Distances that Transform in Lucy Caldwell’s Openings (2024)

Abstract

Lucy Caldwell is a prominent writer within the contemporary Irish literary scene today. Following her short story collections like Multitudes (2016) and Intimacies (2021), her latest short story collection, Openings (2024), explores crucial life stages and experiences, focusing on motherhood, ageing, and emotional separation. Although Caldwell’s earlier works have attracted considerable academic analysis, Openings currently remains a vast literary territory to explore. This study concentrates on three stories from the collection—“If You Lived Here You’d Be Home by Now,” “Dark Matters,” and “Mother’s Day”—to explore how distance and transformation create a unique sense of interdependency among her characters. As the protagonists frequently struggle with temporal, emotional, and psychological isolation, they face with familial absence, separation, or loss forces them to deeply consider their relationships and personal histories. Whether physical or abstract, these experiences of distance facilitate profound self-exploration and a fuller understanding of their lives. In order to analyse these stories, the study employs the theoretical frameworks of Sara Ahmed and Judith Butler. It uses Ahmed’s concepts of orientation and stickiness to understand how affective ties and emotions shape the characters’ connection to the world and their self-perception. Furthermore, Butler’s work on mourning and performativity will offer a critical perspective on the enacted nature of gender roles (especially motherhood) and the physical experience of loss. Lastly, this study aims to explore how repeated emotional and physical acts shape and shift the characters’ identities, offering an in-depth analysis of the complex link between distance and self-transformation.

Keywords

• Lucy Caldwell
• contemporary Irish literature
• Irish short story
• (dis)orientation
• gender performativity

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