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Return of the Oppressed: Sexual Repression, Culture and Class

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Writing Ireland’s Working Class

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Abstract

In this chapter I will discuss issues of sexuality, culture and class with reference to two texts, Christy Brown’s Down All the Days (1970) and Dermot Bolger’s The Journey Home (1990).1 I will show how these novels employ sexual repression as a metonym for cultural repression and advance this theme as a criticism of hegemonic norms. I will also outline the historical and cultural context out of which both works emerged and the relevance in particular of Ferdia Mac Anna’s apposite and influential essay identifying a “Dublin Renaissance” in Irish literature.2 My thesis here, as elsewhere, is that literature of working-class Dublin places that community in conflict with dominant cultural norms, expressing its alienation within the capitalist state through symbolism, form and the unearthing of submerged narratives from Irish history.

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Notes

  1. Christy Brown, Down All the Days (London: Pan Books, 1972);

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  2. Dermot Bolger, The Journey Home (London: Flamingo, 2003). Further references to these editions are indicated by DAD and JH etc., respectively, in the text.

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© 2011 Michael Pierse

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Pierse, M. (2011). Return of the Oppressed: Sexual Repression, Culture and Class. In: Writing Ireland’s Working Class. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299351_7

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