"Women Behaving Badly" in Evelyn Conlon's short fiction

This chapter examines Evelyn Conlon's short fiction in the context of the transformations that have taken place in Ireland over the last forty years, in terms of religious, social and cultural identity. Much women's fiction from the Republic of Ireland since the 1970s and 1980s, reveals a rejection and undermining of nationally privileged images, such as the mother figure and those of women as figures of purity and passivity, as well as a challenge to the hegemonic role of the Catholic Church in relation to women's lives. In this important landscape of change, Conlon's work has been central in challenging and transforming the representation of women in Irish life and literature, and in showing the reasons why women "behaving badly" has long been the only way to reject and undermine nationally privileged images of femininity and conformity.