Chapter 4 - Race and Irish Women’s Novels in the Long Nineteenth Century

Summary

Representations of race are intimately bound to representations of the struggle for freedom and autonomy, made more complex by focusing on novels written by women. These representations of race in Irish women’s literature challenge the ability of Irish women to achieve independence alongside rather than against the colonized peoples of the nineteenth-century Irish literary landscape. From Sydney Owenson to Kate O’Brien, from the Act of Union to Ireland’s independence and its joining the European Economic Community, the way in which Irish women’s fiction has defined freedom has depended upon a politics of race, a politics that is sometimes sympathetic and rooted in affective anti-imperialism, and other times is a politics of denial and erasure. If studies of Irish women’s literature is to contend fully with the history of race, we must be attuned to these politics even, or especially, if the narratives of self-fulfilment and independence become the objects of critique.