The Snapper: Sharon’s Pregnancy and the Irish Catholic Ethos

This paper is designed to historicize Roddy Doyle’s novel, The Snapper, and its character Sharon’s perseverance to keep her privacy with her pregnancy in terms of Irish gendered morals. It is particularly argued that Sharon is a modern reincarnation of the Magdalene women, whose misrepresented sexuality made them reduced to being moral opprobrium by the means of turning them into social outcasts. The Magdalene Laundries in history, which accommodated the defamed women, are prime examples of the Irish Catholic support for the State in implementing moral practices. Sharon’s shamed body is a practice of the collective honor by which patriarchal values are respected in the way of restricting women’s sexuality only to marriage for domesticity. Her body is a repository of Irish traditional practices playing out the Catholic patriarchal ethos perpetually adjusting new experiences to its cognitive-emotional structures, which effectuate the correctness of women’s sexuality.