https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ Theses Digitisation: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/research/enlighten/theses/digitisation/ This is a digitised version of the original print thesis. Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] The Position of the Child in Irish Literature Mick Mooney B.Sc. Honours Mathematics and Physics M.A. Honours English Literature Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Glasgow Faculty of Arts Department of English Literature September 2007 Mick Mooney 2007 ProQuest Number: 10393936 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely e v e n t that the author did not send a c o m p le te manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if m aterial had to be rem oved, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10393936 Published by ProQuest LLO (2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C o d e Microform Edition © ProQuest LLO. ProQuest LLO. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 ■ Î^SG O W iWgARy: ABSTRACT The thesis is fundamentally an interrogation of what is called the 'position of the child' vis- à-vis the 'position of the father'. The concept of the child as defined by age, knowledge, experience, or innocence is dismissed. The concept of position is drawn from Lacan's Schema L and Schema R which map out relations between tlie registers of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. Schema L is used to define the position of the child, or die subject who is both defined and excluded fi'om a relation, and also what is called the position-as- child in a father-occluded Imaginary, produced fi'om a culture with phallic jouissance as its dominant mode of pleasure and pain. The logic of such a cultui e is of the phallic exception. Schema R is skewed in Figure 3 to sketch a model of 'phallic mobility' and 'feminine mobility' between the father and child positions, as well as a Law of the Father and a Law of Desire. Foucault's analysis of Western sexuality from the eighteenth century onwards is proffered as the historical basis for the Law of the Father, when the parent-child relation becomes preponderant as the socialisation process. Around this period, literature develops a notably half-articulated (Imaginary) relation between writer and reader in Sentimental and Romantic discourse, and the position-as- cliild becomes a staple of aesthetic as well as regulatory, political interest. The military and structural violence of colonialism forcibly imposes an English 'position-as-child' on a native populace. The colonial ideology comprising a half-articulated, nostalgic, analeptic and Imaginary framing of both native cultur e and the child is considered a means for overdetermining a proleptic path the native and child then must follow towai*ds a colonial and patriarchal position of the father. The glaring (phallic) exception to half-articulation is Romantic Hamlet. Dispossessed of land and title, incredibly articulate yet politically inept, Hamlet falls every time in Act 5 just like MacPherson's ideal for the Celt in Ossian (1765). How the reception of Hamlet in Romanticism peculiarly ignores the question of land, and how Hamlet invites a neighbouring, Nordic nation to establish a government is, at a period of colonial expansion, eminently gratuitous. Hamlet is the idealised position-as-child in a historically situated, colonial-inspired, father-occluded Imaginary. The main body of the thesis then proceeds by chapters on authors and the voices of characters reaching for a hearing in a father-occluded Imaginary. In Chapter 1,1 first consider two tales by William Carleton set side-by-side in Traits and Stories o f the Irish Peasantry. The tales occur before the Famine and focus on two father- son pairs, and I argue the fi'anie of authoritative relations between father and son are representative of two divergent political attitudes current in the land. The third tale, wiitten in 1861 and set in Dublin city, describes a traumatic search by a boy for a good father in what is, I argue, a parable of the Famine, its causes, and aftermath. A middle-class gentleman becomes a femme fatale over a Dublin underclass. Chapter 2 is another tripartite chapter first of all examining May Laffan's satirical novel, Hogan M.P. (1876). Laffan outlines the semiotic exchange of the position-as-cliild as stylizing the scene of middle-class seduction. The short story, The Game Plen^ illustrates how the infant functions as a mediator of the private-public divide for women in a crowded Dublin slum. As such, the infant, for an irremediably short time, represents an impoverished woman's only measui’e of incontestable wealth. In Flitters, Tatters and the Counsellor^ tlnee Dublin street 'arabs' have uninhibited access among themselves to father and child positions, providing them an enviable and culturally barred jouissance. Desire and jouissance are cur tailed for children, especially in acting - the cult of childhood's natui'alism takes over. A prescribed vanishing of the position of the child takes place in romance, the fetish of the voiceless infant, and industrial schooling. This vanishing is the ideologically demanded aphanasis of the subject of desire in a father-occluded Imaginary. Just such a disappearance is politically staged by Yeats in The Land o f Heart's Desire^ the centrepiece of Chapter 3. The voice and desire of'The Child' cannot be corralled between the pragmatic and Miltonic voices of a strong farmer and Catholic priest. In Chapter 4, the work of Beckett is considered as exemplary of a metonymic discourse neither inliibited by the nothingness of the signifier nor the Oedipal copyright of the Law of the Father matching proper voices to proper places in a text. The elaboration in Chapter 5 of what are key themes - the nationalized womb, how only the fertile are Real, and romance and the position-as-child - ar e invoked together for a discussion of the 'politics of lovelessness' in Edna O'Brien's Country Girls Trilogy. The well-noted rmcertainties in the work Brian Friel are considered next in Chapter Six, uncertainties arising from a profomid lawlessness linked to a loss of gesture and responsibility, both to the self and others, all this for the sake of protecting what is in the post-colonial context, the fragile position of the native father. The fragile father-son relation is bound over to complacency, seriality and stereotyping. Forms of serial lovelessness and lawlessness ar e considered in Chapters 5 and 6 as the utmost of the post-colonial condition. The final chapter discusses ways in which the plays of Marina Carr transgress the division of public and private and the burden of fertility assigned to women. Carr's female protagonists tirade men and wield a taste for both pleasure and trauma without resorting to victim status. If Beckett evacuated the position-as-cliild of its potency as a prop for the writer-father, Carr renounces the position-as-child as a shelter for either women or " children, and instead, assigns responsibility to all, bai’ none. ■s Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1 - William Carleton 26 Chapter 2 - May Laffan Hartley 61 Chapter 3 - W, B, Yeats 91 Chapter 4 - Samuel Beckett 106 Chapter 5 - Edna OBrien 134 Chapter 6 - Brian Friel 166 Chapter 7 - Marina Carr 192 Appendix A - The Black Doctor (1861) 232 Appendix B - Figures and Movements 233 Figure One Movements - Schema L to the Child, Sin, Purgatory, and Famine 234 Figure Two Movements - The Graphs of Sex nation to a father-occluded Imaginary 242 Figure Three Movements - The Position of the Child to the Position of the Father_____ 245 Figure Four and No Movement - The Position-as-Child, or Hamlet Redux___________ 257 Bibliography 258 Acknowledgements Paddy Lyons inspired and guided the initial project, while Vassiliki Kolocotroni made life possible for a long stretch of it in the middle - my thanks to both of them. Andrew Radford provided important readings, support and suggestions, and Nigel Leask helped greatly in organising matters at an important juncture. My deepest thanks go to Jolin Coyle for his help and kindness, both personal and intellectual, in guiding the project to its conclusion. Many crucial amendments and changes of emphasis, as well as the final structure of the thesis, were inspired by or came directly from his suggestions. Donal Fenlon, the librarian, provided timely help with further research material fiom the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, and Mrs Mairead Maume, an independent scholar, directed me to the existence and importance of Carleton's The Black Doctor. I thank them both for their kindness. Finally, I would like to thank the AHRC for tlie scholarship funding which enabled tins thesis to begin in the first place. 1 References and Abbreviations References to Milton's work are from The Norton Anthology o f English Literature, Sixth Edition, Volume 1.