Solace of Laudanum McGarrity, Maria
Journal of West Indian literature,
04/2020, Letnik:
28, Številka:
1
Journal Article
According to Evelyn O'Callaghan, in her groundbreaking study of women, literature and the West Indies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Male-authored accounts, naturally enough, are ...not usually concerned with the details of women's lives. ... women had no official place in the drama of imperial conquest; their roles as mother of heirs and paragons of reassuringly cozy domesticity, were strictly supportive. ...what O'Callaghan's Caribbean, feminist critical work has shown is that focusing on women and celebrating the inclusiveness of what constitutes the feminine and feminism are central not only to women's writing but also to the Caribbean in general. According to Line Henriksen, Walcott "assigned little speech to St. Lucia's . The choice of the sea or the land, the challenging sustenance of fishing or the relative ease of the tourist dollar, is not merely an issue of parentage for these characters but one for all of St, Lucia and the wider Caribbean, The questions surrounding Helen's maternity provide a complex sense of gestation and future inheritance at once, This challenging position emerges not only because she is torn between her two lovers but also because she is struggling with Maud, even though she is reliant on her to some degree, According to O'Callaghan in her "Views and Visions: Layered Landscapes in West Indian Migrant Narratives," Despite the racially stratified nature of plantation society, the domestic world was an intimate one, resulting in a surprising level of interdependence between white, black, and coloured women, As a result relationships of power within the household were anything but stable, and hierarchies and boundaries were constantly negotiated and transgressed, (493) Just such a complex relational dynamic between Helen and Maud is evident in Omeros, After Helen has revealed her condition to Maud, Walcott notes, Maud stood, enraged, in the sun.
Oscar Wilde mocks and celebrates cricket in a single, swift decree as he observes, "It requires one to assume such indecent postures." Indeed, the game of cricket has placed many an Irishman in such ...questionable positions. Joseph O'Neill's contemporary account of the Irish Atlantic world as imagined in a displaced, wounded, post-9/11 New York rests upon the Irish island imaginary of James Joyce and particularly his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. O'Neill shows that the very circularity within the Atlantic world represents not simply the imaged geographies of Ireland, New York, and Trinidad but that all of these locations function as a psychic Netherland and, in fact, as nether-islands. All of these locations in both Joyce's and O'Neill's works host cricket matches that reify and question respective island identities. Joyce and O'Neill specifically shape metaphors, allusions, and the critical settings of their narratives habitually in terms of the propinquity of the sea on their cricket pitches to highlight the vulnerability of the home island. Such unlikely geographic affiliations exist not simply within O'Neill's work but also reach back to a fundamental trope, evident in Joyce's writing particularly, of water (and the sea) as a dominant metaphor for history and the island as a wounded geography in Ireland's globalized imagined community.
McGarrity examines the influence of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland on the indecent postures of island cricket. Joseph O'Neill's use of the game ...in Netherland as a cultural marker of connection in post-9/11 New York initially seems very unlike the context Joyce provides in A Portrait. Though O'Neill himself has a most complicated identity reflecting the cultural hybridity common in the contemporary world, it is his portrait of cricket play in Netherland that marks his novel with a noticeably Irish and specifically Joycean inheritance.
As several of the essays in this collection show, any modern national and/or ethnic identification of cultures that border the Irish Sea are often too limiting or merely projected into the historical ...past as reflections of contemporary political ideologies. In Ireland, from the latter half of the nineteenth and through the twentieth century, writers continually returned to a striking series of ancient myths drawn from the most-famed narratives of the Irish archipelago, identified these as original manifestations of the indigenous peoples, and deployed these constructs as a means of defining national identity. This interest in ancient Ireland partially results from
McGarrity opines that Jim Sheridan's In America offers a critique of traditional roles that immigrant groups often hold in such a contemporary zone. In fact, both male leads are artists. Johnny ...Sullivan is an actor/writer, and Mateo Kuamey is a photographer/painter. The tenement's organizational structure has the Sullivan family at the top of the squalid tenement building, literally living on top of other unidentified immigrants, assorted drug fiends, and most importantly, on top of the African tenant, Mateo. Furthermore, she accounts that Sheridan uses the powerful ascent of the domestic structure through the staircase to highlight the Sullivan family's centrality and dominance within the tenement zone. They occupy the highest apartment and repeatedly ascend the structure in striking moments of mastery: renting the apartment, heaving the air conditioner, returning from carnival in triumph.
The literary, historical, and linguistic confluence that characterized the Irish-Sea region in the pre-modern period is reflected in the interdisciplinarity of these new research essays, centered on ...the literatures, languages, and histories of the Irish-Sea communities of the Middle Ages, much of which is still evoked in contemporary culture.The contributors to this collection dive deep into the rich historical record, heroic literature, and story lore of the medieval communities ringing the Irish Sea, with case studies that encompass Manx, Irish, Scandinavian, Welsh, and English traditions. Manannán, the famous travelling Celtic divinity who supposedly claimed the Isle of Man as his home, mingles here with his mythical, legendary, and historical neighbors, whose impact on our image and understanding of the pre-modern cultures of the Northern Atlantic has persisted down through the centuries.
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