The Irish New Woman and Emily Lawless’s Grania: The Story of an Island : A Congenial Geography

Abstract

The Irish New Woman and Emily Lawless’s Grania: The Story of an Island: A Congenial Geography Heather Edwards There is a revealing moment in Grania: The Story of an Island (1892), by Emily Lawless (1845–1913), when, upon arrival to Inishmaan, English tourists (two women and their male chaperone) are unnerved by their meeting with Grania. The Irish woman, aware of their attempt to objectify her as a native, stares proudly back at them, defiantly countering their expectations of being met by a subservient savage. Juxtaposing Grania with the English female tourists highlights how Grania complicates the tendency to stereotype the Irish as premodern and backward. The English, though they imagine themselves as more advanced and modern, appear conventional in this scene, not only in their adoption of stereotypes that they have heard and read about the Irish, but also in their own performance of womanhood. They are bound by convention in what they wear (“a flutter of skirts and parasols”1) and in their need for a male escort. Grania, on the other hand, emerges as the unconventional figure. Forceful and unchaperoned, Grania’s unconventionality lies in her defiance of the tourists’ expectations and her achievement of a self-assurance, an independence that many women of the nineteenth century could only dream of attaining. Describing the women of Inishmaan in The Aran Islands (1907), J. M. Synge commented: “The women of this island are before conventionality, and share some of the liberal features that are thought peculiar to the women of Paris and New York.”2 The use of the phrase “before conventionality” sets up a hierarchal relationship between the time associated with conventionality and the time Synge associates with the Aran Islands. In Synge’s vision, the time prior to conventionality is of higher value. In the same breath, however, Synge links the Aran Islands with the “liberal features” of cosmopolitan women, evoking a familiar fin-de- siècle figure, the rebellious New Woman3 who demands equal education, access to the public sphere, marriage reform and an [End Page 421] end to sexual double standards. The contradiction that Synge identifies in women from the West of Ireland lays bare a blind spot in discussions on New Women that have relied on assumed links among modernity, the New Woman figure, and the imperial center. This closes the possibility of geographically marginal New Women figures who express place-specific traits but nevertheless exhibit qualities and attitudes of more typical New Women. Current work on this figure typically moves beyond establishing general claims about a singular New Woman and follows up instead on a program suggested by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis: “It is time to ask not who was the New Woman? But who were the New Women?—a question that was far from settled at the fin de siècle.”4 This article undertakes such a clarification by spotlighting some of the geographic and geopolitical specificities of New Woman discourses elucidated by Lawless’s representation of an Irish New Woman in Grania: The Story of an Island. Emily Lawless’s Grania is doubly relevant for such a discussion of geography and New Women because she hails from the Aran Islands, the western margin of Ireland, which is in turn the western margin of Europe. Though a subset of Irish authors, including such diverse figures as Sarah Grand, George Moore, Rosa Mulholland and L. T. Meade, connect the turbulent history and wild geography of Ireland to a resulting rebelliousness and independence in Irish women, they most often address figures who live on the mainland of Ireland. Lawless’s Grania, by contrast, explores the production of an Irish New Woman on Inishmaan, the very island upon which Synge observed protomodern women over a decade later.5 Lawless’s novel suggests what Synge observed but was unable fully to articulate: that Inishmaan was a geography characterized by its own particular modernity, one that could produce modern women. Though unfamiliar to most readers today, Grania garnered considerable attention when it was published in 1892. The novel predates the “official” appearance of the term New Woman in 1894 in the North American Review as part of the debate between Sarah Grand and...