CULTURAL NATIONALISM AND COLONIALISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY IRISH HORROR FICTION by SILAS NEASE GLISSON submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY in the subject ENGLISH at the UNNERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA PROMOTER: DR DC BYRNE NOVEMBER 2000 SUMMARY This thesis will explore how writers of nineteenth-century Irish horror fiction, namely short stories and novels, used their works to express the social, cultural, and political events of the period. My thesis will employ a New Historicist approach to discuss the effects of colonialism on the writings, as well as archetypal criticism to analyse the mythic origins of the relevant metaphors. The structuralism of Tzvetan Todorov will be used to discuss the notion of the works' appeal as supernatural or possibly realistic works. The theory of Mikhail Bakhtin is used to discuss the writers' linguistic choices because such theory focuses on how language can lead to conflicts amongst social groups. The introduction is followed by Chapter One, "Ireland as England's Fantasy." This chapter discusses Ireland's literary stereotype as a fantasyland. The chapter also gives an overview of Ireland's history of occupation and then contrasts the bucolic, magical Ireland of fiction and the bleak social conditions of much of nineteenth-century Ireland. Chapter Two, "Mythic Origins", analyses the use of myth in nineteenth-century horror stories. The chapter discusses the merging of Christianity and Celtic myth; I then discuss the early Irish belief in evil spirits in myths that eventually inspired horror literature. Chapter Three, "Church versus Big House, Unionist versus Nationalist," analyses how the conflicts of Church/Irish Catholicism vs. Big House/Anglo-Irish landlordism, pro­ British Unionist vs. pro-Irish Nationalist are manifested in the tales. In this chapter, I argue that many Anglo-Irish writers present stern anti-Catholic attitudes, while both Anglo-Irish and Catholic writers use the genre as political propaganda. Yet the authors tend to display Home Rule or anti-Home Rule attitudes rather than religious loyalties in their stories. The final chapter of the thesis, "A Heteroglossia of British and Irish Linguistic and Literary Forms," deals with the use of language and national literary styles in Irish literature of this period. I discuss Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia and its applications to the Irish novel; such a discussion because nineteenth-century Ireland was linguistically Balkanised, with Irish Gaelic, Hibemo-English, and British English all in use. This chapter is followed by a conclusion. Key terms: Irish literature; Victorian literature; Horror literature; Romanticism; Postcolonial literary theory; Imperialism; Myth; Ireland, political and social history; Language and literature; Nineteenth-century British Empire TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER ONE: IRELAND AS ENGLAND'S FANTASY ......................................... .33 CHAPTER TWO: MYTHIC ORIGINS ........................................................................ 79 CHAPTER THREE: CHURCH VERSUS BIG HOUSE, UNIONIST VERSUS NATIONALIST ....................................................................................................... 120 CHAPTER FOUR: A HETEROGLOSSIA OF BRITISH AND IRISH LINGUISTIC AND LITERARY FORMS ..................................................... ; .............................. 161 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................... 202 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................... 222 INTRODUCTION I have chosen to write a thesis arguing that nineteenth-century Irish horror literature, including both novels and short stories, reflects support for and disenchantment with colonialism and cultural nationalism. I must admit that my initial interest in this subject stemmed from the fact that I enjoy reading such works. I am also aware that my liking for the works analysed in this thesis led me to seek a deeper meaning behind them, as I asked "Why do some of these works sound so 'British' and have British settings if they were written by Irish authors? Why are Catholics so frequently maligned? Why are Irish characters portrayed so frequently as superstitious fools? Why is horror literature so conducive to the expression of political and social commentary through metaphor?" As I began to look for the answers to these questions, I observed that Ireland has frequently been overlooked in other studies of colonial and postcolonial literature; this observation solidified my decision to devote my thesis to my chosen topic. Due to the island's centuries of occupation and exploitation by the British, it deserves further exploration in the context of colonial/postcolonial literary studies. Declan Kiberd writes that "a recent study of theory and practice in postcolonial literature, The Empire Writes Back, passes over the Irish case very swiftly, perhaps because the authors find these white Europeans too strange an instance to justify their sustained attention."1 When discussing Commonwealth literature in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, Elleke Boehmer does mention Ireland but qualifies the island's 2 inclusion by saying, "Ireland .. .is believed to represent a different case because its history has been so closely and so long linked to that of Britain. However, as its resistance struggle was in certain other colonies taken as talismatic by nationalist movements, occasional references to Ireland will be made in the course of this study."2 I agree with Boehmer' s assertion that Ireland is a unique case, but I would also state that the experience of every colony, whether it be Ireland, Canada, India or Ghana, is unique, due to differences, even if slight, in terms of colonial administration, attitudes, means of resistance, ethnic composition and cultural expression. Furthermore, I do not think that Ireland would qualify as an exception simply because of its geographical proximity to Britain and the comparatively longer relationship between the two countries. At the same time, I realise that this proximity, as well as Ireland's 122-year status within the United Kingdom would lead some individuals, especially lay-people, to consider Ireland as part of Britain and not a colony. The fact that most literature, until very recently, was controlled and consumed by the Anglo-Irish Establishment, referring to the Protestant landlord socio-economic class, who, for centuries benefited from British rule and were of British extraction, also confounds the notions of imperialism and colonisation. Another dilemma in analysing Ireland as a distinct colony stems from the fact that, during an age of national language movements, most Irish citizens willingly adopted English and continued to speak it long after the withdrawal of British occupation from Eire [independent Ireland]. Perhaps, and I state this most tentatively, Ireland was 1 Declan K.iberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) 4-5. 2 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 4. 3 Britain's prototype for further experiments in colonisation and cultural usurpation elsewhere in the world. Whilst Ireland may be viewed as a First World European civilisation, its culture, especially with respect to literature may also, perhaps paradoxically, be viewed as sharing characteristics with those of so-called emerging Third World nations. On one hand, Irish literature stems from an ancient oral tradition, like most, if not all the literatures of Europe. Just as Classical Greek and Mediaeval British epics were derived from oral myth, Irish literature, at least in Irish Gaelic, is a by-product of pre-literate Celtic myths, a subject to which I shall return. Peter Berresford Ellis argues that "contained in many of the stories are voices from the dawn of European civilisation, for the Celts were one of the great founding peoples of Europe."3 Whilst one might argue that Celtic Irish civilisation was perhaps diluted through the addition of Old Norse, Norman French, and British elements, one need only remember that British civilisation is a blend of the same elements. Indeed, the language of Shakespeare, the British Empire, and Churchill owes its existence to an Anglo-Saxon/Norman French patois.4 Furthermore, Irish-born writers from medieval monks to Yeats to Gaelic modernists have contributed to the great annals of Irish literature, perhaps as vibrant as any 'First World' European literature. On the other hand, Irish literature, as a written culture, for centuries resembled a "Third World" colonial literature. Following the British attempts at Anglicisation, for centuries, the emerging literary tradition became written by and consumed by the British and Anglo-Irish elites. Yet one might argue that these writings were also Irish. Seamus 4 Deane argues that the artificially grafted Anglo-Irish literary tradition indeed belongs to Irish tradition. He writes that "there is no dispute about the integrity of this literary tradition in the English language."5 Yet Deane also asserts the difficulties in assessing this coloniser/colonised dichotomy, conceding that "the Irish experience, in all its phases, has led to an enhanced sense of the frailty of the assumptions which underlie