Department of English

This thesis argues that the memoirs Object Lessons (1995) by Eavan Boland and A Ghost in the Throat (2020) by Doireann Ní Ghríofa epitomize how the memoir genre may record cultural memory as well as personal memory. Irish poets Boland and Ní Ghríofa highlight the ways in which the past permeates the present in depicting the repetitions and resonances between the lives of cultural predecessors, specifically the Irish women that came before them, and their own. They identify with these women on the basis of shared gender and national identity and construct attachments to these women through sparse or general historical records, oral storytelling, and personal writing and bolster them through fictionalization informed by their own experiences as Irish women writers. Boland and Ní Ghríofa predicate these relationships on the long-lasting, often traumatic reckoning between Irish conceptions of gender and nation. The relationship between these poets and their cultural ancestors is one grounded in postmemory, an understanding of cultural trauma as an inheritable, affective knowledge, passed through storytelling, that can be felt nearly as deeply as one’s own memories. Both of these memoirs probe the convergences and conflicts between women, literature, and history in Ireland, and, as Boland and Ní Ghríofa reach back into the past to make sense of their present moment, each sketches the Irish woman as uniquely positioned to reshape visions of the past by writing of the lived experience of themselves and their forebears.