Re-Citing the Rosary: Women, Catholicism and Agency in Brian Moore’s Cold Heaven and John McGahern’s Amongst Women

Abstract

Brian Moore and John McGahern share with other contemporary Irish writers a concern with the relationship between speech and action. As Richard Haslam argues elsewhere in this collection, a writer such as Bernard Mac Laverty tends, like Moore and McGahern, to explore the ways in which the dominant cultural discourses of Catholicism, patriarchy and nationalism achieve their effects on the minds and bodies of social subjects. They question not only what language can do, but the power invested in the subject who wields culturally powerful language, and the effects achieved by the words that he or she speaks. This preoccupation with what J.L. Austin called performative language¹ — language which performs rather than simply describes actions — persists long after the political circumstances of the Irish Literary Revival that fostered it.