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

Öz

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.

Anahtar Kelimeler

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

Kaynakça

1. Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press. google scholar
2. Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press. google scholar
3. Altuna García de Salazar, A., & Pando Canteli, M. J. (2025). Paisajes de conflicto desde el postconflicto en la ficción de Lucy Caldwell. Fontes Linguae Vasconum, (139), 169–189. https://doi.org/10.35462/flv139.8 google scholar
4. Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–531. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.theatrejournal.1988.08.024 google scholar
5. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge. google scholar
6. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” Routledge. google scholar
7. Butler, J. (2004a). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence Verso. google scholar
8. Butler, J. (2004b). Undoing gender. Routledge. google scholar

9. Caldwell, L. (2016). Multitudes. Faber & Faber. google scholar
10. Caldwell, L. (2021). Intimacies. Faber & Faber, 2021. google scholar
11. Caldwell, L. (2024). Openings. Faber & Faber, 2024. google scholar
12. Garden, A. (2018). Girlhood, desire, memory, and Northern Ireland in Lucy Caldwell’s short fiction. Contemporary Women’s Writing, 12(3), 306–321. https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpy024 google scholar
13. Magennis, C. (2017). “Bubbles of joy”: Moments of pleasure in recent Northern Irish culture. Études irlandaises, (42-1). http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5183 google scholar
14. Magennis, C. (2021). “Love being a holding-close and simultaneously a letting-go’’: Proximity and distance in Lucy Caldwell’s Intimacies (2021). In D. Flynn & E. O’Brien (Eds.), Northern Irish writing after the troubles: Intimacies, affects, pleasures (pp. 53–62). Bloomsbury Academic. google scholar
15. Maloy, K. (2017). Lucy Caldwell’s The Meeting Point (2011): From Ireland to Bahrain and back. New Hibernia Review, 21(1), 41–58. https://doi.org/10.1353/nhr.2017.0003 google scholar
16. Morales-Ladrón, M. (2025). “Celebrating plurality and multiplicity, … being both/and rather than either/or”: Interview with Lucy Caldwell. Estudios Irlandeses, 20, 170–179. https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2025-13382 google scholar
17. Morales-Ladrón, M. (2026). The ethics of (un)grievable lives in Lucy Caldwell’s These Days. Irish Studies Review, 34(1), 117–131. https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2026.2641258 google scholar
18. Schwall, H. (2021). The aesthetics of “the good-enough mother” in Lucy Caldwell’s short fiction. Études irlandaises, (46-2). http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/12067 google scholar
19. Sherratt-Bado, D. M. (2018). “All over Belfast”: History, loss, and potential in Lucy Caldwell’s Where They Were Missed. In D. Flynn & E. O’Brien (Eds.), Representations of loss in Irish literature, new directions in Irish and Irish American literature (pp. 75–93). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78550-9 google scholar
20. Tekin, B. G. (2025). Ethics of empathy and personal shift in Lucy Caldwell’s These Days. Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies, 50, 97–112. https://czasopisma.filologia.uwb.edu.pl/index.php/c/article/view/2657 google scholar