Women and Relationships in Contemporary Irish Women’s Short Stories

　　This book examines archetypal motifs related to aspects of human relationships in contemporary Irish women's short stories from the late 1960s to the present.  These relationships examined embrace not only relationships between men and women, as married couples and lovers, but also women to women relationships as mothers, daughters, sisters or lovers.  This book has uncovered certain recurrent motifs which may be construed as archetypal and are employed as a narrative device to express a certain level of feminist awareness by Irish female writers in their stories against the backdrop of Irish feminism emerged in the late 1960s.

 

　　This feminist aspect of Irish women's stories appears to address the paradoxes of patriarchal ideology underlying male domination in male/female courtship and marriages, the conflict between patriarchally loyal mothers and rebellious daughters, powerless, but rival, female siblings and peers competing for limited resources and male attention under the Father's law.  Motifs of resistance and subversion serve in these stories as metaphors unveiling female protests against an ideology which defines and confines women in the Irish patriarchal context.

 

　　This book demonstrates a process of transition during which Irish female writers progress from the depiction of women who struggle and fight against unfairness and distortion within an ‘androcentric’ culture to a new direction in which such writers describe a situation where women recognise the internalisation of the ‘false consciousness’ of patriarchy and, out of this recognition, may be eventually able to develop further their sense of self and individuality.  The archetypal motifs in Irish women's stories also illustrate a kind of continuity of an ancient female archetype of female rebellious powers which in female literary imagination never ceases to resurface in the face of patriarchal suppression.

 

 

　　Ann Wan-lih Chang, was born in Taipei and currently lives in Kaohsiung.  She received her M.A. at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1997 and her Ph.D. at the University of Ulster in 2006.  Her major fields of study and research are contemporary Irish women's writing, the short fiction genre, discourse of stereotypes and archetypes in literary texts.  Currently she is the assistant professor of the Department of Applied English at Shih-chien University, Kaohsiung Campus.