Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change

Race, Sex and Nation

Gerardine Meaney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780415957908
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135165635
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book analyzes the roots of Irish social and sexual conservatism and the dramatic change in one of the most basic areas of human experience: how we understand our roles as men and women. It looks at the relationship between sexual and cultural dissent and the long, slow role of culture in generating change. Meaney offers the first major study that sets the relationship between national and gender identities in the context of analysis of Irish identity as white identity, tracing the identification of female sexuality with foreign threat in nationalist discourse and its consequences in contemporary representations of immigrant women and their children. The study presents an extended analysis of the relationship between feminism and nationalism, and between gender and modernism. Analyzing the role of Joyce in contemporary culture and Yeats and Synge in the understanding of tradition, it also sets their work in the context of their less known female contemporaries and challenges conventional understandings of the Irish literary tradition. The book concludes with an analysis of the relationship between race and masculinity in Irish characters in US and British culture, from Patriot Games to Rescue Me and The Wire, The Romans in Britain to M.I.5

Part I
Race, Women, and Nation

1
Virgin Mother Ireland

FEMINISMS AND NATIONALISMS

If “all nationalisms are gendered,”¹ the Mother Ireland trope merely indicates the operation of a fundamental structuring principle recognizable in both official and insurgent nationalisms. It is one instance of the structural interdependence of gender and national identities. “The hegemonic process of constructing a nationalist ideology depends upon distinguishing between self and other, us and them, in the creation of a common (shared) identity; women as symbol, men as agents of the nation, colonized space as feminine, colonial power as masculine.”² Miroslav Hroch argued in the 1990s with regard to both the then resurgent Eastern European nationalisms and to nineteenth-century nationalisms that:

Identification with the national group … includes … the construction of a personalized image of the nation. The glorious past of this personality comes to be lived as part of the individual memory of each citizen, its defeats resented as failures that still touch them. One result of such personalization is that people will regard their nation—that is, themselves—as a single body in a more than metaphorical sense. If any distress befalls a small part of the nation, it can be felt throughout it, and if any branch of the ethnic group—even one living far from the “mother-nation“—is threatened with assimilation, the members of the personalized nation may treat it as an amputation of the national body.³

If the nation is experienced as “a body,” then the body in Western culture is primarily figured as and through the female body. The systematic violation of individual women’s bodies in a way that understands itself as destroying both an organic community and an abstract nation is a horrific validation of Hroch’s analysis of the new nationalisms in this respect. According to Anne McClintock:

All too often in male nationalisms, gender difference between women and men serves to symbolically define the limits of national difference and power between men. Excluded from direct action as national citizens, women are subsumed symbolically into the national body politic as its boundary and metaphoric limit.⁴

Women are obviously crucial to national expansion and consolidation in their role as biological reproducers of the members of national collectivities, but something more complex than the desire to see the nation’s population expand is at stake. Peggy Watson offers an explanation that would indicate why certain nationalisms seem more prone and some less prone to obsession with control of women through and as mediums of reproduction. Watson offers an example with striking parallels to Ireland. She recounts a response from an unnamed member of the post-communist Polish senate that:

The reason for concentrating on the abortion issue at the expense of other pressing problems was simply because it was regarded as something which could be done … the regulation of women was seen as an area which required action, but also one where power could readily be exercised, whereas the economy engendered feelings of powerlessness … Attempting to legislate against the right to abortion in effect serves both to institutionalize the power of men, and to legitimate this power by providing a platform for new, more radical and “modernized” definitions of women as exclusively grounded in domesticity.⁵

A range of legislative measures to promote just such ends occurred in newly independent southern Ireland after 1922, culminating in the delineation of women’s social function within the home in Article 41.2 of the 1937 constitution. The elision of women’s role as activists into idealized passivity and symbolic status is again characteristic of the transition from national movement to state authority internationally. (The analogy with Poland is another reminder that the conjunction of white faces and histories of colonization and migration is not nearly as unusual as Irish cultural theory has sometimes made it seem.) Gender resurfaced as an area where reassurance could be sought against political violence, mass unemployment and rapid social change in the 1980s, a decade characterized in the Republic of Ireland by bitter constitutional campaigns to control the domains of reproduction and the family and ferocious divisions over sexual, familial and religious values.⁶

It might be assumed that the emergence of a prosperous post–Celtic Tiger Ireland would have eliminated the need for this kind of policing of the internal border constituted by women’s bodies. In some regards that has been the case. In most important respects, however, the work of national scapegoat has simply been outsourced, as so much other domestic labor, onto immigrant women. The ease with which popular hysteria about pregnant migrants “flooding” Irish maternity hospitals with their nonnational babies could be translated into 80 percent electoral support for a constitutional amendment limiting Irish citizenship on the basis of ethnicity and affiliations of kinship and blood indicates that racism was never a marginal factor in Irish political life nor a specific historical response to the numbers of actual migrants arriving in Ireland in the late nineties. It was and is now constitutionally enshrined as a structural principle in national identity. Liberal appeals for Irish sympathy with immigrants on the basis that previous generations of Irish emigrants shared their experience ignore the extent to which the Irish cultivated, traded in and still exploit the valuable commodity of their white identity both abroad and at home. Kingsley’s cry of horror that Irish white chimpanzees were so much worse than black African ones is perhaps too much quoted for a reason. It obscures the extent to which subsequent generations of Irish have been able to trade on their difference from the Africans with whom Kingsley’s racist perceptions were more comfortable. The Victorian parlor game that Luke Gibbons so influentially described halted, like Kingsley, at the one point in the map of the British Empire where the natives were white. ⁷ Far from subverting racial hierarchies, the existence of liminally white groups has always been a functioning part of the racist system. Colonized or ethnically distinct whites such as the Irish and Scottish provided the British Empire with a highly expendable soldiery and an army of civil servants to deploy around the empire in the nineteenth century. As the Irish emigrated to the US, they progressively “became white”⁸ without at all disconcerting racist structures. (The way in which certain kinds of white ethnicities such as Irish and Polish function in the construction and control of working-class identity in the US is an increasing area of study.⁹) Long overdue, as studies of Irish emigration develop, is a thorough analysis of the way in which the experience of Irish emigrants abroad had an impact on how the Irish who remained at home viewed themselves, particularly in relation to race. It is certainly the case that a highly racialized and rigidly gendered identity was promulgated by both church and state in Ireland as true Irishness.

GENDER AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WHITENESS

Without rehearsing in detail well-known arguments, it may be useful to summarize. The psychodynamic of colonial and postcolonial identity often produces in the formerly colonized a desire to assert a rigid and confined masculine identity, against the colonizers stereotype of their subjects as feminine, wild and ungovernable. This masculine identity then emerges at the state level as a regulation of “our” women, an imposition of a very definite feminine identity as guarantor to the precarious masculinity of the new state. The specific role of the Irish Catholic Church in this maelstrom of economic, political, social and psychological forces is rather more than one among a number of regulatory institutions. It is after all sometimes very difficult to ascertain where church began and state ended in regard to the institutionalization of individuals, public health and education, for example. The fissure between whiteness and the colonial (not typically white) historical experience of Ireland was traditionally concealed by radiant images of Ireland itself in terms of what Richard Dyer calls “the supreme exemplar of … feminine whiteness,” the Virgin Mary. ¹⁰

Dyer’s work on whiteness is very suggestive in the Irish context, though his own analysis is primarily of whiteness in imperial and postimperial cultures. Dyer’s work on the function of white women in colonial culture and of liminally white groups and the porous boundaries of white identity is particularly relevant. I want to put forward an argument here that the centrality of Mariology in Irish Catholicism and the extent to which issues of reproduction and sexuality dominated public debates and anxieties around modernization while sharing many of the general characteristics of the gendering of national identity outlined earlier are in the Irish case also powerfully linked to residual anxieties around race and Ireland’s postcolonial position as a white European nation.

National identities are structured by the binary of them and us, insiders and outsiders, natives and foreigners. Irish nationalism may have had within it the potential for all kinds of hybrid, liberationist, adulterated and inclusive versions of Irish identity. However, the dominant ideology of state and nation was for most of the twentieth century extraordinarily narrow and exclusive. Bryan Fanning has documented the “othering” of Protestants, Jews and Travellers as part of the process of state nationalism in the Republic of Ireland.¹¹ The dominance of the postcolonial–revisionist debate in the formation of Irish Studies and the analyses it produced of Irish nationalism have long outlived their usefulness. Both sides of the debate have obscured the role of whiteness in the construction of Irish identity as well as the relationship between gender and race in that construction.

Postcolonial theory offered feminist critique in Ireland a vital way of understanding sexual conservatism, the relationship of the Catholic Church and the state and the gendering of national identity as elements that it shared with a wide variety of postcolonial cultures. Postcolonialism remains part of the context in which “non-national women were made central to the racial configuration of 21st century global Ireland, illustrating not only orchestrated moral panics about ‘floods of refugees’, but also the positioning of sexually active women as a danger to the state and ‘the nation.’”¹² However, as the sociologist and theorist of race Ronit Lentin points out:

To date, theorizing Irishness as white privilege has been hampered by legacies of racialisation of Irishness as structured by anti-Irish racism in Ireland and abroad. However, Ireland’s new position as topping the Globalisation Index, its status symbol as the locus of “cool” culture, and its privileged position within an ever-expanding European Community calls for the understanding of Irishness as white supremacy. Whiteness works best when it remains a hidden part of the normative social order.¹³

The emerging field of “whiteness” studies offers a necessary development that illuminates the extent to which race performed a key function in the construction and policing of Irish identity throughout the twentieth century and of the origins of contemporary social and institutional racism in Ireland. It is vital to deconstruct the binary of colonizer and colonized, agency and victimization, pure and hybrid, and acknowledge the extent to which complex processes of accommodation, resistance and opportunism have shaped the concept of “Irishness.”

The promulgation of the image of the Virgin Mary as “Queen of Ireland”¹⁴ is on one level just another permutation of the Virgin–Whore dichotomy at the heart of Western culture’s representation of women. That dichotomy acquired a very particular paranoid intensity in twentieth-century Ireland, however, which is linked to both the history of colonialism and the compensatory urge to promote an essential Irishness that was purer—in effect whiter—than other European races. In this context, the relationship between images of the Blessed Virgin and Mother Ireland is important, not least because the veneration of the former was shadowed by disappointment in the latter. Tracing the evolution of “visual Marianism” in Ireland, art historian John Turpin has argued that “Marianism was a badge of national identity” sponsored by the post-independence southern state as well as the Catholic Church.¹⁵ The influence of French Catholicism on the development of Marian devotion in Ireland is well documented; in effect the image of the Virgin Mother imported from France in the nineteenth century was already highly politicized, an anti-Marianne and an instrument of anti-Enlightenment, counterrevolutionary propaganda. Ultimately highly compatible with romantic nationalism, the cross-fertilization of this image with that of “Mother Ireland” helped dislocate the traditions of radical republicanism from insurgent nationalism in nineteenth-century Ireland. In the post-independence southern state this fusion of national and religious iconography became a lynchpin of the ideology of race and gender.

THE DISEMBODIED MOTHER

The conflation of images of Mother Ireland and Virgin Mary in Irish populist Catholic nationalism deployed the Virgin Mother’s status as epitome of whiteness as a guarantee of Irish (racial) purity. This function could only be performed if the maternal body was idealized out of existence, or at least out of representation. The peculiar stillness and singularly unmaternal figures of the Virgin Mary that predominate in Irish churches and grottoes only become apparent by contrast with the expressive faces and rounded bodies prevalent in Andalucian ones, for example. This refusal to countenance any representation of the mother’s body as origin of life was paralleled by the predominance of images of the Virgin Mary as mother of an adult son, usually Jesus in the mode of the Sacred Heart, and in general in visions, icons and statues that represented her after her assumption, that is to say after her disembodiment. Yeats, in the cultural nationalist journal, Samhain, identified the trend toward curiously lifeless images and the centrality of the images of an impersonal virgin in this process as early as 1905, which would indicate that it was already implicit in Catholic nationalism in the late nineteenth century:

A Galway convent a little time ago refused a fine design for stained glass sent from Miss Sarah Purser’s studio, because of the personal life in the faces and in the attitudes, which seemed to them ugly, perhaps even impious. They sent to Miss Purser an insipid German chromolithograph, full of faces without expression or dignity, and gestures without personal distinction, and Miss Purser, doubtless because her enterprise was too new, too anxious for success, to reject any order, has carried out this ignoble design in glass of beautiful color and quality. Let us suppose that Meister Stefan were to paint in Ireland to-day that exquisite Madonna of his, with her lattice of roses; a great deal that is said of our plays would be said of that picture. Why select for his model a little girl selling newspapers in the streets, why slander with that miserable little body the Mother of God?¹⁶

Irish censorship was extraordinarily sensitive in excising all references to childbirth from the films it cut, including even comic scenes of fathers pacing hospital waiting rooms. Even the liberal journal The Bell found itself at the center of a storm of controversy when it published Freda Laughton’s poem, “The Woman with Child” in 1945:

How am I held within a tranquil shell,
As if I too were close w...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Race, Women, and Nation
• Part II Writing, Bodies, Canons
• Part III Race, Masculinity, and Popular Culture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index