‘… Or That Time She Cried …’

Abstract

This article examines Not I through the paradigm of keening (caoineadh), the Irish practice of mourning the dead, traditionally carried out by paid female performers. Keening, as a third-person lament and a socially-connotated form of female labour, offers a different vantage point on Beckett’s text, and interrogates Beckett’s engagement with gender, labour, and mourning more generally. Following an exploration of traditional keening practices and their repression by the Catholic Church, the article examines how this practice of “singing the dead” may inflect our understanding both of Mouth’s role in Not I, with its ‘posthumous feel’, and of the labour required from the performer to bring Mouth’s song to life.