Camille Pinettes, PhD student in contemporary Irish literature, Université Rennes 2
The girl did not look back and kept her head down when the sergeant passed. The sergeant knew her mother, a widow who gave him butter and rhubarb in the summertime but all she had was a rough acre behind the house. As it turned out, there was hardly a woman in the entire district with land 1.
Claire Keegan, Walk the Blue Fields
The above excerpt from Claire Keegan’s short story “Surrender” lays emphasis on the female characters’ restricted access to land ownership. For the sergeant, a stern, ominous figure in the story, unmarried and widowed women are defined by what they do not own. Notions of authority and possession are at the heart of men’s relationship to the land, but women are excluded from those dynamics. Keegan, who first came to critical attention with her 1999 collection of short stories, Antarctica, frequently addresses themes of gender, place and powerlessness in her work. Her second short story collection Walk the Blue Fields, first published in 2007, encapsulates the various attitudes to nature that are common in modern-day Ireland. Most of Keegan’s characters live in the Irish countryside: some are farmers, others are not; many reside in remote villages or in rural areas in County Wicklow, County Cavan, and County Clare.
While many of the women in Keegan’s fiction do not own the land they live on, they still engage with it on a daily basis; their relationship to the land is particularly complex and multifaceted. Ecofeminist critics have argued that depicting women who are engaging in peaceful and harmonious interactions with the land can be problematic. According to the feminist philosopher Val Plumwood in her volume Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, “the sphere of women and nature” is often portrayed as separate from the androcentric and culturally superior “sphere of reason, humanity and culture” (33). In her essay “Naturalized Woman and Feminized Nature”, Kate Soper remarks that women are “naturalised” by depictions that overemphasise their bodies’ reproductive abilities (141). In this article, I will argue that Keegan’s collection of short stories subverts the traditional trope that associates women with a peaceable, biological connection to nature by portraying women that compete with men’s domination of the land. In Walk the Blue Fields, Keegan offers a nuanced critique of patriarchal values, echoing ecofeminist voices in an original, thought-provoking way.
From Spirituality to Profit: Contrasting Perceptions of the Landscape in Keegan’s Collection
Walk the Blue Fields reflects two incompatible views of nature. Some – often comically naïve – characters are mesmerised by the landscape’s spiritual value, while others cynically regard it as a means of obtaining power. In the title story, a Catholic priest seems to have a religious epiphany as he gazes at the landscape, and concludes that “God is nature” (38). Spirituality plays a large role in several characters’ connection to nature, which is hardly surprising in a historically Catholic country that has seen several waves of pagan revivalism. Literary scholar Oona Frawley argues that depictions of the natural world were frequently imbued with symbolic, folkloric or mystical elements during the Irish Literary Revival (“Nature and Nostalgia” 274-275 2). In the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century, revivalist writers insisted on Ireland’s pagan roots and promoted a romanticised idea of the landscape, which, in many ways, was portrayed as a repository for Irish folklore. In a number of revivalist texts, the Irish landscape and the myths and stories associated with it became the locus of Irish national identity. Keegan’s collection sometimes seems to acknowledge the revivalist movement, but, as Eoghan Smith has noted, it is by no means a neo-revivalist text (Smith 195). In the collection, these spiritual attitudes to nature are not the norm: a number of stories give expression to a far more secular view of the landscape.
Like the sergeant in “Surrender”, who remarks that “there was hardly a woman in the entire district with land”, many of Keegan’s characters tend to regard the land as potential for economic power (111). In a paper entitled “Woodcock for a Farthing: The Irish Experience of Nature”, Michael Viney writes that “Utility remains the benchmark of Irish rural attitudes to nature, and the straight line of gladioli down the tarmacadamed drive a firm statement of landscape policy” (Viney 63). Viney comments on Henry Glassie’s depiction of the way Ulster farmers regarded their land. In a volume entitled Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Glassie wrote:
When they look over the land and proclaim it lovely, … what appeals to them is not nature but reflections of their work. … Banished to the mountains, imprisoned in hedges, nature is conceptually and actually subservient to farming (Glassie, qtd. in Viney 63 3).
From an economic standpoint, the notion of landscape is far less relevant than the concept of land. Gazing at the landscape for the sake of aesthetic or spiritual fulfilment is not the same thing as working the land to make a living. This is a question Keegan explores at length in her short stories. Unlike the priest who finds a reflection of his religious beliefs in nature, many of Keegan’s characters are farmers whose livelihood depends on the productivity of the land. She highlights this through a number of passing comments. For instance, the main character in “Dark Horses” sees the landscape in a competitive light: “he makes out the figure of a man walking through fields greener than his own” (41). Similarly, the farmer in “The Forester’s Daughter” dreams that the leaves of the trees that surround his house are turning into “twenty-pound notes” (67).
Patriarchal Attitudes to the Land
Because it is such a valuable resource, the land is the locus of an array of power dynamics. Turning the land into profit means taming, domesticating it, and suppressing any unruly tendencies it may have. The relationship between humans and the land is often agonistic: conflict plays a large role in human/non-human interactions. The forces of nature are perceived either as a threat humans must protect themselves from or as a resource the characters are determined to exploit and appropriate. Keegan frequently uses violent images to describe the landscape’s domineering attitude: in the title-story, for instance, the walls of the house are “choked in ivy” (32). In a story entitled “The Forester’s Daughter”, which focuses on the Deegans, a farming family in Wicklow, the most striking example of the destruction of human achievements by non-human forces is the fire that reduces the family’s house to ashes. The crossing of boundaries is a central motif in the description of the fire. The flames “cross the ceiling boards” and “leap out” of the “parlour window”, erasing the dividing line that separates the downstairs from the upstairs and the indoors from the outdoors (Keegan 89). The crossing of these human-made boundaries makes the space indeterminate and signals the end of the Deegans’ reign over the landscape. Smoke “crawls through the rooms”, and “fills up the house” (88-9): both phrases are suggestive of the flames’ appropriation of the human space. As the Deegans watch their house go up in flames, their cows stand close to the fire to “warm themselves” (89), as if to bask in the glory of their triumph over their human landlords. This image comically mirrors previous scenes in which the Deegans warmed themselves around the hearth, suggesting that the non-human world has fully re-claimed its ownership of the family’s stretch of land.
In the face of the land’s reluctance to submit to human power, the male characters emulate the patriarchal ideal of man. This makes Keegan’s collection particularly well-suited to an ecofeminist reading, as it explores the relationship between male domination and human domination. In the words of Mark Schlenz, “issues of race, class, and gender inevitably intersect in complex and multi-faceted ways with issues of natural resource exploitation and conservation” (12). Parallels can indeed be drawn between the “degradation, subjection, and exploitation of women” and the way our cultures exploit and degrade non-human beings (Estévez-Saá and Lorenzo-Modia 2). The landscapes in Keegan’s collection undergo dramatic changes at the hands of men. Victor Deegan takes pleasure in “put[ting] electric fences round the land” and in “tak[ing] out the spade” to “plant more oaks on the land” (Keegan 51, 57); in “The Parting Gift”, men are seen “turning the rows”, “gathering” bales of straw “with pitchforks”, and “knock[ing] … meadows” (4, 8). Keegan’s vocabulary highlights the impact of the men’s work on the materiality of the land and alludes to the patriarchal fantasy of physical omnipotence. By contrast, women are almost never seen working in the fields, and Mrs Rudd’s only contribution to her sons’ work is to “bring out the flask, the salad” (4) for them to eat their fill after a day’s work. In Keegan’s collection, agricultural work is unequivocally masculine.
According to literary scholar Eoghan Smith, the politics of land ownership “is portrayed time and again in Keegan as male economic power over women through their historical ownership of the land” (Smith 199). He analyses the protagonists’ surnames: throughout the collection, Keegan often gives her male characters surnames that are common in their area (such as “Brady and McQuaid in the Cavan of ‘Dark Horses’” and “Lawlor and Brennan in the Wicklow of ‘Walk the Blue Fields’”, Smith 199). To Smith, “Locally found surnames carried through the male line root these characters to their specific place” (Smith 199). By contrast, the women in Keegan’s fiction bear names that are not local: though “Night of the Quicken Trees” is set in County Clare, Margaret’s surname, “Flusk”, originates from south Wicklow and Wexford. This leads Smith to conclude that, unlike women, men remain physically attached to their families’ ancestral lands. Fittingly, they are the ones who bequeath their names to their children (Smith 199).
This idea finds expression in a passage in “The Parting Gift” in which we learn that the daughters have all left the family’s land, which makes the narrator’s brother the last child remaining on the parents’ farm. As the narrator prepares to leave her family home, she mentions “the books [her] sisters left behind”, indicating that all her sisters have also left (10). Though, later in the story, her brother expresses a desire to leave (“I’m giving up the land. They can keep it” 11), the narrator knows that he feels compelled to stay: “Already the winter barley’s turning. September will bring more work, old duties to the land. … You know he will never leave the fields” (12). Laura Sydora and Eoghan Smith have both remarked that the idea of “old duties to the land” is a reference to the ancestral bloodline that keeps him rooted where his family is (Smith 200, Sydora 126). In this sentence, the “land” is a metonymy for his male ancestors, whom he must honour (“duties”) by keeping the land in the family (12).
Male bloodlines are also an important theme in “The Forester’s Daughter”. The short story’s title, which focuses on Victor Deegan’s “daughter” rather than his sons, signals to the reader that the family’s male line has been disrupted. The question of male ancestry is brought to our attention early on in the story: “The line of oaks on Aghowle’s lane were planted by his great-grandfather. No matter how hard or high his children swung, those limbs would never break” (57). The unbreakable “limbs” of the great-grandfather’s oaks are a metaphor for the Deegan bloodline. A few lines later, the forester dreams about the future of his estate: “The eldest boy will marry, have children, and carry on the name” (57). However, as it turns out, neither of his sons are prepared to rise to the challenge. The eldest shows little interest in the land: “The boy, a shrill young fellow, grew tall but it soon became apparent that he had no grá for farming” (55). The use of an Irish word (“grá”, which, in this case, means “passion” or “love” for something) can be read as another allusion to the characters’ roots, making it sound as though the Deegans’ ancestors are saying the words, judging the eldest for his lack of skill and interest in farm work. Victor’s younger son is labelled a “simpleton” by his parents, which, in their eyes, makes him unfit for the job. In spite of this, he is seen building a miniature farm in the living room: “The simpleton heads off to the parlour, gets down on his knees and sets to work on his farm. So far he’s built a boundary with dead fir cones and marked out the fields” (64). His work on the miniature farm (“mark[ing] out the fields”) is reminiscent of his father’s work (“[Victor] put electric fences round the land” 51), making him his symbolic – though disregarded – heir.
It later becomes clear that the family’s efforts have come to naught: the boy accidentally sets the house on fire at the end of the story. The narrator reveals that, though he was on the brink of paying off his mortgage, Victor Deegan neglected to take out a home insurance policy: the Deegans end up losing the entire estate. Symbolically, the men themselves are the ones who destroy their family’s ties to the land. Nature’s retaliation reaches its peak when Keegan mentions that “It looks as though the oaks, too, could catch fire” (90). The oaks, which were planted by Victor’s great-grandfather, represent the androcentric ownership of the land: their potential destruction marks the symbolic intersection of feminist and ecological activism. As the oaks burn, the non-human (in this case, the fire) puts an end to the male bloodline.
Women and the Land: From Treachery to Domination
In a paper entitled “Irish Women Evicted: The Rural Home and the Gendered Politics of Economic Morality in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields”, the scholar Laura Sydora offers a feminist reading of two of Keegan’s short stories, “The Parting Gift” and “Night of the Quicken Trees”, in which the female protagonists end up leaving their homes. She comments on “women’s simultaneously threatened and threatening relationship to land, property, and the rural home” (Sydora 134). Sydora makes a convincing point, which is worth exploring further through an ecocritical – and ecofeminist – lens. Like the non-human elements in the narrative, Keegan’s women are constantly tempted to rebel against the roles they have been assigned. Several female characters feel uncomfortable in the domestic sphere and are mostly seen outside of the house. Margaret Flusk, for instance, “always felt marginally safer when she was outside” (Keegan 133). This motif is further developed in “The Forester’s Daughter”, in which Martha, the mother, symbolically sabotages the domestic sphere. Early on, the narrator indicates that she “planted the rosebushes deep in rows at either side of the hall door where she could train them to climb up around the windows” (54). The roses can be interpreted as a sign of Martha’s subversion of femininity. Instead of being symbols of her demureness, they become the instruments of her control over the house: she “plants” them and “trains” them to do as she pleases. Later in the story, Keegan indicates that “Martha’s roses have, through the years, crawled up along the walls and, in the wind, paw the windows” (70). In this powerful image, the roses threaten to break the characters’ windows, as if to foreshadow the housefire that marks the eventual destruction of the Deegans’ home. In this instance, however, the roses’ presence is the result of the human character’s intentional pruning of the plant. In this example, Martha undermines the domestic sphere; instead of acting like a traditional housewife and staying confined inside the house, she domesticates nature – like her husband would – and physically threatens the structure of the house. Like Margaret Flusk, Martha Deegan feels more at home outside. She puts little effort into her cooking because she prefers to spend her time outdoors:
He’d stoop and find the big enamel plate with fried potatoes and a pair of eggs dried out in the oven. Martha preferred to be out in wellingtons lifting a drill for onions or slashing the nettles along the lane (53).
In her own way, she too is working the land (“slashing the nettles along the lane”), wearing unfeminine boots (“out in wellingtons”) and refusing to perform her duties as a wife (53).
This is because, while the women in Keegan’s fiction do not directly challenge the men’s status as landowners, they tend to emulate their behaviour on an implicit level: in the collection, female resistance to patriarchy takes the form of the woman stepping into the man’s domineering role. Later in “The Forester’s Daughter”, this pattern emerges more fully:
Martha takes her tea out to the yard where things always seem a fraction easier. She looks down the lane. The oaks are losing their leaves so quickly now. She drinks her tea, takes the stake off the henhouse door and opens it wide. Her fowl rush past in a sweep of red feathers and dust, racing for the feed and the open air. She stoops and reaches into their nests for eggs. She strides back in to make the breakfast, feeling treacherous. She often feels treacherous in the mornings. She wishes her husband and her children were gone for the day (63).
Keegan challenges the traditional division of space that makes the indoors women’s territory as, contrary to expectations, Martha finds things “easier” outdoors (63). Like her husband, she goes outside to gaze at the landscape (“she looks down the lane” 63) and secretly plays the part of the landowner. In this scene, she seems to have switched roles with the hens. She is no longer the child bearer; instead, she is the one collecting the hens’ eggs. Similarly, she becomes a symbolic landowner by holding the keys to henhouse. The metaphorical usurpation of Victor’s role is later confirmed by Martha’s feeling of guilt (“feeling treacherous” 63), which suggests that she has indeed been breaking stereotypical rules. This passage plays on the polysemic ambiguity contained within the adjective “treacherous”, which could signal that Martha has failed to fulfil her role as a wife, but also that she might be more of a threat than first meets the eye.
Keegan’s collection offers an abundance of anecdotes in which female characters imitate men’s appropriation of the land. One of the most striking examples of this takes place in “Night of the Quicken Trees”, when Margaret Flusk urinates around the borders of her land: “When it got dark at five o’clock, she went outside and lifted her skirt and squatted in the grass. She wanted to pass water on every blade of grass around her house” (127). By choosing the words “lift[ing] her skirt” to refer to urination, Keegan astutely hints at female clothing to stress that Margaret is also subverting gender norms and prohibitions. This passage ridicules androcentric, territorial attitudes to the land (and to women) by transposing the image of the male dog to the human woman. It is worth noting that, in each of the examples listed above, the woman only acts in discreet or subversive ways, suggesting that the norms that dictate how women should act towards the land are only at work in the public sphere. Away from prying eyes, these female characters manage to symbolically dominate the land, emulating men’s appropriation of space by urinating on the borders, training their roses or taking their hens’ eggs.
This, I would argue, is part of what makes Keegan’s collection a nuanced reflection of ecofeminist discourse. Though it acknowledges the difficulties women face in today’s society, Walk the Blue Fields does not portray them as meek or powerless. By depicting female characters that are men’s metaphorical rivals, the book challenges the idea that women, as opposed to men, enjoy an innate, harmonious bond with nature and cannot engage in dynamics of domination or appropriation. Keegan’s women are not always attuned to nature and rarely act in the interest of the non-human: several of them see the land as property, or as the locus of power struggles. These examples show that Walk the Blue Fields does not put women on par with nature, as the object of male domination. Instead, Keegan’s portrayal of women is nuanced enough to suggest that modes of resistance to patriarchal authority often involve reproducing the same power dynamics. This allows the author to emphasise women’s agency while also showcasing humanity’s domineering attitude to the land.
- Keegan, Claire. Walk the Blue Fields. 1st ed., Faber and Faber, 2007, p. 110-111. ↩︎
- In the case of Ireland, this went hand in hand with the construction of a national identity: “The Revival is characterized by this tremendous nostalgia for the past, and its reliance on past myths and metaphors to ascribe meaning to Irish culture” (Frawley, “Nature and Nostalgia” 274). See also Frawley’s monograph Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth Century Irish Literature. ↩︎
- On this subject, the literary critic Eoghan Smith notes that “the magical or eccentric elements of Keegan’s work” are not “presented as a nostalgic, mystical neo-Revivalist retreat from the conservative drudgery of twentieth-century Irish life or a longing for Gaelic authenticity during the peak of urban excess of the Celtic Tiger years” (195). ↩︎
WORKS CITED
Estévez-Saá, Margarita, and María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-Caring: Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(s). Routledge, 2018.
Frawley, Oona. Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth Century Irish Literature, Irish Academic Press, 2005.
—. ‘Nature and Nostalgia in Irish Literature’. Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, vol. 18/19, Department of Celtic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University, 1998, pp. 268–77.
Glassie, Henry. Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Keegan, Claire. Walk the Blue Fields. 1st ed., Faber and Faber, 2007.
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993.
Schlenz, Mark. ‘Survival Stories: Toward an Ecology of Literary Criticism’. 1994 Western Literature Association Meeting, Oct. 1994.
Smith, Eoghan. ‘Autonomy, Naturalism, and Folklore in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields’. The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 42, 2019, pp. 192–208.
Soper, Kate. ‘Naturalized Woman and Feminized Nature’. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, edited by Laurence Coupe, Routledge, 2000, pp. 139-143.
Sydora, Laura. ‘Irish Women Evicted: The Rural Home and the Gendered Politics of Economic Morality in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields’, Review of Irish Studies in Europe, 3, no.1, 2019, pp 123-136.
Viney, Michael. ‘Woodcock for a Farthing: The Irish Experience of Nature’. The Irish Review, no. 1, Cork University Press, 1986, pp 58–64.