Date of Award

Spring 5-20-2025

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

MA English

Department

English

Advisor

John Wargacki, PhD

Committee Member

Elizabeth Redwine, PhD

Keywords

Irish nationalism, double colonization, James Joyce, Eavan Boland, Irish woman, emigration, domesticity, gender, feminist criticism, postcolonial literature

Abstract

This paper explores how James Joyce’s “A Mother” and “Eveline” and Eavan Boland’s “The Lost Land” and “Mother Ireland” illuminate the gendered sacrifices underpinning Irish nationalism through the lens of double colonization. Joyce’s female protagonists are caught between personal desire and cultural obligation: Mrs. Kearney’s assertiveness leads to public dismissal, while Eveline’s paralysis reveals the psychic toll of conflating domestic labor with patriotic duty. Boland’s poems, in turn, demonstrate how both staying and leaving reinforce women’s entrapment within nationalist ideologies. In “The Lost Land,” the mother’s grief is naturalized as part of her expected role in preserving the homeland, while in “Mother Ireland,” the speaker’s emigration is met with guilt and familial pleas for return. These texts reveal that neither resistance nor submission grants women freedom, as all choices are shaped by a culture that conflates womanhood with national service. Yet the act of representing this entrapment through literature becomes its own form of agency. Boland’s work in particular reclaims marginalized female experiences, linking private grief to public history and offering an alternative to mythologized national narratives. Together, Joyce and Boland expose the emotional and historical fractures that nationalist discourse seeks to conceal, offering a vital archive in which women’s voices challenge the conditions of their historical erasure. By situating their work in a shared tradition of gendered resistance, this analysis affirms the necessity of including women’s experiences in any comprehensive understanding of Irish identity and independence.

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