Double Visions: The Metafictional Stories of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Anne Enright and Emma Donoghue

Abstract

This chapter discusses the postmodernist stories of Ní Dhuibhne, Enright and Donoghue. It is argued that all three writers combine postmodern techniques with a clear feminist message and that this comes across most strongly in their use of metafiction and rewriting. Ní Dhuibhne’s stories typically juxtapose contemporary stories with elements from Ireland’s rich repository of fairy tales, folk tales and myths to expose both the patriarchal dimension of these folk tales and the danger of setting too much store by the romantic ideals they contain. In her rewriting of stories by Mary Lavin too, Ní Dhuibhne shows how real life is always more complex and ambivalent than literature can make us believe, and it is precisely through postmodern techniques of metafiction and intertextuality that her short fiction tries to get closer to the ordinariness of everyday lives. In her even more experimental early stories, Enright too is engaged in a practice of revisioning, but her focus is on the all-too-familiar plots and patterns of popular culture. In her stories, Enright often revises the gendered hierarchies that inform these popular plots, so as to open up alternative identities for men and women. The historiographical short stories of Donoghue’s The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) and Astray (2012) are all hybrid stories, which imagine the lives of women (and, in Astray, also men) who figure in the margins of historical documents. Through this mode of rewriting history, her stories seek to question received views or dominant discourses about women (in The Woman) and about emigration (in Astray).