| This dissertation evaluates contemporary narratives that represent institutional care as it relates to three cultural issues in 1950s and 1960s Ireland; namely, adoption, infanticide and child care. More specifically, it interrogate representations of mother-and-baby homes, adoption agencies, Magdalen laundries, and industrial and reformatory schools, primarily in recent Irish fiction, memoir, and documentaries, but also in drama, film, and journalism. Collectively, these sites of confinement, and the state apparatuses that inscribe them, constitute what I call an architecture of containment. Ultimately, this project demonstrates how Ireland's containment practices in the past provide a genealogy for, and thereby resonate in, social ruptures of the present.; Ireland's restrictive architecture served the nation state: its function, to confine and render invisible segments of the population---especially single mothers, 'illegitimate' children, and the sexually promiscuous---whose very existence threatened the vision of Ireland enshrined by de Valera's constitution in 1937. Moreover, this architecture was ascribed a regulatory function; consequently, it served as a bulwark to a post-colonial nativist morality. These various institutions were a constant reminder of the nation's scripted social morals, and of the consequences awaiting transgressors of this morality.; Contemporary narratives responding to Ireland's architecture of containment do more than collectively realize its existence, i.e. remember and speak the history of the past. These narrative responses expose state resistance to earlier representations of such sites of confinement, and indicate society's consent to, and participation in, such resistance. Recent narratives also evince the emergence of an alternative national narrative capable of incorporating the plurality of Irish histories indicated by survivors' stories. The recent proliferation of representations re-inserts adult survivors of Ireland's architecture of containment and their experiences into the nation's cultural memory and, in the process, formally challenges the narrative of state abstraction with a personal linguistics. Narrative representations addressed include: Paddy Doyle's memoir, The God Squad; Dermot Bolger's novel, A Second Life; Patrick McCabe's novel, The Butcher Boy; Patricia Burke Brogan's drama Eclipsed; and the television documentary, States of Fear. |
