Amongst Women Study Guide

The novel is written in quiet and restrained prose, a characteristic of McGahern's writing. The novel is not segmented into chapters. There is not a large amount of plot in the story, with most of the action taking place in flashbacks as the Morans remember the past. There are few dramatic highs and lows and events are paced at the normal tempo of life. All the small details of the Morans' lives gather together to give a powerful story of intergenerational relationships and the need to form connections to the past.

The novel explores the mindset of post-colonial, traditional, Catholic, rural Ireland. Michael says "I'm afraid we might all die in Ireland if we don't get out fast." McGahern asks whether exile offers the only hope for freedom and individuality in this society.

A theme of the novel is the difficulty of communication between a father and his children, which questions Ireland's conceit of itself as a healthy family-centred society. It particularly exposes the insecurities and inexpressiveness of Irish masculinity. McGahern said of the novel: "The whole country is made up of families, each family a kind of independent republic. In Amongst Women , the family is a kind of half-way house between the individual and society." Moran is a man capable of heroic action in a time of revolution, but he is incapable of meeting the demands of domestic and personal intimacy in his fraught and sometimes violent relationships with his wife and children. The question of how to maintain authority over children while still allowing them room to grow is central to the novel.

The novel shows that Moran's contradictory behaviour is a personification of the contradictions of postcolonial society. He typifies the disappointment awaiting the revolutionary who aids the replacement of one power with another without reflecting on the process of domination itself. He vents his sense of betrayal on his family, allowing McGahern to explore how political turmoil can affect families.

The story of the family is an allegory for that of independent Ireland– without the father the family would not exist, but until Moran is dead, the family cannot become itself. The parallel is clearly with Éamon de Valera, though Moran is an Irish Republican legitimist, believing that the only legal government of Ireland was the First Dáil, and is deeply alienatedfrom the Ireland of de Valera.

Moran lives in a world where Ireland has both achieved nationhood and retreated from the world. Emigration is tolerated as a necessary evil, as it was in Ireland in the 1950s, but the economic failures that drove the mass exodus are never challenged. Moran's death is a moment of liberation for the family.

As the main character, Moran, is never endearing, McGahern challenges the reader to empathise with him and to understand why the women in his life remain emotionally tied to him, even after they have successfully established independent lives away from Great Meadow. Moran's retreat from his youthful exploits in the IRA into a vice-like grip on his household can be seen as a political metaphor, described by one critic as a "A diminished form of home rule." His home Great Meadow stands, like its owner, separate and proud from the landscape. For Moran, it is a domestic fortress where he can retreat from his failures in the outside world.