Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature by Julieann Veronica Ulin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature by Julieann Veronica Ulin Martin L. Warren Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature, by Julieann Veronica Ulin, pp. 216. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. $95. Jennifer Veronica Ulin’s study opens with the 1890 obituary of the landlord and politician Arthur McMurrough-Kavanagh (misidentified in the original obituary as Alexander), whose misfortune was to be born without arms and legs. Harold Frederic, the obituary’s author, identifies McMurrough-Kavanagh’s bodily misfortune as emblematic of a curse laid on the MacMurroughs for sowing the seeds of the English colonization of Ireland when the twelfth-century Diarmuid Mac Murrough invited English forces to aid him in regaining his position as ruler of Leinster. Diarmuid Mac Murrough’s fateful bringing of the English to Ireland took place between 1152–72, and in Ireland’s collective memory, those twenty years came to be characterized as the source for the modern English presence. This narrative is the origin story, the foundational colonial story, that lies at the center of Ulin’s Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature. Ulin’s study examines how writers as varied as Lady Gregory, James Joyce, Sean O’Faolain, Brendan Behan, and Jamie O’Neill employ the origin story “in order to disrupt the [End Page 154] causal relationship between the series of events in 12th-century Ireland and its modern condition, to portray modern Ireland’s entrapment within medieval narrative cycles believed to prefigure the present, or to imagine what escape might be possible from the modern legacy of the medieval period.” Ulin posits that by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers began to question the inherited narrative regarding Ireland’s misfortunes: “In inviting the medieval into the modern texts, writers over the last century and a half disrupted rather than simply preserved or revered the historical narrative, thereby dismantling and reimaging the national story.” The impetus for this questioning, according to Ulin, begins in the late nineteenth century with newly translated sources that allowed for challenges to the most influential account events seven centuries earlier, Giraldus Cambrensis’s History of the Conquest of Ireland. Ulin asserts that her book provides the first full account of how the reimagining of events disrupts “the received causal narrative of Irish history, to reframe a range of present conflicts in light of that history and to invite alternative conceptions of the modern nation.” Cambrensis’s account had established a causal relationship between the abduction of Dervorgilla and the Norman invasion. In the first chapter, “Modern Disruptions,” Ulin meticulously outlines how the nineteenth-century translation of such histories as The Annals of Clonmacnoise, The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, The Annals of Loch Cé, and The Annals of Ulster led to scholarly debate over the significance of Dervorgilla’s abduction in precipitating the Anglo-Norman invasion. Having laid the foundation, Ulin goes on to demonstrate how this scholarly debate has acted as a catalyst, down to the present day, for Irish writers to examine the origin story in their own texts. For example, in chapter one she analyzes how two early novelists understood the causal narrative of Irish history in differing ways. Charles Gibson’s 1857 novel, Dearforgil: The Princess of Brefney, A Historical Romance of 1152–1172, strongly reinforces the traditional understanding of the origin story by linking Dervorgilla’s abduction to Henry II’s appearance in Ireland in 1172, while Anna Scanlan’s 1895 novel, Dervorgilla, or the Downfall of Ireland, challenges the “gender blame game” of the origin story that portrays Dervorgilla as an Eve who brings about the fall of Ireland. Using these and other texts, Ulin demonstrates the disruptive force of such literary re-imaginings. The next chapter, “Medieval Cycles,” establishes with great skill how Yeats and Lady Gregory, among other Irish writers, employed the medieval origin story to reframe a range of conflicts present in their own times. Ulin analyzes Yeats’s 1919 play, The Dreaming of the Bones, and Lady Gregory’s 1907 play, Dervorgilla, each of which foreground the significance of Irish medieval history to the narrative construction of its modern colonial conflict. Gregory’s play centers “on the aesthetic construction of this history, focusing not...