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• W2010152020 abstract "Absence and Presence: Mothers in Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing Kathleen P. Costello-Sullivan The novelist, critic, and journalist Colm Tóibín, born in Wexford in 1955, is among the most successful of contemporary Irish writers, although he remains comparatively underexamined by literary critics.1 One early work that helped to establish Tóibín’s reputation as a serious writer is the haunting novel and bildungsroman The Heather Blazing (1992), which traces the dawning reconciliation of conservative Fianna Fáil judge Eamon Redmond to the increasingly liberal politics of contemporary Irish society. While most critics recognize Eamon’s metaphorical embodiment of the nation-state, none has accounted fully for the role of the lost mother in this narrative of personal and national maturation. Yet, there is a continuous engagement with the mother-son relationship in The Heather Blazing; the lost mother is a central facet of the novel. Tóibín’s concern with the role of mothers in The Heather Blazing fits a larger pattern in his work. His short story collection, Mothers and Sons (2006), unsurprisingly privileges the relationships referenced in the title, and his 2008 essay on Irish prosperity also returns repeatedly to the idea of the mother as [End Page 108] “entirely absent” or “missing.”2 John McCourt and Anne Fogarty, in separate readings of Mothers and Sons, identify Tóibín’s “haunting meditation on motherhood” as part of his oeuvre and acknowledge that “the space of the maternal and the voided, haunted place of the mother function as central imaginary sites within his fiction.”3 Neither address a continuous engagement with the mother-son relationship in The Heather Blazing. The Heather Blazing is in fact in continual dialogue with the figure of the lost mother—both Redmond’s literally lost mother, who died in childbirth, and as a metaphor for the cultural loss of women abstracted for, and elided by, the birth of the Irish nation-state. Through the novel’s ironic juxtaposition of the Irish domestic ideal with actual experience; its emphasis on a suffocating and alienating patrilineal heritage to the exclusion of a maternal inheritance; in its consistent resort to alternating images of warmth and cold, The Heather Blazing offers a scathing judgment of the Irish national self-construction that sacrifices women—and generations of Irish—to a nonrepresentative and incomplete vision of Irish society. By highlighting the crushing weight of the mother’s absence, The Heather Blazing demands that women be more fully presenced in the Irish body politic. The novel traces the life story of Eamon Redmond, a high-court judge who was raised by his widowed father and who hails from a line of nationalist rebels. The narrative alternates between memories of Eamon’s childhood in Enniscorthy, scenes from his legal career in Dublin, and summer vacations spent in Cush on the Wexford seacoast. The father of two children, Eamon is unable to connect emotionally either with them or with his wife Carmel, who dies in the course of the novel. His failure to establish emotional bonds is partly explained through scenes from Eamon’s painful and repressed childhood. However, he delights in legal language and argument. This contrast juxtaposes his logical, formidable legal public persona with a closed, inaccessible, and pained private one. As he seeks to acclimate to the death of his wife and to reconcile his investment in a conservative political and cultural past with an evolving and more liberal present, Eamon learns to negotiate the contradictory demands of his job and his family, of his past and his present. [End Page 109] Eamon Redmond’s legal career and struggles present a commentary on the changing nature of contemporary Irish society and the troubling legacy of de Valéra’s 1937 revisions to Bunreacht na hÉireann, the Irish Constitution. Eamon himself, as a high-court judge, is a literal embodiment of Irish law: his words and decisions have consequences socially, as he is empowered to reify the codes and credos of the constitution. In this respect, his struggle to adjust to the changing expectations and needs of Irish society serve as a metaphor for the struggles of the nation as..." @default.
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• W2010152020 title "Absence and Presence: Mothers in Colm Tóibín’s <i>The Heather Blazing</i>" @default.
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• W2010152020 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/nhr.0.0096" @default.
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