“This is a Female text”: The Mediumship of Creative Histories in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In Ghost, Ní Ghríofa as narrator is nearly indistinguishable from Ní Ghríofa as author, and thus the terms will be used interchangeably.

² Hélène Cixous’s words are relevant here: “Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism … . Because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women, or as Hoffmann would say, fairies” (889).

³ Though this essay is looking specifically at the Irish female experience, I see Ni Ghriofa’s “female” as defined more as Kristeva’s “Other,” i.e., that which cannot be represented by phallogocentric and nomenclatural ideologies. “Woman” to Kristeva represents not so much a sex as an attitude of resistance to conventional culture and language: “feminist practice can only be … at odds with what already exists so that we may say ‘that’s not it’ and ‘that’s still not it’” (Jones 262). As such, “female” extends to more than cis women, but for this essay it becomes especially relevant to the lived experience of Irish women, specifically the suppression of their voices and Irish pre-Christian, embodied ways of being.

⁴ See also Mary Ruefle’s “On Erasure,” in Quarter After Eight 16.