SOURCE: Rogers, Lori. “Courting Performance: Coercion and Compromise.” In Feminine Nation: Performance, Gender and Resistance in the Works of John McGahern and Neil Jordan, pp. 59–76. Lanham: University Press of America, 1998.

In the following essay, Rogers discusses the role of domesticity in McGahern's prose.

The reliance—whether unconscious or not—of supposedly essential, self-reliant and self-defined men upon the domestic performances of women is investigated before its consecration within marriage by McGahern's novel The Pornographer and Neil Jordan's film The Miracle. In the former, the protagonist reveals through his profession and his sexual life the pornographic aspects of men's exploitation of women's domesticity, while in the latter Jordan's female protagonist tries to educate her young son to avoid exploiting female performance by entering into a discursive, active relationship with it. Both The Pornographer and The Miracle focus on the need for men to acknowledge the performativity and, consequentially, the...