The Counter-Cultural Experiments of George Egerton and Elizabeth Bowen

Tina O’Toole Unregenerate Spirits: The Counter-Cultural Experiments of George Egerton and Elizabeth Bowen Monique Wittig, addressing ideological activism and social change at the end of the twentieth century, proposes the Trojan Horse as a model for counter-cultural movements and avant-garde writers: ‘at the time it is produced, any work with a new form operates as a war machine, because its design and its goal is to pulverise the old forms and formal conventions. It is always produced in hostile territory’ (‘The Trojan Horse’, 1992b: 75). The experimental work of Irish writers George Egerton (1860–1945) and Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) presents a similar ideological challenge to the gender and sexual binaries of the late nineteenth and twentieth cen- turies. Bowen’s life and work is relatively well-known within the canon of both British and Irish literary scholarship but Egerton, on the other hand, is much less well-known and has only recently begun to emerge within the canon of contemporary literary criticism (e.g. Ardis 1990; Showalter 1992; Pykett 1995; Ledger 1997). Focusing on her early fiction, I will consider the ways in which Egerton deployed protagonists who are clearly marked out as exiles, outsiders to the hegemonic order, partly as a means to destabilise that order. I will then move on to the work of Elizabeth Bowen and will contend that in her work, particularly in her 1968 novel, Eva Trout, Bowen extends the blueprint forged by writers such as Egerton. I will argue that Bowen further develops the interrogation of gender and sexual identities developed by the ‘New Woman’ writers and that in her last novel in particu- lar, there is evidence of a gendered social world in a constant state of f lux, rather than some kind of static account of immutable patriarchal oppres- sion. Such an engagement with gender and sexual identities contributed to the contemporary work being carried out by 1960s feminist writers, such 228 Tina O’Toole Unregenerate Spirits: George Egerton and Elizabeth Bowen 229 as Monique Wittig for example. Thus, by reading Bowen’s fictional experi- lived in Youghal throughout her life; E. L. Voynich [Ethel Lillian Boole] ments in tandem with those of her peers, and as part of a continuum with (1864–1960), author of the best-selling novel The Gadf ly (1897) was the the earlier experiments of Egerton and others, we may gain more insight daughter of mathematician George Boole and Mary Everest Boole, and into the cultural construction and deconstruction of gender and sexual was born and brought up in Cork; and Katherine Cecil Thurston [née identities in these two generations of feminist writers. Madden] (1875–1911), was the daughter of Paul Madden, the Home Rule Born Mary Chavelita Dunne in Melbourne, the daughter of an Irish Mayor of Cork, and spent most of her adult life in Waterford.1 To go back (Catholic) army captain, George Egerton grew up in a number of colonial to Egerton herself, her groundbreaking collection of short stories Keynotes outposts before settling as an adolescent with her family in Dublin. Taking (1893) was written while she lived in Millstreet, Co. Cork, and as I have part of the name of her first husband, George Egerton Clairmonte, as her discussed elsewhere, the local context to this apparently most Scandinavian pseudonym, she went on to become a writer whose work would ultimately of her works is evident in several of her narratives.2 On the whole, how- be associated with that of artists and activists such as Sarah Grand, Olive ever, the Irish context within which these writers worked has been almost Schreiner and George Gissing, among others, who were associated with completely obscured by the predominantly nationalist character of Irish literary decadence at the fin de siècle. The interrogation of sexuality was literary scholarship in the intervening century, which was coupled up until a central project shared by these ‘New Woman’ and ‘Decadent’ artists of quite recently with a more general lack of interest in feminist writings. This the 1890s, who sought to challenge the heterosocial status quo by address- neglect has been particularly marked where nineteenth- and early twen- ing topics such as women’s rights, gender roles, and sexual identities and tieth-century literary culture is concerned, as Heidi Hansson has recently expression (particularly in relation to women’s sexuality). Possibly the best- noted: ‘Political considerations […] intrude and a further dif ficulty when known figure in this project is Sarah Grand, whose novel, The Heavenly women’s works are studied is that the focus on ‘national identity’ in Irish Twins (1893) is one of the most important of this period. Grand began to criticism has made feminist approaches dif ficult’ (Hansson 2008: 3). While publish in the 1870s and her inf luence on the work of later New Woman this scholarly silence is evident in relation to the writers mentioned above, writers, as well as on other literary and political movements of the period, we can see this phenomenon all the more clearly in relation to Elizabeth has been given much scholarly attention in recent years (e.g. Bonnell 1995; Bowen, whose Anglo-Irish Planter background meant that she was con- Mangum 1999; Heilmann 2004). George Egerton’s work came slightly later structed as an outsider figure during her own lifetime, and to some degree in the period and her work exhibits the inf luence of Grand, Mona Caird, ever since. Perhaps the ‘political considerations’ gestured to by Hansson and others, all of whom were striving at the time to develop a feminist above, may explain the considerable attention paid to The Last September literary aesthetic. To outline in brief the Irish context for this material, (1929) by Irish Studies scholars to the almost complete exclusion of almost it is acknowledged that the New Woman project has tended to be seen everything else written by Bowen. almost solely as a radical movement within the history of English litera- ture, with its natural home in the 1890s London literary metropolis. Yet the number of authors involved in these radical cultural experiments who had Irish backgrounds is intriguing: Sarah Grand herself (1854–1943) was 1 For further biographical/bibliographical material on these writers, see O’Toole. 2005. born in Donaghadee, Co. Down, and brought up in Co. Mayo, where she Dictionary of Munster Women Writers. Cork: Cork University Press; also <http:// www.munsterwomen.ie> (accessed 1 July 2010). set one of her best-known works, The Beth Book (1894); ‘Iota’ [Kathleen 2 See O’Toole. 2008. ‘Ireland: The terra incognita of the New Woman Project’ in Mannington Caf fyn] (f l. 1893–1900), was born and brought up in Co. Hansson (ed.) New Contexts: Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Irish Women’s Prose. Tipperary; L. T. Meade (1844–1915) was born in Nohoval, Co. Cork, and Cork: Cork University Press: 125–141. 230 Tina O’Toole Unregenerate Spirits: George Egerton and Elizabeth Bowen 231 Egerton, having spent her formative years in a number of dif ferent perhaps Egerton’s own outsider status enabled her to perceive ‘natural’ countries, sustained this wanderlust throughout her early adulthood. This social relations as part of an oppressive hegemony. Her national identity migrancy had a clear impact both on her writing and, ideologically, on her and her early experience of having been uprooted several times to move sense of liminality in relation to the dominant culture of whichever coun- with her family to a new barracks in another country or continent may have try she happened to live in. In the late 1880s she spent some time living in contributed to this perspective. More particularly, perhaps the fact that Scandinavia where the experiments of writers such as Ola Hansson, as well she herself lived outside of social norms, first as the mistress of a married as Ibsen and Nietzsche inf luenced her own writing, and her first publica- man, and later as a single mother, enabled her to analyse the conventions tion was a translation of Knut Hamsun’s Sult (1890). Keynotes (1893?), her which oppressed her, and to deconstruct them. celebrated first fiction collection certainly proved to be the ‘keynote’ of We find Egerton’s construction of the outsider figure in all of her texts. this fin de siècle intellectual world. It was published by the Bodley Head Having established the psychological depth of her protagonist in ‘The (a publishing house synonymous with Decadence since its publication of Child’, Egerton goes on to show that such depth marks out the individual Oscar Wilde’s Salomé in 1894) where publisher John Lane clearly recognised from the crowd. Among her playmates, the nameless child is a star: ‘They his chance with this new author to develop links with the New Woman are waiting for her, for is she not the most daring, the most individual writers of the period. Lavishly produced, Keynotes was also illustrated by amongst them?’ (Egerton 1894: 6–7). However, this singularity ceases to Beardsley, and launched the Bodley Head’s Keynotes series, publications be an asset as the child grows up. In the second part of this story, Egerton by a range of dif ferent authors which included Grant Allen and Richard Le comments: ‘[The girl] … is too sharp-tongued, too keen-eyed, too intoler- Gallienne. Egerton’s short stories, which reconstructed women’s subjectiv- ant of meanness and untruth to be a favourite with her classmates – too ity from their own perspective and tackled taboo subjects such as women’s independent a thinker, with too dangerous an inf luence over weaker souls sexual identities and autonomy, thus became synonymous with the New to find favour with the nuns’ (12).

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