Praying

Abstract

AbstractThe Catholic Church’s power over the Irish imaginary has been executed in part through its disciplining of the ritualized practice of prayer, a force that has landed most heavily on the artificially privatized experience of women. Representing prayer through the tactics of the modernist mode, Irish women writers draw attention to the ways that female consciousness submits to, as well as eludes, the formidable structures imposed by organized religion. In Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941), Mary Lavin’s twentieth-century short fiction, Emma Donoghue’s Hood (1995), and Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013), prayer surfaces in the narrative as public practice and as private meditation. These works acknowledge the unfathomable nature of prayer and provide readers sophisticated and sympathetic accounts of this practice, even as they critique how prayer creates a specious feeling of individual well-being and binds practitioners uncritically to an institution.