1
Virgin Mother Ireland
FEMINISMS AND NATIONALISMS
If âall nationalisms are gendered,â1 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. âThe 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.â2 Miroslav Hroch argued in the 1990s with regard to both the then resurgent Eastern European nationalisms and to nineteenth-century nationalisms that:
If the nation is experienced as âa body,â then the body in Western culture is primarily figured as and through the female body. The systematic violation of individual womenâs bodies in a way that understands itself as destroying both an organic community and an abstract nation is a horrific validation of Hrochâs analysis of the new nationalisms in this respect. According to Anne McClintock:
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 nationâs 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:
A range of legislative measures to promote just such ends occurred in newly independent southern Ireland after 1922, culminating in the delineation of womenâs social function within the home in Article 41.2 of the 1937 constitution. The elision of womenâs 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 postâCeltic Tiger Ireland would have eliminated the need for this kind of policing of the internal border constituted by womenâs 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 âfloodingâ 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. Kingsleyâs 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 Kingsleyâs 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 âbecame whiteâ8 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 âourâ 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 âthe supreme exemplar of ⊠feminine whiteness,â the Virgin Mary. 10
Dyerâs work on whiteness is very suggestive in the Irish context, though his own analysis is primarily of whiteness in imperial and postimperial cultures. Dyerâs 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 Irelandâs 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 âotheringâ of Protestants, Jews and Travellers as part of the process of state nationalism in the Republic of Ireland.11 The dominance of the postcolonialârevisionist 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 ânon-national women were made central to the racial configuration of 21st century global Ireland, illustrating not only orchestrated moral panics about âfloods of refugeesâ, but also the positioning of sexually active women as a danger to the state and âthe nation.ââ12 However, as the sociologist and theorist of race Ronit Lentin points out:
The emerging field of âwhitenessâ 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 âIrishness.â
The promulgation of the image of the Virgin Mary as âQueen of Irelandâ14 is on one level just another permutation of the VirginâWhore dichotomy at the heart of Western cultureâs 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 purerâin effect whiterâthan 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 âvisual Marianismâ in Ireland, art historian John Turpin has argued that âMarianism was a badge of national identityâ 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 âMother Irelandâ 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 Motherâs 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 motherâs 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:
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 Laughtonâs poem, âThe Woman with Childâ in 1945: