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Mrs Nugent’s Little Piggy Went to Town

Abjected Identities and the Traumatic Return in Neil Jordan’sthe Butcher Boy

ellen-sweeney{at}uiowa.edu

Recent writing on Neil Jordan’s 1997 film, The Butcher Boy, has characterized the film as an allegory of postcolonial Ireland, which is afflicted with a schizophrenic identity resulting from the clash between tradition and modernity. I contend that The Butcher Boy’s focus on the abjection of the socially marginalized provides a visual countertext to the essentializing national narratives that have excluded images and histories that do not correspond with this ‘imagined community’s’ self-conception. The Butcher Boy’s direct engagement with the historical event of the physical and sexual abuse of industrial schoolchildren in Ireland in the 20th century suggests that the film operates as a border text between fact and fiction, testifying to a longhidden aspect of Irish society. Through the twin topoi of the chronotope and the traumatic event, the divisions between the sanitized and the repressed, the past and present, collapse to produce a vision of a nation haunted by its abjected colonial identity and incapable of breaking out of the cycle of self- destructive oppression of the most vulnerable of its population.

Key Words: abjection • chronotope • interpellation • testimony • trauma

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