Throughout her plays, Christina Reid explores the lives of women in Belfast and successfully offers a bold interrogation of other facets of Belfast history from a Protestant women’s perspective. Reid’s examination of the politics, entrenched in the private and public lives of Northern Irish women, is the central focus of The Belle of the Belfast City. In the play, the current political unrest in Northern Ireland is set in relation to sexual and racial minorities, which in turn, are enforced by the misogyny embedded in sectarian violence and religious dogmatism. Far from simplifying these questions, Reid takes extra care to show how the familial, social and political facets are all connected to the perpetuation of the prejudice surrounding idea of the Other and the nation. In addition to this, this play also combines the experience of exile in relationship to gender and sectarian violence through the stories of Belle, Dolly’s half-black granddaughter. As a narrator and inheritor of the matrilineal heritage, Belle by her existence raises questions about the national and racial categorizations of politics. In this play, while male authority uses the female body to marginalize and exploit it, Reid successfully turns the victimized female body into a site of resistance and subversion of that authority. In addition to the family photographs, the songs and dances that are performed through the medium of the female body are unmistakably subversive. While the female voice and body within Jack’s idea of nation are objects of repression and silence, however, the women’s bodies and voices are freed and released in the ritual of female bonding that celebrates the subversive potential of the feminine body. With these theatrical devices, Reid carefully depicts and subverts the portraits of women whose roles and images have been imagined in the discourse of conflict-ridden Belfast.

As a contemporary Northern Irish, Anne Devlin questions the traumatic experience and memory in personal and national histories of Northern Ireland. The Troubles-ridden landscape of Northern Ireland turns into a dramatic site in which Anne Devlin’s heroines negotiate their quests for voice and visibility. In her first play, Ourselves Alone (1985), Devlin foregrounds the experiences of women who are excluded from the public and secluded within their domestic realm. Three young women, Frieda, Josie and Donna, struggle against the isolation and the violence that permeate their daily lives. What is common to these three women is that their lives are constructed, controlled, and represented by the men around them. Their personal identities are constantly wiped out by the communal identities. Whether they are career women, political activists, or housewives, there is always a boundary that limits their sphere of action. Furthermore, the idea of home becomes a metaphor for their nation. Far from being a domestic haven, their homes are constantly disrupted by external violence in war-torn Belfast and their homes turn into an experimental site where men’s national ideology is tried and approved. Here, the male patriarch or father figure comes armed with a specific political and national stance and the home becomes a microcosm of the nation. Women are expected to live up to a national ideal in which their primary function is to reproduce the members of the collectives while their home is under constant patriarchal surveillance. This essay focuses on questions of home, gender and nation and asks how the seemingly most private sphere of home has come to be intersected with the public sphere of the nation and, also, how women’s roles are imagined and perpetuated within the frame of national ideology.