Ireland’s “broken” homes in the novels of Tana French
Beata Piątek
Jagiellonian University in Kraków, PolandBeata Piątek is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her main research interests are memory and trauma in contemporary British, Irish and American fiction, the influence of film on fiction, and ecocriticism.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1048-6991
Résumé
This paper argues that Tana French effectively uses the figure of house and home in order to comment critically on the state of the nation in her Irish crime novels. The analysis focuses on three selected novels: The Likeness (2008), Broken Harbor (2012) and The Searcher (2020). It demonstrates that in The Likeness, French uses the historical and literary tradition of the Big House to comment on the economic and class tensions during the period of the economic boom known as the Celtic Tiger.[1] In Broken Harbor, she employs the gothic mode of writing in her portrayal of the consequences of the credit crunch. And finally, in The Searcher, she debunks the myth of rural Ireland as a pastoral retreat and safe haven. The paper applies Susan Fraiman’s notions of “shelter writing” and “alternative homemakers” (2017) in order to show how French uses domestic space and domestic rituals in order to problematize gender stereotypes and undermine conservative expectations about the nuclear family.
Mots-clés :
Irish crime fiction, Tana French, house and home, Celtic Tiger, domestic rituals, shelter writingRéférences
Becker, S. 1999. Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Clark, D. 2013. Mean streets, new lives: the representations of non-Irish immigrants in recent Irish crime fiction. In: P. Villar-Argaiz (ed.), Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature, 255-267. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Corrigan, M. 2020. Tana French’s The Searcher nods to John Ford’s famous Western with a story of a loner on the hunt for a lost teen. Washington Post 5 October, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/tana-frenchs-the-searcher-nods-to-john-fords-famous-western-with-the-story-of-a-loner-on-the-hunt-for-a-lost-teen/2020/10/05/17de293a-06a4-11eb-a166-dc429b380d10_story.html.
Fogarty, A. 2000. Uncanny families: neo-gothic motifs and the theme of social change in contemporary Irish women’s fiction. Irish University Review 30(1): 59-81.
Fraiman, S. 2017. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press.
French, T. 2020. The Searcher. London/New York: Viking.
French, T. 2012. Broken Harbor. London/New York: Penguin Group.
French, T. 2008. The Likeness. London/New York: Viking.
Freud, S. 1953-74 [1917-19]. The uncanny. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Stratchey, vol. XVII, 219-53. London: Hogarth Press.
Gregorek, J. 2014. Fables of foreclosure: Tana French’s police procedurals of recessionary Ireland. In: J. H. Kim (ed.), Class and Culture in Crime Fiction: Essays on Works in English since 1970s, 149-74. Jefferson NC: McFarland.
Harper, G. 2020. Closeness and cruelty: on Tana French’s The Searcher. Los Angeles Review of Books 29th November, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/closeness-and-cruelty-on-tana-frenchs-the-searcher/.
Macfarlane, R. 2015. The eeriness of the English countryside. The Guardian 10 April, www.theguardian.com/books/ 2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane.
Mannion, E. 2016. Introduction. A path to the emerald noir: The rise of the Irish detective novel. In: E. Mannion (ed.), The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 1-16. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
McHale, B. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London/New York: Routledge.
Norris, C. 2004. The Big House: space, place and identity in Irish fiction. New Hibernia Review 8(1): 107-121.
O’Brien, C. 2013. Commuter belt regions worst hit by downturn, survey finds. Irish Times 5 January, online.
O’Connor, M. 2017. Green fields and blue roads: the melancholy of the girl walker in Irish women’s fiction. Critical Survey 29(1): 90-104.
O’Toole, F. 2011. Afterword: From Chandler and “Playboy” to the contemporary crime wave. In: D. Burke (ed.), Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century, 358-361. Dublin: Liberties Press.
Peterson, S. 2016. Voicing the unspeakable: Tana French’s Dublin murder squad. In E. Mannion (ed.), The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 107-120. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Peterson, S. 2014. Murder in the ghost estate: Crimes of the Celtic Tiger in Tana French’s Broken Harbor. Clues 32(1): 71-80.
Rauchbauer, O. 1992. The Big House and Irish history: an introductory sketch. In: O. Rauchbauer (ed.), The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature, 1-17. Dublin: Lilliput Press.
Reddy, M. T. 2014. Authority and Irish cultural memory in Faithful Place and Broken Harbor. Clues 32(1): 81-93.
Schaffer, R. 2014. Introduction. Tana French and Irish crime fiction. Clues 32(1): 9-12.
Schofield, A. 2013. The Returned Yank as site of memory in Irish popular culture. Journal of American Studies 47(4): 1175-95.
Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland
Beata Piątek is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her main research interests are memory and trauma in contemporary British, Irish and American fiction, the influence of film on fiction, and ecocriticism.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1048-6991
