The Rachel Incident

Content Warning: This section of the guide briefly mentions abortion and anti-gay bias.

Throughout The Rachel Incident, famine functions as a motif representing the deficits in the Harrington-Byrne marriage. Byrne’s book, The Kensington Diet, is about the historical Irish famine. In the book, he argues (unconvincingly, to Rachel’s ears) that the famine continues to linger in Irish consciousness: “Dr. Byrne almost sounded like he thought the famine was a good thing. He seemed to think most worthwhile books and paintings sprung out of the potato blight, and I wondered if Deenie ever told him to calm it down a little” (167). Later, he confesses sheepishly to Rachel that he might have been obsessed with famine because of his own too-large body and his attempts to diet. For him, famine is associated with art produced out of emptiness and, personally, with his own bodily shame. Rachel also comes to understand that, as a queer man who came of age when homosexuality was still illegal in Ireland, he might also associate famine with another form of bodily shame and stigma: “Think about the things I’ve seen, the news stories I was terrorised with, the deadly body I was told that I might become.