“The foresight to become a mermaid”: Folkloric cyborg women in Éilís ní dhuibhne’s short stories

Abstract

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is both a folklorist and a feminist, who “took an interest in rewriting or re-inventing women’s history, a history which had been largely unwritten” (Ní Dhuibhne, “Negotiating” 73). Folklore stories and motifs abound in her writing. Elke D’hoker argues that Ní Dhuibhne reimagines and rewrites folktales to “reflect and interpret the social values and attitudes of a postmodern society” (D’hoker 137). The repurposing of folklore allows Ní Dhuibhne to interrogate some of the complex and controversial ways that Irish society has attempted to represent and control women, entrenching taboos about female behaviours and sexualities. Using Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism and Karen Barad’s deployment of Haraway’s theory of diffraction, this article focuses on issues of voice and orality, and the female body in “The Mermaid Legend”, “Midwife to the Fairies”, and “Holiday in the Land of Murdered Dreams”, to argue that Ní Dhuibhne’s repurposing of folklore is a radically feminist undertaking. All three short stories, which feature female protagonists, reveal diverse, transgressive, sexual mothers and maidens whose symbolic connections with folklore allow them to challenge the restrictive constructions of women in Irish society, creating spaces to explore alternative, heterogeneous, feminist re-conceptions of identity and belonging.