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Kathleen Costello-Sullivan Colm Tóibín's Nora Webster: Peacemaking and Intertextual Redemption Colm Tóibín's 2014 novel Nora Webster continues a twenty-five-year pattern in the author's oeuvre in which he represents the familial impact of traumatic loss, often by drawing on his own personal history. Focusing on a widow and mother as she navigates parenthood and life alone, Nora Webster also extends Tóibín's engagement with themes of small-town interference, pained silences, dysfunctional communication, emotionally neglected children, and disconnected or selfish mothers. Embedded in Tóibín's customary Enniscorthy setting, the characters circulate in the familiar (if claustrophobic) fictional milieu of Tóibín's other novels. In these ways, Nora Webster adheres to an already well-established pattern. Despite these continuities, however, Nora Webster marks an evolution from Tóibín's earlier representations of traumatic loss. The 2014 novel focuses not on the impact of such neglectful parenting on adult children, but rather, on the grieving perspective of the failing parent. Tóibín creates a remarkably sympathetic portrait of a mother figure--a figure that in his other Irish texts is painfully limited or emotionally stunted. By stressing what the central character has lacked through her own neglect; through the restrictions imposed by her town and by widowhood; through her own
New Hibernia Review – Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas
Published: Oct 14, 2016
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