CREATING POSTCOLONIAL NATIONAL HEROES: the REVISIONIST MYTHS of W.B. YEATS and JAMES JOYCE a Dissertation Submitted to Kent

CREATING POSTCOLONIAL NATIONAL HEROES: THE REVISIONIST MYTHS OF W.B. YEATS AND JAMES JOYCE A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Heather McCracken December 2016 © Copyright All rights reserved Dissertation written by Heather McCracken B.A., Sam Houston State University, 2009 M.A., Sam Houston State University, 2011 Ph.D., Kent State University 2016 Approved by Claire Culleton , Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Kevin Floyd , Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Tammy Clewell , Patrick G. Coy , Kenneth J. Bindas , Accepted by Robert Trogdon , Chair, Department of English James L. Blank , Dean, College of Arts and Sciences TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iv CHAPTER 1 Critical Introduction: A Marxist Postcolonial Approach To Revisionist Myth ...............................1 CHAPTER 2 Postcolonial Politics of Irish History .............................................................................................30 CHAPTER 3 Imagining a National Mythic Culture ............................................................................................74 CHAPTER 4 Yeats’s Cuchulain Cycle ..............................................................................................................107 CHAPTER 5 Joyce’s Irish Epic .........................................................................................................................160 CHAPTER 6 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................206 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................212 iii Acknowledgments I want to begin by thanking my committee for providing me the support and feedback that made this dissertation possible. Claire Culleton, Kevin Floyd, Tammy Clewell, and Patrick Coy contributed to this project, and I am so grateful for the dedication and care that they put into their assessment of my dissertation. Specifically, I want to thank Claire for helping me finish my dissertation from a distance and introducing me to the endlessly fascinating world of James Joyce scholarship; Kevin for having long conversations with me over coffee about Marxism, fueling and encouraging my interest in Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson, answering all of my panicked emails, and questioning and therefore strengthening my arguments; Tammy for inspiring not only my scholarship but my teaching as well and helping me adjust to being a doctoral student; Pat for taking a real interest in my work and providing the valuable insight of a scholar outside of my field. Along with my committee I also want to thank all of my colleagues and professors at Kent State University for supporting me over the last five years. My earliest inspirations that first put me on the path to this dissertation were my colleagues and professors at Sam Houston State University, and I want to take a moment to thank one person in particular that shaped my understanding of what it means to be a teacher and a scholar. I was sitting in an undergraduate American Literature class taught by Drew Lopenzina when I discovered the kind of professor I wanted to be someday. Outside of the classroom he gave me the courage to pursue an academic career while being honest about the very real difficulties of doing so. His scholarship has inspired me in a number of ways over the years, and he continues to be a valuable source of encouragement and advice. The only way I can think to repay him for his guidance and friendship is to emulate his commitment to compassion in all aspects of my life. I also want to thank all of the friends and family members who supported me over the years. I especially want to thank my mom, who has been my biggest cheerleader since before I can remember. I honestly can’t imagine getting to this point without her encouragement. She always believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself. I also want to thank one particular friend who went above and beyond in the last year of my dissertation writing process. Seth Johnson spent countless hours providing advice, encouragement, and suggestions that I will forever be grateful for. I am fully confident that one day Seth will make a fantastic dissertation director. Because it would be impossible to list all of the ways that Chris McCracken has contributed to the completion of this dissertation I will attempt to thank him in one sentence: This dissertation is dedicated to Chris, who let me share his name. iv Chapter 1 Critical Introduction: A Marxist Postcolonial Approach to Revisionist Myth In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Irish authors created and established one of the most important cultural movements in Irish history: the Irish Literary Renaissance. These authors sought to give Ireland a literary culture that would serve as counterpart to its political, economic, and military campaigns for freedom from English rule. This dissertation was inspired by the men and women participating in the Irish Literary Renaissance who believed that a nation’s literature directly reflected its identity and, reciprocally, that writers can consciously construct national identity through their works. While each of these authors attempted this identity construction in different ways, they all were acutely aware of their potential role in the nation-making process. In order to understand why these authors embarked on this kind of national project, a basic knowledge of Ireland’s colonial history is necessary. A writer’s environment can have a profound effect on his or her work, especially if this environment is as volatile and oppressive as Ireland was while the nation suffered under British colonial rule. This environment served as the inspiration and motivation for the authors of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Beginning in 1169 with the Anglo-Norman Invasion, the colonization of the Irish resulted in centuries of violence, the confiscation of lands, resources, and sovereignty, and the near total destruction of Ireland’s native culture and language. While the Irish continually fought against this occupation, most rebellions ended in nothing more than failure and stricter colonial rule. The long and bitter battle for decolonization was not officially won until the War of Independence 1 (1919-1921), which resulted in the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. Many factors contributed to this extended, eight-century colonial rule, including ambivalence and division among the Irish along with the calculated oppression of Irish culture. In an attempt to maintain control over the Irish, the English worked toward the eventual destruction of the native culture in order to whittle away any native claims to the colonized land. Geographic proximity helped the English more easily assimilate the Irish to British culture, replacing the native Irish culture and ushering in centuries of colonial oppression. However, there were concentrated efforts to oppose colonial rule, including the literary movement led by authors such as W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, J.M. Synge, and Lady Augusta Gregory which worked to combat cultural destruction by showing that not only could the “wild Irish” write, but that they also had a rich native culture long before the colonization of Ireland began. As Fredric Jameson argued in his groundbreaking essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986), writers living and working in a colonized nation create national allegories by presenting the individual experience as political allegory for the wider national experience. This dissertation examines the ways in which W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, by engaging in revisionist myth-making in order to create new culture heroes, consciously participated in creating the kind of national allegories Jameson refers to in his essay.1 It is my argument that these authors chose revisionist myth because it was a way of giving new life to old stories for the purpose of revitalizing and cultivating a distinctly Irish culture separate from the English culture instituted and spread by colonization. This cultural project was not merely an assertion of identity, as culture was itself a vital part of achieving independence from English rule. 1 I borrow the term “culture hero” from Ato Quayson’s Calibrations (2003). This term is discussed in detail in chapter 3. 2 Ireland’s “Celtic Calibans” While postcolonial theory has gained considerable prominence over the last two decades, Ireland has not always been part of this critical conversation. Recently, however, scholars have begun to seriously consider Ireland’s role as a colonized nation thanks in part to projects like Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, released in 2003. In this collection of essays, Irish studies scholars address the problem of Ireland’s postcolonial status by examining the similarities between the Irish colonial experience and more traditionally studied colonial nations. In the book’s introduction, Clare Carroll opens the debate by explaining some of the common objections to Ireland’s colonial status. Carroll explains that “Ireland, because part of the West, both geographically and culturally in Europe,

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