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Mapping out a landscape of female suffering: Edna O'Brien's demythologizing novels

Although an integral part of nineteenth-century anti-colonial culture in Ireland, the romantic nationalist tradition's gendered images and myths seem from the present vantage to have done as much damage as good. Allegorical representations that expressed the island's political subjugation through suffering women figures, for example, not only simplified the so-called colonial encounter, but also further entrenched the submissive model of Irish femininity. The ideal role for Irish women, such representations suggested, was to inspire their male counterparts through their forbearance rather than to participate in the struggle for nationhood directly. Most recent critiques of this gendered mythology, including C.L. Innes's Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society (1993) and those issued in the documentary film Mother Ireland (1988), emphasize how such representations erased and discouraged women's participation in national politics, and denied them historical agency. Yet in restricting Irish women to the role of muse and