UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE IMAGINING IRISHNESS: EVOLVING REPRESENTATIONS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENRE FICTION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By R. MICHELLE LEE Norman, Oklahoma 2012 IMAGINING IRISHNESS: EVOLVING REPRESENTATIONS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENRE FICTION A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT BY ______________________________ Dr. Daniel Cottom, Chair ______________________________ Dr. Francesca Sawaya ______________________________ Dr. Timothy Murphy ______________________________ Dr. Daniela Garofalo ______________________________ Dr. Judith Lewis © Copyright by R. MICHELLE LEE 2012 All Rights Reserved. Acknowledgements I would like to begin by thanking Daniel Cottom for directing this dissertation and seeing me through nine years of graduate work. I knew I could always depend on his good advice and practical perspective, no matter the issue. His encouragement, guidance, patience, and sense of humor helped get me to this point, and I am a stronger writer and a better scholar because of him. I am also grateful to my committee members, Francesca Sawaya, Timothy Murphy, Daniela Garofalo, and Judith Lewis. Their kind words, valuable criticism—and, sometimes, their willingness to chat over a much-needed martini—have meant so much to me. This project would not be the same without the indispensable assistance of the many librarians and archivists in Ireland and America who helped me locate research materials. Their extensive knowledge and resourcefulness made sifting through countless of boxes, letters, and manuscripts a smooth and pleasant experience. I would like to thank Mr. Robin Adams and the other librarians in the Manuscripts and Archives Research Library at Trinity College Dublin for helping me with my research on Bram Stoker, and Tara Wenger and Elspeth Healey at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library in Lawrence, Kansas for access to the P. S. O’Hegarty Collection. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to the librarians and archivists at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, who spent many hours helping me sift through the Edmund Downey collection and assisted in photographing numerous documents. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the support and encouragement of my family and friends—a simple “thank you” does not seem adequate. My parents and my iv brother have seen me through so much, my constant champions and counselors. I am privileged and humbled to be a part of them. I also wish to acknowledge my friends who kept me going throughout this long and arduous process. Heather Bastian, Scott Duguid, Orit Rabkin, and Elyon Wall-Ellis made life better during the most stressful of days. Lee Vasquez-Ilaoa and Alexandria Lockett, my other family, can never be repaid for all they have given me over the years. I am forever grateful for their friendship. There are so many others who have inspired and supported me throughout the completion of this dissertation and my graduate work. I offer my heartfelt thanks to all of you. v Table of Contents Chapter One: This Ireland, Right Now: Imagining Irishness in the Nineteenth Century ……………………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter Two: Situating the Irish Gothic: Narrative and Nation ……………… 25 Chapter Three: Locating the “Soul of the Soil” in the Big House Novel …….. 65 Chapter Four: Space, Crisis, and the Evolution of the National Tale ………... 107 Chapter Five: Rewriting Tradition: Fairy and Folk Fictions in the Nineteenth Century ……………………………………………………………….. 159 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………….. 205 vi Abstract Though it has garnered some attention from recent scholars, the field of nineteenth-century Irish literary studies remains neglected. It seems to occupy a rather nebulous space, too “foreign” to be exactly Victorian and too early to be exactly “modern.” For Victorianists, the mid- to late-nineteenth century—the heyday of the triple-decker novel—was a time ruled by such writers as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the Brontë sisters. The English novel proved the measuring stick for most literatures produced within the British Empire, and numerous Irish studies scholars do not see Ireland’s literary output as quite measuring up until the appearance of the Modernist texts of the twentieth century. My dissertation moves the conversation beyond the commonplace scholarly lament of the lack of an Irish Middlemarch toward a consideration of Anglo-Irish and Irish genre fiction—Big House fiction, Gothic fiction, the national tale, and folk and fairy tales—as a vital precursor to the national literature that would become the cornerstone of the Celtic Revival. I analyze how writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats manipulated these existing generic forms to construct new national narratives while representing historical and cultural change. Furthermore, my project establishes clear points of connection between the fields of Victorian and Irish studies by examining how “Irishness,” which is inextricably linked to rhetorics of nationalism and colonialism, is imagined, employed, and transformed in this era. vii Chapter One This Ireland, Right Now: Imagining Irishness in the Nineteenth-Century (1) Exorcizing the Specter of Instability, or Abandoning the Search for the Irish Middlemarch In the second act of Brian Friel’s 1980 play, Translations, Hugh, an aging scholar in charge of a rural hedge school, self-consciously extolls the many unique qualities of the Irish language in order to indulge the romantic fancies of Yolland, an English soldier deployed to Ireland during the Ordnance Survey of the 1830s.1 For Yolland, the Irish community of Baile Beag/Ballybeg, in which he has landed somewhat by mistake, is a kind of Shangri-La, a mystical Celtic otherworld that is utterly enthralling yet also one that proves problematically “hermetic” to outsiders. Hugh half-heartedly encourages Yolland, noting that he may one day learn to “decode” his Irish neighbors, and that the language Yolland so badly wants to learn, the language Yolland believes will grant him access to a hidden culture, is a fluid entity whose value can (and does) shift as time progresses and cultures change. Hugh encourages Yolland to “remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen—to use an image you’ll understand—it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of…fact” 1 Friel’s character, whose first name is George, shares a name with William Yolland, an actual English soldier active during the Ordnance Survey. The soldiers’ job was to survey the land for purposes of taxation, making a map of every county. Perhaps more importantly for Friel’s play, the soldiers were also tasked with creating a uniform, English map, which meant changing the names of Irish places into English translations, or, in some cases, changing the original names completely. 1 (284). Hugh’s commentary betrays a psychic awareness of a changing political landscape and of the necessity of new modes of negotiating national identity, helped along by the occupation by English forces connected to the Ordnance Survey, his students’ cautious curiosity about the English language, and Friel’s own advantageous hindsight informing his portrait of nineteenth-century, pre-Famine Donegal. The core conflict of Translations is language: who has the authority to determine the value of a language, who has the power to name and assign worth to people and places, to what extent a language serves as a signifier of national identity, what happens when the sovereignty of language is challenged, and so forth. That Ireland is “imprisoned in a linguistic contour” that operates outside of, or in opposition to, “fact,” is a sentiment that brandishes a keen double edge within the play. The idea of the Irish language, and hence Irish culture, as occupying the dual role of both asset and liability grounds the other matters addressed in Translations, namely the replacement of the hedge school with the National School, the rotting of the wheat and potato crops, and the love story between the monoglot Yolland and the local Maire, who can speak Irish, Latin, and Greek, but who knows no English save for a sentence taught to her by her aunt. Each event heralds the inevitable collision between Ireland’s culturo-political past and present. While he was writing Translations, Friel wrote in his notes that “[t]he play has to do with language, and only with language,” but concluded that “it is a political play—how can that be avoided?” (Morash 551). Even for himself, Friel could not separate depiction of Ireland from political expectation. From its time as a brand new play premiering in Derry to its present status as one of the most often revived plays at 2 the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Translations has confronted modern audiences with an issue central not only to the artistic-political landscape of nineteenth-century Ireland, but to contemporary ways of imagining and talking about the era: competing constructions of Irishness. The complications of evaluating Irish national and cultural identity, especially in terms of literary representation, continue to gnaw at contemporary critics and writers alike. More specifically, the study of nineteenth-century Irish literature remains a bit of a sticky wicket. Though it has garnered moderate attention from recent scholars, the field of nineteenth-century Irish literary studies remains neglected. It seems to occupy a rather nebulous space, too “foreign” to be exactly Victorian and too early to be exactly “modern.” For Victorianists, the mid-to late nineteenth century stands as a major high point for fiction—the heyday of the triple-decker novel—as a time ruled by such writers as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the Brontë sisters. Novels such as Great Expectations, Jude the Obscure, Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch proved the measuring stick for most literatures produced within the British Empire, the pinnacle of English imagination.