Ideal irish womanhood contest in Martina Devlin's short story “Alice through the bathroom mirror”

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Irish Catholic Church adopted and spread a gendered moral discourse to educate women in chastity, purity and passivity. In the twenty-first century, this religious discourse has been maintained and reinforced with the medicalisation of women’s bodies and the pressure put on female subjects to become mothers. Following feminist and resilience studies, we will analyse Martina Devlin’s short story “Alice through the Bathroom Mirror” (2003) to see how the female body is objectified, dehumanised and pathologized by men, and how gender expectations can be challenged by resisting subordination and objectification.