'Isn't it your own country?': The Stranger in Nineteenth-Century Irish Literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines the nineteenth-century British obsession with travel in Ireland, and the representation of the stranger in three novels soon after the Union: Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl, Edgeworth's The Absentee, and Banim's The Anglo-Irish of the Nineteenth Century. These Irish writers use the stranger to expose misconception and urge reconciliation, but the stranger undergoes an evolution in their works, from English, to Anglo-Irish, to Irish--from colonizer coming to terms with the actions of his ancestors, to Anglo-Irish landlord taking responsibility for his land and tenants, to Irishman embracing his national identity and forging his own destiny. ********** On his first day in Dublin in 1842, William Makepeace Thackeray was astonished at the announcement in the Morning Register of the consecration of the Bishop of Aureliopolis by the Pope. As he remarks in his Irish Sketch Book, published the following year: 'Such an announcement sounds quite strange in English, and in your own country as it were; or isn't it your own country?' (1) This is a provocative and disturbing question for the English traveller in Ireland, who is torn between a strong sense of possession and an even stronger sense of alienation. The Act of Union of 1801 ostensibly made England and Ireland one country, but in 1812 Edward Wakefield complained: 'We have descriptions and histories of the most distant part of the globe [...] but of Ireland, a country under our own government, we have little that is authentic.' (2) Indeed, the tendency of travellers in Ireland is to bring their experience of foreign parts to bear on this exotic place: the scenery resembles Spain, Switzerland, or Germany; Irish cabins are like Indian wigwams, Eskimo igloos, or Hottentot kraals--only worse; the people are similar to the Spanish, native Americans, Canadians, negro slaves, Lettes, Estonians, Finlanders, Russians, Hungarians--in fact, to any nation except the English. The English Quaker William Bennet, travelling in Ireland in 1847, the worst year of the Great Famine, has to remind his readers that this is happening to 'a people, not in the centre of Africa; the steppes of Asia, the backwoods of America,--not some newly-discovered tribe of South Australia, or among the Polynesian Indians,--not Hottentots, bushmen, or Esquimeaux,--neither Mahomedans nor Pagans, --but some millions of our own Christian nation at home'. (3) Ireland, for the English traveller, is uncanny precisely in Freud's use of the term (in his essay 'Das Unheimliche') as something secretly familiar which has undergone repression and returned from it; in fact, the English word 'uncanny' is an imprecise translation of the German unheimlich, which literally means 'unhomely'. (4) Ireland is both familiar and exotic, heimlich and unheimlich, for the English traveller. The problem is further complicated for Thackeray by his familiarity with and rejection of Irishness in his personal life. He told the Irish nationalist Charles Gavan Duffy that he had 'lived a good deal among Irish people in London and elsewhere', (5) but the most potent manifestation of the unheimlich in Thackeray's personal life, the most repressed and 'unhomely' aspect, was home, and this was inextricably linked to his Irish experience. Thackeray was married to an Irishwoman, Isabella Shawe, the daughter of an army officer, whom he met in Paris. Four years into their marriage, and after the births of three children (following each of which Isabella Thackeray suffered what would now be recognized as severe postnatal depression) and the death of their infant daughter Jane, Isabella descended into madness. She did so in spectacular fashion: in September 1840, as the Thackerays travelled by steamship from London to Cork so that Thackeray could begin the tour he intended to write up as The Irish Sketch Book, Isabella twice tried to commit suicide by leaping into the sea. Not surprisingly, Thackeray was forced to abandon his tour to make arrangements for his wife; when Thackeray returned to Ireland in 1842, he had placed his wife in a Paris lunatic asylum. …