‘… parents unknown … unheard of …’: Not I and the ‘Mother and Baby Homes Report’

Abstract

This article re-reads Beckett’s play Not I (1972) in the light of the ‘Mother and Baby Homes Report’, published in January 2021. Beckett interrogates what James Smith, Clair Wills, and others have referred to as Ireland’s ‘architecture of containment’. Mouth, ‘brought up … with the other waifs’ in a mother and baby home, absorbed religious notions of sin and punishment. Through a close reading of selected passages, the article considers to what extent Not I can be read as a ‘survivor’s testimony’ such as those given to the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes.