Abstract
The Secret Place (2014) exposes a persistent Western cultural impulse to contain the emotions of teenage girls when they demonstrate control over their lives. In the Irish context, the dismissal of teenage girls is resonant of a containment culture in which controlling women’s bodies and minds has been essential to upholding heteropatriarchal ideals. Resistance to the novel’s unresolved supernatural elements by readers and critics and the lack of sustained academic scholarship also point to an unsettling complacency with the neoliberal impulse to contain female emotion and lived experience in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.
Recommended Citation
Kervick, Mollie. "Gothic Girlhood and Resistance: Confronting Ireland’s Neoliberal Containment Culture in Tana French’s The Secret Place," Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2022, https://scholarship.shu.edu/ciiis/vol4/iss1/3.
Included in
Celtic Studies Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, History Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons
