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Copyright

Dayna Killen; Úna Kealy;

Published On

2025-04-07

Page Range

pp. 201–226

Language

  • English

Print Length

26 pages

9. Becoming a Domesticated Irish Woman

Teresa Deevy’s Critique of Idealised Representations of Womanhood in Katie Roche

Chapter of: Active Speech: Critical Perspectives on Teresa Deevy(pp. 201–226)
‘Becoming a domesticated Irish woman: Teresa Deevy’s critique of idealised representations of womanhood in Katie Roche’ reads Katie Roche as Teresa Deevy’s critique of idealised representations of Irish womanhood, in particular, the hegemonic, ideologically inflected representation that is defined within this chapter as the ‘domesticated Irish woman’. Defining the domesticated Irish woman as an idealised representation, which formed, and into which Irish women were pressed, during the first half of the twentieth century, the chapter considers the influences and ideologies that underpinned and shaped representations of Irish women. Synthesising the work of gender constructivist theorists, Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, with Michel Foucault’s discussion of how individuals are shaped into ‘docile bodies’, the chapter argues that, in Katie Roche, Deevy deploys space, characters’ physicality, and language (within dialogue and stage directions) to deconstruct and interrogate a developmental process whereby young women and girls in Ireland, during the early decades of twentieth century, were shaped into idealised representations of Irish womanhood.

Contributors

Dayna Killen

(author)

Dayna Killen graduated with a PhD from SETU, Waterford in 2024 having been awarded a WIT/SETU PhD Scholarship. Her doctoral thesis focuses on how four Irish women playwrights—Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, Margaret O’Leary, and Teresa Deevy—found creative opportunities in navigating stereotypical representations depicting women as married mothers located inside domestic spaces. In that work, Dayna originated the term the ‘domesticated Irish woman’ to denote a gender representation popularised during the early decades of the twentieth century in Irish society, which the aforementioned playwrights interrogate in their creative work. Dayna, furthermore, investigates a developmental process whereby the behaviours, appearances, aspirations, and spaces occupied by Irish women playwrights and their contemporaries were shaped to fit idealised representations of women as domesticated Irish women. As a Fulbright awardee, Dayna studied at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame. Prior to undertaking her doctorate, Dayna completed an MSc in Global Financial Information Systems at SETU (then WIT) and obtained a first-class honours degree in Drama and Theatre Studies with English Literature from Liverpool Hope University.

Úna Kealy

(author)
Lecturer in Theatre Studies and English at South East Technological University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4660-2838

Úna Kealy lectures in Theatre Studies and English in South East Technological University (SETU). Prior to her career in academia, Úna worked as a drama workshop facilitator and arts manager in Britain and Ireland in both state-funded and commercial theatre organisations. In 2022, she worked with Amanda Coogan, Alvean Jones, Lianne Quigley, Dublin Theatre of the Deaf, Cork Deaf Community Choir, and SETU staff and students on a research project entitled Lyrical Bodies, an investigation of Teresa Deevy’s ballet Possession, which was performed in Project Arts Centre, Dublin and The Granary Theatre, Cork as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival in 2024. With Kate McCarthy, she has co-authored ‘Writing from the Margins: Re-framing Teresa Deevy’s Archive and Her Correspondence with James Cheasty c.1952–1962’, Irish University Review 52.2 (2022); ‘Shape Shifting the Silence: An Analysis of Talk Real Fine, Just like a Lady by Amanda Coogan in collaboration with Dublin Theatre of the Deaf: An Appropriation of Teresa Deevy’s The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935)’, in The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, Vol 1: 1716–1992 (Liverpool University Press, 2021); and ‘Participatory Performances: Spaces of Creative Negotiation’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (Palgrave, 2018). Other publications include ‘Resisting Power and Direction: The King of Spain’s Daughter by Teresa Deevy as a Feminist Call to Action’, Estudios Irlandeses, 15 (2020) and ‘Stasis, Rootlessness and Violence in Lay Me Down Softly’, in The Art of Billy Roche: Wexford as the World (Peter Lang, 2012). With Richard Hayes, she co-authored ‘Artistic Vision and Regional Resistance: The Gods Are Angry, Miss Kerr and the Red Kettle Theatre Company, a Case Study’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (Palgrave, 2018).