Women on the Move: Mobility in Evelyn Conlon’s Fiction

Abstract

This article explores the representation of women’s mobility in Evelyn Conlon’s fiction and focuses on texts in which the female protagonists are depicted as “women on the move” and coded as transgressors and trespassers. The article discusses Conlon’s fiction of mobility in the light of patterns of displacement and dislocation which are recurrent in the novels and stories analyzed. Although the writer consistently disrupts unified patriarchal narratives of “at-homeness”, the article argues that her works expose also the need for connection and continuity and, thus, embody a reformulation of more open forms of belonging and a proposal for more inclusive identity paradigms.

Keywords

• Evelyn Conlon
• Mobility
• Irish Women
• At-homeness
• Identity
• Irishness
• Contemporary Irish Fiction
• Subversive Writing