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Voices from the Margins: Gender and the Everyday in Women's Pre- and Post-Agreement Troubles Short Fiction by Mercedes del Campo

2022; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2022.0019

1534-5815

Maeve Davey O'Lynn,

Irish and British Studies

Reviewed by: Voices from the Margins: Gender and the Everyday in Women's Pre- and Post-Agreement Troubles Short Fiction by Mercedes del Campo Maeve Davey O'Lynn Voices from the Margins: Gender and the Everyday in Women's Pre- and Post-Agreement Troubles Short Fiction, by Mercedes del Campo, Reimagining Ireland 107 (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2022, 316 p., paperback, £40 / $60.95) In the introduction to this considered and engaging study, Mercedes del Campo lays out an articulate and convincing rationale for her research from which one phrase in particular stands out: "The marginal position of women within the dominant discourses of the conflict and of women writers within Troubles literary criticism and the Troubles literary canon goes hand in hand with the marginal status of the short story form." While one cannot dispute that such a canon is to some extent now recognized, nonetheless the concept of a "Troubles literary canon" remains, for want of a better phrase, somewhat troubling. When does it begin? Which work does it include / exclude? Who has canonized the texts enshrined therein? Perhaps most controversial of all: When does it end? As for the marginalization of the short story form, inarguably prose took something of a back seat to both poetry and drama in the north of Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century, though, as this assured and important study from del Campo attests, not entirely. From a probing macro enquiry (which draws on Virginia Woolf, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva) into what inspired women to write what they wrote and when, del Campo then moves into the micro: why these women wrote these stories, what experiences they gave voice to, and what cultural impact they had against a backdrop of violence, displacement, injury, and intimidation. Unsurprisingly, disrupted domesticity features strongly throughout, with female narrators left waiting for, hoping to avoid, and inevitably receiving bad news. The lasting legacy of this less visible but unendurable mental anguish (a figurative "death of the heart") is captured aptly across the stories chosen by del Campo. Those who find themselves more directly touched by conflict, through being labeled as an informer or otherwise marked out for intimidation, do on occasion experience physical violence but far more often are put through the mental and emotional torture of the threat of violence that may never come. Del Campo [End Page 149] references the "troubled, restless sleep" of the protagonist in Fiona Barr's "The Wall-Reader" and the diary entry from Anne Devlin's "Five Notes after a Visit": "I keep myself awake all night so I am ready when they come." Del Campo observes that the latter story, which is dated "Noday. Nodate 1984," gives the reader "the understanding that it could be any day because every day has become the same … [signaling] the prolongation of trauma in time and [the female protagonist's] anxious wait for the worst to happen at any moment." Del Campo's ability to uncover meaning from the material and to place it in context is striking. Furthermore, she acknowledges the pivotal role played by social conditions and material poverty for both the women writing and the female characters in these stories, plus the role of "frontline feminism" and the women's center movement that bridged the wider sectarian divisions: "women from both political persuasions had a willingness to work together because they recognized that they were all enduring the same problems of poverty and violence." She cites the work of Mary Beckett, Mary Costello, Jennifer Johnston, Frances Molloy, and the Charabanc Theatre Company, and recounts key local events such as the 1970 women's march in Belfast from Andersonstown to the Falls Road through British troops to distribute food supplies; the 1971 "Milk Campaign," when mothers from the Ormeau Road in Belfast protested against the Ministry of Education's decision to stop milk supplies to schools for children over the age of seven; and the political roles taken on by Bernadette Devlin, Monica McWilliams, and Pearl Sagar. Del Campo reads Anne Noble's "A Riot" (based on the Ulster Workers' Council strike of March 1974) in this light, as an account of "what...