Refashioning Modernism

Abstract

This chapter turns to short fiction by Irish women writers, skipping across decades to examine the ongoing tactical use of the stubborn mode of modernism in representations of female subjectivity. Elizabeth Bowen’s “Summer Night” (1941), set during Irish neutrality of the Second World War, Maeve Kelly’s “Morning at My Window” (1972) and Evelyn Conlon’s “Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour or And Also, Susan …” (1993), both written in the midst of specific moments of feminist urgency for Irish women, and June Caldwell’s “SOMAT” (2015), published amid the abortion rights debates that preceded the repeal of the Eight Amendment of the Irish Constitution, demonstrate how women writing in the aftermath of high modernism repurpose its experiments, seeking in part to amend the early movement’s masculinist bias. In their representations of neglected aspects of female subjectivity, they engage with modernist heavyweights such as Joyce and Eliot, but they also mine Russian theater and popular romance, among other surprising sources.