Trollope as Mr Kurtz

Abstract

For Lever, the tower was a regressive icon, returning Ireland to a symbolic order that preceded the establishment of the country house. There might have been other architectural signifiers of the history of the place. Had Wolf Tone in the 1790s become the Washington of the United Irishmen, the Palladian villa might have become the locus that embodied the rational culture of the national aristoi, in the same way as Monticello, Mount Vernon and the White House in the United States. (Castletown, appropriately, is now the headquarters of the nascent Irish Georgian Society.) Alternatively Christian Gothic might have provided an ecumenical architectural symbolism for a vigorous and conservative unionism. Kylemore Abbey, it has been argued, embodies many of the ideals of Lever’s ‘Gwynne’ Abbey, if only in subliminal suggestion, and by appropriate historical mutation Kylemore has become a (Roman Catholic) school, a fountain of culture. But the tower, as icon, takes one back historically beyond even Ormond’s ‘brave mansion’ at Carrick- on-Suir to the Ur place, the fortified site that Ormond, in vain it seems, wished to transform into an open manor house. Ireland is a locus that denies the progress of (that kind of) civilisation.KeywordsLiterary RepresentationSymbolic OrderCountry HouseConservative UnionismArchitectural SignifierThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.