‘A Poem Made Flesh’: Necromancing the Sovereignty Goddess in Emma Donoghue’s Hood

Abstract

This essay explores the role of the sovereignty goddess in Emma Donoghue’s Hood (1995) and its protagonist’s efforts to come to terms with the death of her newly deceased girlfriend. Taking its impetus from Donoghue’s self-characterization as a literary ‘grave robber’, this essay examines how Hood’s protagonist, Pen, necromances the sovereignty goddess in an effort to produce and legitimize a recognizable lesbian subject in late twentieth-century Ireland. Framing Donoghue’s queer, feminist engagement with the goddess in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of the ‘chronotope’ – a narratological device that expresses a novel’s interfused time and space – this essay illustrates how Pen’s posthumous re-construction of her partner, Cara, comes to function as an anthropomorphic chronotope, whose body delineates the temporal, geographical, and generic boundaries of the novel. At the same time, drawing on Kristevan notions of abjection, it also traces how the simulacrum of Cara’s corpse decays across the novel, and explores the implications of this dissolution on the viability of the queer sovereignty mode the novel envisages. Refiguring the novel as a gothic tale about lesbian love, death, and grief, this essay demonstrates how Hood deploys an abject sovereignty goddess to both deconstruct the nightmare of Ireland’s social and cultural history, and produce inchoate, utopian daydreams for the nation’s future. In doing so, it argues that Hood performs a post-mortem on both Cara’s memory and the sovereignty tradition itself, resurrecting the goddess to mourn the Irish canon’s hetero-patriarchal sovereignty tradition, even as it facilitates the necromantic conversion of Ireland into a queer nation.