Sick Body, Sick Ireland: Autopathographies and Social Critique in Dorothy Molloy’s Poetry

This paper examines how Dorothy Molloy’s (1942-2004) poetry challenges the twentieth-century Irish poetic tradition and sheds light on the inequities of Celtic Tiger Ireland by inscribing the subjective experience of illness, pain, and female sexuality in seemingly traditional lyrical forms. The poetic medium is ideally suited to express the painful caesura represented by the onset of infirmity – in Molloy’s case, fatal liver cancer – and to denounce the persistence of a highly conservative and macho legacy in Ireland at the turn of the twenty-first century, when Ireland used to present itself as the poster child for modernization. In the collection The Poems of Dorothy Molloy, published posthumously, the author discusses with great frankness the changes in her ailing body and the treatment she and other women cancer patients received in the oncology wards of Irish hospitals. She infused her poems with religious imagery to overtly criticise the Church’s history of abuse in Ireland and the sexual and gendered fear instilled by nationalist and Catholic education. A reflection on Molloy’s poetry, moreover, allows for a discussion of the often political-social character, albeit with different orientations, of illness narratives in contemporary Irish poetry (consider Eavan Boland, Stephanie Conn, Kevin Higgins, and Seán Ó Ríordáin) and the limitations and potential of poetic narrative. The denunciatory and therapeutic purposes of Molloy’s poems benefit from the empathic and performative dimensions of poetry; at the same time, the case of Molloy, a journalist as well as a poet, illustrates how pathographic writings, in the age of transmedia convergence, infiltrate online newspapers and blogs, attesting to the porosity of (auto-)pathographic discourse.