“The Journey of Two Women” A Chronotopic Study of Gender, Sexuality and National Identity in Anne Enright’s The Gathering and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk.

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“The Journey of Two Women”

A Chronotopic Study of Gender, Sexuality and National Identity

in Anne Enright’s

_{The Gathering}

and Deborah Levy’s

_{Hot Milk}

.

Aikaterini Daskalopoulou (11103922) June 2017

University of Amsterdam rMA in Literary Studies

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Introduction

“I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have is stories” (Enright, 2)

“I want a bigger life” (Levy, 8)

The Gathering and Hot Milk

Veronica Hagerty feels that all she has is stories and Sofia Papastergiadis wants a bigger life. The narrators of Anne Enright’s _{The Gathering (2007) and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (2016)} have one main characteristic in common: they both find themselves in unusual, even traumatic, circumstances that have unpredictable effects on them. Veronica’s brother, Liam, was molested when he was nine years old, an event witnessed by an eight-year-old Veronica, and he eventually commits suicide. Sofia finds herself in Andalusia, Spain, visiting the specialist Dr. Gomez to seek a cure for her hypochondriac mother, Rose, who claims to be unable to walk and suffers from other minor afflictions as well. Where the two novels differ is in the approach the two women take to cope with their situation. Veronica looks to the past, constructing a narrative that begins when her grandmother, Ada, meets her husband, Charlie, and her future landlord, Lamb Nugent, who is also Liam’s molester, and that extends to the present day of the novel. Veronica’s attempt to create a history of her family and herself is her way of coping with her brother’s suicide and her own trauma, a way to understand the reasons behind the current, unsatisfying

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status of her life. In contrast, Sofia does not turn to the past but immerses herself in the present, hoping for a “bigger life” and creating new connections with the people that she meets. Through those connections, she is able to change her point of view, acknowledge her contradictions and start building a new identity. The novels thus represent the different journeys taken by two women to reach a better comprehension of themselves and the world they live in, while trying to resist and even change the social norms that have been imposed on them. A comparison of the novels showcases the contrasting but also complementary ways in which Veronica and Sofia achieve this; in a sense, _{Hot Milk picks up where The Gathering leaves off, with the journey} beginning in the past of Veronica’s family and ending with a new future for Sofia.

The Gathering is a family saga narrated by Veronica Hegarty, with the present of the novel set in Ireland in 1998. Veronica, who is 38 years old, is one of the nine surviving children of the Hegarty family. Her brother Liam, who had been living in England, has just committed suicide at the age of 39. This event triggers Veronica’s desire to write down her own story as well as her account of her family’s history, in an attempt to understand and cope with her trauma. Central in the plot is her brother’s abuse in 1968 by Liam Nugent, the friend and landlord of Veronica’s grandmother Ada. Veronica witnessed the abuse but repressed the memory of it until Liam’s death, when she is overwhelmed by guilt and trauma; guilt because she never spoke about it to anyone, and trauma because of the molestation event as well as her brother’s suicide. Her narrative, as she herself acknowledges, is a web of facts and fiction, oscillating between different spatial and temporal contexts. She creates a fictional account of how Lamb Nugent and her grandparents met, while also contemplating her own life as a student, her parents, the abuse of her brother, and her life in the family home with her husband Tom (who works in the financial

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sector) and their two daughters. Veronica previously worked as a shopping journalist, but became a stay-at-home mother when Tom achieved success in his profession. Her only remaining parent is her mother, who is never named in the novel and is always addressed as ‘Mammy’.

The fact that Liam’s abuse takes place in Ireland is of special significance, given the recent history of the country. In the 1980's, with trials starting in the 1990's, Ireland was exposed to the scandal of widespread historical sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. The discoveries led to the formation of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) in 1999, which testifies to the significance of this event for contemporary Ireland (Pilgrim, 406-407). Although the abuse of Liam is not by a priest, since Lamb Nugent does not belong to the clergy, the disavowal of the abuse creates a parallel with events in Irish society. In addition, as my analysis will show, the three family houses in which the main events play out across the generations, Veronica’s childhood home, her adult home with her husband and daughters, and Ada’s home, reflect on specific periods in Irish history through their spatio-temporal organisation.

Hot Milk seems to be set in the summer of 2015. As noted, this novel revolves around 1 Sofia, 25, half-Greek and half-English, who takes her hypochondriac mother, Rose, who seems to be unable to walk, to a clinic in southern Spain, hoping for a cure. An anthropologist who abandoned her Ph.D. to care for her mother, Sofia creates a first-person narrative that explores her identity and conflicting feelings towards her family. Sofia barely speaks any Greek and has no significant connection to her second country of origin apart from her last name,

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Papastergiadis. She has lost touch with her father, a wealthy ship owner named Christos, who left his British family when Sofia was four years old, apparently due to his newly found belief in the Greek Orthodox religion. Christos returned to Greece and has created a new life for himself in Athens with a new wife, Alexandra, and a baby daughter. Meanwhile, Sofia spends her days in the south of Spain bathing under the scorching sun and caring for her mother. There, she also takes two lovers, Ingrid, a German seamstress, and Juan, a Spanish student, in an attempt to try to become “bolder” (Levy, 58). Sofia meets Ingrid in a cafe and they embark on a passionate, yet sometimes violent relationship as they continually push each other’s boundaries. Juan, who works in the injury hut on the beach, treats Sofia’s jellyfish stings, eventually becoming her lover as well. Sofia’s quest to find her identity also takes her to debt-ridden Greece, where she meets her estranged father and his new family. In Athens, she creates a familial and friendly bond with her father’s wife, Alexandra. Upon returning to Spain, the change in her is obvious; she does not hesitate to leave her mother in the middle of the street to force her to finally walk. In Sofia’s narrative, I will argue, the different spaces she moves through acquire a central role, defining her actions and enabling her to explore her sexual identity, her class position - especially in contrast to her father and Alexandra - and the relation between her Greek heritage and the politics of national identity..

Both _{The Gathering} _{and Hot Milk include different spatio-temporal constellations that} shape the narrators’ interactions with others and with their surroundings. Veronica’s feelings and attitude, for example, are different in her parents’ house than in her own house, while Sofia’s changing surroundings gradually inspire her to become bolder and bolder. To analyse and compare the way the novels’ settings influence the narrative and the characters, I will use

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Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, defined as "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature" (Bakhtin, 84). For Bakhtin, moreover, the chronotopes of literature are intimately related to those of social reality, enabling an analysis of the novels’ relation to the material contexts in which they were produced and are set. In the remainder of this introduction, I will explain how chronotopes work and outline the chronotopic structure of _{The Gathering}_{and Hot Milk, both what Bakhtin calls family novel chronotopes. The rest of this thesis is divided into two parts. The first focuses on how the novels, through their chronotopic structures, reflect on gender, sexuality, and class, drawing on theories of material feminism by Rosemary Hennessy and intimacy by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh. Specifically, this part focuses on how patriarchy operates in the chronotopes of the novels and the corresponding social realities. I show how Veronica and Sofia are interpellated by and react to patriarchal structures differently depending on the particular chronotopes they are moving through. The second part is concerned with national identity and examines how the narrators expose the shortcomings and flaws of national thinking, based on Benedict Anderson’s theory of nations as ‘imagined communities’, which explains how cultural narratives, novels in particular, were instrumental in creating a national narrative, and Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of ‘invented traditions’, which focuses on the construction of new points of reference that help cement the coherence of the nation state. Karl Marx’s concept of alienation and Paschalis Kitromilides’ analysis of Greek national identity also prove to be useful in analysing _{The Gathering and Hot Milk respectively and in attending to the differences them.

of which, I argue, can be identified as}

between}

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cultural narratives of the era and problematise various issues that correspond to the material reality we live in. The first-person narrators reveal the discrepancies and issues that govern their lives: the limits created for them because of their gender and class position, the quest to find a meaningful type of intimacy, and the question of how the construction of the nation state defines their lives. _{The Gathering portrays a conservative world, a chronotope in which Veronica} struggles to find her place, and ends in a cliffhanger with the narrator at an airport unsure of where to go and what to do, but clearly yearning for change. In a sense, the narrative structure of Hot Milk continues _{where The} _{Gathering ends: Sofia is on the road, travelling to Spain and} Greece, gaining new experiences and trying to find ways to understand and push the limits of her identity. Together, the two texts present a fascinating challenge to untangle the mental and spatio-temporal journeys of Veronica and Sofia in order to bring to light the gaps in the various ideological structures that are imposed on them by the chronotopes in which they are situated.

What is a Chronotope?

Bakhtin borrows the term ‘chronotope’ from the natural sciences in order to draw attention to the intersection of time and space in the novelistic whole. Time and space are interconnected in a dialogical relationship, as time informs space and space informs time. In order to create a systematic overview of chronotopes and how they will be used in my analysis, it is necessary to look at several of their characteristics.

Space and time are interconnected in literature and in life. Literary and social chronotopes engage in a dialogic relationship as reality is refracted in a literary chronotope and vice versa;_{literary chronotopes are social through and through as authors, according to Bakhtin,}

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draw on social reality for the purposes of artistic creation. The relationship between literary chronotopes and social ones is, however, not simple:

As we have said, the process of assimilating an actual historical chronotope in literature has been complicated and erratic; certain isolated aspects of the chronotope, available in given historical conditions, have been worked out, although only certain specific forms on actual chronotope were reflected in art. These generic forms, at first productive, were then reinforced by tradition; in their subsequent development they continued stubbornly to exist, up to and beyond the point at which they had lost any meaning that was productive in actuality or adequate to later historical situations. (Bakhtin, 85)

Material reality is not merely reflected in a literary chronotope, but also refracted, as the novelistic structure adapts specific historical conditions or keeps them alive beyond their existence in social reality. In _{Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, V. N. Voloshinov puts} forward a theory of language that focuses its relationship with the social environment, insisting that “[e]very ideological sign is not only a reflection, a shadow of reality, but is also itself a material segment of that very reality” (11). By virtue of being constructed of signs, chronotopes have a similar relationship to reality, fabricating the connection between time and space in a manner that makes them part of the material world.

If the chronotope is immersed in the social, then the interconnectedness of space and time is not neutral, but it is immersed in the same valuations that are contained in the social sphere. For Bakhtin, “in literature and art itself, temporal and spatial determinations are inseparable from

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one another, and always coloured by emotions and values” (243). The emotions and values that this connection between time and space carries are reflected in the way in which the chronotopic structures developed in each novelistic whole define the genre: “[i]t can be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions” (Bakhtin, 85). To give an example, in a novel that belongs to the chronotope of the idyll, we would expect a small, pastoral and patriarchal world that defines relationships between characters according to the values that this specific intersection of time and space allows. As Peeren notes, “[a] chronotope may be specific to a historical period, culture, nation, social class, or any other group of individuals – however small and insignificant – as long as they are united within a particular perception and practice of time-space organization” (Peeren, 69). It is this unity of perception and practice that enables the chronotope to exert influence over the characters, and that is also what empowers them, collectively, to alter the chronotopic structure over time.

The distinction between major (generic) and minor chronotopes is vital to my analysis. Major chronotopes are the ones that determine the genre of the novelistic whole. Bakhtin analyses a number of these major chronotopes in his work: the adventure time chronotope, the idyllic chronotope, the chronotope of the family novel, etc. They serve as a framework to produce the values and ideas instilled in a novelistic world, as described above. Minor chronotopes exist _{within major ones: the chronotope of the family novel can contain an} episode governed by the chronotope of the road or the chronotope of the threshold. Bakhtin writes that “[c]hronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in even more complex interrelationships” (252), which allows for a wide array of interactions between major and minor

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chronotopes. Interestingly, Bakhtin claims that minor chronotopes cannot influence major chronotopes; “[a]s the relationships themselves that exist _among _{chronotopes cannot enter into} any of the relationships contained _{within chronotopes” (252, emphasis in the original). Yet in the} next line he insists that the relationship is “ _{dialogical”, which implies that the influence is mutual} (252, emphasis in the original). I will argue that minor chronotopes can and do influence major ones, as they can make possible events that challenge the major chronotope’s value system. In The Gathering _{and Hot Milk, as Veronica and Sofia move from one chronotope to another, the} reader is able to trace the way in which the different value systems that characterise each chronotope alter their behaviour and self-image.

Having analysed what a chronotope is, I will focus on the relationship between the major and the minor chronotopes in the novels. Both texts belong in the family novel genre, as will be analysed in the next part of my introduction, and they both feature similar minor chronotopes.

The Chronotopic Structures of The Gathering and Hot Milk

Bakhtin explores the family novel as a form of the idyllic chronotope, as a “familiar territory” that preserves the unity of life and time, and the “unity of the life of generations” (Bakhtin, 225). In the case of _{The Gathering, Veronica’s story begins from the construction of a fictional} narrative that starts with how Ada met Nugent and her future husband Charlie, continues to describe Veronica’s own (real) past, and ends with the future of her family left uncertain. Her narrative is framed and shaped by the chronotopes of the houses that she moves in and out of, where the events that she describes take place. According to Bakhtin, while the family novel chronotope was first considered part of the idyll, it later evolved to correspond to the new reality

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of bourgeois modernity. Whereas the idyllic chronotope depicts a provincial, patriarchal, and idealised world, the new family novel chronotope “educate[s] man for life in bourgeois society” (Bakhtin, 234) in a material reality that has changed from focusing on the communal to the individual under a capitalist framework. This new focus entails the “destruction of the idyll” as the home becomes a property or necessitates a temporary leaving behind of the provincial, idealised world of the idyll:

At best the idyllic unity of place is limited to the ancestral family _{town house, to the} immovable part (the real estate) of capitalist property [...] What is more, there is a break-off in the course of a character's life from a well-defined and limited spatial locale, a period of wandering in the life of the heroes, before they acquire family and material possessions. Such then are the distinctive features of the classic family novel. (Bakhtin, 232)

The Gathering embodies these characteristics of the classic family novel. At the centre of the novel exist the three houses that Veronica has lived in throughout her life. Veronica’s years of wandering as a college student are depicted as a break between her family house and her marriage-this is also when she meets Michael Weiss, the American who “refused to own [her], no matter how much [she] tried to be owned” (Enright, 82). At the present time of the novel the narrator has acquired “family and material possessions” (Bakhtin, 232) and she lives in an expensive townhouse with her husband and her two daughters. Significantly, even the novel’s title is a reference to family. After Liam’s suicide, the extended family _{gathers in the family}

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house for his wake, in a scene that could evoke a sense of family solidarity. Veronica, however, has already referred to the crowd as “vultures” (74) and talked about the quarrels among the Hegarty siblings. The title, thus, takes on an ironic twist. While a gathering would be an occasion to cherish and help each other, here it becomes another element that unveils the breakdown of the idyllic family under conditions of capitalism.

Hot Milk_{also belongs to the family novel chronotope. Sofia’s narrative revolves around} her family, as she leaves a “familiar territory”, England, to travel to Spain as her mother’s caretaker. She then visits Greece to see her estranged father and his new family. The trips are a “break off” from her “limited spatial locale” (Bakhtin, 232), which consisted of her work at the Coffee House in West London (Levy, 3). Sofia becomes a wanderer as she travels along the hills of Southern Spain: “[b]y the time I had finally climbed down the mountain path that led to the beach, I had journeyed as far as from myself as I have ever been, far, far from any landmarks I recognised” (202). _{Hot Milk’s plot closely fits that of a family novel, as Sofia “wanders through} an alien world among alien people; random misfortunes and successes happen to [her]; [s]he encounters random people who turn out to be [...] [her] enemies or [her] benefactors” (Bakhtin, 232). In Spain, a land comprised of “dusty barren hills” (Levy, 4) and thoroughly alien to Sofia, she has a series of experiences that lead to her meeting various people who are friendly or hostile (or both). The best example of this kind of encounter in the novel is the way Sofia meets Ingrid, who ends up being one of her lovers. Their first encounter takes place in a cafe, when Sofia sees Ingrid’s “black leather shoes with gold buckles on the side” (33) under a bathroom stall and thinks that there is a man in the women’s bathroom. Ingrid and Sofia’s relationship takes a complicated and passionate turn throughout the novel, testifying to the transformative power of

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random encounters. What is more, the narrator’s family is broken, her parents divorced and estranged, giving us “a picture of the breakdown of provincial idealism under forces emanating from the capitalist centre” (Bakhtin, 234). At the end of the novel Sofia seems to acquire a new family, but not in the traditional way of the family novel, by going back to the family home. By forcing her mother to walk (Levy, 215), Sofia is emotionally reunited with her mother and they, once again, become a family and a “household” (217). At the same time, she also forms a bond with her father’s new wife, Alexandra. When the latter communicates with her via an e-mail to inform her about the precarious situation Alexandra and her daughter will soon be in, she calls Sofia her “sister” (187) and, indirectly, asks for help. The new relationships that Sofia has formed with Ingrid and Juan become part of her life as well, adding to her now ‘extended’ family.

Both novels thus share the characteristics of the family novel chronotope and they have relatively close dates of publication, as Enright’s novel was published in 2007 and Levy’s in 2016, less than ten years apart. Far from a coincidence, this suggests that, as capitalism remains the dominant social system around the globe, the family novel chronotope speaks to the collective consciousness of the era. Bakhtin first talks about the chronotope of the family novel in relation to the destruction of the idyll in the works of Rousseau, Thackeray, Thomas Mann, etc., so it stands to reason that the evolution of the novel into the 21st century would bring new developments. In _{The Gathering and Hot Milk this new change concerns the destruction of the} cyclical structure of the family chronotope; while the novel should take the hero (back) into “the small but secure and stable little world of the family, where nothing is foreign, or accidental or incomprehensible [...] where the ancient matrices are re-established on family base” (Bakhtin,

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232), these contemporary novels do the opposite. Enright’s heroine, at the end, finds herself in an airport, unsure of what her next step will be and getting ready to dive into uncertainty, and Levy’s narrator changes her entire worldview through the people that she meets, only to learn that her mother has oesophageal cancer, changing the ‘dream’ of a stable family world to uncertainty and having to look beyond the traditional family unit for support (with Alexandra and Ingrid). These changes would not be possible without the minor chronotopes that exist in the novels, as they become the mechanism that prompts change and evolution in the major chronotope of the family novel. These minor chronotopes, which will be the focus of my analysis of the two novels, place the narrators in spatio-temporal constellations that complicate the family novel chronotope, creating added layers of action.

In _{The Gathering. the houses in which Veronica lived/s become placeholders of memory:} “Space [...] is filled with memories and hopes which in some way allows it to be personified, felt as a reality” by the characters that inhabit that space (Gullon, 12). The chronotopic space of the houses is static, as houses tend to be, but so is the temporal aspect of their existence. They are immovable, frozen in time, because each home constitutes the unique world that produced each Hegarty generation, including Veronica. Veronica’s narrative emphasises the stillness of the houses in her descriptions; her family house is surrounded by an aura of haunting memories, whether it be of the brother who “would squeeze the small bones [of your hand] until you screamed” (Enright, 196) or of the “vague” and “faded” mother who does not live outside the house (197). Ada’s house is “quiet” (47) and the darkest in Veronica’s description, while her own house is an empty, “cream”-coloured space that stands in opposition to the other houses (130). It is important to emphasise again that literary chronotopes engage in active dialogue with

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actual, material chronotopes, “because the literary text would lack any meaning were this not the case” (Holquist, 109), and that the three houses can thus also be seen as allegories for the periods in Irish history that are described in the novel: Ada's house belongs to "an inward-looking" (Del'Amico, 67) post-Independence Ireland; Veronica's house to the world of the Irish economic boom, the time of the Celtic Tiger; and the family house to the intermediary time in between. “Houses are imagined, built, inhabited by time and history, by events and their effects” (Larson et al. 1) and each house in _{The Gathering forms a chronotope that refracts a period of Irish} history and explores how it impacted Irish family life.

The houses as chronotopes also shape Veronica’s identity and, to an extent, determine her reactions to the different events in the novel’s plot line. Downum, in her reading of _The Gathering_{, observes that "Veronica’s emotional state has deteriorated since she learned of her} brother’s suicide, and as the novel opens we find her drinking heavily and suffering from chronic insomnia, alienated from her husband, emotionally distanced from other family members including her own daughters, and jaundiced in her view of most aspects of her life" (83). This observation is enriched when we observe how Veronica moves through the different chronotopes she inhabits; she acts differently in each one and her emotional state is manifested in different forms. Veronica's acts and emotions do not exist in a vacuum; they are influenced and/or produced by the three homes, which correspond to different eras of Irish history. The chronotopic construction of the novel thus marks it as reflecting on the formation of national identity, as well as on family and personal trauma; Veronica's development as a character seeking to understand her family history and her own identity reflects the Irish nation coming to terms with widespread abuse, with how Catholicism interfered with every aspect of daily life and

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with the success of the new Celtic Tiger "imagined community" that emerged before the 2008 global financial crash.

"The house knows me" (4), Veronica says at the beginning of the novel, aware that it is this place that made her who she is, describing her family house as she enters it to inform her mother of Liam's death. Veronica's description of the house varies from the plain description of physical objects to complicated emotional responses. She describes the rooms in the present of the novel, yet the house also appears as a complex site of love, memory, dreams, trauma-even disgust. When Veronica enters the kitchen, she describes the smell as "very dim and disgusting", the armchair "shiny and cold with the human waste of many years" as the whole room makes her "gag a little" (5). Her family house repulses her, yet she accepts that it is what has shaped her and her family: "it is the smell of us", she says later on (5). It is the house of her and Liam's childhood, therefore previous times, memories and events are inseparable from the actual space she stands in. She observes a dent in the wall which triggers her memory, going back to the time when Liam threw a knife at their mother "and everyone laughed and shouted at him" (6): the space of the family house is filled with the memories of everyone who lived in it. The chronotope of the family house assigns Veronica the roles of daughter and sister, no matter what era of her life she is referring to. The narrator approaches her mother in anger and contempt, her being a "hazy" presence in her life (3), transparent, almost invisible, after eleven births and seven miscarriages have taken their toll on her. She feels the urge to shout at her mother (5), to make her visible and make her remember her name; yet being the daughter, she does not. The mantra of the family seems to be “don't tell Mammy”, part of the familiar that should not be disturbed in Bakhtin’s idyllic chronotope. Veronica blames her mother for not taking responsibility for the

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family she created and, as a result feels the “unfairness of the place” in her bones (26). Veronica's attitude to her father varies from blaming the size of the family on him to remembering how “when he asks you for a cigarette and you pull out your box of Durex, like a catastrophic schoolgirl, then he is obliged to erupt, and keep erupting, like Old Faithful, until you have found yourself _{alternative accommodation”} _{(95, emphasis in original). This attitude} coincides with what Del'Amico describes as the "sour extremities of Irish Catholicism, as well as from the patriarchal nature of Irish culture that was advanced by the Catholic church in collusion with the state" (66). The mother, in turn, is the symbol of how a woman should behave in post-colonial Ireland. An invisible, transparent, almost virginal (even in conception) figure that is reduced to her capacity to reproduce the newly formed Irish nation (Sydora, 241). This is the context that Veronica is trying to escape from while being in her family house, reacting with great contempt towards that specific chronotope, even as it continues to shape her.

Veronica's own house, where she lives with her husband and her two daughters, is almost devoid of memories. Veronica has decorated it in modern style, "in oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate" (Enright, 36), taking care of contemporary amenities, open spaces and daylight. However, she is alone in this house: her daughters are "just a residue" and Tom, her husband, is "upstairs dreaming his high maintenance dreams [...] and it has nothing to do with me" (36). Chronotopes are influenced by the relations among the people that inhabit them and in the case of the house, it appears that Veronica, in trying to create a space devoid of traumatic memories (including that of her brother’s abuse), has wiped memory from this house altogether. The lack of human emotion in a space populated by material objects makes it impossible for true, human relationships to develop, marking her house as the chronotopic space in which idyllic ideas of family ties are

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destroyed. She stays awake during the night and sleeps during the day, avoiding her husband and the responsibilities that are expected from her as a housewife. She simply "walks the house" (36), writing, contemplating. Time is being stretched and Veronica fills it by doing "nothing mostly" (38). Both space and time thus appear to be unnerving and unwelcoming towards the narrator, who also resorts to drinking.

Veronica and her husband are trapped in the narrative of the economic boom, which drove Ireland (as the Celtic Tiger) and other peripheral European nations to a short period of affluence. Keeping in mind that the novel was published in 2007, when the global economic system was still believed to be going strong by the general public, it presents a neoliberal and capitalist chronotope that is implicitly and explicitly described as oppressive towards Veronica, empty of emotion and warmth but full of consumerist goods. She characteristically writes that “there is no blood in this house” (130), which features a “stainless-steel Miele dishwasher”, a flat screen television and an expensive convertible Saab. The house itself is a “new five-bedroom detached […] a bit Tudor-red-brick-with-Queen-Anne-overtones” (36). Veronica tries to escape the minor chronotope of the house in which she grew up by creating a home with her own family that fits the capitalist chronotope: a clean, organised space that houses only two children, in sharp contrast to the messy home of her parents that she shared with her many siblings.

Last but not least, Ada's house is positioned in between the other two. Neither her family house, nor her own, it nevertheless plays an important role in Veronica's life as the site of Liam's abuse and the place where they were sent during their mother's possible nervous breakdown. "Ada's house is very quiet" (Enright, 47). The atmosphere in Broadstone is very still and somehow smothering; it is a house with no children, full of things from Ada and Charlie's life

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that are rarely, or never, used. Time, likewise, feels very still in a space that resembles a mausoleum of a former life more than a living, breathing house with people in it. For Veronica, it is also the place where she witnessed her brother's abuse by Nugent, the event that she is trying to reconstruct by narrating her and her family's life. The house is described in different times, yet everything points to that moment of abuse: the silence, the stillness, the smothering atmosphere.

In this chronotopic framework, Veronica's words that "this is the anatomy and mechanism of a family-a whole fucking country-drowning in shame" (Enright, 168) take on additional meaning as her brother's abuse becomes an allegory for the child abuse scandals and her family comes to represent Irish society in general. The houses serve as constructed “imagined communities” in the novel, in line with Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation-state as a constructed community imagined in the collective and individual consciousnesses of the citizens (6-7). Interestingly, the novel as a genre emerged at the beginning of the 18th century, as one of the “two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe” (Anderson, 24) that had the capacity of narrating and, simultaneously, constructing the formation of the nation-state (the other being the newspaper). Anderson bases his argument on the difference of the conception of time between medieval and modern Europe; Christianity did not allow for a synchronic or causal conception of time, as the end of the world was always imminent and every event was directly tied to the divine, not allowing a concept of simultaneity that would be analogous to ours. The new modern concept of time as a “homogenous, empty 2 time” (24), however, allows for events to be narrated at the same time. A similar idea justifies, for Bakhtin, the shift from the idyllic chronotope to the family novel chronotope that destroyed

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the former; time is no longer unified and therefore the artistic chronotope as a refraction of the material reality also has to change (214-15). The genre of the novel, according to Anderson, allows for “acts [to be] performed at the same clocked, calendrical time, but by actors who may be largely unaware of one another”, showing “the novelty of this imagined world conjured up by the author in his reader’s minds” (26). The reason why this chronotopic structure is described as a novelty is because it allowed a member of a community to imagine the existence of other members, whom she had never seen, while “having complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” (26), thus constructing the imagined community of a nation.

Ada’s house is the place of Liam’s abuse, which evokes in the reader’s mind the late 20 th

century scandal of widespread child abuse in the Irish Catholic institutions. It is described as a bleak, dark place by Veronica. The house is in decay, “[t]he door is painted a white gloss, going yellow” and the rooms are “dim” (Enright, 142-143). The broken state of the house signifies the broken state of the Irish State, newly emerged after the civil war that ended in 1923, creating a dismal setting for Liam’s abuse. The family house is permeated with the ethics of the Catholic Church and the state’s family values. Veronica’s parents, as described, are the epitome of the biopolitics that the new state imposed on the bodies of (mostly) women as part of the nation formation process: “In 1932 married women were forbidden to work as teachers; in 1935 the Criminal Law Amendment Act made contraceptives illegal; and with the 1936 Conditions of Employment Act, section 16, the minister for employment was empowered to limit the number of women working in any branch of industry” (Palko, 2-3). Women in the Irish anti-abortion state are robbed of their agency and reduced to their reproductive capacities, resulting in “vague” and “invisible” motherhoods, and men are encouraged to police women’s bodies, as Veronica’s

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father did with the box of condoms.

The narrator’s own house does not appear to be carrying the same emotional or historical weight, as Veronica has ostensibly tried to purge her current existence of the weight of her family and national history. She is the one who has “made it” (Enright, 45); she only has two daughters instead of her mother’s eleven (surviving) children, a husband and a beautiful house. On the surface she has indeed made it, exactly like Ireland managed to get away from the haunting colonial past and its British dependency, as “optimism about Ireland’s financial independence affirms disconnection from the past as both an instrument and, indeed, a desired outcome of Ireland’s contemporary autonomy” (Miller, 4). After Liam’s suicide, however, Veronica discovers that it is impossible to escape memory and past traumas; he becomes a disrupting effect in her perfect life, as he also was while still alive:

The problem with Liam was never something big. The problem with Liam was always a hundred small things. He had cigarettes but no matches, did I have matches? Yes, but the match breaks [...] He goes to find a lighter, rattling all the drawers in the kitchen. He walks out, leaving the back door open. He comes in the front door twenty minutes later with a lighter he found on the street-lying just outside the house actually-except that it is wet. He lights the oven from the pilot and lights his cigarette from the oven and burns his hand [...] and he puts the lighter-a cheap, plastic lighter-he actually puts it in the oven, and when I scream at him he shouts right back at me and there is a tussle at the oven door. (Enright, 124)

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In the same way Liam disturbs Veronica’s perfect house, Ireland’s past is haunting the country’s present. The projected image of the Celtic Tiger and the economic boom behind it merely 3 concealed the “hundred small things” that were the problems of the Republic, given material form in the novel’s use of the chronotopic motifs of the different homes.

Hot Milk also contains different minor chronotopes that testify to the different routes Sofia takes through Spain and Greece. One of the main ones, which I believe shapes the narrative structure on a secondary level after the family novel chronotope, is the chronotope of the road. Sofia is on the road, both metaphorically and literally. Her path takes her across the barren hills of Southern Spain to the chaotic city of Athens, highlighting the random encounters that Bakhtin sees as the main event the road chronotope makes possible:

Encounters in a novel usually take place ‘on the road’. The road is a particularly good place for random encounters. On the road (‘the high road’), the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people-representatives of all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, ages-intersect at one spatial and temporal point. People who are normally kept separate by social and spatial distance can accidentally meet; any contrast might crop up, the most various fates may collide and interweave with one another. (Bakhtin, 243)

The road is the essential meeting point in _{Hot Milk. Sofia seems to be carried away within the} chronotope, allowing herself to be immersed in feelings and actions that otherwise would seem unthinkable, as she “wanted things to be less clear” (Levy, 96). She meets her two lovers in

3_{See “}_{Bruton attributes economic boom to O'Malley.” The Irish Times}_{, 3 July 1999,}

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Spain: Juan, the Spanish student, and Ingrid Bauer, the German woman. The latter is the one who leaves the biggest imprint on Sofia, giving her a silk, yellow top with what Sofia thinks is the word “Beloved” embroidered in blue thread. In Athens, Sofia realises that the word is “Beheaded”, and not “Beloved” (151). Ingrid and Sofia have a passionate, almost violent relationship, symbolised by the play with the words beloved and beheaded that begins from the random encounter in the Spanish cafe. Sofia also bonds with Alexandra in an unexpected way, finding a new friend, or even a sister. Because these encounters belong in the chronotope of the road, the spatial and temporal times that define those meeting are fused to combine the lives of these people with Sofia’s in different ways that ultimately change the narrator and the family novel chronotope itself. “The chronotope of the road is both a point of new departures and a place for events to find their denouement” (Bakhtin, 244), so it is no surprise that one of the many ways the road chronotope influences Sofia is by creating a moment of determination and, to an extent, despair, when she forces her mother to walk again. In the chapter entitled “Matricide” (Levy, 207-210), Sofia leaves her mother in the middle of a small road, giving her the option to walk or die, creating a denouement for their relationship and Rose’s illness. The road, which “was a hazard of holes and small rocks, spraying dust over the windscreen” (209), functions as a metaphor for Sofia’s fragmented life, caught between her passion for life and her sense of duty to her mother.

The above incident takes place on the road, but it also introduces the reader to the chronotope of the threshold, which “can be combined with the motif of encounter, but its most fundamental instance is as the chronotope of _{crisis and break in a life. The world ‘threshold’} itself already has a metaphorical meaning in everyday usage (together with its literal meaning),

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and is connected with the breaking point of a life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life” (Bakhtin, 248). In Sofia’s case, forcing her mother to walk is a life-changing event after years of having had to take care of her. However, the chronotope of the threshold is not always a literal threshold: “[i]n literature, the chronotope of the threshold is always metaphorical and symbolic, sometimes openly but more often implicitly” (248). One of those instances is found in Athens, as Sofia’s father’s house becomes a moment of crisis that empowers the narrator to discover a different point of view on her life: when Sofia travels there to visit her father, Christos, and his new family, she is transformed into an observer of how the new family operates and, through her observations, changes her perspective on her Greek identity and her position as woman. By entering Christos’ house, she essentially enters a new chronotope that is hostile and friendly to her at the same time: friendly because Alexandra becomes her ally, her friend and her “sister” (Levy, 187); hostile because Christos does not see his adult daughter “as a credit to him” (146). “Point of view” (155) becomes her subject, as she realises that her father wants to project his own point of view on his family (155) and on her. She becomes the Other to this group of people, to his (and her) culture, and is transformed by this experience; Sofia arrives in Athens after she breaks a “fake ancient Greek vase” (129), looking for a denouement in her relationship with her father and her Greek identity, which is broken and seemingly fake, like the vase. The narrator compares her image of herself with the image Christos has of her and realises that she is “other things too”, refusing to be bound by the image her father has of her (146). At the end of the novel, when she goes back to Spain, the reader witnesses the result of Sofia’s transformation: “I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with an older man by my side and a

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baby on my lap” (202); she no longer wants to conform to the image other people have of her or their expectations.

A chronotopic reading pays attention to how time and space are loaded with social meaning. In _{Hot Milk, the open, barren landscape of Spain in the summer is contrasted to Sofia’s} metaphorical and literal confinement in a domestic space dominated by her mother. Spain, however, is caught in the aftermath of the 2008 Euro crisis; the same is true for Greece. Unemployment is on the rise and living conditions are harder than they used to be. Juan, who attends to Sofia’s medusa stings on the Spanish beach considers himself “lucky to have a summer job on the beach at the injury hut” and declares that “the dream is over” for Greece (Levy, 5). Spain and Greece are intertwined in the crisis narrative as two of the countries that were part of the 2008 Euro crisis, and Sofia travels to Athens having already developed a new perspective on what the crisis means. As has already been established, novelistic chronotopes engage in a dialogic relationship to actual, social chronotopes and they are “grounded in simultaneity at all levels, including those of both ‘literature’ and ‘real life’” (Holquist, 113). Real life, in this case, is the actuality of the economic crisis in the nations of Spain and Greece that affects Sofia as she is moving through chronotopes. Going back to Anderson, nations are defined as _{imagined communities and, as established in the analysis for The Gathering, chronotopes can} correspond to those imagined communities. In Athens, Sofia is faced with the actuality of the crisis: the “ΟΧΙ” (meaning “NO”) graffities outside her father’s house refer to the 2015 Greek bailout referendum that divided the country, while Alexandra, who is a conservative former Brussels economist, explains her views on the crisis by stating her preference to “take the medicine of reforms” (Levy, 139) and Sofia’s half-sister Evangeline is in danger because of the

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“shortage of medicines due to the ‘crisis’” (134). These instances testify to the social character of chronotopes, establishing a close link between the novel and the material present of Spain and Greece.

The house chronotopes in _{The Gathering and those of the road and the threshold in Hot} Milk_{, therefore, create a multi-layered narrative under the major chronotope of the family novel.} Because, through these minor chronotopes, time and space become enriched with happenings that defy the limits the generic chronotope sets on what can happen in the narrative, the genre of the family novel changes. Most importantly, its cyclical structure is broken as a result of new encounters, values, ideas, and emotions. In Part I and Part II of my analysis I will study closely,how the minor chronotopes change the major one and also create a sense of continuity between the novels: the new value systems that are created by the minor chronotopes, combined with the ideological structure of the major one, enable Veronica to look at a past reconstruction of her traumatic family history and to reach a point that would empower her to continue her life in a different way, and Sofia to fully take advantage of the present and look to the future by creating a rupture with her present identity and starting the formation of a new one.

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Part I: Gender, Sexuality, and Class

In _{The Gathering and Hot Milk the intersections among gender, sexuality, and class are in the} spotlight of the novel. Whether it be Veronica reminiscing about her college lover in her middle class house or Sofia discovering that her sexuality is not welcomed in an upper class setting in Athens, both narrators draw attention to the patriarchal, heterosexual, and capitalist norms that dominate the major chronotopes they inhabit. Bakhtin repeatedly emphasises the thoroughly social nature of subjectivity, as private lives are regulated by social realities that derive from the conditions generated by the distribution of power within a certain society in a particular period. For Mas’ud Zavarzadeh the limits of private life are “set by the discourse of intimacy [...] Intimacy, however, like all modes of cultural intelligibility, is a social construct and produced in response to the needs for the particular modes of subjectivities necessary for reproducing the dominant relations of production” (113), marking the political and social character of a concept that is thought to be private and personal. Rosemary Hennessy’s material feminist theory similarly links individual modes of sexuality to the larger picture of capitalist exploitation and patriarchy. Together, these theories provide the framework for this part of my analysis of the relationship between the major chronotope of the family novel and the minor chronotopes in the two novels: I argue that Veronica and Sofia oppose the patriarchal structures of the family novel by taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the minor chronotopes.

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The Gathering: Tales of Patriarchy from the Irish Republic

“I am not Veronica” (Enright, 129)

The narrator of _{The Gathering struggles with her name and her identity. The saint after whom} she is named “wiped the face of Christ”, and Veronica identifies with her as she has always been attracted to “men who suffer” (128; 129); at the end of the novel, exasperated, she proclaims that she is not “Veronica” because she does not want to be a woman who wipes the tears of the men while she remains nothing more than that, despite the fact that the chronotope of the family novel has forced her to conform with that role.

In _{The Gathering, the family chronotope takes a more traditional form than in Hot Milk.} The setting of the novel is confined to the “familiar territory” (Bakhtin, 225) of the Irish Catholic family and the homes the different generations occupy. It is in these homes, which, as I have explained, appear as minor chronotopes with their own spatio-temporal organisation, that Veronica’s ideas about class, gender and sexuality are shaped. In compliance with the idyllic chronotope, of which the family chronotope is a variant, Veronica’s world is dominated by a patriarchal system. The oppressiveness of this system, in Irish society at large but also in the private Irish home, is illustrated by the novel’s portrayal of Veronica’s mother and father, with her mother said to be mostly invisible and her father dominating the domestic sphere as the main enforcer of patriarchal rule. Chapter 2 of Enright’s novel begins with the poignant phrase “[s]ome days I don’t remember my mother” (3). Veronica’s mother, who is never named in the narrative, has only a “vague” and “hazy” presence (4; 5). The only quality by which she is

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recognised is motherhood; she does not exist in any other capacity in the novel. As Laura Sydora notes in her reading of the novel, “[i]n both her state-sanctioned and self-assumed role as ‘Mammy,’ Veronica’s mother has become a victim of the violent monopolization of identity formation for women within the state, a stranger to herself and her family” (Sydora, 4). Veronica’s father, as I have already examined in the introduction of this thesis, is the head of the household and the enforcer of patriarchal values; when she “pull[s] out a box of Durex” (Enright, 95), he starts shouting that she was “ _{whoring all over Dublin. I was second-hand goods, I was} turning myself into a toilet_{-I kid you not” (96, emphasis in the original).}

Especially telling is the scene where Veronica describes how her father would go upstairs at night: “[t]here would be some muted talk, the sound of his keys and coins as he left them down. The rattle of his belt buckle. One shoe hitting the floor. Silence” (25). This passage illustrates the gendered division of labour in Irish society. The historical reality for women in post-Independence Ireland was particularly grim, as the newly founded Irish State was struggling to position itself as antithetical to England by emphasising the Catholic faith. As a result, “a series of laws were imposed by both the state and the Catholic Church which serves to confine Irish women to the private domain, such as the marriage bar which required women to resign from work upon marriage, and women’s issues were largely silenced and hidden from public knowledge” (Ryan, 93). In the novelistic passage, the woman-object is symbolically waiting in the bedroom for the man-subject to be the force of reproduction for the capitalist mode of production, as she is not allowed to participate in the public sphere. Enright illustrates that “sexuality is inextricably linked to gender and the gender ideology ultimately serves to reproduce the sexual division of labour” (Hennessy, 47) in the way this scene is narrated: the word

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“silence” at the end uncovers the hidden violence behind the sexual act. It becomes clear that the role of Veronica’s mother is not that of a woman as a subject, but of a mother as a reproductive force, a generative body.

This depiction of intimacy takes place in the minor chronotope of one of the family houses in _{The Gathering. In her childhood home, Veronica comes face to face with the} discrepancies between the discourse of intimacy and the reality of it. While intimacy between two people can be defined as “the moment of absolute closeness and thus an instance of transparency, presence, and fullness” (Zavarzadeh, 125), the truth is that the differences between discourse and lived experience “reveal that opacity and gaps are inevitably inscribed in any relationship in culture, which is a set of conflicting discourses attempting to ‘explain’ its social contradictions” (116). This is no accident since “[i]t is [...] politically necessary for the continuation of the existing socioeconomic relations to preserve and prolong these institutions and the values they foster” (Zavarzadeh, 139). In the case of Veronica’s parents, the chronotope of the family novel, and the stifling one of the family house, have imprinted on them this specific social behaviour and they, in turn, reproduce it within the chronotopes. Veronica struggles to escape the confines of these gender roles and cannot forgive her mother for her absent-mindedness, her depression, “the holes in her head” (Enright, 7). In that respect, it should be noted that the narrator is also a victim of ideology; by denying forgiveness to her mother, she ascribes blame to a woman for a situation that was culturally, politically, and physically imposed upon her.

Trying to escape her childhood home, Veronica goes to college and starts travelling. While in college, she meets Michael Weiss, who shows her an alternative to the forms of

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sexuality she knew until now. Veronica is bewildered by his way of expressing intimacy; “[h]e loved to chat while he was touching you, he loved even to smoke in this endless lazy foreplay that was all foreign to me” (Enright, 80). The gap that emerges between them in these intimate moments serves as a sign of Veronica’s interpellation by the Irish patriarchal ideology. According to that ideology sex should have a specific purpose, while Michael Weiss offers sex that is “aimless and unspecific” (80). The protagonist’s sexuality is formed by her experiences within the chronotope of the family home, as we have already seen and intimacy, for Veronica, came to be defined as a means to an end, as serving only for procreation. Moreover, she ended up not being aware of other forms of physical intimacy (later demonstrated by the intimacy she shares with her husband, Tom) as “Ireland was clouded by a strict sense of morality which equated sin almost exclusively with sex” (Ryan, 94).

Ada’s house, another minor chronotope in the novel, is invested with a similar mentality. Representing the broken state of post-Independence Ireland, Ada’s house is described as grim and bleak. Ada is a widow working as a seamstress for theatre costumes. As a woman in a precarious situation she ended up dependent on her landlord, and her late husband’s friend, Lamb Nugent, and Veronica bears witness to a scene that reveals the dynamics of that relationship, when Ada serves Nugent tea:

He wants her to pity him his perfectly pleasant life, and the fact that it does not belong to him; the fact that he is a ghost in his own house, looking at his wife, who drives him up the wall, and his four children, who rob each breath as it comes out of his mouth. While he sits there with a woman too old to bed, the keeper of his treasurers, the woman who

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will not love him, though she really knows she should [...] So Ada eats the biscuits herself. (Enright, 136)

Lamb Nugent, as I said, is Ada’s landlord but, in Veronica’s fictional account of how Ada, Nugent, and Ada’s husband Charlie met, he is also hopelessly in love with her. Ada, being lower middle class and not owning a house, is indebted to her “friend” and landlord, continually charming him and using her sexuality in order to maintain the current state of affairs. Towards the end of the novel, Veronica discovers a pack of letters and notes, correspondence between Nugent and Ada:

Dear Mrs Spillane,

I am afraid I cannot offer any rebate on the six shillings owing since Easter last. The work you have had done on the hall skirting board was undertaken without any prior, and cannot be considered as ‘in lieu’. I will be seeking the full amount when your rentals next falls.

Yours sincerely,

Lambert Nugent (Enright, 233)

Dear Mrs Spillane,

I cannot afford you what you seek in the matter of the tenancy. By sub-letting to Mrs McEvoy, you are in contravention of all agreements in this matter and I am quite entitled, as you will find, to seek an increase or find another tenant, which I am, as you

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know, very slow to do. I am very much in my rights.

Hoping to continue an arrangement that is suitable to all concerned. Yrs,

Lambert Nugent (Enright, 234)

The letters expose even more the precarious, almost predatory relationship of Nugent and Ada. While the landlord claims to be a friend and seeks solace in his tenant’s presence, he simultaneously implicitly threatens to evict and presses for money. The last phrase, “hoping to continue an arrangement that is suitable to all concerned”, alludes to the sexual overtones of their relation. Veronica, in her narrative, adds: “[t]hirty-eight years of _{bamboozling him with her} female charms, while he sat there and took it, and liked it, because he thought it was his due” (235). Here, she recognises that her grandmother was victimised by this man, but also sees that Ada was deliberately manipulating him, playing into this victimisation in order to achieve her goals. The complex exploitative relationship between landlord and tenant, man and woman, predator and victim fits the framework of this specific chronotope as a place that is dark, lonely, and evil (47-48). Veronica claims it was “all her [Ada’s] fault” (90). However, if Ada’s actions are viewed under the concept of “action potence”, a critical psychology tool that “refers to the individual’s ability to do things that she feels are necessary to satisfy her needs and assure an acceptable quality of life” (Hennessy. 219), it becomes clear that Ada was using her capacity to operate inside a sexist society to ensure her desired quality of life under a capitalist framework that allowed Nugent to exploit his relationship with her. Action potence “mediates individual reproduction with societal reproduction” (219) by creating a bond between individual agency and

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the relations of production that determine societal reproduction: Ada was acting according to her class and gender society in a capitalist system in order to survive within it, using her charms as a tool against oppression.

Ada was not the only one victimised by Lamb Nugent. At the centre of the plot of _The Gathering lies Liam’s suicide, and Veronica only reveals what she believes to be the motivation for it in the middle of her narrative, going back to the scene of abuse that she witnessed in Ada’s house. It is no surprise that, given the sexual and class politics between Ada and Nugent, this man also abuses Liam. When Veronica witnesses the scene of abuse, she first experiences a feeling of strangeness (Enright, 143). She then proceeds to describe the event in detail: “[i]t was as if Mr Nugent’s penis, which was sticking straight out of his flies, had grown strangely, and flowered at the tip to produce the large and unwieldy shape of a boy, that boy being my brother Liam who [...] was a shocked [...] boy of nine [...] His hand was buried in the cloth, his fist clutched around something hidden there” (143-144). The narrator notices the obvious shock on her brother’s face but then she proceeds to remark something else: Lamb Nugent’s facial expression. Nugent abuses Liam with a sense of entitlement, probably born out of the conviction that Ada owes him something, _{everything, including the life of her grandchildren. “Mr Nugent is} leaning back in the chair, his chin is tucked in to [sic] his neck, his face pulled hard back his satisfaction, or pain. He looks like an old farmer getting his feet rubbed”; this pleasure is unbearable for Veronica, who considers it the “most terrible thing in the room” (144). The reader understands that it is a “[s]mall wonder, […] that a sexual predator such as Lamb Nugent should look upon other people’s children, especially the children of the poor—Ada was, after all, financially indebted to Nugent, her landlord—as instruments of pleasure or revenge, safe in the

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knowledge that no child’s allegation could trump an adult’s denial” (Harte, 198). Interestingly, Veronica connects Nugent’s expression with that of other men she has slept with (mainly her husband), as the mixture of pain and pleasure she sees on the landlord’s face reminds her of “[t]he pleasure that overtakes them [...] like some kind of ambush. And you feel to blame, of course. You feel it is all your fault” (144). This passage demonstrates one of the ways this scene, in the confined chronotope of her grandmother’s home, influenced Veronica. As a little girl staying at her grandmother’s house, the politics of intimacy that she is privy to are abusive, one sided, male-dominated, and alienating. Alienating because pleasure is produced on a “structure for consciousness that binds sexual subject to sexual object and also perversely disrupts any neatly prescribed links between them” (Hennessy, 69) as the sexual object is seen as a commodity. She then transfers this experience to her life outside the house and perceives all intimacy through this lens.

The third important minor chronotope in _{The Gathering is Veronica’s own house, which} she shares with her husband, Tom, and her children. It is a house devoid of emotions, manifestly a materialistic space, associated with the emptiness of capitalism: this is not the home of the idyll but the house of the bourgeois family novel taken to the extreme, where it does not resemble a home anymore. In its spatio-temporal constellation, Veronica is transformed into an updated version of the other women in her life. Ada spends her days at the sink, where “a few tears would hit the water” (Enright, 89) and Veronica’s mother is trapped in the kitchen in “a home that physically bears the mark of her victimization” (Sydora, 249), but Veronica does not cry at the kitchen counter because she has a “stainless-steel Miele dishwasher”; instead, she cries “respectably, in front of the TV” (Enright, 89). In this house, intimacy is different from the kind

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she experienced with Michael Weiss but similar to the intimacy she has witnessed in the other chronotopes. When Tom has sex with her at her brother’s wake, she “lay[s] there with one leg on either side of his dancing, country-boy hips and [she] did not feel alive. [She] felt like a chicken when it was quartered” (Enright, 40). This scene parallels numerous others in the book (70; 72-73; 82) and it is telling that Veronica thinks of Tom as someone who “belongs” to her (69). Ownership in sexual intimacy comes natural to her, as this is the one form of relation she has experienced in the past, with her mother owned by her father because of her reproductive capacity, Ada owned by Nugent because the landlord-tenant agreement, and Liam owned by Nugent in a shocking attack. Her life in a bourgeois household that, reflecting the capitalist mode of production, is full of material possessions does not change the dynamic of the other influences on her because it again reinforces the norm of domestic exploitation. Veronica gives up working “so that we [her and the children] would not be so much _{in his way” (71, emphasis in the} original). Tom is a successful businessman, so Veronica became a housewife in order to allow him to benefit from her unpaid labour. Even when she did work, she was a shopping journalist, a job she describes as “endless words” about “heated towels” (71), clearly considering her position not as important as her husband’s (71). Hennessy points out that “[w]omen are contradictory positioned in capitalism as free workers and citizens, yet devalued as females” (5); in the novel, although Veronica is valued as a productive worker in the labour market, her real value lies in the domestic labour she produces for her family.

The three chronotopes are not only traversed by Veronica but also by Liam. The novel is filled with Veronica’s memories of Liam in each house but I would like to focus on the spectral appearances that Liam makes in Veronica’s life after his suicide. These appearances have a

“The Journey of Two Women” A Chronotopic Study of Gender, Sexuality and National Identity in Anne Enright’s The Gathering and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk.