“Do you think Mammy’s alright?” – An interdisciplinary exploration of themes of Irish motherhood in Anne Enright’s The Green Road

Abstract

Anne Enright’s novel The Green Road (2015) spans forty years in the lives of the Madigan family. The matriarch Rosaleen summons her offspring home for Christmas with the news that she is selling the family home. This article will attempt to place the three depictions of motherhood in the novel in a historical and cultural context to expose how the social construction of Irish motherhood can have a presence in the perception, particularly self-perception of generations of mothers. The construction of Irish motherhood has a very particular legacy, entwined in a post- colonial, nation building project that was both extremely catholic, conservative and hostile to modernity. The Green Road confronts the idealisation of the Irish mother as the domestic backbone of family and therefore society’s survival but also explores the idea of ‘Mother Ireland’ being the embodiment of the nation itself and representing all that this ideal entails for immigrants’ notions of hearth and home. The voice of the Irish Mother is one that has been muted in Irish culture, and this article attunes itself to the ways Enright amplifies the Irish mother’s voice in all its nuance. This article draws its approach from literary criticism and cultural sociology, examining how both literary and cultural heritage burden the mothers in Enright’s novel.