Home Search Every Field Editorial Search Authors' VIVID FACES: THE REVOLUTIONARY GENERATION IN IRELAND, 1890-1923 Responses By R.F. Foster (Norton, 2015) 480 pp. Guidelines Reviewed by George Bornstein on 2016-01-12. For Click here for a PDF version. Reviewers Click here to buy the book on Amazon. About Us
Masthead This new history of roughly three decades opens with the fall and death of the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891 and ends with the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921, shadowed immediately by Civil War. It also Feedback opens and closes with quotations from Ireland's most famous poet of the period, W. B. Yeats, whose once controversial and now celebrated poem "Easter 1916" furnishes the title of the book:
I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk am ong grey Eighteenth-century houses.
Since Foster is Yeats's official biographer, author of the two-volume standard life, it is not surprising that he refers to Yeats intermittently throughout this book. Yet what happens between the opening and closing references is anything but Yeatsian. Instead, Foster ranges not only through printed books and articles but also through unpublished diaries and manuscript archives. As Charles Cowden Clarke wrote of his pupil and later friend John Keats's first encounter with Spenser's Faerie Queen, Foster has evidently gone through these sources "ramping." His omnivorous diligence results in a detailed revisionist portrait of the revolutionary generation and its members, including more women than usual in such accounts.
It may help readers unfamiliar with Irish history to glance at a few key points and earlier views. Having been granted to Henry II of England after the Norman Conquest in the twelfth century, Ireland remained under English rule until the events of Foster's book in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were periodic uprisings like Wolfe Tone's rebellion of 1798 followed by the Act of Union, Catholic Emancipation led by Daniel O'Connell in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Fenian rising of 1867, the founding of the Land League led by Michael Davitt, the rise of the Irish Parliamentary Party led by Parnell in the 1870s, and the campaign for Home Rule after that. Though England finally promised Home Rule after the turn of the century, it was postponed because of World War I, and by then it was too late. The Easter Rising, largely in Dublin, took place in 1916, and in 1921 much of Ireland was declared a Free State under the Anglo-Irish Treaty. But Civil War followed because the Treaty had not included the six counties of what became Northern Ireland.
Standard Nationalist accounts have viewed 1916 as the culmination of over seven centuries of heroic Irish resistance to English rule, stressing what Foster calls "the language of bloodshed, redemption, and glory, borrowing the familiar conventions of hagiography" (292). Mythologizing finds a worthy foe in Foster himself, the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University and author of the major history Modern Ireland 1600-1972. His other books include two collections of often demythologizing history: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland and Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History. The most prominent "revisionist" historian of his generation, he continues and extends that work in the present volume. To Foster, approaches based on class or ideology seem inadequate. He supplements them by interweaving personal stories to create a portrait of a generation alienated not only from British rule but also from the generation of their parents and the Irish Parliamentary Party after Parnell. Foster sees the members of this generation as "building and inhabiting a different world" (xxi).
That insight leads to what Foster dubs "generationism." Rebelling against their parents in politics as in family romance, the younger generation felt antagonism rather than allegiance toward Home Rule under the leadership of John Redmond, head of the Irish Parliamentary Party. This was as true for the women as for the men, and Foster brings into the story more women than predominantly patriarchal accounts usually do. Not that he always glorifies them. Writing, for example, of activist Con Markievicz, one of the Gore-Booth sisters of Lissadell, he points out that even her comrades called her "the Looney" (qtd. 20). Likewise, the charismatic orator Maud Gonne, beloved of Yeats for so many years, exaggerated the faults of the British Empire when she called it the "symbol of Satan in the world" (qtd. 22). Troubles with patriarchy also torpedoed Gonne's prominence. Her publicized divorce proceedings against the Boer War hero John MacBride turned public opinion against her. Surprisingly to our contemporary ears, revelations that he drank excessively and abused Gonne both physically and mentally led militant nationalist circles to ostracize her rather than him. Furthermore, like a disproportionate number of revolutionaries, both Markievicz and Gonne came from well-off Protestant families in largely Catholic Ireland: Markievicz's family were prominent landowners in County Sligo and Gonne's father was a captain in the British army. Both were conservative rather than Fenian, prompting their daughters to yet another form of generational revolt. Education in Ireland has always taken on a political and religious complexion, often essentially denominational. While Protestant schools often stressed union with Great Britain, Catholic schools bred Irish nationalists. The often lower middle class Christian Brothers schools, for example, listed over forty alumni in the Rising, among them Sean Connolly, John MacBride, P. S. O'Hegarty, Patrick Pearse, and Eamon de Valera. The more exclusive Jesuit school at Conglowes Wood also furnished some, though the nationalist editor E. P. Moran called it "the eminent Tommy Atkins college," producing servants of Empire rather than Ireland. No school contributed more to the revolution than St. Enda's, which aimed to be progressive, de-Anglicizing, and committed to the Gaelic League. Founded by Patrick Pearse in 1908, it produced thirty of the revolutionaries in the General Post Office and from its teachers mustered five of the fifteen executed leaders. In addition, the art colleges often welcomed nationalism, and those wanting further progressive education could receive it at the National University, founded in 1908.
Besides education, drama was a nationalizing force, especially for the Abbey Theatre, which became the National Theatre of Ireland with W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge as co-directors. "Practically all the Abbey plays . . . are revolts," declared the nationalist P. S. O'Hegarty (75). The two most famous were the nationalist Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), by Yeats and Gregory, and the more controversial Playboy of the Western World (1907), by Synge. In the first, an aged woman visits a rural cabin during wedding preparations, turns into a beautiful woman, and leads off the would-be groom to fight and die for Irish freedom. She herself was a familiar symbol for Ireland and the Irish cause, and became immensely popular. By contrast, Synge's Playboy sparked controversy and even riots, prodding directors to call for the police to restore order. Ultra-nationalists were offended by its portrait of an unidealized peasantry, particularly by its treatment of a parricide as a hero and by some of the language. "Audience broke up at the word 'shift'," telegraphed Yeats to Synge. To some Synge was a hero. To others, like the nationalist student Hugh Kennedy, Synge was "a Protestant & socialist" (it is not clear which he found worse) who painted only "a squalid and inauthentic picture of Irish life" (qtd. 82). Whatever Synge's merits, the Abbey was not the only theatre producing nationalist plays, and besides others in Dublin Foster treats those produced in Cork and Belfast, particularly during the five years of the Cork Dramatic Society and the northern Ulster Literary Theatre.
Together, Cathleen ni Houlihan and Playboy of the Western World exemplify the complicated role of sexuality and gender relations in nationalist rhetoric. As part of their opposition to parental values, the revolutionary generation imagined a world decoupled from patriarchy. Yet such a world hardly suited less-educated nationalists, who yearned to see Ireland as pure and virtuous. Beneath the surface also lurked an even more upsetting feature of the time: sexual experimentation. Homosexuality bedeviled the career of Roger Casement among prominent revolutionaries and caused a huge outcry fueled by passages from his diaries. And while female nationalists like Rosamond Jacob (from Foster's own home city of Waterford) carried on lesbian affairs, other nationalists seemed almost Puritan by nature, leading to a bewildering variety of attachments and sublimations.
Besides playing their part in disrupting sexual norms, a host of women such as Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Maud Gonne, Con Markiewicz, and Alice Milligan seized important roles in journalism, particularly in the polemical press of the day, which they often used to promote feminism as well. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, 332 newspapers circulated, many of them printing radical propaganda. When Milligan's prominent newspaper, Shan Van Vocht, folded in 1899, its subscription list was taken over by the energetic Arthur Griffith, later the first president of the Irish Free State, who founded his own paper, The United Irishman, and its successor, Sinn Fein. Both journals employed prominent female writers including Gonne, who also provided weekly financial support for the papers. Unfortunately, however, Griffith's papers turned anti-Semitic, targeting first the maligned French Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus and then alleged Jewish conspiracies in general. "The deadly Jew-made fever has crept over Grafton Street," wrote the journalist Sydney Gifford in The United Irishman.
World War One came as a golden opportunity for nationalists, who sounded again their old slogan, "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity." They included as their largest groups the pro-Home Rule Irish Volunteers and their bitter rivals, the Ulster Volunteer Force, along with the smaller and more militant Citizen's Army of James Connolly, the then-small IRA, and women's groups like Gonne's Inghimhe na Eireann (Daughters of Ireland) and the Volunteers' support group Cumann na Ban (Association of Women). Though high expectations of aid from Germany never materialized, old guns from there did, and the reputations of the upright Arthur Griffith and the controversial Roger Casement both reignited as never before.
Nevertheless, plans of the nationalist leaders were "frenetic" and skepticism prevailed before Easter week. One of the leaders (Denis McCullough, titular president of the IRB Supreme Council) literally shot himself in the foot. The Easter 1916 Rising caused a million pounds worth of damage to the General Post Office alone and took a high toll of civilians amid widespread looting in Dublin. Yet while public opinion at first condemned the rising, it turned after the way British authorities handled it, especially in executing fifteen leaders plus Casement. Even a report by the English government itself termed British policy "woodenly stupid" and out of touch with all opinion in Ireland other than that of the Anglo-Irish (271).
The Anglo-Irish War ignited by the Rising ended positively for a change but still not as the rebels wanted. While the Anglo-Irish Treaty at the end of 1921 made the southern twenty-six counties an independent state, it left the northern six in a separate statelet of their own, still part of Great Britain. Bitterly dividing the Irish forces, it pitted supporters of the new republic against militants demanding freedom for the entire island. In signing the Treaty, the guerilla commander Michael Collins famously remarked, "I have signed my death warrant." Indeed he had, and as part of the ensuing Civil War, IRA dissidents shot him down in Country Cork. The new Irish Free State carried out three times as many executions of hard- liners as the British had during the previous war. The Irish Parliamentary Party died in the subsequent elections, and control passed from intellectuals to what the book euphemistically terms "leaders of a different type" (268) who rendered the State both more puritanical and more Catholic.
A concluding chapter treats subsequent mythological memories constructed about the Rising, including both idealization and re-emergence of old quarrels. P. S. O'Hegarty endorsed the Rising but with "savage misogyny" blamed women members of the Dail (parliament) for endorsing violence. Tom Clarke's widow Kathleen, ever zealous for his reputation as martyr, resented Patrick Pearse for taking command of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood "when he knew as much about commanding as my dog" (qtd. 306). W. B. Yeats pondered his own ambivalence in "Easter 1916," which at first was greeted with hostility but is now a set text for Irish schoolchildren to memorize. "Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart," he wrote, but continued some lines later to ask And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse-- MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever Green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
Foster answers this question in the last sentence of his capacious and revisionist study: "But to 'know the dream' of the revolutionaries," he writes, "it may help to strip back the layers of martyrology and posthumous rationalization, to get back before hindsight into that enclosed, self-referencing, hectic world where people lived before 1916, and to see how a generation developed, interacted and decided to make a revolution--which for many of them may not have been the revolution that they intended, or wanted" (332). Vivid Faces is not for beginners, and despite the author's efforts some of its intricacies may confuse those new to Irish history. So, too, might the intermittent catalogues of family and personal interconnections jammed into paragraphs of single sentences. Yet the overall contribution remains major.
George Bornstein is Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Michigan.
Leave a comment on George Bornstein's review.
Name: Email: Comments:
I'm not a robot reCAPTCHA Privacy - Terms
Submit
About Us Copyright © Dartmouth College, 2008-2020