Baleful distractions: the female body in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and Bram Stoker’s ‘The Coming Home of Abel Behenna
- Autores: Richard Jorge Fernández
- Localización: Joyce’s Heirs: Joyce’s Imprint on Recent Global Literatures / coord. por Olga Fernández Vicente, María del Mar Boillos Pereira, Richard Jorge Fernández, Paulo Kortazar Billelabeitia, 2019, ISBN 978-84-9860-727-7, págs. 43-55
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
The female figure has been prominent in literary depictions of the nineteenth and twentieth century alike, especially during the colonising period and the decolonising process that ensued. Understood as the incarnation of the metropolis or as the representation of the mother nation in need of her saviour warrior, female deployments have been used in both colonial and postcolonial literatures to embody the same—if equally opposing—concepts; such tropes of womanhood as the homemaker, the crone or the seductress have been employed by writers to cater for their own conceptions of the nation, national identity and nationalistic/unionistic aspirations. Both James Joyce and Bram Stoker made extensive use of feminine characters in their short narratives, and while both writers experienced the Revival process, neither took active part in it. It is, however, rather curious that both writers’ embodiment of the female figure lends itself to a postcolonial reading of the nation in feminine terms. The present paper will explore the similarities in these representations and their narrative constructions in an attempt to establish a nexus that links both writers to a postcolonial reading of Irish literature during the Revival phase and its immediately preceding times.
