Women in Irish Short Stories - Essay Example

Running Head: WOMEN IN IRISH SHORT STORIES Irish Literature of the of the Women Introduction In the heart of all Irishman hides a poet, burning with patriotic passion for his beloved Emerald Isle. It is this same fervour, which for centuries, Great Britain has attempted to snuff out of the Catholics of Ireland with dictatorial policies and the hegemony of the Protestant religion. Catholics were treated like second-class populace in their native home. Centuries of oppression churned in the hearts of the Irish and came to a simmer in the writings and literature of the sons and daughters of Ireland. The Literary Renaissance of Ireland produced some of the greatest writers the world has seen. John O Leary said it best, literature must be nationwide and nationalism must be literary. Although there is an endless stream of profound poets and playwrights; John Synge, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, etc., this paper s primary focus is on William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, and their aid during the Irish Literary Renaissance and their perspectives on the Irish Question. They preserved the names of the heroes of the past and celebrated the Irish spirit from side to side their writings so that the sacrifice of many would not be in vain. (Altieri 265) Through the language and verses of Yeats and Joyce and all the writers of the Irish Literary Renaissance, the memories of the courageous have survived. The purpose of the writing was to fire up the patriotic flame of the Irish and work towards a united Ireland. In the troubles of today, the memory of the sacrifices of yesterday are still strong within the culture and habits of the Irish. Someday, their dream and the dream of so many who have gone before them will be predictable and achieved. The opposing desires of feminists "making history" reproduce the epistemological issues embedded in the double reference of the term history itself: first, to history as the past; and second, to history as the story of the past. The first connotation of history-what has happened-posits a base reality whose entirety can never be fully reconstituted. (Altieri 268) The second connotation of history-the narrative of what has happened-foregrounds the role of the storyteller of past events and consequently the nature of narrative as a mode of knowing that selects, organizes, orders, interpret, and allegorizes. These two size of history in turn reflect the double reference in my title, "making history." The feminist wish to "make history" entangles the desire to effect important and lasting change with the desire to be the historian of change. As a heuristic activity, history writing instructions the past in relation to the needs of the present and future. The description act of assigning meaning to the past potentially intervenes in the present and future production of history. For feminists, this means that writing the history of feminism functions as an act in the present that can (depending on its influence) add to the shape of feminism's future. The heuristic and domineering dimension of history writing-historiography as an act in the present on behalf of the future-raises the question of epistemology, central to sympathetic the inner- and outer-directed energies of feminist history writing, whether inside or exterior the academy, whether within the field of women's history or more broadly within women's studies in general. For those working out of a positivist epistemology, the goal of history writing is to construct an objective account of the past based on thorough fascination in the empirical data and an unbiased assemblage of that data into an accurate sequence. The positivist belief in history writing as the making of objective truth may no longer be very prevalent in its purest form, although it served as the theoretical bases for the formation of history as a discipline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the notion of history writing as the best possible rebuilding of the past in a seamless narrative by an omniscient, invisible narrator nonetheless continues to underwrite many projects, including feminist ones. Within this framework, the heuristic and interventionist dimension of history writing tends to be difficult or overtly denied, and thus covertly operative. (Bilger 34) For those working out of a subjectivist epistemology, the Real of history is predictable only through its on paper or oral textualisations. The past is therefore triply mediated-first, through the mediations of those texts, which are themselves reconstructions of what "really" happened; second, through the incomplete and biased survival of those textualisations that are dependent upon the politics of certification and the luck, skill, and persistence of the historian-as detective who must place them; and third, through the interpretive, meaning making gaze of the historian. From this viewpoint, the excellence of history writing depends not upon the level of objectivity but rather upon the clearness of interpretation. And interpretation, as Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra pre-eminently hypothesize, introduce the mediations of language: the meaning-making of tropes, oratory, and narrative. Within the subjectivist epistemology, this dimension of historical discourse is often openly acknowledged as a source of speculation or even commitment. Both epistemologies have been at exertion in women's studies as feminists from a selection of fields engage in "making history"-in the writing about feminism's past and the presentation of feminism's present and future. Some feminists work within a positivist framework, emphasizing the "truth" of what has been improved; others purpose within a subjectivist framework, foregrounding the interpretive dimension of their narratives; and still others unite aspects of each epistemology. This diversity of historiography assumption reflects, I believe, the contradictions built into the foundations of women's studies itself, contradictions that carry on to underlie and permeate most work in the field, whether acknowledged or not. On the one hand, women's studies developed out of the need to counter hegemonic discourses about women that ignored, misshapen, or trivialized women's history, experience, and possible. Women's studies as a result formulated compensatory and oppositional histories that told the "truth" about women-whether it was about women's rank in the so-called Renaissance, the making of women's writing in the nineteenth century, or the sexual brutalization of black women slaves. This hunt to discover of the "truth" of women's history that could shatter the "myths" and "lies" about women in the criterion histories operates out of a positivist epistemology that assumes that the truth of history is objectively predictable. On the other hand, the early resolve in women's studies that hegemonic knowledge was fashioned out of and in the service of andocentric necessitated a subjectivist epistemology that insisted on all knowledge as value based, emerging from a given viewpoint or standpoint. No knowledge is value free, many feminists claimed, including feminist knowledge. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) was widely used to promote women's studies as a "paradigm shift" of dramatic and radical proportions within the institutions of information. (Belanger 240) The goal of writing the past within this epistemological structure was not to find out the true history, but rather to construct the story of women's experience out of a feminist concept. Feminist histories countered hegemonic histories not with the objective truth, but with stories produced from a feminist perspective. Both feminist epistemologies urban out of and have continued currency because of the immediately felt political agenda of women's studies: to engage in the de-formation of phallocentric history and the re-formation of histories that focuses on or integrates women's experience and the issue of sexual category. Why political Because what we know of the past shapes what becomes possible in the future. Because the repositories of human knowledge constitute the building blocks of the representative order. Because knowledge is power, progressively more so in what is coming to be called the Information Age. (Belanger 255) On the one hand, the positivist epistemology can escort toward fundamentalist assertions of fact that obscure the interpretive perspectives of historical tale. On the other hand, the subjectivist epistemology can lead toward the paralysis of total relativism in which the Real of history vanishes into the play of story and discourse. It would be easy, but deceptive, to align the positivist epistemology with the outer-directed, action-oriented wish to "make history" and the subjectivist epistemology with the inner-directed, self-reflexive problematizing of feminist history writing. Certainly, the nervousness about the potential for replicating the master narratives of hegemonic discourse assumes the subjectivist model and foregrounds the position of the narrator in an interpretive ordering of the past. (Bellamy 70) But to connect feminist history text (whether in women's history or other fields of women's studies) with positivism would obscure the diversity of epistemologies present in these histories-some of which are positivist, some subjectivist, and some a combination, with the contradictory presence of both epistemologies causal the endeavour as a whole. Moreover, it would too simply replicate the dismissive sign that consigns everything but the act of poststructuralist problematizing to a bankrupt and inexperienced humanism. References Altieri, Joanne. "Style and Purpose in Maria Edgeworth's Fiction." Nineteenth Century Fiction 23 (1998): 265-278. Belanger, Jacqueline. "Educating the Reading Public: British Critical Reception of Maria Edgeworth's Early Irish Writing." Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies 28.2 (1998 Autumn-Winter): 240-55. Bellamy, Liz. "Regionalism and Nationalism: Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and the Definition of Britishness." The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1990. Ed. K.D.M. Snell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 54-77. Bilger, Audrey. Laughing feminism: subversive comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. 34-45 Read More