Mary Morrissy, The Risiing of Bella Casey (2013): of remembering and forgetting

The Rising of Bella Casey is a complex and a multi-layered historical novel, written between 2007 and 2013 and set about a hundred years earlier against the backdrop of Ireland’s fight for independence from British rule. Mary Morrissy opts for a literary subgenre that allows her to reconstruct and recount the untold story of her protagonist and of her rising − out of violence, from the rapacity of time, and against patriarchal silence − vis à vis a nation and its people’s rising from a traumatic past. A smart and daring narrative, Morrissy’s third novel is attentive to details, tragically ironic and experimental; it is thought provoking, linguistically sophisticated and emotionally captivating. Never banal, nor narcissistic, The Rising of Bella Casey is also a powerful vindication of the protagonist’s right to speak for herself and tell her own story. At large it represents a condemnation of the traditional effacement of women from official accounts of the past constructed within and consolidated through patriarchal cultural systems. The novel also rethinks contested moments of Ireland’s history that resound in the present, the memory of which it still strives to negotiate, lending itself to what Tzvetan Todorov refers to as “abuses of memory”. This undeniably great Irish novel of the twenty-first century revolves around the themes of love (the presence of love, the absence of love, love that overcomes all, love that knows no limits, love that destroys you, love that betrays you, love that is not love, etc.), and of silence (inflicted and self-inflicted, necessary, rebellious, censorious silence). Love and silence are shown to intertwine with individual and collective memory in Bella Casey, a novel that uses remembering and forgetting both as literary tropes and as narrative devices. The first part of this study shall establish the parameters that make this one a great Irish novel of the twenty-first century by squarely situating its plot in Irish history and within Ireland’s cultural and literary tradition. The second part shall explore further and reflect upon Morrissy’s delineation of questions of memory in the novel.