Paige Reynolds

Oxford University Press, 2024. 242 pages.

ISBN: 9780198881056

In the introduction to Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode Paige Reynolds declares that her “book is driven by a straightforward premise: we need to be reading and teaching more regularly the writers studied here” (28). For years, Irish women writers were excluded from the Irish literary canon and the critical studies that examined it, such as the now notorious Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which included very few female authors. While this battle cry defending the value of Irish women’s writing is nothing new, which Reynolds readily acknowledges, her approach is innovative and forces us to reexamine the way we traditionally view periodization, specifically, modernism and Irish women writers’ use of it. Reynolds cites several reasons why Irish women writers have not been categorized as modernists: overt sexism, the devaluation of fiction during the Irish Literary Revival (with the exception of Joyce, largely because of his experimentation), works being published after modernism supposedly ended or not implementing it in an aggressive way, and female authors themselves relying on more familiar modes that would not alienate a wide readership. Reynolds’s book uncovers the “occluded history of Irish women’s modernism” by tracing what she calls “the stubborn mode” or “re-fashioning of modernism” across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (3). Reynolds asserts that the “stubborn mode” is useful for contemporary Irish women writers because it

helps to remind readers of the sweep of history, using literary form and content to accentuate certain ongoing cultural problems, as well as to spotlight remedies previously imagined for such familiar problems, whether the outcomes of those interventions have proven to be successful, unsuccessful, or (more likely, as seen across time) a measure of both. (3)

By tracing the persistent use of the modernist mode across the century, Reynolds’s book seeks to illuminate a better understanding of “its remarkable aesthetic traction as well as its ongoing political and social efficacy” (4).

As noted earlier, one of the strengths of Reynolds’s project is its central premise that we can, and should, loosen the boundaries around periodization, and in so doing, reshape literary canons to include more Irish women writers, especially the modernist canon. She is careful to point out that she is not seeking to reshape the canon of high modernism, nor does her book naively “suppose that simply adding Irish women to the modernist canon can correct gender bias and inequity in the literary field” (22). Instead, adding Irish women to the modernist canon “can accentuate the aesthetic and the socio-political work that can be done by literature – as well as the work that remains to be done, and even the work that cannot be done” (22). Reynolds embeds this loosening of periodization into the framework of her book by taking what she calls a “long view” of the contemporary period in order to “track the persistence of modernism” (13). Her project covers Irish women’s writing from 1939 to the present day. The year 1939 is a significant starting point; it was the end of high modernism and “the securing of a national imaginary predicated on looking inward and backward” (12). She gives several reasons for such an expansive conception of “contemporary”, the most pressing being that many of the “dilemmas” that crop up in Irish women’s fiction “never seem to go away” (13). So, although modernist experimentation in contemporary Irish women’s fiction “does not fit a tidy evolutionary trajectory” (13), there are discernible patterns to this “new” modernism, which Reynolds admits “often looks much like the ‘old’ modernism. It responds to the shock of sudden and vast alterations in technologies, politics, and ways of thinking. It represents interiority of its subjects through stream of consciousness […] subverts linear narratives by employing fragmentation”, and experiments with perspective, whether through unreliable narrators, lack of closure, or “multiple points of view […] frequently going unindicated”, and is “aggressively allusive” and “disrupts standard syntax” (17). Notably, Reynolds argues that Irish women do not simply copy and paste these modernist traits; rather, she illuminates throughout her project, how these writers adapt the modernist mode, and at times, “write back to masculinist modernism and its architects” (15) in order to “address the altered role of women in a changing society” (21).

Because Reynolds’s project pays particular attention to form and content, her methodology of close reading makes sense, but also underpins the purpose of her study, which is to allow “more realistic understandings of the real-world interventions made possible through literature”, which is facilitated through the “difficult and time-consuming” labor that such texts require (23). Reynolds takes time in the introduction to defend this methodology, especially in the face of scholarly trends that focus more on transnationalism and the “global novel”. But her approach, of closely examining what is on the page, helps to uncover the often overlooked or erased experiences of Irish women over the course of the century. Indeed, the strongest elements of this book are when Reynolds performs incredibly sharp and illuminating close readings of the novels under examination. Though the modernist mode in these novels is not always easy to parse, Reynolds does so with ease, while contextualizing her close readings in the socio-historical milieu of the authors and how that reflects Irish women’s lives at the time. Reynolds bookends her project with declarations connecting the importance of literary scholarship to how and what we teach our students; her prose, analysis, and contextualization make the reader feel like they are sitting in her classroom, but in a good way.

The organizational structure is equally accessible. The first chapter sets the foundation of what follows by examining the short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen, Maeve Kelly, and Evelyn Conlon in order to examine “the tactical use of the stubborn mode of modernism in representations of female subjectivity” (25). In particular, this first chapter demonstrates how Irish women “renovat[e] modernist representations of interiority” to more accurately represent “the contours of female subjectivity”, something “masculine modernism” failed to do (31). However, Reynolds also includes a subsection titled “Joyce’s Afterlife”, which sets the stage for her incorporation of Joyce’s influence on Irish women’s fiction throughout the rest of the book. The compromise in his works between realism and modernism to capture what was once regarded as “too private, too trivial, too outside the ambit of the national” not only gives women writers “aesthetic credibility” when it comes to marketing, it also provides them with an aesthetic toolbox to help portray female interiority.

In the chapters that follow, Reynolds pulls together “evocative constellations of novels and short stories” around four banal experiences that are “largely, though not exclusively, internalized: praying, daydreaming, logging off from digital technologies, and reading” (25). Chapter 2 examines how and why Irish women pray in order to uncover how “Catholicism literally and figuratively interferes with women’s daily lives” (25-26). This chapter contains extended close readings of Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941) and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013). Her section on Mary Lavin’s short stories provides an important connection back to O’Brien, whose outcomes of prayer are often ambiguous and inconclusive, and forward to McBride, where prayer outright fails, clearly serving as a critique of Catholicism. The section on sex and prayer in Emma Donoghue’s Hood (1995), although brief compared to the other sections, and which feels wedged in between the longer analyses, shows how prayer does not always end in failure when adapted for personal use in more recent fiction, though the positive outcome is still qualified. Reynolds concludes the chapter by demonstrating how the modernist mode can portray childhood sexual abuse in McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which is illuminating and disturbing, which Reynolds argues, is the point.

There are moments in the subsequent chapters, however, where Reynolds repeatedly defends why she includes certain authors, especially if their works have been previously categorized as realist. Though this defense may come off as repetitive, it is warranted; after all, Reynolds is loosening the boundaries of periodization and the canon of Irish modernism. A tactic that justifies her own experimentation with literary criticism is demonstrating how Joyce’s influence, which some of the female authors cite themselves, provides a “paradigm” for these women writers, specifically his character Molly Bloom. This connection is apt in “Chapter 3: Daydreaming”, which examines “how the private experience of female reverie is shaped by the dramatic cultural and economic transformations characterizing the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries” in works by Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright, and Deirdre Madden (95). What this reviewer found refreshing was Reynolds’s argument about domestic objects and how “those commonplace things that litter our everyday lives, which we frequently overlooked–prompt modes of consciousness” (95). Throughout this chapter, Reynolds shows how daydreams, which were villainized in Irish literature post-Independence, may be aimless, but are not without purpose. These object reveries do not always end with a positive resolution or solution; rather, they expose the “intractability” of “stubborn problems”, such as the constraints put on female sexuality, childhood sexual abuse, or trauma from the Troubles, still persisting into the modern era. This chapter is one of the strongest in the book. It contains incisive close readings, solid connections to, and divergences from, modernists such as Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys, effective comparisons between the different literary works contained within the chapter, and theoretical engagements with Lefebvre, Bachelard, and Freud in order to prove that object reverie is actually productive. Lastly, Reynolds’s structuring of the chapter, which comes full circle around the ambivalence in form and content of these literary daydreams, demonstrates how the invisible labor of female protagonists “puzzling out” the “crucial questions related to stubborn problems” is rendered visible through the modernist mode of reverie, but through accessible prose (132).

Chapters 4 and 5 turn their attention to more contemporary problems and how the modernist mode can be used in small acts of resistance to them. “Chapter 4: Logging Off” examines how the “digital world has altered not only the contours of daily life, but also the form and content of Irish writing” (134). As a response to the “publicness” of new technologies and social media, these works that employ the modernist mode allow the authors to “insist that human character remains neither freely available nor entirely comprehensible” (134), which picks up where Chapter 3 ends. The first two works Reynolds considers, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne’s The Dancers Dancing (1999) and Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (2015), both of which feature rural retreats that end with mostly positive outcomes of “self-understanding” and “self-determination” for their female protagonists (135). Though Reynolds acknowledges such retreats may seem outdated, she argues these writers use “modernist forms and themes” from earlier in the century to portray the changing “public authority” women now enjoy through their ability to experience “productive privacy” (136). However, Reynolds once again complicates such positivity, by including Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours (2014), in which women have no privacy and are completely subjugated by men. Reynolds argues that O’Neill invokes modernist dystopian futurism in order to reveal the fragility of women’s progress and the “ongoing threats to women from patriarchal institutions and practices” (157). In contrast to the other two novels, Reynolds includes this YA novel to show just how enduring modernist tactics are, as they are even “legible in popular commercial literature” (159).

“Chapter 5: Reading” focuses on two critical and commercial successes published in 2018, Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Anna Burns’s Milkman. Similar to some of the earlier texts that Reynolds examines, these novels mix realist and modernist conventions to capture contemporary life in Ireland and Northern Ireland. This chapter connects to what preceded it, similar to Reynolds’s earlier chapters, as the protagonists in these novels imagine they can retreat from their “troubling worlds” through the act of reading (166). However, other characters misinterpret this act, which ostracizes them and actually draws more attention to them. As in Chapter 4, which contains two similar novels and one that is drastically different, Chapter 5 pairs two texts that seem, on the surface, to be radically different. Rooney’s realist prose and “quiet use of modernism” (185) is accessible and often interpreted as popular romance, whereas Burns’s novel directly employs modernist tactics to express the invisible injuries caused by the Troubles, to the point of being difficult to read. However, Reynolds makes solid connections between the two texts to make the point that reading is a political act. Indeed, Reynolds advocates for this idea in the “CODA: Recalibrating”, where she reverses the typical way scholars read, i.e., she reads a male authored text, Solar Bones (2016) by Mike McCormack, through a “recalibrated tradition that foregrounds women’s modernist experiment” (194).

Throughout her project, Reynolds simultaneously locates the persistent use of modernism in contemporary Irish women’s fiction and the “stubborn problems” that continue to plague women over time. And though these novels shed light on socio-political issues and problems, she is careful to acknowledge Anne Mulhall’s argument “that any notion that academic interventions can engender transformative political or cultural change is hubristic, unless academics work in tandem with social movements” (202). Instead, Reynolds locates the importance of literary study and its impact in the “middle space between the street and the novel, between external activism and internal cogitation—the classroom” (202). Indeed, it was refreshing to read this, in conjunction with her defense of close reading, as she realistically points out how we, as scholar/educators, can “teach budding citizens the invaluable skills of deep and slow critical thinking about the past in a moment overwhelmed with immediate, pithy distractions” (203).