in the 1980s and 90s. Throughout the western literary canon the quest motif recurs in myths, legends or genres such as rite-of-passage novels, in which a hero (seldom a heroine) is encouraged to prove his own value through a series of tests. Within this tradition, a woman’s quest is usually one involving a process which shapes her into the contemporary norms of social conformity – essentially losing or sublimating the self rather than developing or expressing the potential of the self. Notwithstanding the traditional depictions of a female quest in which loss and self-sacrifice are characteristic, representations of Irish women in the stories explored in this essay demonstrate heroines whose quest leads them to a kind of awakening and enlightenment. The heroine in Irish women’s stories engages in subversion of the social norm as part of an attempt to reconcile with residual trauma from the past, or with inner conflicts which have left her feeling alienated from accepted social conventions and expectations in respect of women. Irish female writers illustrate through their narrative a latent power to challenge and to subvert the traditionally accepted and dominant patriarchal ideology of Irish society