Between Humour and Violence: The Northern Irish Conflict in Michelle Gallen's Writing

A native of County Tyrone, Michelle Gallen has only recently emerged as a writer with her two novels Big Girl Small Town (2020) and Factory Girls (2022), but nonetheless she has managed to set the tone for a new kind of writing in the post-conflict era, which Sinéad Moriarty has aptly described as “Milkman meets Derry Girls”. Gallen conveys the experience of the Northern Irish conflict between 1968 and 1998 with humour and tongue-in-cheek portrayals, without diminishing the serious traumatic impact of the violence. This essay highlights how both of Gallen's novels intertwine the personal with the political context of Northern Ireland in which their protagonists live, and how the violence during and after the conflict breaks through the humorous surface of their everyday lives. Big Girl Small Town follows Majella's daily life in a chip shop against the backdrop of her grandmother's murder and her father's disappearance. In Factory Girl, Maeve is determined to leave her Northern Irish hometown and gain her independence, while the death of her sister and rising sectarian tensions curtail her desire for another summer of fun. Drawing on various theories of humour, such as incongruity, superiority and relief, as well as the concept of the carnivalesque, this paper highlights the complex interplay between humour and violence in Gallen's writing. In both novels, humour deflates more serious events, such as the murder and disappearance of family members, and is also used as a coping mechanism for an otherwise overwhelming sense of grief and bitterness.