John McGahern and the Big House Trope in the 1980s

Abstract

John McGahern and the Big House Trope in the 1980s Yen-Chi Wu (bio) In a memorable scene in John McGahern’s screenplay The Rockingham Shoot, we see the nationalist teacher Reilly beating up his students with terrifying ferocity. On the surface, he punishes the kids for skipping class, but what really incurs his fury is that some students went to help at the annual shooting held in the Anglo-Irish Rockingham Estate. Dismissing the students for willingly skivvying and acting like peasants in the service of “our overloads,” Reilly hits the kids so hard that the cane he uses for beating gets shredded.1 By the end of the corporal punishment, Reilly—a fervent Irish nationalist and ambitious local politician—is “dishevelled, out of breath and sexually aroused.”2 Linking post-independence nationalism with unwarranted violence and perverted sexual desire is a hallmark in McGahern’s early fictions. Reilly’s abusive behavior is reminiscent of the veteran-patriarch figures in McGahern’s previous novels, such as the fiery-tempered sergeant Reegan in The Barracks (1963) and the domineering father Mahoney in The Dark (1965). But McGahern’s employment of the Big House trope in The Rockingham Shoot separates it from his earlier work. In fact, the Anglo-Irish Big House is a prominent trope in McGahern’s mid-career works, often revealing his sympathy toward the Big House residents and their marginalized status in the nationalist climate. To that end, the screenplay is indicative of McGahern’s creative outputs in the 1980s when he discovered a well-suited marriage between his social critique of conservative nationalism and the revisionist reiteration of the Big House trope. However, McGahern’s turn to revisionism and the Anglo-Irish tradition in the politically turbulent 1980s also raises questions concerning the intersections between historical debates, sectarian politics, and literary production. In the 1980s, except for the second edition of The Leavetaking, McGahern did not publish a new novel. Instead, he wrote The Rockingham Shoot, which was first broadcast on BBC Two Northern Ireland in 1987. His third short [End Page 27] story collection, High Ground, came out in 1985. The 1980s was also when he prepared Amongst Women, which was published in 1990. A noticeable thread running through his works of this period is McGahern’s interest in the Big House trope. In addition to The Rockingham Shoot, three stories in High Ground—“Oldfashioned,” “Eddie Mac,” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood”—feature Anglo-Irish Big Houses.3 Amongst Women could be read as a Catholic version of the Big House, where the rural homestead Great Meadow is an isolated estate and the Morans its aristocratic residents. While Amongst Women adopts the Anglo-Irish literary tradition elusively, McGahern’s early Big House stories often contain historical allusions and draw inspiration from his childhood memory. Some critics thus rely on biographical materials and McGahern’s admiration for Anglo-Irish writers to account for his preoccupation with the Anglo-Irish literary tradition.4 Others attend to the historical and political significance embodied in the Anglo-Irish Big House to complicate the biographical reading.5 While these discussions are admirable pursuits that shed new light on McGahern’s oeuvre, they tend to treat his Big House stories as unproblematic revisionist critique of conservative nationalism. This treatment misses the subtle differences among the stories. It also downplays the significance of the 1980s, when revisionism was under revision itself and a strand of historical revisionism that colluded with modernization ideology suffered from increasing scrutiny. While some of McGahern’s Big House stories are aligned with revisionism, others—especially Amongst Women— employ the traditionally Anglo-Irish literary tradition more creatively. The ways in which McGahern modified his use of the Big House trope deserve more attention in order to fully understand how he responded to contemporary debates on revisionism. McGahern’s Kirkwood stories—“Eddie Mac” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood”—share revisionist ideologies, and they are open to the criticism [End Page 28] voiced by postcolonial scholars. But in “Oldfashioned” and Amongst Women, McGahern is able to render the Big House trope more creatively to interrogate the throes of Ireland’s socioeconomic modernization, instigated by Seán Lemass’s...