‘…something dark and lethal’: The Irish Female Gothic in Tracy Fahey’s I Spit Myself Out (2021)
Introduction: ‘Never Had It So Good’
At the beginning of the 1990s, the Irish economy enjoyed a period of ‘unprecedented, near vertiginous growth and expansion’ (Smith and Workman, 2018:85) that was notably ignited by the liberalizing economic policies and pro-European strategies of Sean Lemass’ Fianna Fáil government during the late 1950s and 1960s. Furthering this, Ireland, at the turn of the millennium,
possessed a young, educated, English-speaking workforce and could offer multinational companies (particularly in the technology and pharmaceutical sectors) easy access to the European market through membership of the European Economic Community (later European Union) as well as low corporate tax rates. The devaluation of the Irish punt…also facilitated an export boom and stimulated a great flexibility in the Irish financial sector (Smith and Workman, 2018:85).
The rise of what would later be referred to as ‘the Celtic Tiger’ rapidly unraveled and reshaped the structural fabric of Irish society. In a single decade, unemployment and emigration rates fell, the middle-classes increased exponentially, and new depictions of a progressive, liberal Ireland were projected onto the national, international, and global stage all of which provided a kind of antidote to previous perceptions of the country being an ‘inward-looking place, locked into age-old doctrines and rivalries’ (Baker, 1999). As Sinead Kennedy notes, Ireland’s shift towards a more liberal, more secular, and more economically prosperous nation during the Celtic Tiger saw the emergence of a ‘new national consensus’ which made the contentious claim that the Irish people, as a whole, ‘had never had it so good’ (2003:95). However, as many critics have since observed, this era of unprecedented prosperity was very much ‘all shine and no substance’ (Killeen, 2017). For many, it was (and arguably still is) a Gothic nightmare where dark realities simmered beneath the country’s newfound financial affluence and ‘surface glamour’ (Killeen, 2017). In November 2004, Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, spoke candidly of the ‘vulgar feast’ (Fahey, Russell, and Whelan, 2007:1) that was Celtic Tiger Ireland. For O’Reilly, the Irish nation had, over the course of a single decade, become marked by ‘rampant, unrestrained drunkenness, brutal random violence, the obscene parading of obscene wealth, [a] growing disdain towards the poor’ as well the overall ‘fracturing of Irish community life’ (Fahey, Russell, and Whelan, 2007:1). Colin Coulter expressed a similar (and somewhat conservative) sentiment when he wrote of the ‘spiritual emptiness’ that had invariably taken over the twenty-six counties ‘in the era of the Celtic Tiger’ (Coulter, 2003:25). For Coulter, Ireland had become ‘a place that elevate[d] having over being,’ a place of ‘rampant consumption’ driven on by arrogance, callousness, and a distinct ‘devotion to self’ (Coulter, 2003:25). This darker side of the Celtic Tiger has, in recent years, become a popular site of academic enquiry, with scholars like Jarlath Killeen, Steve Coleman, and Fintan O’Toole doing much to expose the synthetic nature of Celtic Tiger idealism. This critical reflective trend is also recognizable in the literature published in the years after the Celtic Tiger’s collapse. As Claire Kilroy noted in an interview with Mary Burke in 2017, in the aftermath of the economic collapse, it became ‘acceptable to not be in gainful employment’ and so ‘people had the permission to write again’ (Burke, 2017:20-21). This newfound freedom notably cultivated a new wave of Irish writing which, according to Justine Jordan, brought a ‘palpable energy’ (Jordan, 2015) to Irish fiction as young and upcoming poets, writers, and creatives began to use their crafts to respond to what had happened during the Celtic Tiger and after its collapse. Remarkably, many of these writers began to reengage the Gothic mode to respond to the sinister and seismic shifts that had occurred in Irish society since the early 1990s. As many critics have already demonstrated, the Gothic typically tends to resurface at times of social, political, and economic instability (Shapiro, 2008:35) and so it comes as no surprise to learn that with the economic downturn there emerged a revival of the Irish Gothic tradition. Since 2008, writers like Kevin Barry (Dark Lies the Island, 2012), Donal Ryan (The Spinning Heart, 2012), Colin Barrett (Young Skins, 2013), and Conor O’Callaghan (Nothing on Earth, 2016) have all, in one way or another, turned to the Gothic to talk back to the Celtic Tiger. However, as Claire Bracken and Tara Harney-Mahajan collectively note, this recessionary period also brought about an increased visibility around female writers as independent publishers and journals, such as New Island Books, Tramp Press, New Liberties Press, Banshee, and Stinging Fly, actively pioneered the publication of exciting new female voices (Bracken and Harney, Mahajan, 2017:3). In their collective scholarship, both Bracken and Harney-Mahajan cite writers like June Caldwell, Danielle McLaughlin, and Sara Baume as important and influential contributors to Contemporary Irish Writing yet, rather remarkably, they altogether fail to acknowledge the undeniable influence the Gothic (a mode ‘intrinsically connected to the repressed, the oppressed and the forgotten’ (Wester and Aldana Reyes, 2019:13)) has had upon these writers and their works. Recognizing this scholarly oversight, this article argues for the presence of what can be identified as a revolutionary new ‘Female Gothic’ at play within the realm of Irish literature in the post-Celtic Tiger period. This new ‘Female Gothic’ mode put forward here, notably builds from the foundations of Ellen Moers’ scholarship on the Female Gothic outlined in Literary Women which identifies a Female Gothic text as that which articulates ‘women’s dissatisfactions with patriarchal society’ and addresses the ‘problematic position of the maternal’ (Smith and Wallace, 2018:1) within that society through the Gothic mode. The research at hand accepts Moers’ idea that the Female Gothic is ‘a coded expression of women’s fear of entrapment within the domestic and within the female body’ (Smith and Wallace, 2018:1). However, this definition is consciously expanded to also include notions of female entrapment within cultural and systematic power structures, specifically those relating to religious, governmental, and economic institutions. In this way, the contemporary Irish Female Gothic follows the Irish Gothic tradition and its overt preoccupation with misuses of power. It is transgressive, and politically engaged, and emerges in the post-Tiger period to give voice to a myriad of social, cultural, and political issues directly related to the contemporary Irish female experience, and to challenge the male-orientated ‘mancession’ (Ging, 2017:172) narratives that have come to dominate Irish cultural and literary discourse since 2008.
This article examines the Irish Female Gothic through Tracy Fahey’s award-winning short story collection, I Spit Myself Out (2021). For Fahey, the female body functions as a Gothic site, or a ‘heterotopic and enclosed space of interior drama’ where ‘the difficulties attendant on inhabiting a female body’ (Bassett, 2021) are worked through and mapped out. Fahey’s conscious positioning of the female body as an ‘active’ landscape openly defies the reductive and oftentimes contradictory constructions of female identity and womanhood that have arisen from Irish Catholic and Celtic Tiger discourses throughout the pre- and post-millennial periods. This article therefore pays close attention to the ways in which Fahey’s text works to challenge the ‘double bind’ of Catholic conservatism and the seemingly liberal discourses of neoliberal femininity through its strategic use of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection published in The Powers of Horror (1980). This article further reads Fahey’s collection as a text which rejects the purported freedoms of post-feminism and actively advocates for the reproductive rights of Irish women and women residing inside the Irish State in 2021. In this way, this research recognizes Fahey as an important and influential figure, not only among writers of the contemporary Irish Female Gothic mode, but among writers of contemporary Irish fiction as a whole.
Tracy Fahey’s I Spit Myself Out (2021)
Published in 2021 by The Sinister Horror Company, Tracy Fahey’s I Spit Myself Out is a deeply unsettling collection of eighteen short stories which consciously seek to map out a ‘feminist geography’ (Bassett, 2021) of the female body through the strategic deployment of the Gothic mode. For Fahey, the Gothic is best understood as a ‘dissident’ (Fahey, 2015a:xii) or transgressional mode. It is politically aware and obsessively concerned with voicing the interests of the ‘marginal, the liminal, the dispossessed and the unspoken’ (Fahey, 2015a:1). It is also deeply invested in the notion of the corporeal. According to Xavier Aldana Reyes ‘all gothic is body gothic’ (Aldana Reyes, 2014:7). Indeed, the genre is, for the most part, directly invested ‘in representational excesses of the body, like monstrosity, partly because these are helpful in negotiating larger concerns about humanity and its shifting boundaries’ (Aldana Reyes, 2014:7). The Irish Gothic corpus is also characterized by ‘relations of power and oppression…between the female body and the patriarchal Gothic space’ (Galiné, no date). Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s The Rose and the Key (1871), for example, notably utilized the Gothic to explore the deeply troubling connections between the female body and confinement in nineteenth-century Ireland, while, in Bram Stoker’s text, ‘the fight to destroy Dracula and to restore Mina to her purity’ is often considered ‘a fight for control over women’ (Wasserman, 1977:405). Fahey’s work, which she herself defines as ‘an atlas of female body trauma, of interior pain that arises from the body, from the state of being female’ (Fahey, 2021:1) is consciously aware of the Irish Gothic’s political connection to the body. It is also attentive to Ireland’s historically problematic relationship with the female form and so it not only constructs the female body as a ‘site of contested territory’ (Fahey, 2021:1), but one which is continuously ‘coloured and coded by what went before’ (Fahey, 2021:3). This notion of the haunted body, or the body marked by a passed history, explicitly evokes the familiar Gothic trope that is the burden of the past upon the present, and is succinctly embodied by the collection’s break-out tale, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’
As Fahey notes, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ lays out the body ‘like the subject of an autopsy’ (Fahey, 2021:309) using Clemente Susini’s eighteenth-century Anatomical Venus as a focal point for its excavation of the female form. The story begins with an unnamed female narrator as she slowly inspects and dissects Susini’s life-size wax cadaver from inside the confines of a university museum. The narrator’s intimate exploration of the Venus is something akin to an anatomical striptease as it uncovers secrets buried within the narrator’s own flesh, and forces her to come face to face with the history of patriarchal oppression that has to date marked her own lived existence. Fashioned from seven anatomically correct layers, the Venus, from the very beginning of Fahey’s story, is positioned as an inherently contradictory figure for she is not only an explicit demonstration of the inner workings of the female body, she is also a ’seductive representation of ideal female beauty’ (Edenstein, 2020:15). As Fahey tells us, her skin is translucent, and her long hair, ‘warm to the touch’ (8), is soft like silk and suitably fashioned into ‘two fat plaits’ (Fahey, 2021:8) that flow over her young shoulders. Her body, as a whole, is a pristine puzzle, complete with a perfectly smooth and bloodless heart, a pancreas, lungs, and a tiny unborn foetus curled neatly inside her womb. For The Guardian columnist, Zoe Williams (Williams, 2016), Susini’s Venus is, most obviously, an object of male desire. This is also true of Fahey’s model who is perfectly pliable, with a ‘sleepy, orgasmic face’ (Fahey, 2021:11) and a body that is purposely beautified by a string of expensive pearls. Beauty and indifference, it seems, are the critical components of the Venus’s womanhood, but her overall appeal to the male gaze effectively reflects what Williams refers to as ‘the logical endpoint of [female] objectification’ (Williams, 2016). The positioning of the Venus as a desirous object is radically complicated by the very fact of the form’s artificiality, and indeed the unspoken violence surely needed to achieve such faultless accuracy, and so the figure speaks volumes about patriarchal conceptions of female beauty, and the overall value of the female body in patriarchal society. This argument is further bolstered by the fact that in Fahey’s text, the Venus is explicitly described as ‘the goal of the Grand Tourist…the ancestor of the medical cadaver, the legacy of the Murder Act…the buried treasure dug by grave robbers under the cold eye of the moon’ (Fahey, 2021:9, emphasis added). She is, in other words, a figure laden with a long and complicated history of male violence and misogyny. The Demountable Venus is, of course, the ‘piéce de résistance’ (Fahey, 2021:5) of Fahey’s story, but only according to the gaze of the male who wilfully constructs her as a passive object and sees her body as nothing more than a mere commodity with which they are set to ‘draw the crowds’ (Fahey, 2021:5) to their university museum. For the curious female narrating the story, the Venus is, at least at first, the figure against which she herself is defined as ‘Other.’ Dominant institutions, as we know, implicitly define and sanction all that is considered normal in society with the consequence that everything beyond is constituted as ‘abnormal, inferior, or even shameful’ (Edwards and Graulund, 2013:9). Susini’s Venus is, of course, a product of the male-dominated fields of science and art which not only distorted and problematized the female body in the eighteenth century, but which have continued to morph and inform ideas of female beauty and self-worth well into the twenty first century. When comparing herself to the sculpted Venus, Fahey’s unnamed narrator interprets her body as a mass of imperfections: ‘the stretchmarks, the punctures on my fingers, the scars on my arms and legs, all evidence of my own flawed life’ (Fahey, 2021:18). By her view, even her insides are blemished and inadequate. Her internal anatomy, refusing to conform to what is expected of her, is a self-described ‘ugly puzzle’ (Fahey, 2021:12) constructed from unruly organs that willfully betray her. Her pancreas is a particularly threatening entity for it transforms her body into a battleground by killing of cells that produce insulin with the consequence that she herself is reduced to a ‘withered…inferior husk’ (Fahey, 2021:12).
As the narrator slowly deconstructs the Venus, she reflects upon her own troubled history with her body. She carefully traces her journey from puberty to adulthood, observing the many men – the doctors, the artists, and the ex-boyfriends - who have dictated this problematic relationship, until eventually she recognizes that her own sense of self has been formed through the unwanted opinions of others. Fahey’s story becomes a glaringly obvious pro-feminist text as the narrator steps into the ‘gloom of the museum’ (Fahey, 2021:18) in the closing paragraphs where takes off her clothes and drags them onto the Venus’ ’waxen, unyielding body until she is covered, finally’ (Fahey, 2021:18). The act notably ends the cadaver’s anatomical ‘striptease’ (Fahey, 2021:18) and so redirects the reader’s attention to the narrator whose naked flesh has grown ‘chill and marble to the touch’ (Fahey, 2021:18). In taking the Venus’s place upon the plinth, the narrator attempts to rewrite the dominant narratives inscribed upon the Venus’s passive form. Her corporeal body form is inexplicably transformed into something ‘pure and perfect and smooth to the touch’ (Fahey, 2021:19) offered up as spectacle to the male magician who, outside the museum, beckons to an unseen crowd, urging them to ‘come inside’ (Fahey, 2021:19) and watch as he ‘saw[s] the lady in half’ (Fahey, 2021:19). When eventually the narrator is severed and dissected, her ‘skin envelope’ (Fahey, 2021:19) will ultimately reveal the ‘intimate clockwork’ (Fahey, 2021:19) of her body, and with it the gruesome and complex nature of female corporeal existence. Her body’s refusal to respect the patriarchal ‘borders, positions, and rules’ (Kristeva, 1980: 4) that typically delimit the female’s overall value and worth in society therefore renders her an abject figure, that is, according to Julia Kristeva, one that not only ‘disrupts identity, system and order,’ but ‘pulverizes’ (Kristeva, 1980:5) the spectating subject. The male magician is, of course, the unsuspecting victim of this abject feminine, and so the true violence of the tale is not necessarily enacted upon the female, but rather upon the male whose sanitized, misogynistic worldview is forcefully and irrevocably uprooted (or ‘pulverized) by a graphic visualization of the undesirable truth. For Fahey then, the abject body, or the alternative female bodily landscape alluded to in ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ is a politically progressive constitution for it not only threatens to destabilize dominant norms but ultimately draws into question the integrity and stability of patriarchal narratives. The figure of the ‘invisibly monstrous’ (Fahey, 2015b:94) body notably surfaces again in ‘Love Like Blood,’ but Fahey’s feminist interrogation of patriarchal imperative is most succinctly compounded in ‘The Wrong Ones,’ a story set on a rundown farm in rural Ireland which, for years, has been owned and occupied by Audrey Leahy, her teenage son TJ, and her failing elderly father, Thomas.
‘The Wrong Ones’ memorably opens on ‘a dull grey morning’ (Fahey, 2021:21) as Gemma, a Garda detective stationed in ‘the middle of nowhere’ (Fahey, 2021:21) arrives to the Leahy’s farmland to investigate the remains of an infant found buried in ‘a hollow of muddy earth’ (Fahey, 2021:21). From the outset, the Leahy farm is positioned as distinctly Gothic landscape. The farm is, of course, a crime scene as well as an unconsecrated burial ground concealing ‘the oversized cranium’ and ‘the tiny, pale bones’ (Fahey, 2021:22) of a child. But the land is also home to a sinister farmhouse and a ‘sprawling collection of outbuildings’ (Fahey, 2021:22). The Leahy house, in particular, is described by Gemma as ‘grey, solid and ugly’ (Fahey, 2021:24). The yard, she says, ‘is muddy with deep, torn-up ruts of tractor wheels, now puddled with rain. The ground is littered with bits of rusting metal, an old cooker, tilting drunkenly to one side, some ancient and broken toys, rain-washed to dirty pastel colors’ (Fahey, 2021:24). Gemma ‘hasn’t been inside the house in years’ (Fahey, 2021:25), but from what she can remember it wasn’t ever ‘a home that was open to visitors’ (Fahey, 2021:25). When Gemma eventually does enter the Leahy house, she finds that nothing much has changed. Her presence is particularly unwelcomed by Audrey who stands, ‘face scowling,’ in ‘the dark kitchen’ surrounded by ‘the smells of cabbage and dirty laundry’ (Fahey, 2021:25). As Gemma studies Audrey, she is struck by ‘a twinge of guilt’ (Fahey, 2021;27) sparked by a memory of the two of them in their last year of primary school. The Audrey Gemma remembers
…was always too untidy, too awkward, and too different. Her hair was greasy, and her clothes never fitted. She smelled of wet walls and cigarettes. For lunch she had cold potatoes instead of sandwiches. Her books were tattered and second hand (Fahey, 2021:27).
Gemma’s memory jogs further forward, and she is sat in the backseat of her parents’ car. Audrey Leahy is sat next to her wearing ‘what looks like a ragged man’s coat, no hat no gloves, her arms crossed protectively in front of Gemma then realized was ‘a large swollen bump’ (Fahey, 2021:31-2). Gemma remembers being ‘shocked to the core’ (Fahey, 2021:320) when, at last, it occurred to her that Audrey had left school because she was pregnant. She also recalls her father’s ’savage’ (Fahey, 2021:32) disgust, and Audrey’s own shame and embarrassment as she tried to conceal the secret of ‘her awkward shape’ (Fahey, 2021:32). As Fahey’s story moves on, it becomes obvious that the ‘tiny bones at the bottom of the hill’ (Fahey, 2021:34) are the fetal remains of an unwanted pregnancy taken to term by Audrey. However, the case is further complicated when Gemma discovers that Audrey’s pregnancy is the shameful consequence of an incestuous rape suffered at the hands of her father who it seems may too be the father of the young and troubled, TJ. Rape, incest, and poisoned bloodlines are all core tropes of the Gothic which frequently position the female as a ‘passive victim to an aggressive male sexuality’ (DiPiacidi, 2018:3). As David Punter and Glennis Byron collectively note, in the ‘particularly transgressive’ Male Gothic mode, ‘sexual violence is dealt with openly and often in lingering and lascivious detail’ (Punter and Byron, 2004:278). By the end, the Male Gothic male protagonist is typically punished for his breaking of taboo, however, the text itself generally resists narrative closure with the supernatural tending always to be left unexplained (Punter and Byron, 2004:278). In contrast to this, the Female Gothic plot resists ambiguous closure. The heroine generally undergoes a series of traumatic events (usually an imprisonment within home of a powerful male figure) which lead towards ‘some kind of agency and power in the patriarchal world’ (Punter and Byron, 2004:279). Often, she is, by the end of the text, reintegrated into a community and ‘acquires a new identity and a new life though marriage’ (Punter and Byron, 2004:279). With ‘The Wrong Ones,’ Fahey consciously blurs the traditional patterns and conventions that separate the Male Gothic from the Female Gothic mode. Audrey, for example, has never enjoyed ‘an idyllic and secluded life’ (Punter and Byron, 2004:279) nor is her imprisonment within her father’s home resolved with a happy ending. She is, instead, forever trapped inside the site of her traumatic experience, and forced not only to share space with her abuser, but to care for and look after him as well. Fahey’s refusal to resolve Audrey’s narrative can, however, be read as a political statement, especially when the text itself is considered against Ireland’s vicious and violent mistreatment of women throughout the period of the Twentieth Century. Discussing this history, Ann-Marie Graham notes how ‘illegitimacy’ (that is, extra-marital pregnancy) and the figure of the ‘unmarried mother’ (Graham, 2012:1) were highly stigmatized in both the Irish Free State and the Irish Republic between 1921 and 1979 and were often interpreted as flagrant symbols of moral impurity. Women ‘in trouble’ were criminalized and socially marginalized by these identities, but they were also frequently incarcerated in specialized Church-run institutions (or ‘County Homes’) in an effort to prevent their treacherous ‘lapse of virtue’ (Garrett, 2004:23) from staining the fabric of the State. According to Louise Ryan’s research, extramarital pregnancies in Ireland often resulted in the breakdown of the family unit or, increased rates of child abuse, both sexual and physical (Ryan, 1996:18). Infanticide was also a particularly prevalent issue. As Ryan notes, the murder of young infants was a ‘daily reality’ (Ryan, 1996:18) in the Irish Free State with the majority of killings being carried out by Catholic mothers seeking to conceal the evidence of their perceivably depraved sexual behaviour. Rather remarkably, State records covering the period between 1922 and 1950 further reveal that illegitimate infants were also frequently ‘done to death by fathers or relatives’ (Rattigan, 2008:379). This evidence, of course, demonstrates the extent to which illegitimacy was stigmatized in Irish society at this time, but it also notably reveals the widespread influence of the Roman Catholic Church, and the fear and fanaticism it incited in its quest to control the nation’s female population. Audrey is, of course, an innocent victim of this quest. She is tainted by an incestuous rape and so, unable to conform to the (largely paradoxical) model of ‘feminine perfection’ provided to her by the Virgin Mother (who so clearly embodies ‘the equivalence between goodness, motherhood, purity, gentleness and submission’(Warner, 1976:335)), she is ostracized, silenced, and ultimately forced to conceal her trauma, while her paternal abuser goes uncorrected and unpunished.
Thomas is, of course, the treacherous symbolic father of Fahey’s text. He is both the depraved Gothic villain responsible for his daughter’s shameful bump, and the symbolic stand in for the many ‘Fathers’ of the Catholic Church (and, indeed, the Irish State) who permitted, either directly or indirectly, the collective and unjust treatment of young and vulnerable Irish women. In her deployment of the Gothic incest trope then, Fahey explores, from a feminist perspective, the issues that align with abuses of male power. She reclaims the voice of the female victim, and in doing so, highlights the impossible double bind suffered by a legion of women who, for decades, were divested of their freedoms and bodily autonomy under Irish Catholic rule. Both ‘Noli Me Tangere’ and ‘Reducing’ (a tale that echoes Stephen King’s Thinner) further Fahey’s interrogation of the female body as a landscape dominated by patriarchal power structures. ‘Reducing’ may, in fact, be read as a pro-feminist manifesto for it explicitly demonstrates the psychological conflicts that occur within the female when she becomes compliant with the expectations and demands of her male counterparts. ’Reducing’ also raises questions around the notion of the female body as commodity in contemporary society and so seems to touch upon and even criticize the ‘the post-feminist dictates of bodily regulation’ (Bracken, 2016:63) that thrived and intensified throughout the period of the Celtic Tiger. As Rosalind Gill’s scholarship duly notes, post-feminist sensibilities typically present the sexualized body as a woman’s most potent (if not sole) source of power and identity (Gill, 2007:149). This overt sexualization, propagated in Ireland by neoliberal economics and the ‘concurrent commercialization’(Ging, 2009:151) of the Irish media, notably sold women the illusion that they were no longer passive objects of male desire but rather ‘active, desiring sexual subjects’ (Ging, 2009:151) with a newfound freedom of self. In reality, women continued to be locked in to an anti-feminist retro-sexism, their bodies, as always, ‘requiring constant monitoring surveillance, discipline and re-modelling (and consumer spending)’ (Gill, 2007:158) in order to conform to now even narrow judgements of female beauty.
As Fahey herself notes, ‘Reducing’ is a story about ‘how women are marginalized by a shared world-view of idealized bodies’ and how women themselves ‘conspire in this collusion’ (Fahey, 2021:314). Fiona, the story’s narrator, is an obvious victim of internalized misogyny. She sees herself as a ‘padded monstrosity,’ with thighs ‘that expand in ugly protrusions of folded fat,’ and a stomach that folds ‘in a creased, solid apron of flesh’ (Fahey, 2021:188). According to her partner, James, she has ‘let [herself] go,’ (Fahey, 2021:187) and so no longer appeals to his limited view of desirability. James’ opinion ultimately pushes Fiona to starve her body. She ‘sweep[s] the house of sugar’ and makes ‘grim little meal plans’ that are ‘devoid of joy and carbohydrates’ (Fahey, 2021:189). Predictably, it is food that becomes the criminal, and not James. As the story moves forward, Fiona takes a trip with her friend, Sue, to St. Anthony’s Shrine where instead of pledging a prayer for those in ‘war-torn countries’ or ‘people starving in famines,’ she wishes for help ‘to lose weight’ (Fahey, 2021:194). Fiona is granted her wish, and almost overnight her frame begins to shrink. Her thighs become ‘visibly smaller’ and her bum, ‘harder and firmer’ (Fahey, 2021:195) than it was before. Though Fiona recognizes the problematic irony that lies in the fact that she had to shrink to be noticed, she is nevertheless empowered by her transformation. She admittedly takes pride in making other women jealous of her shrinking body. She ‘revels’ in the ‘sneaky glances’ her friends take at her ‘newly svelte form’ (Fahey, 2021:197) and feels validated by the men on the street who cat-call her as she parades in her size eight jeans and knee-high boots (Fahey, 2021:199). By the end of the story, Fiona’s uncritical and seemingly celebratory attitude towards patriarchal norms culminates with the loss of her friends and work colleagues. Even James has decided to leave her for another woman despite the fact that she has ‘lost so much weight’ (Fahey, 2021:203). Here, Fahey once again reveals the cruel bind of patriarchy (that pervasive and inherently ‘gothic’ structure which forever demands ‘the suppression – and sometimes the outright sacrifice – of women’ (Heiland, 2004:11), and the false economy of (politically-evacuated) freedom that inevitably goes alongside a post-feminist sensibility. Fahey’s Gothic therefore mourns the assumed ‘pastness’ of feminism, and resists the notion that a post-feminist construction of the self is any other than the enthusiastic performance of ‘patriarchal stereotypes of sexual servility in the name of empowerment’ (Tasker and Negra, 2007:3). Where post-feminism ‘typically relies upon binary and cisgender categorizations’ (Gill, 2017:615), Fahey continues to go rogue with ‘Sin Deep,’ a trans-inclusive narrative that supportively opens up the identity category of ‘woman’ with its Gothic deconstruction and reconstruction of the female body. As Fahey herself notes, this story is deeply invested in the notion of skin, and the shedding of skin as a form of ‘metamorphosis and abjection’ (Fahey, 2021:312) and so can be linked to the recessionary climate of ‘neoliberal suspicion’ (Cahill, 2017:155) that saw political debates around equality deservedly acquiring a new centrality in contemporary Irish society. Fahey’s collection can therefore be understood as a powerful contributor to the grassroots activism that circulated around same-sex marriage and transgender rights movements in the late 2000s, and indeed those that dealt openly with women’s reproductive freedoms during Ireland’s Repeal the Eight campaign. The final story of Fahey’s collection, also titled ‘I Spit Myself Out,’ tackles the contested topic of pregnancy, and, from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, traces out the conditions of miscarriage that position the female body as a repository of the Gothic past.
‘I Spit Myself Out’ notably begins media res with a graphic retelling of the narrator’s spontaneous loss of pregnancy, and the distressing scenes that follow in the hospital as she is scrutinized by a ‘conspiracy of men’ (Fahey, 2021:293) who will ultimately decide her fate. For Fahey, pregnancy is an inherently Gothic process, for it not only (monstrously and abjectly) distorts the physical dimensions of the body, it also plunges the female subject into a crisis where she herself feels like she is ‘coming adrift’ (Bassett, 2021) from her own identity. Rather remarkably, Fahey’s narrator does not come adrift during her pregnancy, but rather in its tragic aftermath when the best of her has been ‘wrenched out,’ leaving her an empty, ‘abandoned nest’ (Fahey, 2021:287). Having failed to take her pregnancy to term, the narrator conceives of herself as ‘a monster,’ her body, ‘an imperfect vessel,’ a ‘house of death’ (Fahey, 2021:287) that has recklessly betrayed her. Fahey once again conjures here the notion of internalized sexism, but she also seems to lay claim to an argument that emphasizes the dangers posed to the self when a female anchors her identity (and her ideas of womanhood) to her body’s ability to reproduce and procreate. This argument is further bolstered by the narrator’s horrified response to finding out that she is in fact ‘the dominant twin’ who devoured her own sister in the ‘dark waters’ (Fahey, 2021:295) of her mother’s womb. The gothicity of pregnancy is compounded here with Fahey’s discussion of Vanishing Twin Syndrome, a condition which sees the spontaneous disappearance or resorption of one or multiple embryos in utero, and which further confirms the narrator’s own suspected monstrosity for she is now both a chimera and a cannibal (Zamani and Parekh, 2021). As she learns more about her condition, the narrator discovers that the cells of her sister and own ‘half-made girl’ are ‘locked inside [her] body,’ circling as ‘two small passengers’ who are forever entombed in the ‘sinews and organs and bones’ (Fahey, 2021:299) of her own corporeal form. She even begins to embrace this new image of herself. ‘I’m not me anymore,’ she states. ‘I am a trinity. Me, my sister, my baby. Chimera’ (Fahey, 2021:301). As Fahey propels her narrative, her narrator finds that she is pregnant again, this time with the ripening flesh of her unborn sister and child. She keeps the pregnancy a secret, refusing to involve doctors or hospitals for neither were able to fix her ‘failing body’ or ‘failing mind’ (Fahey, 2021:303). She is ‘conscious of her own brittleness’ and is ‘infinitely more careful’ (Fahey, 2021:303) this time, as her body swells and blooms. But this pregnancy is no template of perfection either. When the narrator looks in the mirror, she is ‘quietly appalled’ by the shadows under her eyes, and ‘the bones that stand out, stark’ (Fahey, 2021:304) from her face. Her body it seems has been slowly colonized by her ‘dark passengers’ (Fahey, 2021:304). As she herself observes: ‘They feed from me. They feed off me. Every day that passes, more of my body is reclaimed, like land from the sea’ (Fahey, 2021:304). The foetuses are therefore cast as gothic parasites, vampires even, who maliciously feed upon their maternal host, gaining strength from her flesh and her bones. By the end of the text, Fahey’s narrative has transitioned from first person singular to second person singular to first person plural. This, of course, marks the fracturing of the narrator’s identity as she surrenders her sense of self to the unborn organisms that relentlessly consume and burn up her ‘useless husk of flesh’ (Fahey, 2021:306). To reclaim her own identity, the narrator must identify her borders by drawing a line between what is self and what is ‘Other.’ Effectively she must begin the process of abjection. She must renounce or ‘cast off’ that which threatens the distinction between subject and object, and which looms as an undesirable force on the peripheries of her consciousness. In this case, the narrator is haunted by her body’s failure to conform to an idealized patriarchal notion of motherhood, and it is this that she must expel, both physically and mentally, if she is to become a self again.
In the closing paragraphs, the narrator takes a knife from ‘the top kitchen drawer’ (Fahey, 2021:307). She tests the blade against the tip of her thumb, and then against the ‘dividing line’ (Fahey, 2021:307) that demarcates the boundaries between inside and out. She eventually slices herself open. The image in the mirror in front of her fractures and she ‘spits’ herself out. In Kristevean terms, she ‘give[s] birth’ (Kristeva, 1980:3) to herself. This process of abjection ultimately permits the narrator to reclaim her own lost sense of identity. The ‘We’ denoting her chimeric self is once again returned to the ‘I’ that opened the story at the beginning. This reading of ‘I Spit Myself Out,’ therefore allows us to argue that Fahey’s Gothic approach to the female body brings the human rights of the pregnant female into brutally sharp focus by demonstrating the unequal partnership that is forged between a mother and her unborn child. This is particularly relevant when we read Fahey’s text against Ireland’s history of prohibiting legal access to abortion services, and, of course, its constitutional history of equating the ‘right to life of the unborn’ (Bunreacht na hÉireann, 40.3.3) with that of the mother. Fahey’s use of abjection therefore purposely disturbs the staunchly misogynistic notion of woman as a mere vessel for reproduction, and pulls into view the threatened autonomy of Irish mothers whose bodies and rights have, for so long, been ruled by the Irish State’s over-restrictive and discriminatory legislation.
Conclusion
As this article has demonstrated, the contemporary Irish Female Gothic is a complex and politically conscious mode of expression which gives voice to a myriad of issues that have, for many decades, plagued the lives of Irish women residing inside the Irish State. This new, politically engaged ‘Female Gothic’ mode followed a similar trajectory to that of early twentieth-century writers like Eva Gore Booth and Dorothy Macardle who successfully utilized the Gothic to voice female trauma and to put forward coded expressions of women’s ‘fear of entrapment’ (Smith and Wallace, 2018:1) with patriarchal society. Tracy Fahey notably adopted the Gothic to further a distinctly pro-feminist agenda in the post-Celtic Tiger period. Her short story collection, I Spit Myself Out, published in 2021, notably repositions the female body as an ‘active landscape’ instead of a passive site where ‘predominantly male narratives are played out’ (Bassett, 2021). Here, through the strategic deployment of Julia Kristeva’s theory of Abjection, Fahey deconstructs and wholly transforms the female corporeal form to resist and explicitly challenge a variety of patriarchal narratives. Her Gothic rendering of the diabetic body in ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ puts forward a nuanced understanding of the invisibly disabled Gothic body and so lays claim to a more varied and complex representation of the female experience beyond idealizing male narratives. Fahey notably carries forward the metaphor of the body as canvas in ‘The Wrong Ones,’ a story which tackles Ireland’s repressed history of female abuse and neglect. In this story, the female body is positioned as a Gothic site of shame, trauma, and guilt. It is a highly stigmatized entity that conveys to the reader the extent to which the figure of the unmarried mother was criminalized and diabolized by patriarchal power structures and religious and national narratives throughout the period of the Twentieth Century. Fahey links this history with the Celtic Tiger’s explicit commodification of the female body in ‘Reducing,’ a tale which effectively demonstrates the cruel ‘double bind’ of neoliberalism and Catholic conservatism as it affects women in contemporary Irish society. This devout politicism is notably furthered by the text’s title story, ‘I Spit Myself Out,’ which exposes the Gothic undercurrents of pregnancy to progress a staunchly pro-choice narrative in the wake of Ireland’s hugely successful ‘Repeal’ campaign. This story alone positions Fahey as a hugely significant contributor to the burgeoning new canon of Irish Female Gothic literature.
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