The Rebellious Daughters of Edna O’Brien and Claire Keegan

Abstract

This chapter focuses on that most iconic and troubled of female relations: the mother-daughter bond. Starting from a general overview of psychoanalytic and contextual interpretations of the mother-daughter plot, the chapter proceeds to a close reading of mother-daughter stories by Edna O’Brien and Claire Keegan. In the case of O’Brien, it is argued that her recent stories show a departure from the classic Freudian plots enacted in her early stories and instead depict a more intersubjective mother-daughter relationship based on similarity, difference and mutual respect. Unlike O’Brien’s heavily symbolic stories, which are bent on dramatizing the underlying psychic structures and archetypal myths that govern individual behaviour, Keegan’s realistic stories are less bound by Freudian categories and Catholic or nationalist iconography. Instead, her stories frame the mother-daughter relationship in the light of the gendered hierarchies and power structures that still shape individual identity and family relations in patriarchal societies. Yet, even though these patriarchal strictures may appear inflexible and deterministic in Keegan’s seemingly timeless rural Ireland, her stories do revise the mother-daughter plot in a way that emphasizes mutual acts of rebellion and the possibility of change. The chapter also shows how both authors make use of first-person present-tense narration to stage their particular take on the embattled mother-daughter plot.