Troubled houses: Irish women writing the Great War (Patrick MacGill, Liam O'Flaherty, James Hanley, Kate O'Brien, Kathleen Coyle, Rosamond Jacob)

In this dissertation I highlight home front texts written by Irish women during the 1930s that have been given little, if any, critical analysis; examine how these texts resonate with Irish men's and British women's (anti)war writing of the period; and explore the literary and socio-political implications of these texts with regard to the myth of Ireland and the Great War, artistic expression, and gender in the Irish Free State during the 'Thirties. My discussion begins by analyzing Patrick MacGill's Fear!, Liam O'Flaherty's Return of the Brute, and James Hanley's "The German Prisoner," focusing on how Irish alterity and its intersection with gender and race function in the war texts written by these three Irish male writers. The discussion then shifts to Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle, noting the ways in which O'Brien's conflation of the Great War with Ireland's "Troubles" and Spain's Civil War is embodied within the bildungsroman of the title character. Finally, in Kathleen Coyle's A Flock of Birds and Rosamond Jacob's The Troubled House: A Novel of Dublin in the 'Twenties, the position of the mother within the family and the country at war, particularly in relation to the figure of "Mother Ireland" and what it means to be a good Irish mother, is questioned by both writers. The themes that are evident in Irish women writers' home front novels---such as female characters bonding with rebellious male ones, illicit sexuality (adultery, homosexuality, female promiscuity) leading to female autonomy, and the amalgamation of the wars into a continuum where home is central---greatly differ from their Irish male counterparts' war novels. What this dissertation suggests is that despite the censoring and green-washing of public opinion by Ireland's theocracy during the 1930s, home front novels by Irish women served as means of protest (at least artistically) against the Free State government and women's status within post-colonial Ireland.