Nora

Pat Murphy's third feature film, Nora (2000), is based on Brenda Maddox's 1988 biography of Nora Barnacle, the wife of James Joyce. The film is on one level a sumptuous historical romance, on another a feminist biopic, on yet another a complex meditation on the relationship between high modernist art and ordinary human relationships. It challenges the ways in which history and sexuality have been constructed in Irish film throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Both the literary biography and film of Nora explore the nature of sexual and aesthetic freedom. But whereas Maddox's biography illuminated an independent-minded and resilient woman, Murphy's film also offers both a feminist and a post-modern critique of the ethics and aesthetics of modernism. Gerardine Meaney investigates the complex relationships between these two texts, and locates the film in the context of new developments in costume drama and historical film in the 1990s.