Profs & Pints Charlottesville: Irish Motherhood and Fiction

Profs and Pints Charlottesville presents: "Irish Motherhood and Fiction," on the mythical status of Mother Ireland and the fictionalized and lived experiences of Irish women, with Siân White, professor of English and teacher of Irish Studies and gender at James Madison University and scholar of Irish literature and film.

Irish mythology surrounding the mother figure can be tough to square with the uneven value that Ireland sometimes has placed on women and children's lives. Spend Saint Patrick's Day the thoughtful way by learning how Irish writers have described this disconnect with lyricism and beauty.

Professor Siân White will explore the key role that the figure of mother has played in Irish history and literature. She'll look at the mother in the early 1900s fiction of an aspirational, cultural Irish nationalism, discussing the 1902 play "Cathleen ni Houlihan" by WB Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. She'll examine actual women's participating Ireland's struggle for independence and developments such as the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War. And she'll describe how the 1937 Irish Constitution enshrined the mother as the essential moral center of a stable home and nation.

She'll discuss how women and children are affected by the importance to Ireland's social order of the Catholic Church, which has run crucial educational and reformative institutions with the face of massive shifts in how Irish society and Irish law regards contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage, and abortion. We'll delve into Claire Keegan's critically acclaimed 2020 novella Small Things Like These, as well as the 2024 film based upon it, looking at how they deal with questions of gender, class, morality, and complicity.

You'll surely emerge from the talk with a deeper understanding of Irish literature and a list of books and films to check out and enjoy. (Tickets must be purchased online at $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees and should be purchased in advance. Doors open to talk attendees at 4:30 pm and the talk itself starts at 6 pm.)

Image: From a 1928 John Lavery portrait of his wife, Hazel Lavery, posing as symbolic Irish mother figure Cathleen ni Houlihan.