Violent Loyalties: Manliness, Migration, and the Irish in the Canadas, 1798–1841 by Jane G. V. McGaughey (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Violent Loyalties: Manliness, Migration, and the Irish in the Canadas, 1798–1841 by Jane G. V. McGaughey Willeen Keough McGaughey, Jane G. V.–Violent Loyalties: Manliness, Migration, and the Irish in the Canadas, 1798–1841. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. 256 p. Impressively researched and rigorously argued, Violent Loyalties interrogates the highly masculinized cultural construction of the “wild Irish” in Upper and Lower Canada in the volatile period of Irish immigration following the United Irish Rebellion in 1798 until the union of the two Canadas in 1841. Focusing on perceptions of gender, violence, and loyalty, McGaughey effectively argues that Irish masculinities were increasingly perceived by the dominant Anglo culture as violent, reckless, disloyal, and uncivilized. Often, these facile categorizations did not fit the lived experiences of Irish men in the colonies. Indeed, there were a number of Irish men who aspired to middle-class and elite “manliness”—a standard of physical and moral attributes, such as courage, honesty, integrity, and self-restraint, that usually garnered the admiration of the dominant group—but found their bid for respectability frustrated by a blanket perception of unruly Irishness. By contrast, some Irish men ignored elite standards, deploying facets of hypermasculinity to intimidate competing groups and challenge class and ethnic power relations in the [End Page 221] Canadas. McGaughey argues that loyalty intersected with all these masculinities in intriguing and often ambiguous ways. Loyalty to the British imperial order was an important element of achieving idealized manliness within the dominant culture: courage and strength in state-sanctioned expressions of violence were expected and even valued. However, violence and loyalty employed for interests other than the Crown’s (the Orange Order, for example, or the Shiners) were eschewed by hegemonic culture—the very same markers of idealized masculinity interpreted as more sordid and uncontrollable when deployed on behalf of marginalized groups. Further, says McGaughey, the perception of the “wild Irish” became transnational—a significant part of the British imperial imaginary as Irish migrants moved to various British colonies during the study period. McGaughey provides case studies of a variety of Irish masculinities that presented themselves during the study period—some that met the standards of elite manliness, some that tried but failed, and some that disregarded those ideals and maintained their own standards of manliness. We meet Irish-Protestants who left Wexford after the 1798 Rebellion and were seen by dominant Anglo culture as “reactionary losers” (p. 56), lacking the self-confidence and sense of adventure often associated with Irish-Protestant masculinity. Conversely, some 2,000 Catholics sponsored by the Peter Robinson settlement scheme, although perceived as industrious, could not lay claim to proper manliness because of the “essential” lack of moral fibre of their ethno-religious group. Col. James Fitzgibbon, a Catholic Irish speaker from Co. Limerick who converted to Protestantism, fared better in his bid for respectable masculinity; his efforts to reconcile differences between the two ethno-religious groups, especially in order to support the interests of the Crown in the 1837 Rebellion, earned him a “reputation as the ultimate example of chivalric manliness” in Canada West (p. 24). The variety of examples presented by McGaughey begs the question: how did “Irishness” so readily became monolithically violent and disloyal in popular understandings, even though Irish masculinity and manliness were situational and multifaceted in the early Canadas? The middle chapters are particularly intriguing because of the complexity of masculine aspirations and power relations they present. Chapter 4 explores the liminal space occupied by Ogle Gowan, founder and first grand master of the Orange Order in British North America. Gowan challenged the powerful Family Compact, presenting Orangeism as an alternative and preferable form of loyal masculinity. Yet, its aggressive performance of violence, electoral intimidation, and triumphalist display reinforced the concerns of dominant culture about Irish belligerence. Gowan and the Order touted the physical, rational, and moral superiority of the Anglo-Saxon over the supposedly weaker, emotional, and warlike Celt, but their bid for acceptance by the elite faltered because their violent masculinity was deemed “too Irish.” While colonial authorities were willing to deploy this deeply loyalist form of Irish masculinity on occasion in the interests of the Crown, Gowan’s...