Ireland's Others: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ireland’s Others: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture José Lanters (bio) Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Ireland’s Others: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. xi + 304 pp. $30 (paper). The "Others" in the title of Elizabeth Cullingford's illuminating study of gender, ethnicity, and class in Irish literature and popular culture are numerous, and both real and fictive. In addition to Ireland's own "internal Others," which she lists as "women, gays, abused children, travellers, and the working class" (6-7), she also discusses the reversal of the Irishman on the English stage, the Irish construction of the stage Englishman. In the first part of the book, beginning with Dion Boucicault, and moving on to George Bernard Shaw, Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, and Neil Jordan, Cullingford traces the representation of Irish-English relations in gendered terms, uncovering a narrative of homosocial or -erotic bonding between English and Irish males that serves as an alternative to the familiar metaphor of the Union as rape or heterosexual marriage. She argues that, of all the stereotypes about Celt and Anglo-Saxon, gendered and sexual metaphors are the most persistent formulation of the politics of national difference, and this may go some way to explaining why her study is so heavily weighted toward this theme, and why other Others she mentions, such as travellers and the working class, are given comparatively short shrift. Part two of the study focuses on analogies between the Irish predicament and the tribulations of other civilizations. Some of these are (safely) long-dead, such as those of Greece, Rome, and Carthage. The discussion in the opening chapter of this section focuses primarily on McGuinness's Carthaginians, although there are also readings of Seamus Heaney and Friel. Other analogies analyzed here refer to contemporary groups involved in postcolonial struggles apparently similar to the Irish experience, like African Americans and Native Americans. Beginning with a reading of James Joyce in light of Charles Vallancey's theory about the origins of the Irish language in Phoenician Africa, Cullingford extends this ethnic debate to a reading of contemporary authors like Roddy Doyle, whose The Commitments famously—and, as she argues, precariously—compares North Dubliners to African Americans, and to representations of Native Americans and cowboys in works like Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, which is mainly discussed through Jordan's film version. The third section of the book deals with "Literary and Political Canons," and begins with a chapter about the ways in which mass culture incorporates and transforms the classics of the past. This initial focus on cultural ideology (appropriations by American, English, and Irish "low" or popular culture of icons of Irish "high" culture such as W. B. Yeats), while fascinating in itself, does at times seem to move perilously far away from the book's declared focus on "Ireland's Others," particularly given its emphasis on gender and ethnicity. This is remedied in the next chapter, on the representation of Eamon de Valera [End Page 81] in Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, whichreturns to a discussion of sexual and gendered metaphors, while the concluding chapter of the book is a feminist defense of Heaney and Sinead O'Connor in light of attacks on them by other feminists, in the context of Margot Harkin's Hush-a-Bye Baby, a film to which, as the author points out, "feminist scholars (myself included) return again and again" (5). Ireland's Others is a wide-ranging study packed with fascinating insights and enlightening readings, so it might seem a little churlish to remark that Cullingford does return "again and again" to the same handful of authors, and that her preoccupation with McGuinness, Jordan, Harkin and, to a significantly lesser extent, Friel, Heaney, Shaw, Yeats, and Joyce, does perhaps take something away from the book's potential scope. It is not surprising in itself that McGuinness's plays and Jordan's films are given so much attention, given their consistent use of gender as political metaphor; the analysis of Friel, however, is mainly confined to Translations, with only casual mentions of Dancing at Lughnasa and...