English

Sydney Owenson wrote The Wild Irish Girl hoping to effect in reality a union between Britain and Ireland that was already irrevocably enshrined in law. The passage of the Union in 1801 was itself marked by a discourse of national marriage between Britain and Ireland, with Britain the groom and Ireland the bride, revealing the Union to have shared almost all the characteristics of the classic marriage contract. It is this discursive context that shapes Owenson's text and is responsible for the failure of the text's desired resolution, an allegorical marriage between Britain and Ireland.

Dougherty: "Never Tear the Linnet from the Leaf" 77 of female sexual misbehavior, and of adolescent male revenge on behalf of an absent father. In O'Hanlon's retelling of the X case. Miss X becomes not a terrified raped girl, but a woman who, like Hamlet's mother, is a possible accomplice to the overthrowing of proper governmental authority through her unchaste behavior, whue the influential and elderly O'Hanlon transforms himself into Hamlet, vowing to restore order on behalf of this overthrown authority.' His quote suggests a common trope of the Irish anti-abortion movement, that the Republic of Ireland remains the last tiny bastion of traditional morality, "though all the world o'erwhelm it"; it suggests as well that "men's eyes" might yet read Miss X's intentions, intentions that unintentionally changed the course of Irish history.

Edna O'Brien's novel Down by the River describes the crises of knowledge engendered by Ireland's 1992 X case, in which a fourteen-year-old rape victim was forbidden to leave the country for an abortion. The novel focuses in particular on the crisis of knowledge provoked when the invisible Irish female child enters the symbolic order as a newly-gendered subject who is required to identify with an abject maternal body.