Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Little Red and Other Stories and gerotranscendence on the page
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Zuzanna Zarebska
Abstract
Little Red and Other Stories is a collection of short stories that taps into many different dimensions of older women’s existence, exploring characters who are often bereft or in search of a more meaningful expression of their identity. Divided by physical and non-physical frontiers, gerontological challenges persist as much as the desire to live in spite of internal and external changes. The stories are shaped by mortality and by the subjective and imaginary discourses of culture, with the issues of autonomy, agency, intimacy and well-being remaining at their core. Little Red and Other Stories provides us with a multidirectional perspective on the aging process. It offers stories that see characters move towards a greater experience of agency and relational freedom. The internal interrogations and external interpellations present in the narratives are reinforced by the author’s use of metatextuality, bearing in mind her expertise in folk literature and mythology. She deliberately places her characters in unusual circumstances in order to convince her reader that if crossing of the real/fantastic worlds is possible, it is also possible to cross, or challenge, age definitions. If transgressions are possible on the page, we, too, have the capacity to create our own life-narratives and be agentic in our older age, a time conventionally seen as stagnant, limited and dominated by decline. Indeed, older people, mostly women in Ní Dhuibhne, have an extraordinary capacity to translate their experience into wisdom and possess the necessary stamina to rewrite their stories.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Literary and critical encounters with the Anthropocene: An interview with Seán Hand
- Introduction: Narratives of ageing in the fantastic mode
- Age(ism) in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales
- “Old things made new”: Transfusive rejuvenescence in M. E. Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne” and H. G. Wells’s “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham”
- “Inside many of us / is a small old man” – age/ing in Anne Sexton’s Transformations: A community discussion
- “It made her age hard to guess”: Narrating the dynamics of aging and gender through Victorian Gothic archetypes in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black
- The wisdom of intergenerational relationships in Ursula Le Guin’s series Annals of the Western Shore (Gifts, Voices and Powers)
- Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Little Red and Other Stories and gerotranscendence on the page
- Futurity, the life course and aging in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun
- Rewriting rules, changing worlds: Diegetic and ludic forms of metareference in The Magic Circle
- Unresolved conflicts and suspended ethics: Reading “The Monster” from the perspective of voice
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Literary and critical encounters with the Anthropocene: An interview with Seán Hand
- Introduction: Narratives of ageing in the fantastic mode
- Age(ism) in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales
- “Old things made new”: Transfusive rejuvenescence in M. E. Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne” and H. G. Wells’s “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham”
- “Inside many of us / is a small old man” – age/ing in Anne Sexton’s Transformations: A community discussion
- “It made her age hard to guess”: Narrating the dynamics of aging and gender through Victorian Gothic archetypes in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black
- The wisdom of intergenerational relationships in Ursula Le Guin’s series Annals of the Western Shore (Gifts, Voices and Powers)
- Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Little Red and Other Stories and gerotranscendence on the page
- Futurity, the life course and aging in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun
- Rewriting rules, changing worlds: Diegetic and ludic forms of metareference in The Magic Circle
- Unresolved conflicts and suspended ethics: Reading “The Monster” from the perspective of voice
