Beyond the pale : representations of women as others in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and Patrick McCabe's Carn

Abstract

The following study focuses on how the twentieth century female in the Republic of Ireland is represented in Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes and in Patrick McCabe's Carn. A historiography of Irish feminist literature offers an insight into the evolution in women's lives between the seventeenth century and the twentieth century. The theories of feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Kate Millet and Germaine Greer are juxtaposed to the depiction of three women in the above novels and to socio-historical facts, in an attempt to assess the verisimilitude of ? and divergences within - the fictive narrative and the memoir, as well as the accuracy of the feminist theories. Ultimately, the scope of the work is to discover the way the average woman lived her daily life in a country which was dominated by the patriarchal Catholic Church and lived under the influence of its imperial neighbour England.