Abstract
In 2020, a dominant narrative for women writing women has been the revolt against a passivity traditionally troped as specifically feminine. For women writing women in Ireland, the centuries-old rhetoric of colonization further strengthened this alignment. Ireland was depicted as a victimized woman, passively suffering at the hands of a brutal oppressor and in need of rescue by her brave sons – a foundational image creating what Edna O’Brien has called “a land of strange throttled sacrificial women,” as well as a literature veering troublingly close to masochistic jouissance. Ireland’s most successful millennial novelist Sally Rooney both belongs to this tradition and marks a departure from it, challenging psychoanalytic theory. This chapter hopes to engage with this challenge, and to further explore our uneasy attitude to a formation of the unconscious described by Freud as mysterious and dangerous.