The Myth of Sovereignty: Gender in the Literature of Irish Nationalism

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The Myth of Sovereignty: Gender in the Literature of Irish Nationalism Joseph Valente Nineteenth-century imperialism relied for much of its ideological strength upon normative tropologies of gender disjunction, exclusion and stratification. In figuring the conquerors as the exponents of a principle coded and celebrated as masculine (encompassing an aggressive will to historical progress, technical mastery and rational transcendence, et cetera) and the conquered as the embodiment of a principle stereotyped and discounted as female (encompassing a passive repose in organic cyclicality, affective immanence and domestic concerns, et cetera), imperialist discourse has inscribed a vicious symbolic circle in which sexual and socio-economic dominance reflect and authorize one another. Colonial rule and expropriation were naturalized as the latest historical signifiers of an inherently gendered cosmos; gender hierarchy and male control were naturalized as the ultimate referents of the colonial mission. As this dynamic has played itself out in the European incursions into Asia and North Africa, it has been lucidly critiqued under the rubric of Orientalism. Edward Said has famously demonstrated how Western anthropologists, ethnographers, explorers, poets and politicians of the nineteenth century constructed the Oriental as irrational, sensual, available, supine and enigmatic as opposed to the lucid, accurate, energetic and decisive Westerner. 1 But many of these same manichean disjunctions were taken to inform the relationship between imperial Britain and its nearest ward, Ireland. The nexus of the ideological modalities of Orientalism and Gaelophobia finds its personification in the prominent and formidable figure of Arthur “Bloody” Balfour, who was charged on the one hand with justifying British sovereignty in Egypt, which he did in terms of the superior knowledge and rationality of the Anglo-Saxon, and on the other with administering British sovereignty in Ireland, which he did via the brute force of the Coercion Bills. Perhaps nowhere does the link between knowledge and power stand more nakedly revealed. 2 The sexual inflection of socio-economic dominance was unusually explicit in the case of Ireland. First of all, its hybrid status as a metropolitan colony left Ireland especially susceptible of familial metaphors. [End Page 189] Long nicknamed the Sister Isle, Ireland was increasingly imaged in wifely terms as the century wore on, the implied connubial connection with England serving to naturalize that long-standing bone of contention, the Union. Noted historian Oliver MacDonagh writes, The sexual image was in constant use in nineteenth and early twentieth century England to express the dominator’s concept of the relationship between the two islands — with perhaps the Gates [Home Rule] Acts dimly perceived as a sort of counterpart to the Married Woman’s Property Acts and the British retention of the power of political decision subconsciously validated by similar psychological mixtures of assertion and insecurity. Even the Hibernophiles might explain themselves in terms of arch-femininity. Harold Bigbie, the Daily Chronicle journalist, introduced his Home Rule Tract of 1912 with Ireland a young and capable matron seated at her fireside, who raises her gray eyes to the visitor and says, with a whimsical and ingratiating play of laughter on her lips, “I wish to do my own housekeeping.” 3 This genderizing dynamic found further reinforcement in the contemporaneous popularity of crude ethno-anthropological discourses, which switched the symbolic focus from the Irish nation to the Irish race and thereby underwrote a burgeoning Anglo-Saxon supremacism. The supposedly virile efficiency of the Teutonic races was contrasted with what Matthew Arnold called the “nervous exaltation” and “feminine idiosyncracy” of the Celts, which made them, in his eyes, a naturally subordinate race. 4 Such discourses played on and played into the modern, markedly gendered schism of mind and body, thought and feeling, reason and fancy, in order to suggest that the Irish, like women in general, were constitutionally ill-equipped for the dispassionate pursuit of state and social policy and were for that reason properly dispossessed of any real historical agency. Thus, in 1843, for example, The Times was already arguing that the Irish were “a people of acute sensibilities and lively passions, more quick in feeling wrongs than rational in explaining or temperate in addressing them,” and, as such, were ripe to be “fiendishly exploited” by demagogic leaders like Daniel O’Connell. 5 Lord...