The good, the bad, the ambivalent: agency, identity, and the IRA wife in contemporary Northern Irish texts

Abstract

The metaphorically imprisoned IRA wife is a contemporary Northern Irish literary convention. Who is the IRA wife, and how does her characterization and function differ depending on the narrative in which she exists? Jim Sheridan's 1997 film The Boxer, Danny Morrison's novel The Wrong Man, and Anne Devlin's 1986 play Ourselves Alone all foreground a male-dominated Republican movement whose desire for political self-determination limits women's potential to achieve that same fundamental human right. In The Boxer the imprisoned IRA wife is a victim who eventually learns to stand up for herself; in The Wrong Man she is a dangerous commodity with the potential to destroy the IRA from within; and in Ourselves Alone she is purposely complex, impossible to classify with any sort of consistency. Whatever her function within a text, her existence and circumstances clarify, complicate and question existing conventions and expectations of Northern Irish female identity.