＂Pigs!＂: Gothic Racial Stereotype and Repressed Fear in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy

Abstract

Patrick McCabe’s ＂The Butcher Boy’ features a pig-like young murderer who turns out to be a butcher boy and slaughters his Anglicized neighbor like a hog. Underlining the prominent ＂pig＂ image, this essay demonstrates that pig is a Gothicized racial stereotype of the Irish people. In the long colonial era, the British had borrowed much from the Gothic trope in order to characterize Irish people as insurgent pigs. The idea of the ＂swinish multitude,＂ through Gothic rendering, was conversely transformed into a symbol of transgression for the Irish political agitators. After the nation’s independence, Irish nationalists further endeavored to imbue pride in Irish primitivism, taking it as a national emblem against the modern and British cultural influences. ＂The Butcher Boy＂ is set at the turn of the 1960s, when conservative nationalism gave way to a modernizing project. Under the values of modernization, Irish primitivism is again dismissed as derogatory. Against this backdrop, the protagonist Francie’s struggle with the pig image signifies Irish people’s unceasing negotiation of their racial stereotypes and their cultural primitivism. From this perspective, the racial stereotypes of the Irish people, which were a remnant of the colonial era, represent a ＂repressed fear＂ that recurs to the nation as it launches its modernizing project. This essay, treating the Gothicized racial stereotype as a repressed fear in ＂The Butcher Boy＂, examines Irish people’s continued struggle with their cultural primitivism in the face of the modernizing world.