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Dorothy Macardle and the Irish Mother: Feminist Writings and the Disruption of Nationalist Myth

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Dorothy Macardle and the Irish Mother: Feminist Writings and the Disruption of Nationalist Myth 1 DOROTHY MACARDLE AND THE IRISH MOTHER: FEMINIST WRITINGS AND THE DISRUPTION OF NATIONALIST MYTH A Master of Arts Thesis presented by Céillie Clark-Keane to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts May, 2015 2 DOROTHY MACARDLE AND THE IRISH MOTHER: FEMINIST WRITINGS AND THE DISRUPTION OF NATIONALIST MYTH by Céillie Clark-Keane ABSTRACT OF MASTER OF ARTS THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University May, 2015 3 ABSTRACT Dorothy Macardle was an author and activist in early twentieth-century Ireland, during the War for Independence and, after, during the early years of the Free State. Despite her status as a successful writer and her recognized involvement in these political movements at the time, Macardle and her published works are often overlooked by scholarship today. This thesis attempts to recover Macardle and her works by exploring Macardle’s commitment to feminist ideals in her literary fiction as well as her conservative historical publications. In order to do so, this thesis considers four key texts published by Macardle: “The Portrait of Roisin Dhu” (1924), The Tragedies of Kerry (1923), The Irish Republic (1937), and The Unforeseen (1946). Placing these seemingly disparate texts in conversation with one another, this thesis suggests that, throughout Macarlde’s works, the author-activist focuses on disrupting the problematic nationalist image of the Irish Mother. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Table of Contents 4 Introduction 5 The Mother in Irish Lore and Literature 7 Colonialism and the Mother 9 Macardle and the Mother 13 Mother-Daughter Relationships in The Unforeseen 21 The Irish Mother and the Father-Son Pair 26 Nan as the Daughter 30 Mother-Daughter Relationships in The Irish Republic 31 Conclusion 36 Works Cited 41 5 Dorothy Macardle was a significant figure in the Irish literary revival as well as the political campaign for the independent Irish Republic of the early twentieth century. During her lifetime, Macardle published widely acclaimed plays, novels, and a collection of short stories, and she was commissioned to write The Irish Republic; a documented chronicle of the Anglo- Irish conflict and the partitioning of Ireland, with a detailed account of the period 1916-1923, the first republican history of Ireland, in order to further then-Taoiseach Éamon de Valera’s campaign for an independent Irish state. Despite the significance of her contributions and these publications, Macardle and her works have remained largely unexplored by contemporary critics. Prominent Irish studies scholars like Gerardine Meaney and Margaret Ward have noted the potential in further exploring Macardle as a figure and her body of published works, both literary and historical.1 Despite this acknowledged potential, few articles have been published on Macardle’s writing, and only cursory attention is afforded to Macardle in larger works of literary criticism. When scholarship does afford Macardle’s writing this limited attention, the complexities of her historical and literary achievements are often elided or overlooked to place Macardle in a simple nationalist narrative. In this simple narrative of Irish history, politically varied nationalist forces fought to free Ireland from English rule, but the politically conservative party Fianna Fáil gained power to form the Free State of the Irish Republic.2 Macardle and her body of works, however, do not fit simply into either political group in this narrative. Her committed involvement with Cumann na Ban and Sinn Féin, as well as her time spent in prison, her participation in the Mountjoy hungerstrike, and her founding of the Women’s Political and Social League characterize Macardle as a progressive feminist activist. This commitment to 6 progressive, feminist ideals translates into Macardle’s fiction writing. In contrast, Macardle’s historical writing is politically conservative. Significantly, The Irish Republic is the conservative historical text that has remained an authoritative resource on early twentieth-century Irish history, although Macardle herself has been largely overlooked. Historian and Macardle biographer Nadia Claire Smith suggests that Macardle’s achievements as a progressive activist and author, as well as a conservative historian, require more attention, as they reveal a problem with this simplified national narrative.3 Smith writes, The career of Dorothy Macardle serves as an interesting and revealing case study concerning the course taken by politically active republican women after Irish independence in 1922. Historians have commented on the discrepancy between the active role played by republican women in achieving Irish independence, and their apparent silence and disengagement in independent Ireland. Dorothy’s life and work present a different picture. As an engaged intellectual and feminist, she represented an alternative face of Irish womanhood that diverged from images promoted in mainstream discourse, and took on those images in her fiction. (3) Smith challenges the “discrepancy between the active role played by republican women in achieving Irish independence, and their apparent silence and disengagement in independent Ireland,” and she does so using Macardle’s career “as an interesting and revealing case study.” While Smith’s use of Macardle and her career as a “case study” does not completely reconcile the conflict in this national narrative, it does present reconciliation as a possibility and, in doing so, call for further exploration. Smith uses Macardle’s career to disrupt the nationalist narrative with Macardle’s exemplary “alternative face of Irish womanhood,” which she suggests Macardle 7 features as “images in her fiction.” Smith thus points to Macardle’s fiction as historical evidence of her challenging the national narrative with “an alternative face of Irish womanhood.” If Macardle’s commitment to feminist groups such as Cumann na Baan mark her as a significant activist, and her integration of feminist ideals characterizes her fiction writing, how can this “alternative face of Irish womanhood” be entirely absent in Macardle’s historical writing? By placing Macardle’s literary works in conversation with her historical texts, I contend that this “alternative face of Irish womanhood” is not completely absent. Instead, this thesis reconsiders Macardle’s works for their feminist potential. I posit that Macardle features the folkloric Irish Mother in each of her writings in an attempt to engage with the nationalist figure. Through this engagement, Macardle challenges the simplistic nationalist figure of the Irish Mother in order to present, or at least provide space for, an “alternative face of Irish womanhood.” The Mother in Irish Lore and Literature The Irish Mother, also known in folklore as Mother Ireland or the Irish Mammy, has persisted as a trope in Irish literature, as well as Irish history and politics. The female figures of Irish myth depend upon woman’s familial connections. For example, the banshee is a supernatural female figure that followed families to predict imminent deaths; the legend of Óebfhinn’s dream features a mother bathing her sons and, in doing so, determining their temperaments; Irish mothers came upon changeling babies; and plot of the myths of “The Deaths of Lugaid and Derbforgaill” and Fedhelm in the Ulster cycle depend upon the wives in each.4 This historical preoccupation with the figure of the woman in the family directly connects to the more recent religious beliefs, mainly Catholic society’s worship of the Virgin Mary. 8 With women in myth and religion tied directly to their role as mothers, women in Irish literary tradition were deeply connected to this maternal role, as well. Diane Stubbings suggests that the end of the nineteenth century was a turning point for the figure of the Irish Mother. As Stubbings explains, “The myth of the mother was essentially a constructed figure,” which was “subjected to censorship and distortions by well-meaning revivalists” (4-5). While the Irish Mother as a “constructed figure” is a logical explanation of myth as a social construct, this mythic figure’s “subjection to censorship and distortion” in its nineteenth-century construction is significant. Stubbings attributes the “censorship and distortion,” or change in the myth, to its employment as a political image by the “well-meaning revivalists” with nationalist agendas (4- 6). Stubbings goes on to point specifically to the re-inscribed, re-purposed Irish Mother as a national figure celebrated for her domestic, maternal contributions. While Stubbings uses Irish modernism to nuance her argument, this re-inscription of the folkloric Irish Mother is more widespread in literature during the literary revival and the early years of the Free State. Macardle’s focus on the maternal engages with this larger literary fixation on the figure prevalent in Irish literature. Iconic nationalist works such as William Butler Yeats’ play Cathleen ni Houlihan and activist-author Patrick Pearse’s poem “The Mother” celebrate the role of the Irish Mother.5 Significantly, these representative texts construct the role of the Irish Mother based on the interactions with the male characters. In the poem Pearse lauds the role of the women in war; however, the access to this role in war is available to women exclusively in relation to male participants or, more specifically, male family members. The Mother recognizes the distinction between her own internal memory of her sons and the external memory of her sons that will continue in history, and she identifies her space as the domestic hearth. The play similarly locates the Cathleen ni Houlihan figure in a domestic space as the Old Woman 9 approaches the cottage to gain entrance. Even more, the play depicts the maternal figure as sexually appealing as she is seen as a young, beautiful woman who inspires men to go to war fighting for her and, in doing so, fighting for Ireland.
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