Latter-day Mother Irelands: The Role of Women in Michael Collins and The Wind that Shakes the Barley

Abstract

Despite the experimental and subversive work of Irish feminist filmmakers such as Pat Murphy and Margo Harkin in the 1980s, as Gerardine Meaney has contended, "the image of woman as Ireland, Ireland as woman, remains powerful and pervasive in the new Irish cinema" (1998: 250). The cinematic convention of representing Ireland through female characters becomes particularly relevant in two recent Irish historical films: Michael Collins (1996), directed and written by Irish Neil Jordan, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006), written by Scottish Paul Laverty and directed by English Ken Loach. In their dealing with themes such as military occupation, colonisation and the heated debate about the Treaty, both films maintain the nationalist rhetoric that represents Ireland as a woman/mother in a direct manner. Over the course of this essay, I shall try to chart the implications of both films' representations of women, with a view to demonstrating how, even at present, the trope of Mother Ireland continues to be deep in the national unconscious.