Alice Milligan: Republican Tableaux and the Revival Catherine Morris
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FIELD DAY REVIEW 132 Alice Milligan: Republican Tableaux and the Revival Catherine Morris Alice Milligan (1866–1953) was a cultural and political activist who rejected the unionist politics that sustained Ireland’s place within empire to become an internationalist republican. She was a key figure in the formation of the anti-colonial movement from the 1890s and a founding member of the Anti-Partition Council from the 1930s. A prolific writer for over six decades, she published her work in a range of genres (including poetry, short stories, novels, plays, journalism, letters and memoirs). From 1891 to the 1940s, she founded a series of cultural, feminist and political organizations that not only put the North on the map of the Irish Literary Revival but also gave a new resonance to Irish Wood engraving: Cluithcheoirí na hÉireann, Postcard, 1907. visual culture. Her work shows Holloway Collection, National Library of Ireland. her commitment to the human FIELD DAY REVIEW 6 2010 133 FIELD DAY REVIEW Alice Milligan. 1896. Photo: Seamus MacManus. Courtesy of Moya Cannon rights of political prisoners and of women. northern Protestant who had relinquished She used visual and performance arts to the unionism of her background, her create the cultural conditions that would give identity was never easy to ‘translate’ the Irish language contemporary meaning. within a sectarian society. Her legacy was Everything Milligan wrote was not celebrated by the Northern Ireland published in the unindexed pages of state, nor was it accorded an important now obscure national newspapers. As a part in the official narrative of the 134 ALICE MILLIGAN: REPUBLICAN TABLEAUX AND THE REVIVAL 1 Ireland: Weekly Bulletin Irish Literary Revival. After her death, Declan Kiberd has called ‘an attempt to of the Department of one obituary noted: ‘the radius of her release the still-unused potential buried in External Affairs No. friendship was an index of her quality. past moments’.3 183, Dublin, 20 April 1953, 7. W. B. Yeats, Standish O’Grady, Arthur Tableau vivant is a hybrid of theatre 2 Death notice of Angela Griffith, John O’Leary — these are only and pictorial art; its political implications Doyle (1907–25), a handful of the names which add up to a can only be fully recognized in relation (who died of anorexia roll call of modern Irish history’.1 to other pictorial representations. The nervosa), Cumann na mBan, September 1925 1923 performance enabled the confined 3 University College *** prisoners to transform themselves into Dublin: Visual Cultures a community. This was characteristic of postdoctoral fellowships Those who were in B Wing, the Irish Revival in general; its aim was proposal outline, 2006. Kilmainham, during the summer of 1923 to produce a communal consciousness by will ever remember Angela Doyle as creating the ‘past’ through street parades, Robert Emmet ... Angela chose Robert collecting folklore, staging and publishing Emmet and to all of us who had ever Irish legends and histories, initiating art visioned Emmet, Angela seemed to and museum exhibitions, by travelling with embody every idea of ours. Young, pale, theatre productions and magic lantern fair, tall, with an earnest sad expression shows. Milligan was concerned essentially in her eyes, she seemed the ghost of the with how this emergent nationalist culture hero of 1803.2 depicted itself in public space as both an act of, and a search for, self-representation. In 1923 Irish women prisoners on hunger In particular, her theatre work explored strike in A Wing of Kilmainham Jail staged how the body itself became the subject of for their comrades in B Wing a series of repressed history in nationalist iconography costumed tableaux vivants that evoked and commemoration. Visual culture in this their republican heroes Robert Emmet and period of radical transformation offered a Anne Devlin. With its roots in English site for the rehearsal and performance of and French state-censorship of spoken possible identities. Irish public space was language in theatre, the voiceless form reclaimed and redefined in print culture, of tableau vivant also proved, because of in performances enacted on official and the suppression of Irish, to have a special unofficial stages, in the opening up of potency in the colonial (and immediately theatres, galleries and cinemas. The post-colonial) context of Ireland. The unwritten story of Milligan’s political women who staged these tableaux in mobilization of visual culture is located in 1923 were responding to their memory of a wide range of archival materials, such as how ‘living pictures’ had been radicalized photographs (nicknamed ‘the mirror with a during the Irish Literary Revival by Alice memory’ in the 1890s), magic lantern slides Milligan. In fact, many of the prisoners had and travelling lantern shows, illustrated been trained in the making of tableaux by fiction, theatre posters, newspapers and Milligan through her association with the journals, tableaux vivants (also known as Gaelic League and Inghinidhe na hÉireann ‘living pictures’ and ‘poses plastiques’), (Daughters of Ireland). ‘Living pictures’ was representing scenes from well-known Irish a particularly appropriate theatrical mode melodramas, public commemorations, for these women prisoners to display their costumed pageants, banners carried at allegiance to historical forebears whose public demonstrations, murals, paintings legacy was, like their own experience, one and public monuments, street theatre, of disempowerment, bodily torture and sculpture and film reels. silence. Their enactment of these tableaux In this essay I want to investigate a in such circumstances is an example of what whole series of questions and contexts that 135 FIELD DAY REVIEW will help us better understand the latent explains how it would have appealed so 4 Adrian Frazier, Yeats, visual community dynamics that fired directly to Ireland’s ruling elite: Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Ireland’s national theatre and Irish language Theatre (Berkeley, movement. What were tableaux? Where did The picture of the countess was so 1990), 1. this silent form of drama come from? What flattering, and that of the peasants so 5 Pamela Hinkson, made it so popular in Europe, America amusing, that the ladies of the Chief Seventy Years Young: Memories of Elizabeth and England at the turn of the twentieth Secretary’s Lodge — Lady Balfour, the Countess of Fingall century? Milligan’s first tableau show was countess of Fingall, and others — begged (London, 1937), 235. actually planned with the help of members Yeats to let them perform the work 6 Cited in Peter of the Anglo-Irish colonial establishment as nine tableaux vivants six months Somerville Large, The Irish Country House for performance at the Chicago World Fair before the performance scheduled for (London, 1995), 355. in 1893. It is worth asking how she began the Ancient Concert Rooms ... Their to transform this theatrical genre into a performance was a complete success: it powerful expression of the Revival’s most was such fun for the gentry to act the radical ideas. peasants, who must have seemed like fabulous talking beasts out of Grimm The Irish Village and the Chicago World Fair ... Certainly, the chief virtue in the ethical scheme of the play is generosity, Look how well we’ve captured these a quality most accessible to the rich. unhappy ridiculous people aching for The main virtue to which the poor may an impossible escape! We feel we have a aspire is gratitude.5 special hold upon them because we have had, for what it is worth, possession of In her autobiography, Lady Fingall observed the future for which they yearn. that the Anglo-Irish lived in ‘a world of their own with Ireland outside the gates’.6 Thomas Kilroy, The Seagull: after This is a useful description of how the Chekhov (1993) ‘Countess Cathleen’ tableau (and other unionist appropriations of this dramatic Six months before it became ‘the Irish mode) functioned in Ireland before 1916. cultural event of the decade’,4 Yeats’s play As a private entertainment, the tableau The Countess Cathleen was performed offered Ireland’s ruling elite an opportunity as a series of living pictures at the Chief to rescript themselves as benevolent heroes Secretary’s Lodge in Phoenix Park on 24 of the Great Famine. The rightness of and 25 January 1899. It is a piquant irony empire, with its reliance upon rigid class that the lords and ladies of the British distinctions, was reconfirmed in the frozen establishment in Ireland first enacted pictures mounted at the Lodge: ‘The this particular story, for its dramatized chief secretary, Arthur Balfour ... found a version would soon launch the Irish pleasant satisfaction in the graceful way the Literary Theatre. Nicknamed ‘the pet of countess of Fingall, as Countess Cathleen, the Castle’ by Edward Martyn for this died to save the peasants who could not initiative, Yeats nevertheless agreed not save themselves.’7 Despite the fact that the only to the production of his play at the play was set during a famine, the Chief chief secretary’s official residence, but also Secretary’s wife spared no expense on the to rehearsing a cast that included Lady lavish costumes, designed from sketches Balfour, Lady Fingall, George Coffey and commissioned from George Russell (Æ); she members of Margaret Stokes’s family. In pulled rank to decorate her pictures with the play, an aristocratic heroine sacrifices authentic ‘Celtic’ jewels and ornaments her soul to the devil in order to save the borrowed from Ireland’s National Museum. Irish peasantry from famine. Adrian Frazier John Kelly notes that although Yeats 136 ALICE MILLIGAN: REPUBLICAN TABLEAUX AND THE REVIVAL ‘Scenes In The Irish Village. On the Midway Plaisance’. Color plate by Charles S. Graham from ‘The World’s Fair in Water Colors’, June 1, 1893. Photo: © Field Museum Library / Getty Images 7 Frazier, Yeats, rehearsed the show at the Chief Secretary’s photograph] ..