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Abstract
Kate McCafferty and Anne Enright: Irish heroines-villains-victims in the
Latin western hemisphere
Izarra,
Laura (University of São Paulo)
Irish
migrant narratives written by women represent themes of
displacement and renewal in Latin America. The gendered
cultural discourse of migration reveals many masks that
women adopt, either to conform to the narrow social limits laid
upon them or to configure a subjective emancipating
space throughout the process of transculturation in
the non-English speaking lands of the West. This paper seeks
to address two contemporary novels in a contrapuntal
way: Kate McCafferty’s Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl
(2002) and Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza
Lynch (2003). The two fictional Irish heroines played
the endless heroine-villain-victim-heroine roles in the
Caribbean and South America, either in the
seventeenth-century or nineteenth-century historical
context. The Irish slave girl’s testimony unveils a
multiethnic perception of the other within a
transcultural and political process of emancipation while
the narrative on Eliza Lynch is analysed at the
confluence of various other narratives that resignify her
life story from different ideological perspectives.
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