Estudios Irlandeses (Mar 2006)
Accepting the Grotesque Body: Bildungs by Clare Boylan and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne
Abstract
In Clare Boylan’s fantasy novel Black Baby (1988) and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s realistic novel The Dancers Dancing (1999), female protagonists fear those who symbolize the grotesqueness of their own overweight bodies; hence, these heroines reject marginalized women, either black or retarded, and Irish peasants. Through their heroines’ struggles to accept both themselves and marginalized others, Ni Dhuibhne and Boylan deconstruct the psychology of self-hatred, whether it occurs in teenage or elderly women. Bakhtin’s ideas about the grotesque body, along with Stallybrass and White’s connection of the grotesque to prejudice, and Kristeva’s theory of abjection illuminate the conflicts over self-acceptance that Boylan’s and Ni Dhuibhne’s heroines face.
