The year 2017 was pivotal for women because of the #MeToo movement's global momentum. People were alerted to the abuses of power and sexual harassment by male authorities in different fields such as government, entertainment and industry. These scandals also helped bring attention to the objectification of women's normalised bodies and their subjugation in patriarchal cultures. Yet neither this disempowerment of women nor women's coming forward new, because they have been widely explored in contemporary women's writing. Examining Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's poetry from the prism of #MeToo, this paper discusses women's imprisonment and silence, their harassment and victimisation and the docility of their bodies in traditional patriarchal discourse. This paper aims to investigate how women are monitored physically and mentally in male-centred contexts, how they are molested in traditional societies and how they can be empowered by coming forward and telling their own stories.

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The signing of the contentious Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 was a traumatic experience for many Irish people. This is not only because of the ensuing Irish Civil War, but the psychological adjustments that the Irish people have to make in their partitioned land. Since the Irish Republican Army (IRA) emerged during the Anglo-Irish War (1919-21), it has been bent on terminating the British government's control of Ireland and establishing a truly independent and unified Irish Republic through armed struggles. This traumatic history, which was embedded with the conflicts and compromises of such struggles, became a pivotal issue in many Irish writings. As a consequence, it helped shape subsequent Irish literature and culture when the dream of a free and unified Ireland was constantly recalled and reconfigured. These painful markings are reflected in complex ways in Edna O'Brien's fiction House of Splendid Isolation (1994), in which an IRA fugitive named McGreevy holes up and finally bonds with Josie O'Meara, an aged widow, in a dilapidated house. Apart from the political turmoil, considerable anguishes caused by love and marriage converge to entangle the protagonists' traumas. This paper focuses on how, by shifting between the multifarious narrative perspectives, O'Brien's House of Splendid Isolation stitches the interwoven personal, interpersonal, and national suffering together. In addition, the role women play in facilitating sympathetic understanding and reconciliation amid the violence and traumas in contemporary Ireland is discussed. The findings imply that, despite the ageold traumatic experiences caused by political conflicts in Ireland in the past few centuries, a trauma-free tomorrow via love and reconciliation, mostly with the help of women, is possible in contemporary Ireland.

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