Joyce's sisters' pantry: Food in mid-20th century Irish women-authored bildungsromane

This thesis argues that food is an essential topic in mid-century Irish women’s fiction-writing. Adopting a gastrocritical approach to a purposive sample of Bildungsromane written by Irish women from the 1930s through the 1960s (Norah Hoult, Kate O’Brien, Maura Laverty, and Edna O’Brien), this thesis demonstrates how food provided a generative topic and a nuanced language for articulating self-discovery and coming of age, as well as a modality for social commentary and critique. I build this argument through attention to four gastrocritical points of tension which form spectrums through which authors explore the self: ritual, often as it opposes the mundane; hunger and appetite, and the ways these relate to denial and restraint; tradition and its relationship to concepts of modernity; and, the home as a site of both oppression and empowerment. Theoretically, Feminist Food Studies support this gastrocritical research design, attuned to food work and consumption both as vectors for pleasure and self-discovery, but also as means of suppression and alienation. Sustained critical attention to food in mid-century Irish coming of age novels written by women builds a more comprehensive understanding of the Bildungsroman’s place in Irish anglophone literature, the contributions made by Irish women’s writing traditions, and the cultural importance of food in Ireland more broadly. This thesis’s findings build on extant work that reverses reductive studies on the alleged cultural inconsequence of food in Irish history and advances scholarship on the articulation of gendered subjectivities in mid-20th century Ireland through findings on food’s central role in mechanisms of identity formation for women.

Funder

University of Galway

Publisher

University of Galway

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CC BY-NC-ND

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University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)