The Country, the City, the Sea, and Girls with Green Eyes

My latest piece of published work is a chapter in an edited collection called Narratives of Place in Literature and Film. Edited by Steven Allen and Kirsten Mollegaard the fifteen chapters look at vast array of narratives of place: urban, rural, non-places, and so on.

My chapter focuses on three films directed by Desmond Davis which were written by Irish novelist Edna O'Brien: Girl With Green Eyes (1964), I Was Happy Here (1966) and The Country Girls (1984). Allen and Mollegaard introduce my work:

‘Matthew Kerry’s chapter focuses on three feature films in which urban spaces play significant roles… These films, which were created by film director Desmond Davis in collaboration with Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, frame their stories of burgeoning female sexuality and eventual disillusionment in a series of contrasting environments that contextualize regional and national identity. The films (and O’Brien’s novels that the films are based on) not only explore gendered spatialities, but also examine notions of belonging and displacement, memory and history, violence and oppression. Kerry explores the films’ industrial, historical, and social contexts in order to analyse what the films reveal about gendered places and changing identities for Irish women in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Kerry’s chapter highlights the many social strictures and patriarchal norms Irish women faced when they left their homes in the country to work in the big city, or when they left Ireland to work in the United Kingdom. He discusses how rural and urban spaces, as well as the confined spaces of home, structure the women’s perceptions of themselves, often under the yoke of a nationalist agenda where their struggle to achieve sexual and freedom is weighed against the haunting presence of Catholicism and the motherland. Davis’ films and O’Brien’s novels show how women’s agency and determination can liberate and empower them, even in places dominated by patriarchal discourses’ (Allen and Mollegaard, 2019: 97 – 98).

This will most likely be the last piece of academic film writing I do. The chapter has turned out well, but as I completed it I did wonder to myself if I have anything new to say in terms of film theory. I'll be working on another textbook though, so watch this space... 

Kerry, Matthew, ‘The Country, the City, the Sea, and Girls with Green Eyes’ in Allen, Steven, and Kirsten Mollegaard, 2019, Narratives of Place in Literature and Film, London: Routledge.

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