Frehner, Ruth: The Colonizers' Daughters

Gender in the Anglo-Irish Big House Novel. In a majority of big house novels (as the country house novel is called in Ireland) women are the protagonists. Yet gender has hardly ever been an issue in criticism so far. This first full-length gender-specific study examines the various poetic functions of the daughter protagonists in nine novels by George Moore, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Fitzgerald, Aidan Higgins, Edith Oenone Somerville & Martin Ross, Molly Keane, John Banville and Jennifer Johnston, published between 1886 and 1991. Chapters on marriageable girls, spinsters, and illegitimate daughters show in what way issues of gender, class, and race intersect in the figure of the big house daughter. Whether a commodity of the marriage market, or rebellious against patriarchal values, whether finding themselves at the end of a line in their sterility, or di-vided in their hybridity, these daughters are shown to reflect not only the double allegiances of the Anglo-Irish and their predicaments before and after 1922, but also, in some instances, to allegorize a colonized Ireland. A concluding chapter, focussing on a daughter of a mixed marriage, posits that the myth of a raped and conquered Catholic Ireland needs to be revised. XIII,256 Seiten mit 8 Abb., gebunden (Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten/Swiss Studies in English; Band 125/A. Francke Verlag 1999)