Critique, 53:393–409, 2012 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0011-1619 print/1939-9138 online DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2010.511319 JANE ELIZABETH DOUGHERTY Southern Illinois University Carbondale From Invisible Child to Abject Maternal Body: Crises of Knowledge in Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River Edna O’Brien’s novel Down by the River describes the crises of knowledge engendered by Ireland’s 1992 X case, in which a fourteen-year-old rape victim was forbidden to leave the country for an abortion. The novel focuses in particular on the crisis of knowledge provoked when the invisible Irish female child enters the symbolic order as a newly-gendered subject who is required to identify with an abject maternal body. Keywords: invisibility, abjection, knowledge, maturation, subjectivity The 1992 X case forced the Republic of Ireland to engage in a national conversation about two issues that before 1992 had been considered unspeakable in Irish society, sexual assault and abortion. 1 X was a fourteen-year-old girl who was raped and impregnated by a family friend. Her parents planned to take her to England for an abortion but first contacted the Irish police to see if the fetal material might be used in the prosecution of the girl’s assailant. In response, the Irish Attorney General cited the 1983 Pro-Life Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which banned abortion in Ireland, and forbade the family to leave the country. When this became public, it precipitated a furious national debate, and the adjudication of the X case continues to inform the laws governing the rights of Irish female citizens. 2 As feminist scholars have shown, the X case represented a crisis of knowledge for contemporary Irish society: it called into question not only the nation’s laws but the nation’s very identity. 3 In particular, the X case forced Irish society to reconsider the place of female subjects in that society. The symbolic centrality of Irish women to the self-conception of the Irish nation has both obscured and ensured their place on the social periphery, 4 and the emergence of a female subject who had experienced an unspeakable crime and who sought an unspeakable procedure proved to be profoundly threatening to Ireland’s sense of itself. What scholars have neglected, however, is that the unprecedented visibility of a girl subject in the Irish symbolic order was by itself enough to cause a national crisis of knowledge. An Irish girl subject stands at the crossroads—on the X, one might say—between the invisibility of Irish female child status and a societally enforced identification with the (abject) maternal body. Both the X case and Edna O’Brien’s 1996 novel Down by the River, which is based on the events of the X case, make this quite clear. 393