County Cork, Mississippi: Elizabeth Bowen, Settler-Colonialism, and Welty's "The Bride of the Innisfallen"

Abstract

County Cork, Mississippi:Elizabeth Bowen, Settler-Colonialism, and Welty's "The Bride of the Innisfallen"1 Mary M. Burke (bio) Eudora Welty's The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, in which over half the narratives are set outside the author's native Mississippi, confounded critics and fans when it was published in 1955. Welty's 1951 title tale was inspired by her stay in the County Cork "Big House" (ancestral mansion) of writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973). As such, rather than lacking a sense of place—as was charged in 1955—the title story's opening evocation of Ireland and America's shared settler-colonial histories suggests that Welty could see her own Deep South in Bowen's County Cork. Nicholas Canny's influential thesis that the colonization of Ireland was the model for that of the "New World" explicates how the plantation system associated with the antebellum South was, in fact, created by seventeenth-century "New English" economic and cultural domination in Ireland (Canny 575, 576). The latter was the Tudor reconquest, England's attempt to reassert control over Ireland centuries after the initial Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169, which was spurred in part by the belief that this first "English" cohort had, in effect, "gone native" (Canny 592). In Amy Clukey's formulation, the difference in Irish and American terminology for similar phenomena "obscures" their "commonalities": Irish "landed estates and big houses" equate to "plantations; landlords replace planters; and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy supplants the North American plantocracy" (Clukey 64). "Big House" is an Irish usage for the manor houses of the post-Tudor reconquest Anglo-Protestant elite and is also the name of the Irish literary genre to which such dwellings are central. As such, the [End Page 145] Southern plantation novel and Ireland's Big House narrative emerge as the same genre separated by water. In self-consciously postcolonial iterations such as John Banville's Birchwood (1973), the Big House novel takes a postmodern Gothic turn in order to grapple with its problematic roots in the romanticization of colonial culture. This is paralleled by White American fiction's movement from nineteenth-century celebrations of slave plantation life to its Gothicizing and critique by Welty's Mississippi contemporary, William Faulkner (Clukey 21). Unsurprisingly, then, the southern writer is sensitive to the ghosts of the mirror settler-colonial culture. My book, Race, Politics, and Irish-America: A Gothic History, argues that Faulkner's implicitly Irish- and Scottish-American characters are haunted by the trauma that they carry to the Americas and unthinkingly revisit upon the marginalized. Welty, who seldom used non-southern settings, likewise simultaneously summons up unfinished American and Irish history in "The Bride of the Innisfallen." First published in the New Yorker in 1951, the story was inspired by Welty's visit during the previous year to Bowen's Court, the ancestral County Cork mansion of Anglo-Irish modernist Elizabeth Bowen whose antecedents came to Ireland with the reconquest campaign of the seventeenth century. Indeed, the collection in which that story was republished in 1955, The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, was dedicated to Bowen. Dawn Trouard notes that Welty's recall of her trip to Bowen's southern Irish manse consciously conflates the landscapes and terminologies of Ireland and the American South: the fuchsia hedges of Bowen's Court remind the American author of Savannah, while the Irish novelist's hospitality is ambiguously ascribed to her "Southerner" identity (Welty, qtd. in Trouard 258; the emphasis is Welty's). Bowen's Gothicizing of the Big House in her 1929 novel The Last September emerges from self-awareness regarding her family's settler-colonial origins. Taking its cue from the sentient house of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1840), the novel's manse in the twilight of the colonial presence in Ireland is described from a distance: "It seemed to huddle its trees close in fright and amazement at the wide light lovely unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set" (Bowen, Last September 92). The Bowens descended from a Welsh ancestor who was granted confiscated land in Ireland because he had fought with...