The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

1995: Emma Donoghue, Hood

1995 Emma Donoghue, Hood Many of Emma Donoghue’s seven novels deal with relations between women, from the coming-of-age story Stir-Fry (1994), to the historical novels Life Mask (2004) and The Sealed Letter (2008) to the modern romance, Landing (2007). A third historical novel, Slammerkin (2000), deals with women’s sexuality in an abusive heterosexual context; and the author breaks new fictional ground with Room (2010). A native of Dublin, Donoghue (b. 1969) has also written a number of plays and published several collections of short stories. She is also a noted historian and anthologist of lesbian writing. Pen O’Grady is grieving. Her lover of thirteen years, Cara Wall, has been killed in a car crash. Pen’s name – the same as that of the female swan – seems to have already inscribed her fate, in the sense that swans are customarily thought of as monogamous. But the novel is not only a swan song; it is also a prescription for growth and change. As well as detailing how the thirty-year-old Pen manages the transitions to such female destinies as widowhood and spinsterhood, more importantly and unexpectedly Hood charts her passage into full acceptance of her own sexuality. Of spinsterhood, Pen says, ‘I’d prefer it to the flapping gingham motherhood, or (god forbid) the wifehood drowned in off-white lace’ (114). In contrast, ‘dykehood was definitely a baseball cap’ (ibid.), the neologism as well as the headgear suggesting informality and insouciance, a jaunty disregard for the conventions of appearance associated with the other ‘hoods’ mentioned. In a word, dykehood is gay. If she is to have a life of her own, Pen must think of her sexual identity to be permissible outside her closeted relationship with Cara. Being a gay woman holds good in all cases – social, familial, professional. Pen’s recognition of who she is independently of Cara allows Hood its mourning theme, while also being something of a valediction forbidding mourning. Shocked and preoccupied as Pen is, this recognition is slow to dawn on her. Besides, there is nobody else on hand to see to the various tasks connected with Cara’s death, the Wall family being no longer in one piece. Fourteen years earlier, Cara’s mother, Winona (née Winnie Mulhuddart from County Limerick) made a life for herself in America with her other daughter, Kate, and is at present too busy to return home. Cara’s father, an unassuming librarian, is not a 126 THE IRISH NOVEL 1960–2010 great one for facing reality – in discussing her family’s break-up, Kate says, ‘I should have known Dad would never have the guts to emigrate ’ (111). If the other Wall women had remained in Ireland, Pen might have found it more difficult to sustain her affair with Cara. But with the women’s departure, there is room enough in Cara’s home – what Pen mockingly, though also self-consciously, refers to as the ‘Big House’ (108) – for her and Cara to live in a world of their own. Given that Cara’s father is a ‘gentle Joseph’ (113) type, Pen is under the impression – or chooses to believe – that nobody is any the wiser about the affair, though one of her later moments of awakening is the discovery that Cara’s father knew all along what was going on. Moreover, it was to Kate that the teenage Pen first felt herself attracted, developing such a crush that Kate’s departure for the States caused Pen to do surprisingly poorly at her exams – another example, perhaps, of not only the problems that remaining closeted create but also of what is arguably this novel’s greater concern, which is with the ways in which sexual identity impinges on representations of oneself in other spheres, particularly in public. If, to the young Pen, David Bowie ‘was living proof that a perv could win fame and glory’ (191), then there should be a place in the world for her, too. Cara’s death does bring Kate back to Ireland. She is now not only what Donoghue refers to as a ‘het’ (hetero), but also, inevitably, culturally very different. Clearly, Kate has left Ireland behind, and considers her native country one that ‘has nothing but a past tense’ (102). This view resonates with the novel’s suggestions that gay identity may be regarded as socially progressive, transgressing familiar, culturally determined norms of marriage, domesticity and the kinds of sexual roles that have conventionally been...