National Allegory and Maternal Authority in Anglo-Irish Literature

Mother England, Mother Ireland: National Allegoryand Maternal Authority in Anglo-Irish Literature and Culture, 1880-1922 Andrea Christina Bobotis Greenville, South Carolina MA in English Literature and Language, University of Virginia, 2002 BA in English Literature and Language, Furman University, 1998 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degreeof Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia May,2007 Abstract "Mother England, Mother Ireland" proposes a new way of reading allegories of nation-building and national identity in Anglo-Irish literature at the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that authors who claimed affiliations with both England and Ireland (Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde) exploited the capacity of allegory to infiltratea range of genres and, in doing so, discovered hidden potential in the links between motherhood and motherland. Examining nonfiction, novels, drama, speeches, and public spectacles, I show how these writers adapted allegorical representations of Ireland as a mother not only to confrontIreland's vexed political and cultural relationship with England, but also to explore cross-cultural links between Ireland and Britain's outlying colonies. ii Table of Contents Introduction: Reconsidering National Allegory 1 Rival Maternities: Maud Gonne, Queen Victoria, and the Reign of the Political Mother 20 Collaborative Motherhood in Lady Gregory's Nonfiction 62 The Princess as Artist: Mother-Daughter Relations in the Irish Allegory of Oscar Wilde's Salome 114 Technologies of the Maternalin Bram Stoker's The Lady of the Shroud 154 Bibliography 190 Endnotes 201 Introduction Reconsidering National Allegory In the late 1880s the Anglo-Irishwoman Fanny Parnellwas at the height of her popularity as an Irish nationalist poet. The younger sister of Charles Stewart Parnell,the Protestant politician and champion of Irish Home Rule, Fanny Parnellwrote patriotic poems, but she also devoted herself to activism, founding the American branch of the Ladies' Land League, an organization that subsequently flourished in Ireland (albeit briefly) under her sister Anna's guidance. Like most patriotic literature in nineteenth-century Ireland, Fanny Parnell'spoetry relied upon allegories of the Irish nation as a mother who longs forher brave Irish sons to claim independence fromEngland. In her poem "Ireland, Mother!" Parnelldeclares her loyalty to this maternal figure: "Fairest and saddest, what shall I do for thee?" (qtd. in Cote). Despite her own success as a patriotic poet and activist, Parnell admits in the poem her anxieties about serving Mother Ireland adequately: "I am a woman, I can do naught for thee,/ Ireland, mother!" (qtd. in Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, 12). Parnell'spoem dramatizes the predicament of Irish women with political aspirations in the nineteenth century: although nationalists routinely envisioned Ireland as a female figure,women facedconsiderable obstacles when they sought to participate in Irish politics. To what extent did the very representation of Ireland as a mother contribute to these obstacles? Many scholars argue that the portrayal of Ireland as a woman (and, more particularly, a mother) has eclipsed the genuine political accomplishments oflrish women. It has become standard since the 1980s to regard this figuredisapprovingly. 1 This dissertation, 2 however, argues that Anglo-Irish authors employed Mother Ireland in ways that legitimized women's political and artistic aspirations. I show how the Anglo-Irish imagination transformed images of the nation as a mother to challenge gender roles in Ireland, to scrutinize the nation's contested status within the United Kingdom, and to experiment with cross-cultural identifications between Irelandand Britain's other colonies. The authors within this study-Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde-discovered new possibilities forfeminized allegory as a result of their hyphenated national status, which impelled them to revise established depictions of Mother Ireland, but also to dissect and exploit the ways that representations of maternitywere used to justify the British Empire's pursuits in Ireland and furtherabroad. Evaluating the charged period between the Home Rule debates of the 1880s and the emergence of the Irish Free State in 1922, I consider essays, novels, and plays alongside public spectacles and political speeches. This attention to form allows my project to make claims about genre and gender in Ireland. I propose that Anglo-Irish writers gained access to the radical potential of a maternal Ireland by pursuing genres not commonly associated with literary expressions of Irish nationalist identity in the nineteenth century. As a result, the authors in my project eluded the idealized representations of motherhood that had calcified in popular formssuch as the ballad and nationalist drama. They also revealed the political viability of allegory by disputing the notion that it operates indirectly and obliquely. While Fanny Parnellprotests women's limited political roles in her ballad "Ireland, Mother!," my argumentsuggests that she-and Anglo-Irish writers like her-might have articulated greater 3 possibilities for Irish women if she had avoided the ballad form, noted forits veneration of women as passive symbols, not political activists. As my dissertation title suggests, an evaluation of Mother Ireland obliges a reassessment of"Mother England"-namely, the ways that the English mobilized portrayals of maternityto account for England's colonial relationship with Ireland. Analogies for colonialism oftenrely on particular gender configurations: the colonizer (described as male) violates the colonized ( described as female), or the paternalistic colonizer assists the childlike, helpless (and thus feminized) colonized. As David Cairns and Shaun Richards describe it, colonialism creates a situation whereby the colonized are "constrained to assert a dignified self-identity in opposition to a discourse which defines them as, variously, barbarian, pagan, ape, female; but always subordinate and inferior"(8). My dissertation shows that equally potent were representations in which England acted as a compassionate mother toward her colonial children. This mother/child relationship is especially apparent in my firstchapter, in which I show how Queen Victoria marshaled images of her own maternityto represent England's aptitude for governing Ireland. Maud Gonne, I argue, challenged Victoria's claim to the maternalrole, but also adopted some of the Queen's political strategies. The image of Queen Victoria looms in a less conspicuous (but no less forceful)way over my other chapters as well. Augusta Gregory, the focusof my second chapter, was herself described by Gonne as "a queer little old lady, rather like Queen Victoria" (MacBride 321 ). In the third and fourth chapters, Victoria emerges in maternalcharacters such as Oscar Wilde's Herodias, Queen of Judea in his play Salome (1894), and Bram Stoker's Janet MacKelpie, who is playfully 4 named "empress" in his novel The Lady of the Shroud (1909), evoking Victoria's adoption of that title in 1876. Ireland is of course not unique in its tradition of national allegory, particularlyof imagining the nation as a mother. As Ida Blom notes, "In the Nordic countries, as well as in India, the mother figurerepresented the nation" (8). This kind of iconography can be found in imperial nations of the nineteenth century (France's Marianne and England's Britannia) as well as colonized nations such as Egypt and Ethiopia. Scholars have scrutinized women's power under these female images of the nation, oftenconcluding that there is an "inverse relationship between the prominence of female figures in the allegorizations of nation and the degree of access granted women to the political apparatus of the state" (Pierson 44). Marina Warner,for instance, claims that male figuresof nationhood such as England's John Bull or America's Uncle Sam are freeto be seen as individuals with whom real men might identify. "The female form," however, does not refer to particular women, does not describe women as a group, and often does not even presume to evoke their natures. We can all live inside Britannia or Liberty's skin, they stand for us regardless of sex, yet we cannot identifywith them as characters. [ ... ] Liberty, like many abstract concepts expressed in the feminine, is in deadly earnest and one-dimensional. (12-13) Female personificationsof the nation, fromWarner's point of view, do not represent the "collective consciousness" of women (12). She contends that while masculinized allegory may hold political potential for the men living under its sign, feminizedallegory holds none of the samepromise forwomen. While Warnerfaults feminized allegory forits tendency to reinforce gender hierarchies that are damaging to women, national allegory more broadly has been criticized by postcolonial scholars for perpetuating power inequities of both gender and ethnicity. Jean Franco, forexample, claims that "the problems that national discourse engendered problems of patriarchy and of power and its attendant techniques of exclusion and discrimination-could not be resolved by a genre[allegory] that was implicated in these very procedures" (133). From Franco's perspective, allegory itself is express\ve of the most oppressive forms of nationalist and imperialist thought. Franco's charges against allegory emerge

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