Magdalene Laundries' Representation in Irish Literature 1914-2024

Supervised by Professor Paul Delaney 

Project Background 

This summer, I will research depictions of the Magdalene Laundries in Irish Literature.  For those of you who might not be familiar with these institutions, they were commercial laundries run by the Church and facilitated by the Irish State between 1922-1996.  Women and girls were incarcerated in these institutions because of their marginalised status as "fallen women".  They were forced to work long gruelling hours, without pay, in poor conditions and adhering to a rigid daily structure.  The Magdalene Laundries burst into public consciousness in 1993, with the discovery of 155 unmarked graves at the High Park Laundry, Dublin.  This was the catalyst which began the process of revealing the institutional abuse perpetrated by Church and State in these Laundries— a process which is still ongoing.  The persistent culture of silence and shame engulfing the Laundries is only beginning to be disassembled now.

My research is concerned with how we articulate the unsaid in the literary mode. As John Banville wrote of the stigma laden culture surrounding the Laundries; “Never tell. Never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watchword. Everyone knew, but no one said.”  For years Church and State dictated the narrative, or lack thereof, about Mother and Baby Homes, while survivors' voices were either ignored or weaponised against them.  Questions of authorship, narration and the ethics of representation have become central to the reparative process, and are also central to my research. 

Methodology and Research Questions

• How do we respond to cultural trauma, specifically the Magdalene Laundries, in Irish literature?
• Can literature express the unsaid?
• Can psychogeography be captured in literature?

These are my guiding research questions which I hope to provide answers to.  My project will do so by examining literary representations of the Laundries spanning from 1914 - 2024, through a self-led diachronic, close-reading of eight texts from a range of authors.  I will identify common tropes, themes and imagery throughout the texts.  My research will also track the evolution of societal understanding of the Laundry system, by comparing available reports on conditions within the Laundries to their depictions in the texts.  Essentially, I will consider what the texts can tell us about our own responses to institutional abuse.  I will also be conducting visits to sites of Magdalene Laundries around Ireland while reading the texts, and documenting this process.

Impact and Outcomes 

The intended impact of my project is to contribute towards a better understanding of the Magdalene Laundry system that existed in Ireland via literature.  Upon completion, my project will produce:

• A poster detailing the timeline of the texts and my research findings 
• A comprehensive report on Magdalene Laundry Literature 1914-2024 
• A supplemental video documenting the sites of former Magdalene Laundries, with quotes from the texts and facts about the sites interspersed throughout

This research would not be possible without the Justice for Magdalene Research campaign group and the Magdalene Oral Archive.

Photo taken from Allison Lowry's exhibition "(A)Dressing our Hidden Truths"