By Coco Usher
Known for her elliptical narration and controlled prose, Claire Keegan is a “master of the art” in Irish short stories (Smith 193). In Keegan’s short story Foster, a young girl leaves her family to be fostered by her maternal aunt and uncle for the summer, discovering in these relatives a home of warmth and safety that she has not previously experienced. Alongside its powerful echoes of Irish history, Foster draws on biblical sources, mimicking and inverting the circular journey of the Bible’s prodigal son. In the original parable, a father’s disobedient son renounces his family, only to be driven back to its supportive framework by widespread famine. Mirroring a similar journey of departing and returning, Keegan’s novella inverts the parable’s ideas of safety and danger, identifying the family as a source of precarious instability. Through the young girl’s departure and return to her home in Foster, Claire Keegan presents an ironic retelling of the parable of the Prodigal Son, critiquing the traditional authority afforded to the father of the Irish family.
In Keegan’s inversion of the Biblical story, the parable’s sacrificial cow becomes a source of identification for the young girl, and reveals the endangered position of women in the Irish family. Keegan consistently renders Foster’s dysfunctional parent-child relationships through the images of cows, drawing on Ireland’s agricultural and farming imagery to create a metaphor for the broken family. On her final day with the Kinsellas, the young girl is disturbed by the separation of the farm’s cows: “It’s an odd system, taking the calves off the cows and giving them milk replacement so Kinsella can milk their mothers” (76). In unconscious self-reflection, Keegan’s protagonist ponders her own condition through the plight of the motherless calves. Throughout the narrative, the “lost heifer” the girl observes wandering the roads becomes a symbolic mirror of her own family separation, creating a bond between the two vulnerable figures (91). Before returning home to her family, the young girl dreams of “the lost heifer panicking on the night strand, of bony, brown cows having no milk in their teats” (82). Not only does the lost heifer mimic the girl’s distressed mental state, but the bony, milk-drained cows also present dreamlike apparitions of her mother. Once at home, the girl’s mother echoes these “bony, brown cows,” taking “her breast out for the baby” between serving tea and conversing with the Kinsellas (85). In the kitchen, “damp and cold,” “tracked over with dirty footprints” (85), one gains a sense of the mother’s fatigue, as she endures an endless stream of pregnancies, alternating between carrying a belly “hard with the next baby” and child rearing (7). Throughout Foster’s bovine imagery, Keegan associates women with heifers and cows, reinforcing their position of vulnerability within the domestic sphere.
Keegan enhances Foster’s bovine imagery through allusions to the parable of the Prodigal Son, in which the slaughtered calf features as a paternal gift. Upon her homecoming, Dan exclaims, “Ah there’s the prodigal child,” rendering visible the many echoes between Keegan’s Foster and the parable of the Prodigal Son (87). Both narratives illustrate a coming of age, detailing a child’s departure from, and return to the family. Keegan’s ironic retelling, however, is definitively an Irish inversion; with a young girl featured in the story, the parable’s problematic character is no longer a spendthrift son, but rather a drunk and feckless father. In the Biblical narrative, the father slaughters the “fattened calf” in celebration of his prodigal son’s return home (Luke 15:27). By tying the young girl to the image of the cow, Keegan emphasizes the child’s vulnerable position in the family; instead of being celebrated with a feast upon her return, the young girl embodies the slaughtered cow, entering a home full of instability and danger.
The prodigal son’s encounter with famine also has special symbolic meaning in Keegan’s Irish short story, in which images of hunger recall the country’s long history of famine. In the Biblical parable, the prodigal son’s departure heralds a “severe famine in that whole country” (Luke 15:14). Faced with deprivation, he longs to “fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating” and resolves to return to his father’s house where “hired servants have food to spare” (Luke 15:16-17). Upon his return to the family, the father greets the son with a “feast” and celebration (Luke 15:23). In the context of Irish literature, these motifs of hunger and starvation constitute central symbols in the national mythos, recalling the Irish Famine (1740-1741), the Great Famine (1845-1852), the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, and the country’s long history of food scarcity (Fegan 3). Mary Fitzgerald Hoyt suggests that Foster, with its emphasis on “hunger and feeding,” is deeply informed by the vestiges of the Great Famine (Lynch 136). In Foster’s Irish context, food is thus a porous symbol, embodying both the physical and emotional nurturing that the family is meant to provide (Lynch 136). Though the young girl’s summer trip mimics the circular journey of the prodigal son, it is notable that the parable’s symbolic “feast” occurs at the very start of Foster, upon arrival at the Kinsellas’, rather than during her return home. In the Kinsellas’ kitchen, Keegan’s prose tips into a rich culinary portrait: “syrup on the point of bubbling over, thin leaves of pastry baked into the crust,” “a bowl of tomatoes and onions chopped fine, a fresh loaf, a block of red cheddar” (6, 10). In this passage, Keegan translates the Kinsellas’ parental love into the language of food, joining the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son with the rich symbolism of hunger and food in Irish literature. Keegan’s inversion of this biblical parable thus reveals the “failings of daily life in rural Ireland,” exposing a culture in which the family cannot always provide the physical and emotional sustenance a child requires (Terrazas-Gallego 81). This disparity between the Kinsellas and the young girl’s family is emphasized through their repeated gifts of food to her mother: “rhubarb,” “jam,” and a “four-stone sack of potatoes” (12, 84, 89). Food therefore becomes a pivot between Foster and its grounding parable. In the Biblical parable, the prodigal son must flee homeward in order to escape famine and gain access to a house of plenty. In sharp contrast with the parable, Foster’s“prodigal child” can only achieve the physical and emotional nurturing she needs by leaving her Irish home (87). Keegan sums up the fraught position of the Irish daughter with the young girl’s simple observation in her father’s presence: “I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be” (9). Unlike the prodigal son, Keegan’s protagonist can only gain true sustenance by fleeing her father and by moving beyond her nuclear family.
While the biblical parable ends conclusively with the prodigal son’s return, Keegan’s Foster closes on a note of ambiguity and change, one which brings into question the authority of the father in the Irish family. In the story’s close, rather than following the traditional resolution of a parable, the young girl experiences a Joycean epiphany, in which the symbolic memories of her summer coalesce and move her. Remembering “the boy in the wallpaper, the gooseberries,” “the lost heifer,” and “the third light,” Keegan’s protagonist becomes grounded in a new time of “now” (Keegan 90-91, Lynch 138). Whereas the prodigal son returns home to acknowledge his father’s authority, Keegan’s protagonist follows a Joycean history of literary flight from the father: “I take off from standing and race on down the lane… I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me” (90). Foster thus mimics the bildungsroman structure of Irish works such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ending with an uncertain departure rather than return (Wu 186). In true Joycean fashion, Foster’s resolution hinges on a single word, “Daddy,” which creates an ambiguous ending in the young girl’s story (92). Echoing Joyce’s “Old father, old artificer,” the use of “Daddy” marks a significant shift from the novel’s opening with “my father,” reattributing paternal authority to a more deserving figure (Joyce 213, Keegan 92, 1). In this way, balancing tenuously between return and change, the ending in Foster tips towards the latter. This ambiguous ending in flux mimics Frank O’Connor’s “moment of change” in the short story, in which he suggests a “bright light” falls on an action and a character’s “life assumes a new shape” (D’Hoker 158). Crucially, by questioning the father’s position, Keegan does not simply invert the parable of the Prodigal Son; she also brings into question the Irish Constitution’s position on the family as the “natural primary and fundamental unity group of Society,” as established in Article 41 (Staines 223). In doing so, she follows a long literary tradition of questioning the authority of the Irish father, established by predecessors such as James Joyce, Edna O’Brien, and John McGahern. Keegan’s names for the young girl’s foster parents, “Edna” and “John,” place her firmly in this literary tradition through a subtle nod to O’Brien and McGahern (64, 4). As Keegan herself suggests, just as families can be “loving and glorious,” they can also be “awful places” (Lynch 133). Therefore, Foster does not feature a simple return to the home and family as with the Bible’s Prodigal Son. Instead, Keegan’s Irish inversion of the biblical parable ends with a definitive breakaway, marking the flight of Foster’s prodigal daughter.
Keegan’s Foster presents a powerful Irish inversion of the prodigal son’s journey of departure and return. By writing her story across the bones of a biblical parable, Keegan draws on Frank O’Connor’s notion of the short story, in which “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society” are superimposed “on symbolic figures whom they caricature and echo” (18). Through her Irish retelling of the Biblical parable, Keegan’s young protagonist caricatures and echoes the prodigal son, unspooling the ironies and shortcomings of the Irish father’s unquestionable authority.
Works Cited
D’Hoker, Elke. “The Rebellious Daughters of Edna O’Brien and Claire Keegan.” Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 141-175.
Fegan, Melissa. Literature and the Irish Famine: 1845-1919. Clarendon Press, 2002.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Oxford UP, 2008.
Keegan, Claire. Foster. Grove Press, 2010.
Lynch, Vivian Valvano. “Families Can Be Awful Places: The Toxic Parents of Claire Keegan’s Fiction.” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, vol. 19, no. 1, 2015, pp. 131-146, DOI: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24624323.
O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Melville House, 2004.
Smith, Eoghan. “Naturalism, and Folklore in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 42, 2019, pp. 192-208.
Staines, Michael. “The Concept of the Family Under the Irish Constitution.” Irish Jurist, vol. 11, no. 2, 1976, pp. 223-242, https://heinonline-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/HOL/Page? handle=hein.journals/irishjur11&id=229&collection=journals&index=.
Terrazas-Gallego, Melania. “Claire Keegan’s Use of Satire.” Estudios Irlandeses, no. 9, 2014, pp. 80-95, https://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ Melania_Terrazas_9.pdf.
The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Oxford UP, 1998.
Wu, Yen Chi. “Austerity, Irish Literary Tropes, and Claire Keegan’s Fiction.” Austerity and Irish Women’s Culture: 1980-2020. Edited by Deirdre Flynn and Ciara L. Murphy. Routledge, 2022, pp. 177-192.