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Mourning Remains Unresolved: Trauma and Survival in Anne Enright's The Gathering

According to the editors of a recent special issue of Éire-Ireland devoted to the history and literature of Irish childhood, ‘‘the story of contemporary Irish society, a story that many claim signals unprecedented social and economic transformation, is a narrative with the child as its central trope’’ (Luddy and Smith 6). Supportive evidence for this assertion exists in many forms, from the plethora of recent films, plays, art works, and autobiographies that anatomize Irish childhoods from plural perspectives to the litany of child abuse scandals—and their systematic concealment—involving churchand state-run institutions that have attracted a torrent of media attention since the mid-1990s. The continuing proliferation of first-hand accounts of child physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, within individual Irish families as well as within the state’s network of industrial and reformatory schools, bears vivid and disturbing testimony to this cultural confluence. The popular reception of such memoirs affirms the moral and emotional power of their truth-claims, yet the cultural representation of institutional, clerical and familial child abuse has not been the sole preserve of real-life victims and survivors. Ireland’s novelists and short-story writers have also given ‘‘eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and to weep’’ (Ricoeur 188). Indeed, some of the most memorable and affective portrayals of child sexual abuse in contemporary Ireland have been in fictional form, from Dorothy Nelson’s groundbreaking In Night’s City (1982) through Jennifer Johnston’s The Invisible Worm (1991) and Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River (1996) to Patrick McCabe’s phantasmagoric Winterwood (2006).