The Reinscription of Home, Gender and Nationalism in Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone

Abstract

As a contemporary Northern Irish, Anne Devlin questions the traumatic experience and memory in personal and national histories of Northern Ireland. The Troubles-ridden landscape of Northern Ireland turns into a dramatic site in which Anne Devlin's heroines negotiate their quests for voice and visibility. In her first play, Ourselves Alone (1985), Devlin foregrounds the experiences of women who are excluded from the public and secluded within their domestic realm. Three young women, Frieda, Josie and Donna, struggle against the isolation and the violence that permeate their daily lives. What is common to these three women is that their lives are constructed, controlled, and represented by the men around them. Their personal identities are constantly wiped out by the communal identities. Whether they are career women, political activists, or housewives, there is always a boundary that limits their sphere of action. Furthermore, the idea of home becomes a metaphor for their nation. Far from being a domestic haven, their homes are constantly disrupted by external violence in war-torn Belfast and their homes turn into an experimental site where men's national ideology is tried and approved. Here, the male patriarch or father figure comes armed with a specific political and national stance and the home becomes a microcosm of the nation. Women are expected to live up to a national ideal in which their primary function is to reproduce the members of the collectives while their home is under constant patriarchal surveillance. This essay focuses on questions of home, gender and nation and asks how the seemingly most private sphere of home has come to be intersected with the public sphere of the nation and, also, how women's roles are imagined and perpetuated within the frame of national ideology.