The Irish New Woman

Tina O'Toole

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137349132
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria europea

The Irish New Woman explores the textual and ideological connections between feminist, nationalist and anti-imperialist writing and political activism at the fin de siècle. This is the first study which foregrounds the Irish and New Woman contexts, effecting a paradigm shift in the critical reception of fin de siècle writers and their work.

1

Feminism and Famine

Recent scholarship has begun to read New Woman narratives within cross-national contexts (to use Boehmer’s term) and to consider the impact of contemporary colonial culture on this material, as I mentioned in the Introduction. For instance, postcolonial critics have underlined parallels between the rhetoric of empire-building in contemporary adventure fiction, which describes the enlarging of territory and the creation of a wider sphere for action, with that of New Woman texts that adopt the same strategies in order to enable women to break out of the private sphere.¹ This rhetorical construction of expanded horizons for women was a key strategy adopted by Sarah Grand,² who deployed the traditional attribution of moral authority and social conscience to women as a means to legitimize their authority in the public sphere. Reading this in a postcolonial framework, Grand’s tactics may be directly compared with the imperialist’s assumption of a civilizing role, or a fitness to rule, as justification for the colonizing impulse, as Jusová has demonstrated. However, Jusová’s categorization of Grand as an ‘imperialist feminist’ is not as unproblematic as it might at first appear; Grand’s complex and implicitly contradictory self-positioning in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Beth Book, demonstrates something of a more complicated relationship with imperialism, and with Ireland, her place of birth.

Grand had first-hand experience of living in a range of British army outposts across the colonial world from the 1850s to the late 1870s. Having spent her formative years in a colonial culture of one kind, in Ireland, it is perhaps unsurprising that she chose to marry an Irish military doctor, David Chambers McFall, who was a member of the colonial service. As a result, her early married life was spent in a number of British settlements including Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka in 1972), Singapore, China, Japan and the Straits Settlements (now part of Malaysia); these experiences are reflected in her writing, particularly in short stories such as ‘The Great Typhoon’ (1881) and ‘Ah Man’ (1893). As my interest here is in Grand’s Irish material, I focus in the main on Grand’s deployment of her childhood experiences in Ireland in The Beth Book. This was the third novel in Sarah Grand’s famous trilogy, which included Ideala (self-published in 1888) and her best-known fiction The Heavenly Twins; The Beth Book was her last work to directly espouse a feminist perspective.

Quickly becoming notorious for its frankness about sexual matters, The Beth Book had a style and subject matter that linked it with Grand’s best-selling novel The Heavenly Twins. Because of this notoriety as well its authorship (Grand was by now well known as a feminist campaigner), the book received a hostile reception from critics. One such criticism condemns the writer’s ‘farcical sex manias’ and goes on to attack Grand for the ‘strange and hideous obsession’ and ‘iconoclastic fervour’ with which she tackles the controversies ‘that raged twenty years ago around the dead CD Acts’.³ Reviewers like Frank Danby accuse Grand of ‘uncovering sewers’ and question the ‘cold-blooded selfishness’ of a protagonist who asserts herself against societal mores, as well as chiding Grand for her ‘egotistical outpourings’.⁴ Clearly, Grand had touched a nerve. As Sally Mitchell suggests, the novel: ‘exposed secrets that women knew but remained silent about because (male) public culture “protected” them (and itself) by pretending to believe in the virtue of ignorant innocence’.⁵ What Elaine Showalter describes as Beth’s ‘healthy and assertive sexuality’ was, without question, the aspect of the novel with which the critics had most difficulties.⁶ The Beth Book charts the progress of a young woman through all the stages of nascent adolescent sexuality to maturity. Those critics who complained about the wealth of detail in the first chapters of the novel doubtless would have preferred the economy of expression regarding a girl’s sexual and emotional development that was more common in the period. In an 1897 interview with Sarah Grand, interviewer Sarah Tooley subtitled one section of the published interview ‘Just like Beth’, and it is clear that Grand, ever conscious of the power of publicity to market her work, encouraged this association:

‘I was, I believe’ continued Madame Grand, laughing, ‘a very tiresome child, and not, like my studious elder sister, amenable to rule and discipline. I could not see the fun of reading when I had so many interesting people to talk to, and I was forever being picked out of the lower regions from amongst the servants, or out of some poor person’s hut, where my greatest delight was to sit down and share their meal of potatoes and salt’.⁷

Yet, in later life, Grand made a point of distancing herself from the autobiographical aspects of The Beth Book, as is evident in this response to her companion and biographer Gladys Singers-Bigger: ‘I can’t think why you should suppose it is [autobiographical], but I have forgotten what it is all about. I haven’t looked at it, that I can remember, since I corrected the proof sheets’.⁸ By now retired but having served as Lady Mayor of Bath, and thus having become part of the establishment, Madame Grand (as she was by then known) clearly found it necessary to distance herself from the earlier feminist project which she had once claimed as autobiography. In denying that The Beth Book was semi-autobiographical, she clearly felt the need to safeguard her new-found social standing and to suppress the material and emotional impoverishment of her upbringing. In reading Gillian Kersley’s edition of the Singers-Bigger diaries, I am struck by Grand’s great efforts to reconstruct herself as a good mother in later life and to cover the traces of her difficult childhood and family circumstances.⁹ Admitting that The Beth Book was based on her own experiences, therefore, undermined her public commitment to the hegemonies of the maternal and the nuclear family. We might conclude that the earlier autobiographical admission in her interview with Tooley was purely a marketing strategy, if it were not for the clear similarities between Grand’s early life and that of her protagonist. Furthermore, subtitling The Beth Book ‘A Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell McClure: a Woman of Genius’ draws attention to the similarity between her own name, Frances Bellenden Clarke McFall, and that of the central protagonist here (a connection that may have been lost on her audience, given that she had used the name ‘Sarah Grand’ in both her private and writing life from the 1880s on). By 1932, when the interview with Singers-Bigger took place, her birth and married names had been long forgotten, deliberately left behind by Grand herself. The extent or the accuracy of the autobiographical detail in this novel is unclear. However the Singers-Bigger diaries, as well as Kersley’s archival sources, confirm that Grand saw the book as her ‘portrait of the artist as a young woman’; it was more than likely influenced by her own experiences as a child in Ireland.

Grand’s inspiration for using an Irish context may have come from contemporary popular novels such as Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), in which the South African writer drew on the landscape and social context with which she was most familiar. Grand, like other Victorian readers, had probably read the so-called dialect novels of Fiona MacLeod, and the quest novels popularized by Rider Haggard, which tended to be based in distant and exotic locations. Exploiting the exotic landscape she was most familiar with, Grand used rural Ireland as the context for the first volume of The Beth Book. Grand establishes the Irish setting for The Beth Book by giving the scene some local colour early on, depicting Beth’s mother, Mrs Caldwell, observing a butcher killing a lamb outside his shop in the main street in Donaghadee, Co. Down.¹⁰ Setting the tone for her attitude to Ireland and the Irish, the narrator observes: ‘They did strange things in those days in that little Irish seaport, and, being an Englishwoman, she looked on like a civilized traveller intelligently studying the customs of a savage people’.¹¹ As is clear, Grand is developing a narrative here that will find favour with her English audience, establishing both the primitivism of the Irish and a claim to anthropological expertise in her eyewitness account. This chimes with Boehmer’s point that colonial writers aimed to ‘decipher unfamiliar spaces’ for their readers: ‘They transferred familiar metaphors, which are themselves already bridging devices, which carry meaning across to unfamiliar and unlikely contexts. Strangeness was made comprehensible by using everyday names, dependable textual conventions, both rhetorical and syntactic’.¹² The ‘dependable textual conventions’ of The Beth Book characterize the Irish as loquacious and argumentative. Describing life in the streets of a rural Irish town, the narrator describes

women in close white caps with goffered frills, short petticoats and long blue coats; and men in tail-coats and knee breeches, with shillalahs [sic] under their arms which they used very dexterously. They talked Irish at the top of their voices, and gesticulated a great deal and were childishly quarrelsome. (p. 63)

The combination of references to native costume, a spoken language which is outside the register of her readers and that most Irish artefact, the shillelagh (a heavy walking stick), adds authenticity to her narrative and thereby establishes her authority on this Irish scene. As with much nineteenth-century anthropological study, an unspoken element of this account is that it describes the customs of a ‘savage’ people just at the point of the near-extinction of that culture.

Having established that the Caldwell family are English, the narrator makes clear their connection to the colonial hierarchy; from a very young age, we are told, Beth had been aware that her father ‘had something to do with the firing of big guns’ (p. 20). We later learn that he is a commander in the coastguard, which is a point in common with Grand’s own background: her father was a member of the coastguard during their time in Ireland.¹³ Accordingly, Grand’s attitude to the colonial dispensation is a conservative one, notwithstanding her avowed nostalgia for her childhood home as described in the interview with Tooley:

Although not strictly of Irish birth, I love the country and indeed think that no one can pass a length of time there without coming under its strangely romantic spell. We had Irish servants, and much of my time was passed in the cottages of the peasantry listening to the legends and the folk-lore of the people.¹⁴

Despite this stated affinity with Ireland and the suggestion that she is herself almost Irish, Grand’s political views were in line with the class hegemonies and popular imperialism of the day; for instance, Irish history and culture are here reduced to ‘legends and folk-lore’.¹⁵ Contemporary critics have a tendency, sometimes incorrectly, to associate feminist politics with an adherence to social justice more generally and thereby assume that a class or an anti-colonial perspective tends to be linked to a feminist one. Given Grand’s origins within the colonial classes, it is perhaps to expect too much to expect a re-examination of these basic tenets of her social construction. While Grand’s rejection of patriarchal structures may have challenged the gender imbalance of her society, she was a liberal feminist, that is, she argued for equality for women within a social order she otherwise agreed with, as Mangum has demonstrated. This is reflected in the way she describes the Irish in the Tooley interview, where they are categorized as either servants or peasants, with no mention of an Irish landed gentry or middle classes. In other words, she reserves her own position of privilege in relation to those she includes in her Irish narrative. Furthermore, as Pykett has observed, there is a clear tendency to romanticize Irish poverty here.¹⁶

Grand’s views on the imperial project are not immediately evident in this novel, but we don’t have to look far to discover her stance. For instance, in ‘On the Boer War’, a newspaper article written in 1900, she states:

War betokens a want of wit on the part of rulers and governors; it is an ugly old anachronism … A strong Government sends army enough to the disaffected region to inspire respect … Meanwhile, able agents are set to work beneath the surface to spread friendly feeling; to encourage commerce, which is the best bond of union between nations; and to promote inter-marriage, which is the natural means of amalgamation; and to do all else that makes for peace and goodwill. Had this policy been pursued at the Cape there would have been no Boer War.¹⁷

Written three years after the publication of The Beth Book, this extract demonstrates Grand’s endorsement of British settler colonies overseas, and as such, her affinity with imperial ambitions is clear. Of course, such perspectives were not uncommon among first-wave feminists, as Ware has pointed out, in that the alternative values they proposed did not extend to a challenge to imperialism.¹⁸

However, there are some passages in The Beth Book that appear to betray a deeper understanding of the workings of the imperial machine, which may perhaps be attributed to Grand’s examination of hegemonic structures from a feminist perspective. For instance, quite early in the novel we are given an illustration of the indigenous situation, in which the narrator seems to demonstrate some understanding of the economic basis of colonial oppression: ‘Both men and women were usually in a torpid state, the result, doubtless, of breathing a poisoned atmosphere, and of insufficient food ... It took strong stimulants to rouse them; love, hate, jealousy, whisky, murder and sudden death’ (p. 44). We might read this description of native listlessness as a demonstration of solidarity on the part of the author, as the narrator attributes the torpor of the poor to the wretchedness of their living conditions. However, in common with colonial discourse generally, the depiction suggests a combination of indolence and violent energy; Lyn Innes describes the contemporary characterization of the Irish as ‘bestial, dirty, loutishly masculine, aggressive and ugly: the extreme of masculine bestiality feared by Victorian Englishmen and in this aspect like representations of African and Indian men’.¹⁹ Such formations justified the methods by which colonized peoples were disciplined and contained, as Cairns and Richards remind us:

The products of anthropology – cephalic measurements, facial angles, indexes of nigrescence, which at their wilder extremities spawned the notion of the Irish as a race of covert blacks, became increasingly popular in the 1860s and particularly so after the emergence of Fenianism ... But anthropological discourses which simianized the Celt merely brutalized and, in so doing, justified treatment fit for brutes – coercion, the short-hand term for the suspension of habeas corpus and the passing of special crimes acts.²⁰

The narrator’s use of the term ‘childishly quarrelsome’ to describe the Irish in the street scene above might be described as a gesture to colonial paternalism; infantilizing the colonized in order to justify their exploitation. This need for supervision is underlined by Captain Caldwell’s attitude to the locals. Some examples of this may be summed up by comments such as: ‘They would steal the teeth out of your head in this God-forsaken country’ (p. 35) and ‘The workpeople were wild and ignorant, and only trustworthy as long as they were watched’ (p. 37).

As we might expect in a New Woman novel, power struggles between colonizer and colonized are staged in the domestic sphere. At the outset, we are told of Mrs Caldwell’s inability to manage a household, largely due to her lack of training in such matters: ‘She was not made for labour but for luxury; her hands and arms, both delicately beautiful in form and colour, alone showed that. She looked out of place in the kitchen’ (p. 3). This passage draws on first-wave feminist calls for meaningful work for women and the demand that women be properly trained for the task in hand. However, as the narrator makes plain, the colonial context and attendant sectarian divisions deepen Mrs Caldwell’s domestic difficulties. This is reflected in the paranoia with which the servants are described; they are clearly considered to be subversives within the household, who steal everything in sight ‘including the salt out of the salt cellars between meals, if it were not locked up’ (p. 72). There is no indication of any awareness of the inequalities of the colonial situation here, or of the poverty underlying these thefts from the larder. Indeed, we might well observe that class differences could equally lead t...