The Space Outside: Images of Women in Plays by Eva Gore-Booth and Dorothy Macardle

Leeney, Cathy

doi:10.1057/9780230801455_4

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…This eschewal of the restrictions of the domestic interior is contrasted with the use of the realist form in plays by Irish women in the middle of the twentieth century, as in this period 'the earlier, spacious experiments of Gore-Booth are narrowed to images of confinement and alienation'. 9 Realism can explore the tensions between constraint and freedom, as McMullan argues with reference to work from the second half of the twentieth century:…”

Section: Constraint and Freedom: Space And Formmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Crossing of Boundaries: Transgression Enacted

Hill¹

2011

Theatre Research International

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Feminist discourse has proven to be a vital component in the expanding field of Irish theatre studies owing to its exposure of elided work and the articulation of unrepresented voices. Irish women's participation in the public sphere and cultural fabric of society has been hindered in the course of the twentieth century and this is reflected in limiting representations of femininity as perpetuated by discourses of nationalism and Catholicism: the dominant imagery of the idealized mother which merges the feminized nation – Mother Ireland – and the Virgin Mary. In Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949, Paul Murphy highlights the ‘contradiction between the symbolic centrality of Woman as fantasy object and the social subordination of women as social subjects’. The incongruity between the shifting realities of Irish women's lives and the inflexible institutions that shape cultural representations is the focus of much feminist theatre research in Ireland. This research examines work which articulates the experience of estrangement from the dominant cultural imaginary and attends to the possibilities of staging more accommodating models through three interlinked strands: self-representation and the unhomely experience; constraint and freedom as explored through space and form; and a shift in focus to performance and the body.

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Section: Constraint and Freedom: Space And Formmentioning

confidence: 99%