Daydreaming

Abstract

AbstractModernist technique, most obviously stream of consciousness, has frequently been employed to make visible and public the reveries of women. Irish women’s contemporary fiction uses such tactics to underscore the ways in which real life intrudes on and reshapes this imaginative practice. In Night (1972), which riffs off the narrative techniques depicting Molly Bloom’s ruminations in Ulysses, Edna O’Brien demonstrates the limits of feminism and the sexual revolution in revamping individual psychology as well as in reworking modernist form. At the cusp of the twenty-first century, Ireland grappled with cultural alterations arising from the newfound affluence of the Celtic Tiger, widespread revelations of childhood sexual abuse across the island, and the promise of peace in Northern Ireland. Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) and Deirdre Madden’s Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) focus on female characters in the throes of these contemporary conditions, adapting stream of consciousness to portray how the twenty-first century’s flush of goods and capital influenced the reveries of Irish women.