The Clothes of the Dead: Materializing Loss in Anne Enright’s The Gathering

Abstract

This paper explores the interconnected themes of dress, death, and identity in Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2008). It is an attempt to examine how clothing functions as a powerful symbolic medium through which Enright’s characters express their cultural belonging. Through Veronica Hegarty’s narration of her brother Liam’s death and burial, the study investigates the significance of dressing the dead as both a personal and cultural practice. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from Sigmund Freud (2003), Elisabeth Bronfen (1992), Peter Brooks (1992), Clare Gittings (1984), and Nina Glick Schiller (1995), the paper argues that clothing goes beyond its mere function as a material covering of the body to an equivocal sign that communicates meaning after death. Particular attention is given to the various garments associated with Liam’s dead body, including his fluorescent jacket, worn-out Wellington boots, paisley pyjamas, and formal suit. These items reveal the conflictual analogy between individuality and social convention, private memory and public ritual, as well as homeland and diaspora. By connecting funeral dress to issues of migration, displacement, and Irish identity, the paper highlights the role of mourning practices in resisting cultural erasure and maintaining a sense of belonging across geographical boundaries. As possible findings, the study contends that Enright transforms the act of dressing the dead into a meaningful ritual through which identity is reconstructed and preserved. In The Gathering, clothing becomes a metaphorical language that negotiates the boundaries between life and death, presence and absence, and memory and forgetting. Thus, this paper opens new horizons to understand the slippery nature of death via the acts of dressing and undressing the dead.