‘Stories Are a Different Kind of True’: Gender and Narrative Agency in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction

Abstract

This chapter addresses the relationship between gender and narrative agency in three recent experimental novels by women writers, Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010), Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), and Anna Burns’s Milkman, which won the Booker Prize in 2018. These novels build on the modernist legacy of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien by using experimental form specifically to critique orthodoxies of gendered power. All depict women and children injured and exploited by men but assign these victims the role of narrator, much as the #MeToo movement has encouraged survivors to speak out against sexual violence and harassment. Though survivors’ testimony is routinely silenced or disbelieved because of unconventional expression, these narrators’ seemingly unreliable accounts – subjective, fragmented, digressive – paradoxically confer credibility on their voices.