Petrifying Time: Incest Narratives from Contemporary Ireland

Abstract

The ‘he’ of the above epigraph is James MacNamara, the ‘she’, his 14-year-old daughter Mary, and the ‘it’, the ur-rape committed beside the river on the family’s home property. Unthinkable, unnameable, unbearable, yet familiar and expected, this event creates a rock that dams the flow of life. This sexual violation — the first of many — and the pregnancy that follows become the girl’s primary reality, its taboo territory her only imaginative space, her ‘home’ a site of terror and shame. How can a woman writer create such an incest narrative, that is to say, live it imaginatively, while also creating the survival story that her text signifies? How can she ‘master’ the double texts without losing the young female character’s experience of frangible subjectivity?² This chapter sets out to explore these and other questions as it examines the treatment of father-daughter incest in recent Irish fiction, with particular reference to two highly accomplished and instructive texts, Dorothy Nelson’s In Night’s City (1982) and Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River (1996).

In the instance of his doing it, she thought she had always known that it would happen, or that it had happened, this, a re-enactment of a petrified time.¹

Edna O’Brien