Maud Gonne Research Articles

"Easter, 1916" at its Centennial: Maud Gonne, Augusta Gregory and the Evolution of the Poem

"Easter, 1916" at its Centennial: Maud Gonne, Augusta Gregory and the Evolution of the Poem

The Woman Image in Yeats’s Later Poetry: Why the Dancer, Not Maud Gonne or Crazy Jane?

Maud Gonne and Crazy Jane have long been critical focuses in discussing the imagery of Yeats’s women, which symbolizes the Irish identity. Yeats, however, sticks to the dancer imagery throughout his writings, while being fascinated with Maud Gonne and even after he had finished with the Crazy Jane poems. It may be that the dancer transcends both Maud Gonne and Crazy Jane, both of whom being not confined to the dominant ideology of their society. They are complimentary, on the levels not only individual but also symbolic, social, cultural and national, each representative of the upper minority and the lower majority—with the poet’s growing confidence in the wisdom of the Irish people, who are crude but penetrate the duality of life. The dancer imagery is Yeats’s ultimate Image of the Woman who extends to all the levels of identities—personal, social, and national—toward redemption, merging the two opposite yet complementary images of women, Maud Gonne and Crazy Jane.

‘Victor Hugo, the Irish ‘Misérables, and Fenian women in the nineteenth-century’

When W.B. Yeats first met Maud Gonne, he told her of his ambition to be an ‘Irish Victor Hugo.’ Indeed the influence of France’s greatest national poet on Yeats appears to have been profound and lasting. In his youth Yeats claims to have read Hugo’s entire works, he quotes frequently form Hugo, and he spoke of Hugo at his meeting with the French poet Paul Verlaine in Paris. While the leader of French Romanticisim no doubt very pleasingly appealed to Yeats’ literary sensibilities, his political humanism, and his somewhat outlandish spiritual beliefs, the links between France’s greatest national icon and Ireland are in fact far greater than has ever been acknowledged. This article seeks to explore Hugo’s little-acknowledged, though decisive role as a spokesperson for the Irish ‘Misérables’ during the nineteenth-century. As well as examining Hugo’s much-overlooked support for the plight of the irish, this article will move on to ...

The Impact of the Legendary Love between Yeats and Maud Gonne on Yeats’s Creation of Love Poems

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) is an Irish poet, dramatist and prose writer. T. S. Eliot considers him as the greatest English poet in the twentieth century. The classic and legendary love between Yeats and Maud Gonne is greatly well-known in the Western World and permeates from generation to generation. This essay gives a brief introduction to this romantic and sorrowful legend of love and attempt to analyze its impact on Yeats’s creation of love poems in different period of life.

W. B. Yeats & George Yeats: The Letters

After his marriage to Bertha Georgie Hyde Lees in a register office in Paddington on 20 October 1917, W. B. Yeats fell into ‘great gloom’. He accused himself of having ‘betrayed three people’, his ex-lover Maud Gonne, Gonne's daughter Iseult who had rejected his proposal of marriage earlier that year, and his new wife. Then, on honeymoon, his new wife surprised him. It was, he wrote, ‘something like a miraculous intervention’: ‘[George] got a piece of paper and talking to me all the while so that her thoughts would not affect what she wrote, wrote these words (which she did not understand) “with the bird” (Iseult) “all is well at heart. Your action was right for both …”’.1 The uplift in Yeats's mood which followed this ‘discovery’ that George possessed the talent for automatic writing is an early tribute to the power of her discretion – as well as to her cleverness at quelling her husband's preoccupation with Iseult – but it also marks the beginning of a new collaboration which led to Yeats claiming early in 1918 that ‘a very profound, very exciting mystical philosophy’ was coming ‘in strange ways to George and [himself]’.2 This collaboration between husband and wife culminated in the system elaborated in A Vision, which was first published in 1925.

The Irish Girls' Rising: Building the Women's Labor Movement in Progressive-Era Chicago

The Chicago Women's Trade Union League (CWTUL), inaugurated at Hull House in 1904, had its roots in the 1900 stockyard strike of Irish women, the short-lived Maud Gonne Club, and Local 183 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, the first women's union in the stockyards. Mary E. McDowell, head resident of the University of Chicago Settlement and advisor to Local 183, served as CWTUL's first president from 1904 to 1907. The working-class leadership of the Chicago branch — unlike its better-known counterpart in New York — was “old immigrant” (primarily Irish Catholic but also including Germans and Scandinavians) with a distinct culture that derived from its ethnic makeup and its settlement-house attachments. In “The Irish Girls' Rising,” Suellen Hoy explores these developments and highlights CWTUL's significance in building the women's labor movement in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century.

Inside Ireland’s Women’s Prisons Past and Present (review)

Reviewed by: Inside Ireland’s Women’s Prisons Past and Present Sarah McNeely Inside Ireland’s Women’s Prisons Past and Present, by Christina M. Quinlan, pp. 272. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011. $74.95 Distributed by International Specialized Booksellers, Portland, OR. Christina M. Quinlan’s Inside Ireland’s Women’s Prisons Past and Present provides a comprehensive sociological and ethnographic study of Irish women’s experiences with incarceration from the nineteenth century to the present day. A pointed critique of the gendered ideological impulses behind the criminalization of women and of the poor conditions that have characterized women’s imprisonment in Ireland, Inside Ireland’s Women’s Prisons questions the purported rehabilitative function of the patriarchal Irish prison institution with regard to its female inmates. As Mary Robinson states in the foreword, “It is a publication that is not always a comfortable read but is an essential one for all involved and interested in our prison system – and what it says about us as a society.” Quinlan’s research, drawing on memoirs, prison records, news stories, photographs, and interviews with prison officials and prisoners themselves, presents an attitude of advocacy with regard to women prisoners in Ireland. The first chapter clearly articulates the theoretical impulse of Quinlan’s research: to bring into light the discursive construction of the female prisoner and her subjectivity in relation to her gender and to the institution that contains her. In this helpful chapter, Quinlan takes care to explain the major concepts and terminology—particularly her utilization of the terms “discourse,” “subjectivity,” and “space”—that motivate and guide her study of women’s imprisonment in Ireland. Quinlan’s explanations may occasionally seem redundant, but they clarify maters for the nonspecialist reader. This is especially true as she moves from explaining the historical perspective of women’s imprisonment in Ireland to the socio-ethnographic work of examining female prisoners’ representation, both by others and by themselves. Chapter two, “The Historical Perspective,” explains the petty, nonviolent nature of the majority of women’s criminal activity. Female imprisonment in [End Page 152] Ireland has been generally as short-term but frequent through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter three, “The Contemporary Perspective,” continues this explanatory work, describing the state of women’s prisons in present-day Ireland. Not much has changed over time with regard to the female prison population, which remains transitory and unstable largely because of the petty nature of women’s crimes and high rates of recidivism. Chapter four, “The Women’s Perspectives,” profiles Irish women prisoners to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the population of imprisoned women. When Quinlan transcribes interviews conducted with the prisoners, the immediacy and pathos of their words offer compelling support for her claims about the troubled construction of identity in the prison environment. Chapter five, “The Scholar’s Perspective ” reviews the extant body of literature relating to women’s imprisonment. Quinlan begins by tracing the two strands of analysis in this research, one of which represents women in prison as victims, and the other which represents them as resisters. Following this review of literature, “Space and Identity in Women’s Prisons,” moves into more theoretical territory. Here, Quinlan invokes the theories of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to expand on her observations of institutional power and women’s performed identity as prisoners. Quinlan concludes her study by restating her claim that Irish constructions of femininity have had profound influences on women’s experiences with imprisonment. Her overarching argument, that women prisoners have been and continue to be the most marginalized members of Irish society, finds strong support here A monograph entirely concerned with the Irish prison system might at first glance seem sufficiently esoteric to discourage many readers. Despite the book’s specialized subject matter and in-depth historical overview, Quinlan produces an engrossing, relevant book. Scholars of women’s history and the Irish press will also find value here: for example, a section of the historical overview includes a discussion of such women nationalists of the nineteenth century as Maud Gonne, who, as middle-class, educated women, did not fit the profile of the disenfranchised female prisoner. Quinlan also discusses the press’s skewed representation of...

Inseparable and No Longer Subsequent: The Relocation and Representation of Women in Irish Theatre Practices

Women as playwrights, directors, designers and actors have played an indisputably integral part in cultivating the theatrical landscapes of Ireland, but their work, however, has largely been overlooked. That said, this is not a new lament: the last twenty years of Irish theatre scholarship have sought to redress this gender imbalance by looking to women's involvement in the ‘imagining’ of the Irish nation. Colm Tóibín's Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (Lilliput Press, 2002) famously confirmed Augusta Gregory's co-authorship (with W. B. Yeats) of Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902). C. L. Innes's widely known Women and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935 (The University of Georgia Press, 1993), shed light on the ideologies behind the iconography of Mother Ireland, and Mary Trotter's Ireland's National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2001) revealed the impact of Maud Gonne and the all-women society the Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Erin) on the development of the Irish National Theatre Society.

A Study on the Political Meanings of Maud Gonne Reflected in Yeats's Poems in 1910s and 1920s

A Study on the Political Meanings of Maud Gonne Reflected in Yeats's Poems in 1910s and 1920s

Gender and the Postcolonial Archive

Gender and the Postcolonial Archive Karen Steele (bio) Molly O'Hagan Hardy's article aptly notes the opportunities and perils attendant upon archival triage. As she observes, ideology is actively at work when archivists appraise what gets bought or sold, what is precious or ephemeral, what is catalogued and stored for others to study, and what is discarded, rejected, lost, or forgotten. The dogged impenetrability of Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh's Sinn Féin notebook at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) serves as a potent example of the challenges for critics invested in uncovering women's political agency during Ireland's revolutionary years (1916-1923). Literary historians like Hardy, who discover and analyze marginalized voices, untold stories, and forgotten artifacts, can never comfortably assume that the taxonomies of the postcolonial archive will remain static and stable, accessible and usable. In my attempts to unearth the buried stories of Irish nationalist women, I am often confronted by the fact that the postcolonial archive turns out to be both capacious and wily. Because so many of the documents stored and shelved are resistant [End Page 55] to library catalogues and scholarly consolidation, they seem to materialize serendipitously and disappear unpredictably. As I was thinking about the archival mystery of Nic Shuibhlaigh's notebook, I was also nightly rereading to my youngest son the last installment of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, . . . and the Deathly Hallows (2007). I was struck, in so doing, by how much the postcolonial archive resembles Hogwarts's Room of Requirement, a vast, unplottable area on the third floor of this venerable school for witches and wizards. As Harry discovers, the Room of Requirement only materializes for Hogwarts students and staff who are truly in need. For those with an urgent "requirement," an aged, sturdy door unbolts to a room of cathedral-like proportions, though it can contract or expand, reveal treasures or hide secrets, depending upon its occupant's needs. Hogwarts students and professors, it turns out, use the room for both noble and dubious, ideological and practical purposes: to train subversive students in banned knowledge, to stash evidence of alcoholism or theft, to obscure the real source of one's academic brilliance, or to provide a private lavatory when one is desperate for relief. So too, the postcolonial archive proves to be tensile and compressive; within its elastic walls, we can discover objects capable of altering our knowledge about the past and providing new tools to confront the present. The postcolonial archive, of course, has never settled in any one location. Just as the manuscripts and letters of canonical writers such as W. B. Yeats or Lady Gregory are scattered in Ireland, Great Britain, and the United States, so too, the correspondences, manuscripts, and papers of radical Irish women are housed in well-known and hidden locations. To trace the textual history of nationalist women such as Máire Nic Shuibhlaigh, Maeve Cavanagh, or Constance Markievicz, one must access both rarified locations—the National Library of Ireland, the National Archives, the British Library, the Public Records Office, or the HRC—and small, specialized, or forgotten repositories, such as the Bureau of Military History, the myriad nationalist periodicals now available on microfilm, or online databases such as ProQuest. For those lacking resources to travel across continents or oceans, the postcolonial archive has repeatedly answered its researchers' "requirement" through the republication of primary source materials. Barbara Harlow [End Page 56] and Mia Carter's indispensable Archives of Empire, for example, reprints a broad array of documentary evidence of Britain's imperial project during the long nineteenth century, in locations as far flung as India and Egypt. As the editors note, this postcolonial archive documents and organizes for its readers "the richness of the substantial critical resources and the substantive grounds for the critique of imperialism" (2003, xxii). For those interested in Irish nationalist women, excellent primary materials can be found in Margaret Ward's In their Own Voice (1995), Maria Luddy's Women in Ireland 1800-1918 (1995), the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, volumes 3 and 4 (Bourke et al. 2002), or my Maud Gonne's Irish Nationalist Writings (2004). Each of these sources provides...

Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (review)

{ 280 } Book Reviews perhaps too obviously a short paper on a specific conference theme. Nonetheless , even these shorter essays provide descriptive introductions to plays that are not necessarily widely known to scholars of the Ameri­ can theatre, particularly those by younger playwrights. This is an interdisciplinary volume in which interpretations of the historical and cultural past of two nations promote an understanding of how national, ethnic, and personal identities are shaped. It will interest those teaching and researching North Ameri­ can drama for the accent placed on the significance of form and the innovative approaches to plays as constructing memory, history, and identity. Barbara Ozieblo — University of Málaga \ \ Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation. Edited by Melissa Sihra. Foreword by Marina Carr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. xix + 241 pp. $74.95 cloth. On April 2, 1902, in St. Teresa’s Hall in Dublin, British-­ born and fervent Irish Nationalist Maud Gonne indelibly created the title role of Kathleen ni Houli­ han, the symbolic Mother Ireland who inspires her native sons to defend her honor by becoming martyrs for her—the Nation—in her quest for independence. Exemplifying the “overall disempowerment of women in mainstream channels of artistic expression” (9), William Butler Yeats claimed sole authorship of ­ Kathleen ni Houlihan. Scholarship, however, has proven that Lady Augusta Greg­ ory penned the majority of the play. Gregory remains the token woman represented in the canon of Irish dramatic literature, a monolithic figure of Irish drama whose undeniable contributions have nonetheless overshadowed those of other women of the Irish theatre for the last one hundred years. It is appropriate , then, that Kathleen ni Houlihan, a play for which her authorship has only recently been restored, is perhaps her most important work. The character of Kathleen, promoting feminized concepts of the nation, determined subsequent portrayals by male Irish playwrights of Irish women as icons, disavowing their lack of agency as subordinates in the patriarchy (1). Lady Gregory’s creation of Kathleen ni Houlihan (exacerbated by the hypnotic performance of the striking and influential Maud Gonne) as well as other female characters symbolizing Ireland dominated patriarchal twentieth-­ century Irish drama as the most common representation of women. { 281 } Book Reviews Certainly,as Janelle Reinelt asserts in her preface,contemporary playwrights such as Marina Carr and Marie Jones have some level of recognition, as their works have been produced internationally, and “most theatre scholars and avid theatregoers will have heard of Lady Gregory and associated her with early Irish Nationalism” (xii). However, as Reinelt adds,“few will know in any detail many of the women in between”(xii). Marina Carr notes in her foreword that ­ Melissa Sihra’s edited collection begins to name the “vanished women” (xi) and their unknown or forgotten plays. Sihra, who is interested in representation as well as authorship, proposes that her collection will further attempt “to interrogate the signification of ‘woman’ as idealized trope of nation and to look at the ways in which the works of later Irish dramatists either contests or per­ petu­ ates this legacy” (1). Sihra commissioned twelve essays by Irish academics, arranged chronologically “in order to enable the historical, social and thematic contexts to emerge organically” (11), with brief interchapters providing insight regarding the “governing of gender, sexuality and the female body . . . as encoded by both the Catholic Church and Irish Constitution” (1) that twentieth-­and early-­ twenty-­ first-­ century female playwrights observed, reported, and challenged. Eamon de Valera’s 1937 Constitution of the Republic of Ireland enshrined woman in the home, but urbanization, a booming economy, demands for equal pay and education, and the signal election of Mary Robinson as the first female president in 1990 reflect the evolving status of women since the Republic’s founding , and the fairly recent decriminalization of contraceptives (1985), homosexuality (1993), and divorce (1995)—as well as vocal demands for the legality of abortion—­ reflect the Catholic Church’s waning political power following allegations of child sex abuse by the clergy and other scandals. Sihra acknowledges that the chronological framework allows for “moments of intersection and thematic interrelationship [that] have materialized in the volume of their own accord ” (11). While not a comprehensive...

Yeats and Maud Gonne and “A Bronze Head”

Yeats and Maud Gonne and “A Bronze Head”

Critical companion to William Butler Yeats: a literary reference to his life and work

Irish poet William Butler Yeats is often considered the premier English-language poet of the 20th century, but he was also an important playwright, folklorist, critic, and politician. Yeats' works vary from complex and highly symbolic to short and straightforward, making him popular in both high school and college literary classes. His most famous poems - including The Second Coming, Easter 1916, and Among School Children - are among the best known in the world. This heavily illustrated new volume is essential for high school and college students interested in this prolific poet. Coverage of this title includes: all of Yeats' important poems, as well as all his volumes of poetry; all his plays and important drama-related topics, including Dublin's Abbey Theatre, which he helped establish; his critical and other nonfiction writing, including his famous autobiographiesImportant themes in his work; friends and literary influences, including Maud Gonne and James JoyceAppendixes, including a chronology, bibliographies of primary and secondary sources; and, more.

Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival (review)

Reviewed by: Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival Kenneth Shonk Jr. Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival by Karen Steele, pp. 273. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007. $24.95 (paper). In the coda to Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival, Karen Steele notes that Constance Markievicz is the lone feminine presence among the Irish heroes memorialized in marble in St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin. For Steele, this symbolizes the manner in which many of key female figures of the Revival period have been excluded from the nation’s historical memory. This monograph goes far toward establishing the proper status of women within Irish nationalism during the Revival. Steele demonstrates that women were not mere supporters, but rather, vital entities within the movement. Steele’s assessment of the “advanced nationalist press” adds a much-needed and most welcome corrective to Ireland’s masculine, heroic national narrative. By examining Ireland’s radical press in the years leading up to the Easter Rising, Steele discusses the nexus between high and low culture and its impact on the events of 1916. This intersection between feminism, anticolonial nationalism, and socialism served as a vital, invigorating force to the cause of Irish independence. The push for a free Ireland served as an entrepôt for many Irish feminist intellectuals into both the nationalist cause, and—as many believed at the time—entry as well into what was seen as an assured place within an independent Irish state. Yet the involvement of women in the nationalist cause was more than an external association, with such women as Alice Milligan, Maud Gonne, Delia Larkin, and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, as well as such organizations as Cumann na mBan and Inghinidhe na hÉireann playing key roles in defining and advancing the cause of Ireland’s independence. As Steele notes, [End Page 157] the “advanced nationalist press provided a unique public forum for debates about Ireland’s future, and fertile ground for germinating ideas about what cultural and political organizations should develop.” This is exemplified by such journals as the Shan Van Vocht, which served as a rhetorical proving ground for noted Revivalists and nationalists, including James Connolly, Douglas Hyde, George Russell, and William Butler Yeats. The body of Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival comprises five chapters advancing chronologically from the 1890s up through the 1910s. The involvement of women in the nationalist cause evolved over time, and in a direction that was steadily less feminist. Women’s early inclusion and participation in the movement was eroded, eventually becoming a thoroughgoing marginalization in the years following the establishment of the Irish Free State. Steele argues that the women of Ireland were the custodians of Celtic values as well as purveyors of the feminist cause. Such sentiments are evident in the opening chapter, in which Steele uses the Shan Van Vocht and the nationalist-tinged romances of Alice Mulligan to demonstrate a growing intersection between Irish nationalism and feminist interests. From the ashes of the Shan Van Vocht, which ceased publication in 1899, emerged the United Irishman, a periodical that brought together the interests of Irish feminists, socialists, and nationalists. Along with the formation of the Inghinide na hÉireann as a feminine response to British colonialism, the involvement of women in this era counters assertions that the Irish feminist cause failed to live up to its potential. Additionally, the writings of Maud Gonne and Arthur Griffith sought to educate what they thought would be a revolutionary generation with women as domestic nation-builders continuing their agenda in the home. It was from this intellectual foundation that the more-recognized agents of Irish feminism emerged. With the elevation of Constance Markievicz and Cumann na mBan to prominence, a complex discourse of allegory and militancy developed that was indicative of revolutionary feminism, but also evidence of an audience savvy to the clues and nuances of the advanced nationalist press. In a general sense, Steele’s work is demonstrative of how cultural nationalism becomes imbued into cultural discourse by means of intellectual input—and in the case of Ireland during the Gaelic Revival, we see how women operated inclusively within the push for...

“Colleen Modernism”: Modernism’s Afterlife in Irish Women’s Writing

S    twentieth-century Irish women’s writing can make use of a rich body of single author monographs, intellectual biographies, and insightful critical articles as well as the wealth of material provided in volumes  and  of The Field Day Anthology of IrishWriting. A number of these studies address the biographical links between twentieth-century Irish women writers and influential modernists, informing readers, for instance, that Maud Gonne encountered the Futurist Valentine de St. Point in Paris, or that Mary Colum hobnobbed with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, and Elinor Wylie in America. But few address in any sustained way how these writers engaged with modernist imperatives. In recent years, Elizabeth Bowen has been situated convincingly among the pantheon of modernists.1 However, with a few notable exceptions, experimental Irish women writers like Brigid

Dying for Ireland: Violence, Silence, and Sacrifice in Dorothy Macardle's Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924)

Dying for Ireland:Violence, Silence, and Sacrifice in Dorothy Macardle's Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924) Jennifer Molidor Although the Irish struggle for independence provided increased access to the public sphere for republican women like Dorothy Macardle (1889–1958), women's political activism also frequently provoked scorn from male nationalists. William T. Cosgrave, for instance, responded to Cumann nam Bán's opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty by publicly blaming the bitter Irish Civil War on women's interference. Cosgrave claimed female activists were no "ordinary females"; quieting this "women's war" meant instigating a so-called "war on women."1 In 1922, this antagonism was demonstrated in a series of raids aimed at weakening the IRA by arresting female republican advocates like Dorothy Macardle, Maíre Comerford, and Mary Mac Swiney. Though Macardle and others protested their detention by going on a hunger strike, many were held without charge until the end of the civil war in 1923. Writing to the Freeman's Journal, the Irish Times, and the Irish Independent from Mountjoy Prison in 1922, Dorothy Macardle responded to Cosgrave's remarks on the detention and hunger strike of her friend, Mary Mac Swiney. "We were maintaining the Republican idea as writers, speakers, editors and members of the Publicity Departments Staff,—we were, that is, engaged, like Miss Mac Swiney, in speaking truths which the Provisional Government desires to keep concealed."2 By documenting the events of the Irish Civil War as an historian; by addressing injustices as a journalist; and representing the conflicts between nationalist and feminist agendas in her fiction, Macardle's life was devoted to "speaking truths." Most of Macardle's short story collection, Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924) , was written during her internment in Mount joy and Kilmainham Gaols. The collection draws attention to overlooked sacrifices made by women [End Page 43] in the Irish cause. Stories like "The Brother" and "The Prisoner" present heroic male narratives of rebellion, while other stories, like "By God's Mercy" and "A Story Without An End," address women's experiences as wives and mothers of male republicans. Macardle's stories "The Return of Niav" and "The Portrait of Roisin Dhu," however, attend to the relationships between women, and demonstrate what Gerardine Meaney calls "an acute awareness of the dangers of women's symbolic function in nationalist ideology."3 The received narrative of Irish nationalism has tended to presume the masculine nature of the fight for an Irish republic, though recent scholarship has shown that women fought and suffered alongside their male compatriots, and that they did so amid gendered discourses of sacrifice—for example, the myth of Mother Ireland.4 Macardle's writings challenge such representations by linking violence against women with images of women in nationalist iconography. As Anne McClintock and others have argued, in the process of decolonization "women serve as the visible markers of national homogeneity" and as such "they become subjected to especially vigilant and violent discipline."5 For women, the noble sacrifice of "dying for Ireland," in the context of a masculine project of national solidarity, meant the sublimation of sexual difference. Dorothy Macardle's literary reputation rests in large part on her substantial 1937 history of the independence era, The Irish Republic.6 Only limited attention has been paid to her other works. Gerardine Meaney provided an intelligent discussion of Macardle's short story "The Portrait of Roisin Dhu," which is reprinted in the fifth volume of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Macardle also features briefly in Margaret Ward's Maud Gonne: A Life and Unmanageable Revolutionaries, in Terry de Valera's recent memoir, in Sinéad McCoole's No [End Page 44] Ordinary Women, and in a notable article by Peter Beresford Ellis. In 2007, Nadia Smith published the first full biography of Macardle in Dorothy Macardle: A Life; Macardle also featured in Smith's study of Irish women historians. A number of encyclopedia entries make reference to Macardle, but many contain factual errors.7 Despite her complex participation in feminist and republican movements, no full-length study has yet directly addressed Macardle's novels, poems, plays, stories, and literary criticism in the...

Artistic Liminality: Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan and Purgatory

Artistic Liminality:Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan and Purgatory Stephanie J. Pocock In March, 1902, Maud Gonne, rehearsing for the role of the Old Woman in W.B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory's short play Cathleen ni Houlihan, wrote to Yeats to suggest a small change. "My dear Willie," she began, We rehearsed Kathleen tonight, it went splendidly all but the end. It doesn't make a good curtain—We are all of the opinion that Michael ought to go right out of the door instead of standing hesitating. It doesn't seem clear if he doesn't go out. If he goes out Delia can throw herself on Bridget's shoulder in tears which makes a much better end. Please write at once and say if we may do that.1 Yeats acquiesced, as he was wont to do whenever Gonne pleaded with him, and the final step of Michael Gillane across the threshold of his small cottage in pursuit of the "young girl" with "the walk of a queen" met with roaring approval.2 The cheers of its nationalist audience have long since died down, although not, perhaps, the effects of the political fervor that the play inspired. Critics still ponder whether the play is better read as political propaganda, or as literature. The sensationalism of Yeats's political opinions—whether passionately nationalist or darkly eugenicist, as in his penultimate play Purgatory (1938)—have proven distracting to discussions of his plays' literary and theatrical merit. Because of his involvement in the creation of a national theater that sought to "build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature," Yeats's plays have often been considered artifacts of his public life, evidence of the political and cultural beliefs that under girded his creativity.3 Conor Cruise O'Brien cautions that Yeats's politics should not be overlooked as an important influence on his literature, for "throughout his life as a writer Yeats had abiding, and intensifying, political interests and passions. It is [End Page 99] misleading to make him essentially non-political, on the strength of certain disclaimers, refusals, and ironies."4 Yet, once Yeats's political involvement enters the critical fray, the temptation arises to oversimplify the relationship between politics and art, and to view political events as material from which the artist may draw. Such an oversimplification assumes that political views are inflexible sources for art, and remain unaltered by the process of artistic creation.5 For Yeats, the relationship between politics and art was far more complex; the imaginative force of art was as likely to shape political convictions as the reverse.His ideal artist occupied a carefully negotiated space between public and private goals, and was free to address relevant events and issues while maintaining a personal vision free from the tyranny of opinions. Yeats's political views depended upon the maintenance of this liminal space; he supported the creation of a nation in which poetry could be both created and understood, and he reacted both politically and artistically when he felt that ideal threatened. Though Yeats was for many years an ardent nationalist, Gonne's brand of nationalism troubled him. Single-minded violence or self-sacrifice in the service of a cause produced, as the narrator of "Easter, 1916" tells us, "hearts . . . enchanted to a stone," invulnerable to the ambiguities of their situation, ambiguities vital to the creation of literature.6 Yeats understood violence as a necessary part of the historical cycle, but only inasmuch as it led to rebirth and creativity. Without the artist to remember and to reinterpret heroic acts, to build on the ruins of objective violence like the honey-bees in the crumbling walls of Thoor Ballylee, political ideals were empty, and heroism merely self-immolation.7 [End Page 100] His disappointment with the Irish Free State arose from its failure to incarnate a uniquely literate society from war's ruins. Instead, he found himself, in Seamus Heaney's words, in a "world of illiterates and politicians"; a world where some of his compatriots were less concerned with the creation of poetry than with the burning of Ascendancy houses.8 Yeats's resulting despair is clearest in Purgatory, a...

"That a black twisty divil could be hiding under such comeliness": Woman versus woman in Early Twentieth-Century Irish Theatre

This essay engages with dramatic representations of womanhood in the Irish context during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Lacanian theory is used in conjunction with Irish women’s studies scholarship in order to inform the analysis of plays by dramatists including Maud Gonne, Padraic Colum, Lennox Robinson, and T. C. Murray. The aim is to show how women in Irish society were faced with the impossible task of fulfilling such idealized roles as Woman, Wife and Mother, and how this situation was variously represented and contested in the theatre.

Rival Maternities: Maud Gonne, Queen Victoria, and the Reign of the Political Mother

n the opening pages of her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen (1938), Maud Gonne discloses that the queen to whom her title refers is none other than Cathleen ni Houlihan, the female personification of Ireland whom Gonne famously performed in the 1902 play by William Butler Yeats and Augusta Gregory. 1 Another queen, however, lurks in the title. By the time Gonne’s autobiography was published, Victoria had been dead almost four decades, but Gonne’s text—a work intended to shape her legacy within the Irish nationalist movement— nevertheless invokes her rivalry with Queen Victoria, sovereign of Ireland. During the latter part of Victoria’s reign, Gonne devoted her energies to denouncing British imperialism and promoting Irish nationalism by writing essays for nationalist newspapers and delivering speeches in Europe and America. 2 Gonne was celebrated by her contemporaries for her oratory, but she was even more renowned for her compelling personifications of Ireland. Gonne embraced her identifications with Ireland-as-woman, believing them to be politically advantageous. A striking woman with an impressive voice, she turned down nearly all of the theatrical roles she was offered out of fear that acting would monopolize her time and talents, but she eagerly adopted the role of Cathleen ni Houlihan: “I did it,” Gonne explains, “because it was only on that condition that Willie Yeats would give us the right of producing his play, and I felt that play would have great importance for the National moveI

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Jean-Michel Rabaté Imagine that you want to write something original and powerful about well-known modernist authors, each of them guarded by more glosses, guides, and Google entries than one can hope to survey in a lifetime. This modernist issue gives you a modest tip, a simple method, which I will abbreviate for easier mnemonic manipulation as the three C's: Complicate, Couple, Contextualize. This is what has been done, with various inflections and tactics, of course, by the authors of this fine group of essays dealing with canonical modernist writers (the usual suspects are almost all there: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Samuel Beckett; Laura Riding and Joseph Cornell have been thrown in to test the conceptual limits of what we tend to call "late modernism"). These essays attempt to complicate our usual notions regarding the "canon" by reading these formidable authors in hitherto unexplored contexts that either bring new information to bear on the texts (as is the case of Pound's "Seafarer" presented in the framework of The New Age, a context that gives a new political dimension to the famous creative translation from the Anglo-Saxon) or add a dialogical dimension that had not been worked through previously (such as when Cornell is seen dialoguing with Moore, or Stein discussing with Riding the poetic use of private correspondence). With the emergence of these new contexts, "couples" tend to be constituted: they can be real-life acquaintances like Pound and Orage or Eliot and his Swiss doctor Vittoz. These "couples" could also include one-time lovers like Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, deeply frustrated or would-be lovers like Yeats and Maud Gonne, or more distant friends and collaborators like Moore and Cornell, Stein and Riding. These couples encompass the dynamic function of interiorized models, such as philosophers—Bertrand Russell or her own father—for Woolf as she debates whether to accept or reject philosophy, or the critical and literary models provided by a strong predecessor, which Eliot found in Chapman's works. My list seems to imply that only Beckett was left to stand alone—but this is not true, as we see him in front of his mirror, carefully preparing the image of isolation, alienation, and exclusion that served him [End Page v] so well in the launching of his career, according to Stephen John Dilks's not so pious revisionist interpretation. Thus we move from biography to literary and cultural history, a modernist historiography that pays attention to the crucial role played by little magazines, as Lee Garver does innovatively in "Seafarer Socialism: Pound, The New Age, and Anglo-Medieval Radicalism." Yet these essays never bracket off the constitutive function of hermeneutics, as we can see best in Janet Neigh's engaged essay, which takes a feminist and post-colonial problematic as a point of departure. A central cluster focuses on T. S. Eliot, with Steven Matthews, "T. S. Eliot and Chapman: 'Metaphysical' Poetry and Beyond," Amanda Jeramin Harris, "T. S. Eliot's Mental Hygiene," and Jewel Spears Brooker's review essay "Sleuthing Around in The Waste Land," in which she reviews two important books by Lawrence Rainey. Then Woolf is submitted to new couplings and contextualizations by Victoria L. Smith in "Ransacking the Language: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf's Orlando" and Michael Lackey in "Modernist Anti-Philosophicalism and Virginia Woolf's Critique of Philosophy." Issues of space — the literary space opened by letters, or contained in boxes and in poems defined by strict syllabic counts — produce an interesting contrast between the practices of Stein and Riding on the one hand (as we discover in Logan Esdale's "Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and the Space of Letters") and Moore and Cornell on the other (as Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta shows in "Acts of Containment: Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure"). Finally, Yeats's and Beckett's various strategies of self-dramatization and auto-mythification are scrutinized without complacency by Janet Neigh in "Reading from the Drop: Poetics of Identification and Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan'" and by Stephen John Dilks, in "Portraits...