Celtic Connections

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IRISH–SCOTTISH RELATIONS AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

The essays in this collection are distinct yet connected, and are designed to come together like the intricate cross-bars and precise patterning of the plaid to capture the complexity of the Celtic connections they address. They move from pre-history to postmodernism, from Gothic to Gaelic and from Macbeth to Marxism, incorporating gender and genre, and providing a detailed survey of responses to the Irish–Scottish paradigm.

Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2003) and Muriel Spark for Starters (2008). He has also co-edited Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (2010); The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark (2010); and This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard (2010). Alison O’Malley-Younger is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sunderland and co-director of the North East Irish Culture Network. She has co-edited Representing Ireland: Past, Present and Future (2005); Essays on Modern Irish Literature (2007); No Country for Old Men: Fresh Perspectives on Irish Literature (2008); and Ireland at War and Peace (2011). ISBN 978-3-0343-0214-2

P E TE R L A N G www.peterlang.com

VOLU ME 3 8

Willy Maley and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds)

CELTIC CONNECTIONS   Willy Maley and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds)

While a number of published works approach the shared concerns of Ireland and Scotland, no major volume has offered a sustained and upto-date analysis of the cultural connections between the two, despite the fact that these border crossings continue to be politically suggestive. The current collection addresses this area of comparative critical neglect, focusing on writers, from Charles Robert Maturin to Liam McIlvanney, whose work offers insights into debates about identity and politics in these two neighbour nations, too often overwhelmed by connections with their larger neighbour, England.

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CELTIC CONNECTIONS I R I S H – S COT T I S H R E L AT I O N S A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R E

re

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REIR

38

IRISH–SCOTTISH RELATIONS AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

The essays in this collection are distinct yet connected, and are designed to come together like the intricate cross-bars and precise patterning of the plaid to capture the complexity of the Celtic connections they address. They move from pre-history to postmodernism, from Gothic to Gaelic and from Macbeth to Marxism, incorporating gender and genre, and providing a detailed survey of responses to the Irish–Scottish paradigm.

Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2003) and Muriel Spark for Starters (2008). He has also co-edited Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (2010); The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark (2010); and This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard (2010). Alison O’Malley-Younger is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sunderland and co-director of the North East Irish Culture Network. She has co-edited Representing Ireland: Past, Present and Future (2005); Essays on Modern Irish Literature (2007); No Country for Old Men: Fresh Perspectives on Irish Literature (2008); and Ireland at War and Peace (2011).

P E TE R L A N G www.peterlang.com

VOLU ME 3 8

Willy Maley and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds)

CELTIC CONNECTIONS   Willy Maley and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds)

While a number of published works approach the shared concerns of Ireland and Scotland, no major volume has offered a sustained and upto-date analysis of the cultural connections between the two, despite the fact that these border crossings continue to be politically suggestive. The current collection addresses this area of comparative critical neglect, focusing on writers, from Charles Robert Maturin to Liam McIlvanney, whose work offers insights into debates about identity and politics in these two neighbour nations, too often overwhelmed by connections with their larger neighbour, England.

re

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imagining land

CELTIC CONNECTIONS I R I S H – S COT T I S H R E L AT I O N S A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R E

Celtic Connections

Reimagining Ireland Volume 38 Edited by Dr Eamon Maher Institute of Technology, Tallaght

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Willy Maley and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds)

Celtic Connections Irish–Scottish Relations and the Politics of Culture

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National­ bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Celtic connections : Irish-Scottish relations and the politics of culture / Willy Maley and Alison O’Malley-Younger, eds. p. cm. -- (Reimagining Ireland ; 38) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-0343-0214-2 (alk. paper) 1. Celtic literature--History and criticism. 2. English literature--Irish authors-History and criticism. 3. English literature--Scottish authors--History and criticism. 4. Politics and literature--Ireland--History. 5. Politics and literature-Scotland--History. 6. Comparative literature--Irish and Scottish. 7. Comparative literature--Scottish and Irish. 8. Civilization, Celtic. 9. Nationalism and literature-Colonies--Great Britain--History. 10. Ireland--In literature. 11. Scotland--In literature. I. Maley, Willy. II. O’Malley-Younger, Alison. PB1096.C45 2012 891.6--dc23 2012038216 ISSN 1662-9094 ISBN 978-3-0343-0214-2 (print) ISBN 978-3-0353-0407-7 (eBook) Cover illustration: Patrick Geddes et al., The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (London: T. Fisher Unwin) Spring, 1895, p.5. © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2013 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany

For Paddy Lyons who always connects

Contents

Acknowledgements ix WILLY MALEY AND ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER

Introduction: Twilight to Tiger

1

JOHN STRACHAN

Charles Robert Maturin, Roman Catholicism and Melmoth the Wanderer 41 ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER

Doctors and Devils: Diagnosing Racial Degeneracy in Stevenson’s Gothic Fiction

61

LAUREN CLARK

Second Cities of  Empire: Celtic Consumerism Exhibited

89

MASAYA SHIMOKUSU

‘True poetic comrades’: Mineko Matsumura and the Reception of  Fiona Macleod in Japan

115

WILLY MALEY AND NIALL O’GALLAGHER

Coming Clean about the Red and the Green: Celtic Communism in Maclean, MacDiarmid and MacLean Again

133

viii

DEIRDRE O’BYRNE

‘My ways are my own’: Female, Family and Farm in Hanna Bell’s December Bride 153 MARTYN COLEBROOK

‘There is something narcotic in watching a war unfold on your doorstep, knowing all the while it can’t hurt you’: Liam McIlvanney’s All the Colours of  the Town 169 EMILY A. RAVENSCROFT AND JAMES MOLLISON

Macbeth in Maghaberry: Corrupting Power Relations with the Scottish Play in a Northern Irish Prison

185

STEFANIE LEHNER AND CILLIAN MCGRATTAN

The Confidence Game: Rebranding Irish and Scottish Cultures

203

Notes on Contributors

223

Index 227

Acknowledgements

Many of the papers collected here originated in the North East Irish Culture Network (NEICN) ‘Celtic Connections’ conference held at the University of  Sunderland, 12–14 November 2010. We would like to thank all those who participated in that event, and we would particularly like to thank the contributors to this volume, and also colleagues at the Department of  Culture at the University of  Sunderland, for their support. Special thanks go to Steve Watts for his unfailing encouragement and enthusiasm, and to Robert Finnigan for his assistance with the indexing. We would also like to thank Eamon Maher, series editor for Reimagining Ireland, for his help with this project, and Commissioning Editor Christabel Scaife for her patience and guidance. Finally, this publication was part-funded by the Culture Research Beacon at the University of  Sunderland. We would like to extend our thanks to them for this, in particular Professor John Strachan, and Dr Susan Mandala, without whose assistance this project would not have been possible. Finally, we would like to thank Mary Critchley for bringing the final manuscript safely into harbour.

WILLY MALEY AND ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER

Introduction: Twilight to Tiger

Perhaps in the very combination of opposites – […] ‘the Caledonian antisyzygy’ – we have a ref lection of  the contrasts which the Scot shows at every turn, in his political and ecclesiastical history, in his polemical restlessness, in his adaptability, which is another way of saying that he has made allowance for new conditions, in his practical judgement, which is the admission that two sides of  the matter have been considered. If  therefore, Scottish history and life are, as an old northern writer said of something else, ‘varied with a clean contrair spirit,’ we need not be surprised to find that in his literature the Scot presents two aspects which appear contradictory. Oxymoron was ever the bravest figure, and we must not forget that disorderly order is order after all. — Smith, 1919: 45 I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but ay be whaur Extremes meet – it’s the only way I ken To dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt That damns the vast majority o’ men. — Riach and Grieve, 1993: 30

The divided self is a familiar theme in Scottish literature, from Jekyll and Hyde to the work of  R. D. Laing, and Ireland too has its doubling propensity, as Joyce suggested when he characterised his country, and his fittingly named hometown, as having the capacity to think ‘two thinks at a time’ (FW 583.7). This shared history of double thinking has also been at times a shared colonial experience that has entailed double-dealing. England used Scotland to complete its colonisation of  Ireland. As Seamus Deane put it, ‘the Irish–English relation … was mediated through Scotland’ (Deane, 1997: 108). Deane identifies a Celtic tussle between two colonised or semicolonised countries in thrall to a larger nation:

2

WILLY MALEY AND ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER All through the late eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century, Irish commentators had fought the Ossian battle over and over, denying to the Scots the primacy they claimed in the Celtic hierarchy, insisting instead that it was the Irish who had been the original founders of  the culture of which Scotland was a derivative. Yet because of  the Irish failure to recognize and commemorate their own achievements, the Scots had almost won the battle of public relations on this score. (Deane, 1997: 42–3)

Yet Deane resists the Irish–Scottish double-act, wishing, like other Irish critics, to hold the Scottish comparison at bay, with Ossian as the bad example of  Scottish appropriation and cultural theft, so that the whole political force of  the Ossian controversy in Ireland was that Scotland could not have it both ways – claim to be an authentic Gaelic culture and remain in union with Great Britain. It was the Union that had robbed it of its authenticity; it was the Union of  Great Britain and Ireland that had to be resisted if  Ireland’s Gaelic authenticity were to be retained and retrieved. The Scots, as represented by their writers, especially Macpherson, Burns, and Scott (not to mention the Edinburgh Review), had duplicated the achievement of  their intellectual Enlightenment cohort; they had found a way to reconcile culture and the market, they had blended the discourses of  feeling and calculation. (Deane, 1997: 108)

Where Deane sees Scotland as the colonial collaborator of  the Celtic nations, Cairns Craig sees Scotland as less assimilated: Why then should Scottish literature have retained and indeed asserted its independence in a context where the Scottish people – unlike the Irish, for example, – have seemed deeply resistant or apathetic about other forms of independence? […] In part it is that Scotland has, despite both internal and external pressures, never been integrated into the cultural values of  the British state. The texture of  Scottish life, in its religious, educational, legal, linguistic forms, remains distinct from that of  England to an extent which is little recognized in England, let alone the outside world. (Cited Nicholson, 1992: xii)

But Celtic connections are arguably more of a seesaw than a set-to. In his general preface to The Waverley Novels, Walter Scott wrote: ‘Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact, which pervade the works of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of  the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved

Introduction: Twilight to Tiger

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for Ireland’ (Scott, 1829: xv). At the end of  that same century, Yeats wrote enviously of  the fame of  Scott and Burns and aspired to such literary greatness for his own nation: ‘The time has not yet come for Irishmen, as it has for Scotsmen, to carry about with them a subtle national feeling, no matter when, or of what they write, because that feeling has yet to be perfectly elaborated and expounded by men of genius with minds as full of  Irish history, scenery, and character as the minds of  Burns and Scott were full of  Scottish history, scenery, and character’ (Cited Frayne and Johnson, 1975: I, 385). More recently, Donny O’Rourke lamented the fact that new Scottish poets lacked the historical sense of  their Irish counterparts: ‘What is lacking in Scotland, as opposed to Ireland, is much sense of young writers using an ancient language to grapple with the present’ (O’Rourke, 1994: xxxvii). As such, Scottish/Irish ‘Celticism’ can be seen as less of a connection than a contestation subliminally linked to ‘cultural cringe’ as Mark Renton in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting colourfully concludes: ‘Some say that the Irish are the trash ay Europe. That’s shite. It’s the Scots. The Irish hud the bottle tae win thir country back, or at least maist ay it’ (Welsh, 1993: 190). For Deane, as for Renton, the Celtic connection can come down to a competition, a contest to see which nation could prove most resistant to, or least complicit with, English imperialism, but Deane also suggests that this resistance to assimilation amounted to a resistance to theory, identified as the ideology of  the occupier: Ireland, before and after the Union, could not be conciliated as Scotland was. The divisions were too deep, the antinomies too strong. The culture lacked a theory of society and would continue to do so, precisely because theory had been identified as inimical to its preservation. (Deane, 1997: 37)

Joyce was cutting in his caricature of  Scotland as a Celtic sibling who profited from Union through the Anglo-Scottish Ulster Plantation of 1609, but who remains a junior partner in Empire and not an equal. In ‘Gas from a Burner’, he writes:

4

WILLY MALEY AND ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER Poor sister Scotland! Her doom is fell; She cannot find any more Stuarts to sell […] My Irish foreman from Bannockburn Shall dip his right hand in the urn And sign crisscross with reverent thumb Memento homo upon my bum. (Levin, 1977: 462–3)

Scottish writers have been strongly inf luenced by Joyce, most notably Hugh MacDiarmid. As Edwin Morgan pointed out: Although they were near-contemporaries, and had many literary acquaintances in common, Joyce and MacDiarmid never met. Meetings were set up several times, but for various accidental reasons failed to materialise. We have MacDiarmid’s word for it that Joyce knew his poetry and in particular ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ (1926), but the inf luence that can be documented goes in the other direction, and is shown most obviously in the title of  MacDiarmid’s long poem ‘In Memoriam James Joyce’ (1955). (Morgan, 1982: 202)

Morgan sees an af finity between Joyce and MacDiarmid in spite of dif ferences with regard to perspectives on nationalism: Joyce and MacDiarmid both emerged from social and literary environments where they felt impelled to adopt a critical, single-minded, often lonely role. They laid on themselves a weight of responsibility which Joyce dealt with almost entirely in terms of art and which in MacDiarmid issues in ceaseless journalistic and publicistic activity as well as in art but which in both men had deep roots in their national feelings about Ireland and Scotland as places presenting challenges and problems quite distinct from those of  England or (if  there is such a thing) Britain. (Morgan, 1982: 204)

MacDiarmid (of whom more later) found it possible to subscribe to Scottish nationalism while Joyce struggled to accommodate his large mind to the narrow nationalism emerging into dominance in Ireland: To Joyce, a straightforward nationalism like MacDiarmid’s was impossible, and his exiling of  himself  from his own country – something which MacDiarmid could never have done – gave the clearest indication that so long as Irish nationalism implied continued support for the Catholic Church and continued faith in the revival of  Irish Gaelic as the native tongue, it could never command his loyalty. (Morgan, 1982: 205)

Introduction: Twilight to Tiger

5

It is worth pausing to acknowledge the type of  ‘straightforward’ nationalism to which MacDiarmid allegedly subscribed as it underpins, in either a negative or a positive sense, many of  the concepts and themes we will be addressing in this collection, most tellingly the question of what constitutes national identity. Can a nation have a distinctive identity without subscribing to essentialism, or a sense of shared identity based on artificial traditions and myth? While we acknowledge that these questions are essentially unanswerable, the complex case of  MacDiarmid allows us a segue into approaching the dense (and often obfuscating) polemic which surrounds questions of gender and nationalism while examining side roads of poetry, politics, propaganda, revolution, Renascence and Renaissance (Scottish and Irish), archaism, antisyzygy, Modernism, Socialism, nationalism, intra-nationalism, internationalism – a whole gallimaufry of concepts worthy of association with MacDiarmid’s poetic magnum opus, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926). Given that MacDiarmid is credited with displaying a spirit of  ‘contrariety’ (see Hart, 2007: 31) let us follow his lead and begin our discussion of  his literary and political nationalism by discussing the acknowledged antipathy to nationalism of  his Celtic cousin, Joyce.1 As Deane writes in Celtic Revivals: It is well known that Joyce, like Stephen Dedalus, considered himself  to be the slave of  two masters, one British and one Roman. It is equally well known that he repudiated the Irish Literary Revival … Repudiating British and Roman imperialism and Irish literature which seemed to be in the service of  that cause, he turned away from his early commitment to socialism and devoted himself  to a highly apolitical and wonderfully arcane practice of writing. Such, in brief is the received wisdom about Joyce and his relationship to the major political issues of  his time. Although some revision of  this estimate has recently begun, it remains one of  the most secure assumptions about his life and work. (Deane, 1985: 92)

1

See, for example Willy Maley, ‘Postcolonial Joyce’ in Alan Marshall and Neil Sammells (eds) (1998), Irish Encounters: Poetry, Politics and Prose since 1880, Sulis Press, pp. 59–70.

6

WILLY MALEY AND ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER

Here, Deane identifies a critical school of  thought which labels Joyce a disinterested aesthete, indif ferent to the politics of  his native land, and committed, like his part-autobiographical persona Stephen Dedalus, to a vocation of international modernism. While it is beyond the scope of  this collection to discuss Joyce’s complex and often-contradictory variants of nationalism and internationalism it does allow us to raise an important point, namely ‘the incompatibility of modernism and Ireland’ [which] ‘gradually became a critical staple, juxtaposing an enlightened internationalism with an insular and conservative nationalist culture’ (Keown and Taaf fe, 2010: 1). The critical perception is that nationalism in Ireland, with all of its inward looking verities and commitment to its patria, was inimical to the collectivist impulse and international manifesto of  the modernist movement. Faced with the prejudices of provincialism, as countless scholars have argued, Joyce, like Dedalus performed an abrupt volte-face, turning his back on what he viewed as the cultural and political stagnation of  Ireland, and choosing f light to the cosmopolitanism of  Trieste, Zurich and Paris, rarely to return in anything other than his imagination and memory. It was on the Continent, during his self-imposed exile, that he pursued what Neil Corcoran describes as his subversive revenge on the English language […] making it astonishingly and uniquely foreign to itself  by more or less retaining its syntax while radically destabilizing its lexicon in a promiscuous riot of pun and word-play. In the ‘language in no sinse of  the world’ of  the Wake English is exposed to numerous other languages in a way that undermines the assertiveness of its imperial authority and de-authorizes it. (Corcoran, 1997: 3)

In its polyphony and pluralism Joyce’s use of  language breaks the boundaries between centre and periphery and allows the voice of  the silenced other to participate in dialogue. To paraphrase and expand on Tim Middleton’s discussion of  Caledonian Antisyzygy, in its insistence on undermining and reconciling false dichotomies, and challenging the monoglossia of  both

Introduction: Twilight to Tiger

7

colonialism and xenophobic nationalism, Joyce’s language could be seen as ‘Bakhtin’s adulteration with knobs on’.2 Roughly a decade after Joyce was utilising his heteroglossic HibernoEnglish to fire an arsenal of polyphonic paradoxes at the monoglossic edifice of  the English language, MacDiarmid was undermining the centrality of  this ‘acquired speech’ in his newly invented dialectal and dialectical language of  ‘Synthetic Scots’ – a Scottish language which would carry the weight of  tradition out of  the parish and into the avant-garde arenas of international modernism. Speaking of  the composition of  A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle Alan Bold observes: MacDiarmid could prove his soul was Scots only by abandoning his inhibitions and allowing himself  to be possessed by the Scots language. Theoretically he had proposed Synthetic Scots as a fusion of all Scotland’s linguistic resources – the oral rhythms of  the various dialects, the lexical density of dictionary Scots, the lyrical qualities of  literary Scots – and felt that a Synthetic Scots was apposite to a poem intent on synthesis. (Bold 1988, 221)

Following Ezra Pound’s modernist maxim, ‘make it new’ MacDiarmid creates an original language and uses it to construct his oxymoronic ‘paean to contradiction’ (Hart, 2007: 29). Written in a stylised and imagined vernacular, the poem succeeds in what it sets out to do – create a distinctive (if  fictive) Scottish language capable of carrying the weight of a distinctly Scottish experience beyond the shores of  Scotland to an international audience. Narrated by an inebriate Scot, it synthesises and bridges the gaps between the Caledonian, the cosmopolitan and, as Matthew Hart argues, the cosmic, with an innovative lexical deftness that ‘whummles’3 stereotypical expectations of a Scottish national culture in its expansive and extensive range of illusions and allusion. For example, of  T. S. Eliot who famously

2

In ‘Constructing the Temporary Self: The Works of  Iain Banks’, Tim Middleton describes Caledonian Antisyzygy as ‘Bakhtin’s monoglossia with knobs on’, see Tracey Hill and William Hughes (eds) (1995), Contemporary Writing and National Identity, Sulis Press, Bath, p. 20. 3 Overturns.

8

WILLY MALEY AND ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER

argued that there was no tradition of  Scottish literature independent of an English tradition the speaker says: T. S. Eliot – it’s a Scottish name – Afore he wrote ‘the Waste Land’ s’ud ha’e come To Scotland here. He wad ha’e written A better poem syne – like this, by gum. (Cited in Hart, 2007: 30)

In what can be seen as a reverse manoeuvre of  Joyce’s attempt to insert himself into an international tradition of modernism, MacDiarmid, in challenging Eliot’s High Modernism, incorporates modernism into what he sees as a thriving Scottish tradition, demonstrating that ‘Scots poetry is a fit medium for furthering the culture of international modernity’ (Hart, 2007: 30). There is a clear element of puckish glee in MacDiarmid’s challenge to Eliot, motivated in no small part by national pride. MacDiarmid proclaimed in 1922 that ‘it tak’s an almark like Joyce tae write aboot Edinburgh!’, and later, in what might be seen as an impertinent interpolation of  Joyce within the Scottish tradition (the very tradition which Eliot disavowed), ‘we have been enormously struck by the resemblances – the moral resemblances – between Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of  the Scottish Language and James Joyce’s Ulysses’ (cited Hart, 2007: 28). Elsewhere, while acknowledging the importance of  Joyce to the Irish tradition, MacDiarmid asks his Celtic counterpart to be silent, and give the Scots a chance to find their own distinctive voice, rooted in the local, but looking outward to the global: Wheesht, wheesht Joyce, and let me hear Nae Anna Livvy’s lilt, But Wauchope, Esk and Ewes again Each wi’ its ain rhythm’s til’t. (MacDiarmid, 1994: 153)

The similarities between Joyce and MacDiarmid are many: both are eccentrics in their challenge to an English centre or core; both produce a distinctive national literature beyond that which can be subsumed into an English tradition; both look out from the stagnation of  their respective countries, each creating highly experimental and cerebral linguistic collages designed

Introduction: Twilight to Tiger

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to fashion and represent distinctive Celtic cultural identities which are separate from those of  England. They dif fer in their responses to nationalism. In broad strokes this can be allied to the fight or f light response. While MacDiarmid chose to fight colonial misconceptions and Scottish cultural stagnation from the inside, Joyce chose to f ly from the moral paralysis of  Ireland to the continent and challenge these issues outwith. There are ‘lacunae rather than links’ (Maley and Jackson, 2002: 77) between them but the ties that bind are as compelling as those between their native countries: their relationship with England and the fact of colonialism. Alasdair Gray, who in Lanark (1981) did for Glasgow what Joyce did for Dublin in Ulysses (1922), echoed Joyce’s line on the way in which Scotland was deployed by England in the interests of  Irish colonisation, as the accession of  James I allowed for an Anglo-Scottish connection at Ireland’s expense: Another tactic is to find a native clan and isolate it from the others by paying it to work as your police force. Jamie and later British Kings did that in the Scottish Highlands but it did not work in Ireland. The Irish persisted in hating the English more than each other, so Norman, Plantagenet and Tudor overlords had been forced to quell them by periodic massacres which left the winners sickened and exhausted, the Irish as Irish as ever. And the Irish were still Catholic! If  English Catholics promised them more freedom they might send in an army by way of  Ulster, crossing the narrow channel that divided it from the Scottish coast. It was from here the first Scots had left Ireland for Britain. A lot of  English settlers could have held the country down, but English kings had persuaded hardly any English farmers to settle in the poorer land they would not visit themselves. Bearing all this in mind Jamie arrived at a tactic which could only be deployed by a Scottish king ruling Ireland with an English army: the colonization of  Ulster. (Gray, 1992: 30)

But not all Irish critics and writers have been quite so touchy about Scotland. Commenting on the Field Day Anthology of  Irish Writing (1991), Bill McCormack argued that if  Ireland is to be properly understood in all its richness and complexity ‘then the culture of  that geographical space known as Scotland should properly be treated because, for much of  the historical period covered by the early pages […] the oral or literary culture of  the two places were interactive in a most intimate manner’ (McCormack, 1994: 445). McCormack went on to ask:

10

WILLY MALEY AND ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER Why then – considerations of expense, length etc., aside – is early Scottish literature omitted? Perhaps the implication that Gaelic Scotland constituted an instance (not wholly unique) of  Irish colonizing activity was politically inadmissible. The counterargument, that events in the eighth century (or earlier) hardly compromise the integrity of  twentieth-century independent Ireland, is forceful – suspiciously so, if one recalls that Yeats’s first play about Cuchulain, On Baile’s Strand (1904), crucially depends on kinship and antagonism bridging the North Channel […] The nation, conceived historically, is no more and no less than a totality made up of all totalities subordinated to it and is (at the same time) overdetermined by totalities of a higher complexity. In contrast, any notion of  Ireland as ‘self-identical whole’ stems (whether it likes it or not) from the Prussian side of  Hegel’s system. (McCormack, 1994: 445)

Where some see barriers, others see bridges, particularly between the North of  Ireland and Scotland. Marilynn Richtarik cites Stewart Parker’s Lost Belongings (1987), where Orangeman Roy O’Connell endeavours to instil a sense of  belonging into his children through an inventive geology that carves in stone the cultural connections between Ulster and Scotland, so that ‘the bedrock of  Ulster is just a continuation of  the Bedrock of  Scotland’ (Richtarik 1997/98: 74). But it is not all wine and roses for the thistle and the shamrock. In the same issue of  the Irish journal Bullán two prominent Scottish critics distanced themselves from Ireland. The historian Colin Kidd spoke of  being ‘an intruder upon another nation’s domestic quarrel’, while the poet and critic Robert Crawford described himself as a ‘foreigner’, bored by the vicissitudes of  the Irish cultural context, who ‘can enjoy the luxury of  turning away’ (Kidd, 1995: 109; Crawford, 1995: 134). Ironically, Kidd served as Professor of  History at Queen’s Belfast, so he may feel less like an intruder now. As for Crawford, he may be less inclined to turn away now that the peace process has made comparisons and connections easier as conf lict recedes. In a pioneering essay on Irish–Scottish studies, Marilyn Reizbaum asks a question pertinent to our aims in this collection: ‘Why Scotland and Ireland? What is marginal, one might ask, about cultures that have produced writers like Burns, Boswell, Stevenson, and Scott on the one hand, and Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, and Joyce on the other?’ (Reizbaum, 1992: 168–9). It is not our intention to of fer answers to the contentious, and very often tendentious issue of  Celtic commonalities between the Irish and the

Introduction: Twilight to Tiger

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Scots. Rather, our aim is to examine the intersections and interfaces across areas from history to sexuality, taking in gender and genre en route, and by so doing encourage readers to look anew at the overlaps, cross-cultural connections, shared histories and ‘doublings’ which exist between Ireland and Scotland. The thematic threads we identify are woven into the texture of  this collection like a filament through a plaid or a tartan; sometimes less distinct but essential to the overall design. Tartan is an apt thematic design for this collection. The kilt, alongside being an iconic insignia of  ‘Scottishness’, exemplifies what Sean de Friene has described as ‘national parallelism’4 connecting the Celtic peripheries, in the sense of it being an authentic avatar for a distinct Celtic identity irrespective of its provenance being bound up with militarism, myth and marketing; as Declan Kiberd rightly points out, in Ireland, the kilt pleased the revivalists with its connotations of aristocracy, of  Scottish chieftains and pipers marching into battle; but the garment never was Irish and subsequent historians have shown that the Irish wore hip-hugging trousers long before the English (and were reviled for their barbarous fashion by the new invaders). The kilt wasn’t properly Scottish either, having been devised by an English Quaker industrialist, seeking an outlet for unused tartan after the highland clearances … None of  these considerations, however, prevented a generation of enthusiasts from raising the cry, ‘Down with trousers!’ (Kiberd, 1996: 134)

To Revivalists, then, tartan (when woven into the kilt) had a distinctly Anglophile and political hue as an iconic (though not necessarily authentic, or even historically accurate) emblem of  Pan-Celticism, designed to be paraded as a pennant against the seoinin and Sassenach. In this collection we replace the cry of  ‘down with trousers’ with ‘up with kilts’, not in a separatist sense as described above, but in the Gaelic sense of  ‘breacan’ or variegated. In this we follow Kiberd’s memorable observation that ‘the seamless garment once wrapped like a green f lag around Cathleen ni Houlihan … has given way to a quilt of many patches and colours, all beautiful, all distinct, yet all connected too’ (Kiberd, 1995: 653). Similarly, the essays in this collection are distinct yet connected, and designed to 4

Sean de Friene (1965), The Great Silence, Mercier Press, Dublin, p. 108.

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come together like the intricate cross bars and precise patternings of  the plaid to capture the complexity of  the Celtic connections they address. There are, of course, numerous fibres and folds in the collection. The essays move from pre-history to postmodernism like separate strands shuttling on a loom with the common purpose of  focussing, as the title suggests, on ‘Irish–Scottish Relations and the Politics of  Culture’ to ‘provide the threads to weave new, mixed fabrics of identity located firmly in “the now” ’ (Arrowsmith, 1999: 180). To return to Reizbaum’s groundbreaking essay, it is worth noting that she justifies the juxtaposition of  these two national/colonial literatures thus: I feel I can talk about Scotland and Ireland together in this context, without homogenizing them and thereby further marginalizing them (all Celts are alike), because they have comparable ‘colonial’ histories with respect to England (unlike Wales) and because their status as minority cultures, which has more or less continued in psychic and/or political ways, has had a similar impact not only on the dissemination of  their respective literatures but on the nature and means of  the writing. (Reizbaum, 1992: 169)

Reizbaum speaks of  the hidden gender politics at work in the ways in which colonial literatures are ef feminised by their subjection yet masculinised by a rhetoric of violent resistance to that subjection, leading to ‘the phenomenon of  “double exclusion” suf fered by women writing in marginalised cultures, in this case Scotland and Ireland, where the struggle to assert a nationalist identity obscures or doubly marginalises the assertion of gender (the woman’s voice)’ (Reizbaum, 1992: 165). Reizbaum’s argument is key to an understanding of  the workings of colonialism in a Celtic context: The feminist call in Scotland and Ireland for the reformulation of  the canon of  Scottish and Irish works parallels the challenge to the mainstream Anglo-American establishment presented by Scotland, Ireland, and other countries or cultures like them – former colonies who retain a marginalized standing in relation to the former colonizer. For example, while British anthologies often ignore Scottish and Irish authors, anthologies and critical works of  Scottish and Irish writing typically treat women writers with the same disregard […] At a time when there is a call for pantransnationalism, a recognition of  the heterogeneity of nation-states, nationalist movements such as those in Scotland and Ireland are often implicated as retrogressive, even dangerous. (Reizbaum, 1992: 166–7)

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Reizbaum identifies the extent to which Irish and Scottish canons have been sentimentalised and stereotyped: In both Scotland and Ireland … certain writers serve up caricatures of national types that have to some degree been created cooperatively through imposition and internalization by the colonizer and the colony (dubbed ‘green prose’ in Ireland and ‘kailyard’ in Scotland). We are familiar with the ‘stage Irishman’, the ‘Paddy’, whose counterpart in Scotland is the ‘gentle Highlander’. (Reizbaum, 1992: 167)

Reizbaum’s argument is that ‘women in the cultural field … in Scotland and Ireland have sought to alter this dynamic, seeing on the one hand the paternalistic nature of cultural marginalisation (their identification with the nationalist cause) and, on the other, the patriarchal dimension of  their cultures’ nationalist movements (their exclusion from it)’ (Reizbaum, 1992: 168). She shows that the emphasis on nation in a colonised culture leads to the subordination of other identities: It is less my intention to bemoan the fate of  Scottish and Irish writing and its absence from the canon – or, indeed, to argue for its inclusion in that canon that is extant – than to demonstrate that the problems these literary establishments face illuminate the debate between feminists and cultural critics in their approach to canonicity. When a culture has been marginalized, its impulses toward national legitimization tend to dominate in all spheres and forms of cultural realization. (Reizbaum, 1992: 171)

Thus the question of  Irish and Scottish women’s writing of fers a way of understanding the larger questions of canonical formation and gendering: ‘The predicament of women’s writing in Scotland and Ireland provides an analogy, then, with the fate of  Scottish and Irish literature on the whole, which has been trapped by its cultural identity, excluded from the canon from without because of it, or included at the expense of or through a distortion of it’ (Reizbaum, 1992: 176). Reizbaum recognises the degree to which Irish and Scottish women writers face dif ferent problems in having their voices heard: ‘While in Ireland, “the Troubles” in the North enact on a regular basis the history of strife and make the potential for obscuration of other issues that much greater, the absence of physical struggle in Scotland produces a subtler nationalist imperative, a primarily psychic and

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internalized sense of struggle and marginalisation that has obscured the connection between nationalism and feminism’ (Reizbaum, 1992: 181–2). Despite the theoretical strides made by critics such as Reizbaum and others,5 the comparative critical coupling of  Ireland and Scotland remains a source of controversy, and contestation. Some critics are unwilling to pursue the place of  these two semicolonial nations within a postcolonial paradigm that too often sees the world in terms of  ‘Europe and its Others’ or ‘the West and the Rest’. As Ellen-Raïssa Jackson explains: The challenge that postcolonialism presents to existing critical frameworks is matched by the reluctance of critics to read Scottish and Irish literature against and alongside one another. Whereas a strong urge to bring together cultural analyses of  Scotland and Ireland has been shown in projects such as the Irish–Scottish academic initiative, the debate surrounding the New British History, and through suggestions in the work of  Robert Crawford, Marilyn Reizbaum and Seamus Deane, an equally forceful rejection of  this approach has surfaced in the work of  Fintan O’Toole, Colin McArthur and others. ( Jackson, 2002: 121)

In Ireland the aversion to postcolonialism has a long provenance, perhaps best summed up by Liam Kennedy’s coruscating attitude towards ‘The Field Day tendency in cultural politics’, that is ‘literary and cultural critics’ who ‘like jackdaws to shiny objects, seem to be drawn to labels and packaging. Assertion becomes a low-cost substitute for evidence. Metaphors masquerade as theory’ (Kennedy, 1996: 178). The substance of  Kennedy’s charge against Field Day is that they represent a collective, Catholic, ultra nationalist, Anglophobic, anti-Unionist ‘homo academicus on the make’ (Cited in Graham, 2001: 91). Elsewhere Edna Longley levels a similar complaint, suggesting that Field Day’s raison d’être is to ‘call upon theoretical support which supports their book’ (Longley, 1994: 28). Thus Longley’s cautionary note: ‘Strange collusions are taking place: intellectual holiday romances in a postcolonial never-never land’ (Longley, 1994: 28). Ireland, according to Kennedy, displays a ‘palpable sense of victimhood and exceptionalism […] which might be summed up by the acronym MOPE, that is, the most 5

Such as Luke Gibbons, Seamus Deane, Willy Maley, Marjorie Howes, Ellen-Raïssa Jackson and Stefanie Lehner.

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oppressed people ever’ (Kennedy, 1996: 25). When read in conjunction with Scotland’s claims to a postcolonial status this moping (or exaltation of victimage) can result in ‘a distasteful kind of  beauty parade in which the competitors are made to press their claims to be the most oppressed colonial subjects or to be the most “truly” postcolonial subjects’ (MooreGilbert, 1997: 12). From this ‘lowlier than thou’ attitude comes the combative and antagonistic ‘cultural cringe’ model of national identity which leads Roddy Doyle’s Jimmy Rabbitte to proclaim in The Commitments: ‘The Irish are the niggers of  Europe, lads’ (Doyle, 1987: 13), and Welsh’s ‘Rents’ to observe: ‘Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent healthy culture to be colonised by […] Ah don’t hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots’ (Welsh, 1993: 78). Competitive inferiorism aside, and taking into account how the debate has moved on since Matthew Arnold famously proclaimed the whimsical and otherworldly Celts as unfitted to the modern world, the underlying premise of a homogenous Celtic sensibility reducible to some essentialist common denominator looms spectre-like over contemporary critical practice: ‘We have all been stuck in the essentialist parish for too long,’ argues Gavin Miller, ‘we need to get out more’ (Miller, 2005: 1). Add to this to the problematic status of  both Ireland and Scotland within a postcolonial paradigm, f lavour with myths of origins, top with the putative slippage between the textual and the political, and you have a recipe for the rejection of  Celtic connections as a comparative cul-de-sac. Miller’s tongue-in-cheek review of  Eleanor Bell’s Questioning Scotland asserts that a number of  ‘those who pronounce upon Scottish Culture’, amongst them ‘Tom Nairn, Craig Beveridge, Ronald Turnbull and Cairns Craig’, are sick – suf fering from a ‘malaise […] called essentialism’, the symptoms of which are ‘investment in the idea of  tradition, parochialism, singular self definition, stereotyping, questionable generalisation’, ‘cultural exclusiveness’ and ‘reductiveness’ (Miller, 2005: 1–2). In Scotland, according to Bell, ‘this urge for essentialism has often remained largely untheorised and unchallenged’ (and, presumably to extend the trope, undiagnosed) (Bell 2004: 3). The national pathogen was diagnosed earlier in Ireland, as is evident in Seamus Deane’s weary acknowledgement that ‘Nothing is

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more monotonous or despairing than the search for essence which defines a nation’ (Deane, in Hederman and Kearney, 1982: 512). Again, as Stuart Kelly argues in The Scottish Review: ‘I have a profound suspicion of essentialism; and essentialism always trips into exceptionalism. We’re not just essentially dif ferent, we’re exceptionally better.’6 In its valorisation of static, inf lexible types and tropes essentialism is at best misguided, and at worst dangerous. Yet, as an old Irish proverb states, and as this collection argues: An te rugadh I stabla ni capal – Everything born in a stable is not a horse. One might add, nor is every horse born in a stable. Place of  birth is therefore less critical in cultural identity than one might at first assume, and to extend the metaphor a national literature crosses borders as easily as it closes them. A centripetal approach based on synergies and syntheses reroutes the essentialist bandwagon from its linear and organic path by ‘a move away from fixity to f luidity, from identity to dif ference, from dogma to dialogue’ (Graham and Maley, 1999: 149). In short, it blurs the boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and directs us to what Luke Gibbons describes as ‘[another] way of negotiating identity through an exchange with the other’ by making: Provision, not just for ‘vertical’ mobility, from the periphery to the centre, but for lateral journeys along the margins which short-circuit the colonial divide … Hybridity need not always take the high road: when there are borders to be crossed unapproved roads might prove more beneficial than those patrolled by Global Powers. (Gibbons, 1996: 180)

These ‘unapproved roads’ provide a border-crossing opportunity beyond the core–periphery model and allow for a reciprocal writing in the margins which eschews essentialism and allows for conversations within and between cultures beyond their identification with a putative cultural norm. One such byroad is the paradigm of dislocation, duality and paradox characterised by Caledonian Antisyzygy. Using as his example James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) Paul Coates argues that ‘Stories that deal explicitly 6

accessed 22 April 2012.

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with the Double seem in the main to be written by authors who are suspended between language and cultures … Here the Double is the self when it speaks another language’ (Coates, 1988: 32). For Coates the ‘doubleness’ of  both Hogg and his novel result from his ‘Scottishness’, and by extension his sense of  fractured identity within a culture in process of being subsumed into a normative ‘British’ tradition wherein its status can only ever be seen as irreconcilably split, schismatic and peripheral. This paradigmatic duality, popularised in 1919 by George Gregory Smith under the term ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’, was later immortalised by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid to mean the antithesis, ambivalence and ambiguity which results from straddling opposing ideologies and national identities. This notion of  the divided self in Scottish fiction and culture has faced considerable critical animus ranging from ad hoc criticism to outright hostility. For example, Eleanor Bell rejects the ‘urge to categorise’ and ‘the need to mythologise’ in the construction of  Scottish national identity (Bell, 2004: 43). Bell cites Francis Russell Hart to support her case against what she sees as the reductive essentialism in such approaches to Scotland: Centuries of social observers have told us of  the distinctiveness of  Scottish culture by invoking a peculiar national character. Put together, this heritage of  tropes and stereotypes produces a logical absurdity. That grandly anomalous person ‘the typical Scot’ is ‘a schizophrenic creature at once realistic and recklessly sentimental, scientific and soldierly, bibulous and kilted, teetotal and trousered [etc]’. (Bell, 2004: 42)

In sum such a stance argues that the traumatised topos of  Caledonian Antisyzygy presupposes a Master/Slave dialectic in which priority is af forded to ‘a notional centre’ (Norquay and Smyth, 2002: 2), thus England the Master and Scotland the Slave. For critics such as Bell, the notion of antisyzygy as a national cultural pathology presupposes a paralysing schism at the heart of  Scottish culture which immobilises Scottish identity in static stereotypes and immuring clichés based on anglocentric values and ‘provincial’ insecurity. This process of national dependence, according to Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull, leads to another form of doubling based on the ‘undermining of  the native’s self-belief and the disintegration of  local identity’ (Beveridge and Turnbull, 1989: 5). In short, following Frantz Fanon’s account of

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colonial mimicry, Beveridge and Turnbull posit the notion of  the evolue; natives who attempt to escape their ascribed inferiorism by mimicking the culture of  the metropolis. Conversely, Cairns Craig argues that Scotland’s schizophrenic anima mundi can be viewed as an enabling rather than a disabling attribute: Too often in studies of  Scottish Culture the apparent lack of unity of  the self is taken to be the symptom of a failed identity, of a self-contradictory and destructive identity, rather than that the healthy self is always a dialectic operating within and between ‘opposing’ elements of  the self and others. (Craig, 1996: 113).

Craig’s analysis of  the dialectical identity of  Scotland is in accord with what Richard Kearney defines as ‘the Irish mind’: ‘In contradistinction to the orthodox dualist logic of either/or, the Irish mind may be seen to favour a more dialectical logic of  both/and: an intellectual ability to hold the traditional oppositions of classical reason together in creative conf luence’ (Kearney, 1985: 9) Though troublingly reductive on a surface level, such claims transcend essentialist and oppositional readings by positing the notion that the duality of  the Irish mind ‘defies a narrow logic of identity; it epitomizes the defiance of an excluded middle’ (Kearney, 1997: 213). This paradoxical notion of an excluded middle (or marginal centre) lends itself  to an approach to both Irish and Scottish literatures which allows for an examination of  the pervasive tension at the core of  hyphenated identities. This is turn circumnavigates the critical clichés of cultural cringe and colonial deracination which define Scotland (and Ireland) as anachronisms and anomalies in an all-encompassing British tradition. It is not all doom and gloom. If  the Ulster Plantation of 1609 saw England using Scotland as a bulwark against Ireland then the St Andrews Agreement of 2006 saw Scotland giving back something positive, a model of a devolved assembly. In Devolving Scottish Literature (1992) Robert Crawford alluded to the ‘obvious strong shared preoccupations’ of Scottish and Irish literature (Crawford, 1992: 286). Crawford extended his devolutionary argument in a review essay entitled ‘Devolving Irish Literature’ (1995). Marilyn Reizbaum’s ‘Canonical Double Cross’ may be being

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supplanted by a double-deal that sees Irish–Scottish studies emerge as a challenge to anglocentric hegemony. Together we are strong. In 1916 the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued that counterhegemony is essential to the liberation of any class to combat the ideological control of  the dominant class. In the same year, in what might be seen as a radically counter-hegemonic expression of  the ‘people nation’, Irish (and Scottish) men and women seized the General Post Of fice on Sackville Street, Dublin, and read a proclamation declaring the establishment of an Irish Republic. After holding out against British superiority in manpower and artillery for almost a week, and with Dublin in ruins, the republican insurrectionists surrendered. The leaders of  the rebellion were tried, condemned to death, and executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol. Amongst them was the figure of  the Scottish-born Irish Marxist James Connolly – radical, revolutionary, republican, and, in one of  the greatest ironies in Irish/English history, heroic martyr to the cause of  Ireland. As Catherine Rees observes, ‘the image of  Connolly’s execution at Kilmainham Gaol, shot by firing squad whilst tied to a chair, so injured from the fighting that he could not stand, helped transform him into a martyr for the nationalist cause, and provoked widespread protest in both Ireland and abroad’ (Rees, 2010: 172). Thus, due to the pathos surrounding his execution, Connolly became a burning symbol, moving from history to hagiography and from Marxism to martyrdom in death. In life he was, as Matthew Hart argues, an ‘Irish revolutionary, who advocated a … mixture of socialism and nationalism, theorizing that an assault on British imperialism in Ireland might facilitate a broader social revolution’ (Hart, 2007: 28). In this he bore a marked similarity to his friend and supporter, the fabled Scottish labour leader John Maclean, whose forceful and telling response to the rising and its aftermath, The Irish Tragedy: Scotland’s Disgrace (1920), chronicles the Celtic connections between Ireland and Scotland, and demands action from his own nation: My plea is that Britain has no right to dominate Ireland with constabulary armed with bombs, and with an army and navy considered foreign by the Irish. We Scots have been taught to revere the names of  Sir William Wallace and Robert Bruce because these doughty men of old are recorded as championing the cause of  freedom when

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WILLY MALEY AND ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER Edward I and Edward II tried to absorb Scotland as part of  English territory. All Scots must therefore appreciate the plight of  Ireland, which for seven centuries has chafed under the English yoke, and now ought to stand by Ireland in her last great ef fort for freedom; the last because triumph is bound to be hers very soon. (Cited Maley, 2010: 124)

Here the militant Red Clydesider Maclean acknowledges the need for a collective, Celtic counter-hegemony – a Celtic communism set against a divisive English imperial policy based on divide et impera. In Willy Maley and Niall O’Gallagher’s essay in this collection the politics and beliefs of  these Celtic compatriots7 provide the context, subject and backdrop to the works of  the radical socialist versifier Hugh MacDiarmid and the Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain), for whom, as the authors argue, ‘literary and political activism went hand in hand’. Locating each of  their chosen triptych in the entwined histories of  Ireland and Scotland, Maley and O’Gallagher make the bold claim that ‘the occlusion of  John Maclean, and his Edinburgh counterpart Connolly, from accounts of  Scottish political and literary history is not simply a result of political amnesia or selective memory’, but ‘Specific acts of censorship and suppression … deferred until the dust had begun to settle on decades of agitation’. Perhaps this is part of what Berresford Ellis has described as ‘the divisive tradition that the makers of imperial policy would like the Celts to recall, creating scissions and animosities among them’ (Berresford Ellis, 1985: 188). Certainly, as Maley and O’Gallagher suggest, it is a suppression of combined ‘literary and political energy’ for the duration of  the febrile atmosphere of  the 1930s. In a direct challenge to this oppressive hegemony, Maley and O’Gallagher argue for a reconciliation, and recognition, of  the syntheses and interfaces between Scottish and Irish nationalism and socialist internationalism as ‘essential for a proper understanding of our recent past, and an informed debate about the future’.

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As Murray Pittock points out, ‘by most measures of nationality, James Connolly was a Scot: described as “Scoto-Hibernian” even in Dublin (where he came from Edinburgh at the age of 28), he spoke with a Scots accent and named his daughter, born in 1907, “Fiona” after William Sharp’s alter-ego’ (Cited Maley, 2010: 126).

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The two poets, MacDiarmid and MacGill-Eain – the one a wielder of  ‘synthetic Scots’, the other a modern Gaelic bard – who form the literary backbone of  Maley and O’Gallagher’s essay of fer two sides to an issue which is especially fascinating in an Irish–Scottish comparative context: the language question. Where Yeats had praised Carleton and Synge as Irish emulators of  Burnsian dialect, Edwin Muir, in his book on Walter Scott, praised Yeats for opting for English, and decried Scottish ef forts to find a literary voice in the vernacular: Scotland can only create a national literature by writing in English. This may sound paradoxical: in support of it I can only advance my whole case in regard to the Scots language, as outlined in the first part of  this book, and the contemporary case of  Ireland. Irish nationality cannot be said to be any less intense than ours; but Ireland produced a national literature not by clinging to Irish dialect, but by adopting English and making it into a language fit for all its purposes. The poetry of  Mr Yeats belongs to English literature, but no one would deny that it belongs to Irish literature pre-eminently and essentially. The dif ference between contemporary Irish and contemporary Scottish literature is that the first is central and homogeneous, and that the second is parochial and conglomerate; and this is because it does not possess an organ for the expression of a whole and unambiguous nationality. Scots dialect poetry represents Scotland in bits and patches, and in doing that it is no doubt a faithful enough image of  the present divided state of  Scotland. But while we cling to it we shall never be able to express the central reality of  Scotland, as Mr Yeats has expressed the central reality of  Ireland; though for such an end the sacrifice of dialect poetry would be cheap. The real issue in contemporary Scottish literature is between centrality and provincialism; dialect poetry is one of  the chief supports of  the second of  these two forces; the first can hardly be said to exist at all. And until Scottish literature has an adequate language, it cannot exist. Scotland will remain a mere collection of districts. (Muir, 1936: 111–12)

By contrast, Robert Crawford claimed for Scottish literature an inventiveness that had a Joycean echo: Scots is likely to strike the majority of international readers as a deliberate variation on English, which frequently quotes, re-accents, and realigns elements of  English vocabulary, mixing them in a rich impurity with alien elements (in the same way that some ‘Black English’ works). Such Scots is a form of  ‘dialogized heteroglossia’, which is why the use of it af fects not only Scottish but English identity, in much the same way as does the superbly impure language of  James Joyce and the other Modernists. (Crawford, 1993: 7)

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Thus, in Crawford’s view the linguistic ‘impurity’ of  the Scots is a reciprocal process – a fusion and confusion which creates a crucible for convergence between the occupier and the occupied. The language which emerges is a palimpsest of compromises and concessions: a dialogue which is exuberantly adulterated, impure and inclusive, and border crossing in its openness to the process of cultural renewal. If  language has the capacity to invert and challenge the normative traditions of  English, history, or the lack thereof, is a thread which weaves a Celtic connection between the marginalised Irish and the Scots. As Seamus Deane has argued: ‘Ireland has no continuity of cultural experience comparable to that of  the nation states of  France and England’ (Deane, 1985: 18), while Cairns Craig, discussing an expanded Celtic periphery, observed: ‘History in Scotland, Ireland and Wales remains a series of accidents, held together by no fundamental necessity … England has a history; Ireland and Scotland will only acquire a history once they come into the orderly and progressive world that is imposed on them by England’ (Craig, 1996: 101). If, as Deane and Cairns suggest, ‘history’ is accepted as the history of  the colonising power then other (subaltern) accounts will appear to be either variations on a theme, mere propaganda or lies. Within this conception, the historical narrative of  the dominant discourse (in this case England) is accepted as prima facie evidence of  the past event; thus reality is mediated through the dominant discourse. This, in turn, establishes and sustains the authority of  the dominant discourse to speak the truth, resulting in the subaltern (in this case the Scots and Irish) being written out of  history. It follows that, as Cairns suggests, Scotland and by extension Ireland, due to their colonial contexts, are ‘bypassed by history’ and therefore ‘historyless’. Yet, paradoxically what Scotland and Ireland have in common with other putatively postcolonial cultures is ‘the impossibility of an escape from history, […] with the recurrent sense that the past can never be left behind, that it will appear and exact a necessary price’ (Punter and Byron, 2004: 55). In short, history to the colonised is by nature recidivist; crystallised in the familiar Gothic trope of deferred retribution. ‘There is’ according to Alan Bissett: ‘something/someone/ somebody that haunts the fringes of  the Scottish imagination … perhaps the whisper of  history, pain, feudalism, legend, all or none of  these

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things, but undoubtedly Scotland’s is a fiction haunted by itself, one in a perpetual state of  Gothicism’ (Bissett, 2001: 6). Equally, in Ireland, as Siobhan Kilfeather argues: Gothic fiction enables Irish writers to address anxieties about speech and silence, to accuse the state and the family of psychological terrorism without having to propose a program of reform […]. It demands some ref lection on what possibilities for change are allowed by an obsession with a memory of the dead. (Kilfeather, 1994: 46)

This ‘Gothicism’ of  the Celtic peripheries is symptomatic of a history of unresolved issues and unfinished business, littered with the detritus left by the colonial storm of progress; a cryptic palimpsest of ellipses and silences from which ancestral voices cry out for retribution and reprisal, and the silenced Celtic bogeyman threatens to contaminate the present with his primitive, anachronistic return. ‘Ireland’, according to an anonymous report in the Nation of 5 February 1848: is the fatigue ground of  the English imagination, and a full-bellied dyspeptic people must have their daily providence of  terror, that they may ‘sup full of  horrors’, and bless their stars for living east of  the channel. Every people in every age have their country of monsters, where human kind, like evil demons drank human blood, and lived on the marrow of dead men’s bones […] it is now our part to furnish England with monsters, thugs and devils great and devils small. (Cited Cosgrove, 1995: 99)

Such squalid and monstrous behaviours were not confined to west of  the channel but stalked and menaced the English imagination from north of  the border in the figure of  the wild Highlander, a savage, uncouth and ineradicably superstitious throwback to primitive times whose lawlessness and savagery were thinly disguised beneath a veneer of civilisation. By the mid-nineteenth century a Celtophobic gulf existed between the ‘civilised’ English and wild Celt, with the Celtic mentalité in all its savage irrationalism representing a dangerous antithesis to the English scientific mind, hence racial conf lations of  the Irish and the Highland Scots, and fantastical and fanatical depictions of  Celtic inferiority such as the following piece of chauvinism expounded by the Edinburgh-born Dr Robert Knox:

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WILLY MALEY AND ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER The Celtic race does not, and never could be made to comprehend the meaning of  the word liberty … I appeal to the Saxon men of all countries whether I am right or not in my estimation of  Celtic character. Furious fanaticism; a love of war and disorder; a hatred for order and patient industry; no accumulative habits; restless, treacherous, uncertain … (Cited Cheng, 1995: 29)

Thus, for Knox as for many other scientific racists, the Celtic periphery represents a source of  terrifying otherness which justifies racist xenophobia as a response to a very specific threat of racial pollution in the contact zones of  Empire. For Knox, race is axiomatic in determining character, and the indolent and belligerent Celts are deviant and degenerate racial specimens who embody the darkest imaginings, dreads and desires of  Enlightenment Britain. While Celtophobic ethnocentrism attempted to demonise and expel the pre-Enlightenment spectres of  the Celtic fringe’s primitive past, the Gothic with its register of excess, transgression and taboo glutted itself on the ‘steady diet of atavistic antagonisms and malevolent mythologies’ (Flannery, 2006: 92) which stemmed from the haunted histories of  Scotland and Ireland. Strewn with the corpses of colonialism’s hated others, Scottish and Irish gothic evokes what Ian Duncan describes as ‘demonic forces expelled from the modern order of nature, whose return threatens a reverse colonisation – rendering the present alien, unnatural, fatal, exposing its metaphysical emptiness’ (Duncan, 2000: 77). The Celtic connection between Scottish and Irish Gothic can thus be seen as a legacy of a colonial psychology which f lirts with phantasms of usurpation, origins and legitimacy to provide an uncanny testimony to the violence of  the colonial past, and the ‘pastness’ of  the postcolonial present. Numerous scholars from Roy Foster to Victor Sage have argued that Gothic is a distinctly Protestant mode, with the typical Gothic scenario representing a dramatisation of  the extreme distrust held by early authors of  Gothic towards countries which practised Catholicism. The sublime settings, often Mediterranean, invariably Catholic, and usually Medieval, were used as a backdrop and mise en scène designed to evoke the horror and dread associated with the perceived superstition and fanaticism of  feudal Catholicism set against the ‘civilised world’ of progressive Protestantism.

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Indeed, as John Strachan, citing Charles Maturin, claims in this collection, the ‘barbarism of  the feudal ages, with their wild superstitions and dubious Christianity, their knightly gallantry and baronial oppression, the native fierceness of  the Gothic conqueror, mingled with the levity, bigotry, of  his Italian and Gallic slave, of fer powerful materials to the painter of manners with the pen’.8 Ireland and the Highlands of  Scotland served as suitable receptacles for Protestant and Enlightenment fears of  the violent resurrection and atavistic return of a primitive past (as represented by the Roman Church) that threatened to drag Enlightened Europe back into the Dark Ages. Added to this ‘the fear of  Catholic, not to mention Jacobite, resurgence was never far from overheated Protestant imaginations in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century’ (Gibbons, 2004: 17). Such attitudes resulted in the spatial displacement of  Gothic terrors from the exotic climes of  the Mediterranean to the Celtic periphery. Indeed, as Luke Gibbons argues: While the Jacobite ghost had been politically exorcized in the decades after Culloden, it assumed a new, cultural afterlife in the Irish and Scottish periphery, re-emerging in the national imaginaries of  Ossian, Celticism, the historical novel, and, of course, the Gothic itself. (Gibbons, 2004: 19)

Politically exorcised perhaps, but culturally salient nonetheless, the dark shadow of  Jacobinism continued to stalk the Protestant imagination as a sinister and terrifying monument to past wrongs, tormenting the English, and Anglican imaginations, by speaking of  ‘unresolved guilt and the question of  legitimacy, several generations after the event’ (Gibbons, 2004: 19). Two of  the essays in this collection concern themselves with Irish and Scottish Gothic. In the first, John Strachan discusses a text that has become near paradigmatic as a Gothic tour de force: Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. With conceptual rigour, Strachan’s essay addresses what many have seen as the thematic core of  Maturin’s novel – the symbolic and sacramental trappings of  Catholicism – and establishes a link 8

Charles Robert Maturin (1824), The Albigenses. A Romance, 4 vols, Hurst, Robinson and Co., London, vol. 1, p. vii.

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between Ireland and Scotland by discussing its reception ‘in the two most significant Scots periodicals of  the day, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Edinburgh Review’. Drawing on the evidence of  these texts, and acknowledging the contribution to the Gothic tradition of  James Hogg, Strachan locates Maturin’s text in relation to a burgeoning tradition of tales of  terror evolving in Scottish periodicals in the early nineteenth century. He concludes by placing Maturin on an intra-national and an international stage as a traditionalist in form, and an anti-papist in belief, thereby adding to a continuous debate about the nature of  ‘Irishness’ in both the novel and the novelist. At the opposite end of  the nineteenth century, Alison O’MalleyYounger returns to the notion of  ‘Celtic Gothic’ through the lens of  Robert Louis Stevenson’s short fiction. While the priest-hating, ostracised and impoverished Anglo-Irishman of  Strachan’s essay may seem a strange bedfellow with the languorous, bohemian Scot of  O’Malley-Younger’s, there are contact points that suggest border-crossings and blurred distinctions operating across the Celtic peripheries. Maturin’s near maniacal anti-Catholicism, for example, is ref lected in the hysterical scapegoating of  William Burke: Irishman, Catholic, murderer, and one of  the subjects of  Stevenson’s ‘crawler’ The Bodysnatcher (1884). While the Faustian John Melmoth stalks the pages of  Maturin’s Gothic extravaganza as a symbol of  tainted inheritance, he reappears doubly in the shadowy figures of  the degenerate Irishmen, Burke and Hare, in Stevenson’s short story. In each instance the demonic and demonised figures at the core of  the texts represent the terrifying possibility of a recidivist return of  the repressed irrupting into the present. Thus, as these essays argue, the spectres of  John Melmoth and Messrs Burke and Hare can be seen as supernatural symptoms and spectral scapegoats of a tormented colonial imagination, and Celtic Gothic a means of  ‘redressing rather than disavowing the sins of  the past’ by rattling ‘the skeletons in its own vaults, thus going some way towards exposing the calcified cultural deposits that underlie the ideology of race itself ’ (Gibbons, 2004: 16). If antipathy towards the Celtic (and Catholic) undergirded many of  the Gothic tropes in nineteenth-century Irish and Scottish literatures, Celticism also provoked a reverse ethnocentrism in the Celtic peripheries

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wherein ‘ethnocentric … men and women sought to combat heavy doses of  Anglo-Saxonist venom with a Celticist serum of  their own making’ (L. P. Curtis, cited in Cheng, 1995: 50). This was made manifest in the patriotic Anglophobia of  Pan-Celtic institutions such as the Gaelic League, the narrow gauge nationalism of  Sinn Fein and the volkish Celticism of  the Revivalists, for whom the ancient Celtic past became a crucible of authenticity. For these Pan-Celtic enthusiasts Celtic culture became ‘aligned with the medieval, with the pre-modern, the archaic, and the maladapted; with all those things whose inevitable fate it was to be vanquished by modernity’ (Cleary, 2005: 1). Conversely modernity became equated with colonial oppression, as Emer Nolan points out: The modern, in colonial conditions, is associated with ‘foreignness’, domination and violence; it is in no sense naturalised in the course of a long process of economic and social development. It is precisely in such a situation that the culturally ‘old’ appears most intensely valuable, and becomes the object of political contestation. For a while it may virtually obliterate traditional culture, such an experience of modernisation also confers an auratic significance on the remnants of the archaic. (Nolan, 2005: 225)

Thus, while the history of  the Celtic fringes remained a history strewn with the corpses of  Celtic monsters, this same Celtic history became to Irish and Scottish Revivalists the antiquarian linchpin (or Tara Brooch) for a myth-making, Anglophobic, national collective unconscious. What was at stake for Revivalists was nothing less than the regeneration, reinvigoration and restoration of  the Irish and Scottish nations, the essence of which lay in a remote idealised past, inhabited by a pantheon of  Celtic gods and monsters, and peopled by primitives and peasants tending their quaint, parochial kailyards and farmlands while transmitting ancestral voices in their cadenced (often Gaelic) folksongs. This Eleusinian fairyland represented for writers such as Yeats the richness of  the national imagination, and the anima mundi of  the nation set against the mercantile soullessness of  England. As Jacqueline Genet observes: ‘By helping to create an ideal image of rural Ireland, Yeats spreads the idea that the true soul of  the country is in its rural roots. All industrial progress is considered an act of  treason against the traditional ideals’ (Genet, 1996: 148). In short, Ireland had culture and England had commerce.

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According to Lauren Clark in her essay on ‘Celtic Consumerism’, Scotland and Ireland had commerce too. Beginning with a quotation from charismatic Celticist Patrick Geddes, Clark takes us into the heart of  Scotland’s Celtic Renascence, and its inception in 1890s Edinburgh. It is well documented that Cultural Revivalism in both Ireland and Scotland represented a rearguard action against modernity as its proponents turned to the timeless sanctuary of an imagined past. Thus in disavowing the discontinuous tempos of  the city, commerce and modernity, this [Revivalist] critical tradition has persistently sought radical alternatives in the assumed continuities of  folk cultures, ‘authentic’ habits and ‘genuine’ communities. (Chambers, 1994: 71)

The temper of  this tradition, born in the wake of  Romantic nationalism, was anti-modern, anti-mechanistic and anti-urban: hence glorified interpretations of pre-industrial life, and depictions of unspoilt folk culture which has escaped the ravages of  that crucible of consumerism: modernity. In contradiction, particularly in Ireland conspicuous consumerism (as exemplified by the Great Exhibition of  the 1850s) was vitiated, and consumers reviled as shallow, superficial, ersatz and vulgar by turn-of-the-century arbiters of  taste, and disdained by radical cultural nationalists. Yet, in the midst of  the frenzy of squabbling about ‘West Britonism’ and cultural cringe, the Revivalists and associated cultural developments such as the Home Industries and Co-operative movements can be viewed as self-help initiatives designed to regenerate a moribund Irish economy. Similarly in Scotland, reformers such as Geddes initiated schemes of urban renewal designed to improve the living conditions of  the poor, including those who resided in ‘the rotting cabins of old Ireland … [and] the squalid and super-crowded tenement of  the Scot’ (Geddes, 1971: 113). As Clark makes clear, despite the apparent hypocrisies and contradictions of  Revivalists over the evils of commerce, some Revivalists positively encouraged exhibitions in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin and Belfast in what they themselves dubbed the Second Cities of  Empire as a means to promote ‘other identities – namely international, industrial, artistic and civic – from 1853 to 1911’. The Celtic consumerism which emerged, often

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wrapped in the livery of  kitsch, was, as Clark describes it, an uncomfortable and colonially therapeutic truth used to promote Celtic industries and identities in the fin de siècle period. Here as elsewhere, the image of  the Celt (seen in the immuring clichés of  the mock Highland village) is viewed as essentially unfitted to commerce as anything other than a spectacle to be consumed. This follows essentialist and deterministic notions which branded the Celt as indolent, resistant to advancement, inef fectual in politics, wanting in sanity and, as Matthew Arnold famously stated, ‘always ready to react against the despotism of  fact’, a factor which Arnold observes has ‘lamed him in the world of  business and politics’.9 For Yeats, Celtic values resided in the hypostasised Irish Celt as represented in his own euhemeristic folk tales and fairy legends. The fairies of  Ireland, fostered by the tolerant mysticism of  the Catholic Celts (to Yeats Catholicism and Celticism appeared almost homologous), lived in a convivial mystic fraternity, not enjoyed by their Caledonian cousins as the temper of  the taciturn Scots, ‘too theological and too gloomy’ had ‘soured the naturally excellent disposition of ghosts and goblins’ (Cited Maley, 2007: 164). Yeats’s description of  hosts of disgruntled Scottish elementals due to what he perceived as the dour, Protestant empiricism of  the Scottish character is, of course, partisan and problematic. Moreover it f lies in the face of notions of  Caledonian Antisyzygy and the pluralistic and divided nature of  ‘[t]he Scottish muse’, which according to G. Gregory Smith: has loved reality, sometimes to maudlin af fection for the commonplace, [but] she has loved not less the airier pleasure to be found in the confusion of  the senses, in the fun of  things thrown topsy-turvy, in the horns of elf-land and the voices of  the mountain. (Smith, 1919: 19)

Yeats, then, in scotching the myth of  the ‘doubleness’ of  the Scottish temperament, splits ‘the polar twins of  the Scottish muse’ (in Middleton, 1995: 20), and turns Scotland into a surly only child who doesn’t believe

9

Matthew Arnold (1867), Study of  Celtic Literature, Smith, Elder & Co., London, p. 14; quoted in Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (2000), Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity, Cork University Press, Cork, p. 105.

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in fairies. Yet, when it came to Fiona MacLeod, ‘the Celtic Tigerlily who put the prim into primeval’ (Maley, 2007: 170), Yeats was infinitely more accommodating to a cross pollination of ideas, arguing that ‘she [Macleod] had in her hands the keys to the gates of  the primeval world, which shut behind more successful races, when they plunged into material progress’ (Cited Maley, 2007: 170). In the history of  twice-told tales, doppelgangers, double-dealers and divided selves attributed to the Scots, Fiona MacLeod/William Sharp stand as a monument to Caledonian antisyzygy. An ambiguous twofold beacon of  fusion and confusion filtered through a double-life, a persona and a pseudonym, William Sharp instigated the second identity of  the Gaelicspeaking Highlander Fiona MacLeod as part of  his passionate Celticism, and proceeded through his mystical renderings and multiple letters to exert a profound inf luence on writers such as AE and Yeats. Fiona MacLeod was neither the first nor the only soubriquet Sharp adopted in the course of  his literary career.10 However, for Sharp, MacLeod was much more than another nom de plume, but a second self, embodying the mystic, the mythic and the esoteric elements of ‘Scottishness’ more commonly associated with the anachronistic Highlander than with a middle class gentleman from Paisley. ‘So seriously did Sharp take the pseudonym’, argues Richard Ellmann, ‘so fully did he assume in 1894 the personality of  Fiona MacLeod, that he wrote under her name books in a style dif ferent from his own, sent letters to her for friends in a feminine handwriting, complained to friends who wrote to her that they never wrote to him, and eventually almost collapsed under the double life’ (Ellmann, 1948: 77). A cerebrally ‘dimorphic’ (Manlove, 1994: 126) antiquarian and Celticist, MacLeod almost pulled of f a greater hoax than Macpherson’s Ossian controversy, and like Macpherson’s well documented Ossianic fraud MacLeod 10

Sharpe’s periodical The Pagan Review (1892) included articles on Scotland’s Celtic cultural heritage written by a number of dif ferent personae including the editor W. H. Brooks. Its success helped to establish Sharp with the Celtic Renaissance movement in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Latterly the popularity of  the otherworldly MacLeod drew attention to the Edinburgh branch of  the Celtic Renaissance fronted by Patrick Geddes.

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generated considerable amounts of vehement spleen amongst the Revivalist communities, especially in Ireland. In relation to Macpherson’s antiquarian swindle Russell K. Alspach identifies the source of  Hibernian irritation: ‘The feeling toward Macpherson in Ireland was mostly one of irritation, for it was felt that he had dressed Cuchulin and Finn in the kilt and plaid besides winding the strands of  the two great sagas into a Gordian knot’ (Alspach, 1959: 97). MacLeod, like Macpherson, was also traf ficking in borrowed robes, but doubly so: whereas Macpherson was adorning ‘bits and pieces of  Irish and Celtic legend borrowed, altered, and embellished with his own creative writing’ (Trumpener, 1997: 75) in the authentic plaid of  the Highlander, Sharp/MacLeod took it one step further and channelled his/her Celtic myths through the voice of a woman, and one who successfully pulled of f  the deception – almost. Yeats was initially enraptured by MacLeod’s supernatural Celticism, commissioning two plays, The House of  Usna11 and The Immortal Hour12 for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899. This was vetoed by Lady Gregory who baulked at the idea of a Pan-Celtic theatrical movement, famously thumbing her nose at MacLeod thus: I think the word ‘Celtic’ was put in for the sake of  Fiona MacLeod, whose plays however we never acted, although we used to amuse ourselves by thinking of  the call for ‘author’ that might follow one, and the possible appearance of  William Sharp in place of  the beautiful woman he had given her out to be, for even then we had little doubt they were one and the same person. I myself never quite understood the meaning of  the ‘Celtic Movement’ which we were said to belong to. When I was asked about it, I used to say it was a movement meant to persuade the Scots to begin buying our books, while we continued not to buy theirs. (Cited Maley, 2007: 171)

From the tone of  the piece it appears that Gregory’s words are motivated more by personal dislike of  Sharp/Macleod than by her political, artistic or cultural beliefs.13 Nonetheless she makes an important point – to be Celtic 11 12 13

Performed by the Stage Society of  London in April 1900. Published in The Fortnightly Review in 1900. This is just as well bearing in mind Gregory’s avowed ‘Irishness’ is somewhat fudged by the inconvenient truths of  her Ascendancy background and social class. As one

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one had to have credentials most of which she herself did not have. These included poverty, piety, peasantry and an address in the Irish Gaeltacht – with no pressing necessity to speak the indigenous language. While Gregory leaned towards separation rather than synthesis between Celtic peoples, MacLeod issued a cri de coeur for a Celtic commonality of purpose between the Irish and the Scots in an article entitled ‘Celtic’ published in the Contemporary Review in 1900: The Celtic element in our national life has a vital and great part to play. We have a most noble ideal if we will but accept it. And that is, not to perpetuate feuds, not to try to win back what has gone away upon the wind, not to repay ignorance with scorn, or dullness with contempt, or past wrongs with present hatred, but so to live, so to pray, so to hope, so to achieve so that we, what is left of  the Celtic races, of  the Celtic genius, may permeate the greater race of which we are a vital part, so that, with this Celtic emotion, Celtic love of  beauty, and Celtic spirituality, a nation greater than any the world has seen may issue, a nation refined and strengthened by the wise relinquishings, and steadfast ideals of  Celt and Saxon, united in a common fatherland, and in a singleness of pride and faith. (Cited Weygandt, 1913: 254)

There are shades of  Arnold and Renan in Macleod’s comments about the Celtic races, but also an acknowledgement of  Celtic Connections that is lacking in Gregory. Celticism for MacLeod was less dependent on nationality than it was on ‘temperament’, Gaeldom and unification with other Celts; Gregory’s interest rested on the uncorrupted integrity of  Ireland’s specific culture as a justification for a break with British rule. Gregory did not stand alone. In a rejoinder to Macleod’s ‘Celtic’ published on 18 August 1900 in Standish O’Grady’s All Ireland Review George Russell (AE) argued that Celtic Revivalism was ‘Ireland’s last stand for freedom’ (Russell, 1900: 1), a freedom that could only be attained by eschewing the compromise advocated by Macleod (whom he defines as an ‘English writer’): ‘God gives no second chance to a nation if it f lings aside its birthright’ (Russell, 1900: 1). The article ends:

who collected the rents of  her poor tenants as readily as she did their superstitions and stories her ties to the Gael were somewhat questionable. With this in mind it may be worth f lavouring her words with a large helping of irony.

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She [Macleod] humbly speaks of  herself as the representative voice of  the Gael. This is a claim which the Gael in Ireland will repudiate; for the Gael in Ireland, in addition to his traditions which are shared to some extent by the Scottish Celt, has the aspiration to a distinct and self-governed nationality, and no-one can claim to represent him who does not share this aspiration. (AE, 1900: 1)

Thus, while Russell is happy to acknowledge the sense of  tradition which connects the Irish and Scottish Celts, he demurs from seeing Celtic connections in their relative aspirations for the future. Ireland demands selfgovernment; Scots, he argues, are content to work within a larger ‘Great British’ identity, and it is here in their respective relationships with England that the Celtic connection is broken. In each instance, be it Macleod, Russell or Gregory, however, there is a sense of  the incontrovertible fact that authentic national identity (whether Irish, Scots or a Celtic combination of  both) sprang from a purer, prelapsarian pre-industrial past, only available to the contemporary reader through translation or transliteration – a facet of  Celtic identity and culture which Masaya Shimokusu addresses in this collection in an essay which takes MacLeod to a level of connectedness beyond what ‘s/he’ defined as the Celtic races – to Japan. Taking us first to the heart of  the Irish Revival, with Douglas Hyde’s appreciative comments about MacLeod’s place in the ‘Scoto-Celtic movement’, Shimokusu then places Macleod on a global stage, and meticulously traces the thematic and formal, and pseudonymic, connections between Katayama/Mineko Matsumura and Sharp/Macleod. He concludes that, in Japan at least, Macleod crested a wave of  Hibernophilia existing in the first decades of  the twentieth century, and that s/he was greatly admired as an ‘Irish’ writer during this time. As the cases of  Fiona Macleod and earlier James Macpherson suggest, there is poetry in propaganda, and there is propaganda in poetry. These ‘bardic’ translations contained a healthy dose of each, operating as a wellspring from which Celtic peoples, parched from years of colonial suppression could drink and be reinvigorated in the sure and certain knowledge of  their entitlement to independence from British rule. Situated in the afterglow of a pre-lapsarian Celtic past, and the foreglow of a post-lapsarian golden future, these ‘discovered’ and ‘translated’ texts suggest a recoverable,

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vibrant anterior life, and of fer a pulpit from which its tales can be told; tales which neither have to be historical, factual or even remotely resemble the truth. As Susan Manning argues: ‘Macpherson’s Ossianic epics “attempt to re-establish lost links, associations with a previously whole, now ruined but desired national life … bereft of reference” and with historical events and local conditions elided’ (Manning, 2002: 148–9). In other words, what is presented is, according to Cairns Craig, ‘a world of cycles and repetitions, rather than beginnings, middles and ends’ (Craig, 1996: 36); a world in which the logic of  history has failed, and has been replaced by myth (Craig, 1996: 105) – a mythic sensibility inseparable from its colonial context. Having mapped out a series of connections in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the collection closes with four essays that bring the story up to date. Deirdre O’Byrne undertakes a subtle and searching exploration of  December Bride (1951), Hanna Bell’s moving novel ‘firmly rooted in rural, Northern-Irish–Scots culture’. A film version directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan in 1990 brought Bell’s book to a new audience, but here O’Byrne argues eloquently for its lasting literary significance and proposes a new edition that will finally allow December Bride to take its place as a beautiful example of  Irish–Scottish writing that depicts a dimension of  Irish experience too often lost in the focus on Anglo-Irish relations. Martyn Colebrook looks at a more recent novel that paints a powerful picture of cross-border conf lict and connections that run across the water from Belfast to Glasgow, Liam McIlvanney’s debut novel, All the Colours of  the Town (2009). Colebrook’s reading of  McIlvanney is a model of critical engagement with a contemporary text that plugs into debates around sectarianism, the peace process and the legacy of violence. Like O’Byrne’s essay, it valuably points up the degree to which family, memory and religion connect Irish and Scottish – and Irish–Scottish – communities. Emily A. Ravenscroft and James Mollison focus on a recent reworking of Macbeth, the so-called ‘Scottish play’, in Northern Ireland’s maximumsecurity facilities at HMP Maghaberry. Filmed as Mickey B in 2009, this adaptation emerged under the auspices of  the Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC), with the prisoners involved at every level from script to set-construction. Ravenscroft and Mollison do not attempt to reconstruct the original Irish–Scottish context of  Shakespeare’s drama of monarchy,

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tyranny and national conf lict, nor do they seek to make neat comparisons with present debates around devolution or independence. Rather they embark on a scrupulously theorised reading of  the process and production of  this unique artefact by way of a rigorous Foucauldian analysis of power and corruption in the penal system. Their chapter leads nicely into the final essay, by Stefanie Lehner and Cillian McGrattan, which acts almost as an afterword as it examines the state of play in Irish–Scottish studies. Their conclusion, that ‘in the imagined “nations” of  Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland the deferred realities of  the social and economic continue to haunt politics’, is only negative if we are afraid of ghosts, rather than willing to embrace or exorcise them. If  the Scotland of  Shakespeare’s haunting play was ‘almost afraid to know itself ’, and that of  Joyce’s barbed verse a mere ‘poor sister’, then the relations recorded here are more nuanced. Celtic connections, informed by union and empire as much as independence and resistance, are a two-way street, and a way out of  the cul-de-sac of  familiar Anglo-Irish obsessions. It is only fitting that this volume should end with two co-authored essays, and that four of  the contributions, including this introduction, should be collaborative ef forts. Yeats, who took a more generous view of  Celtic connections than Joyce, subscribed to the old Gaelic adage that ‘contention is better than loneliness’. Celtic connections may be contentious, but we hope readers of  this collection will enjoy the company.

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Maley, Willy (2000), ‘ “Kilt by Kelt Shell Kithagain with Kinagain”: Joyce and Scotland’, in Attridge, Derek and Howes, Marjorie (eds), Semi-Colonial Joyce, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 201–18. Maley, Willy (2000), ‘Crossing the Hyphen of  History: The Scottish Borders of  Anglo-Irishness’, in Bery, Ashok and Murray, Patricia (eds), Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations, Macmillan, London, pp. 31–42. Maley, Willy (2007), ‘Away with the Faeries (or, it’s Grimm up North) Yeats and Scotland’ Journal of  Irish and Scottish Studies, 1, 1, pp. 161–78. Maley, Willy (2008), ‘Semicolonial Yeats?: Fairyland, Ireland, Scotland, and Ulster’, in Allen, Richard C. and Regan, Stephen (eds), Irelands of  the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, pp. 176–93. Maley, Willy (2010), ‘Their Song is Over (and Other Familiar Refrains): Irish Revolutions, Gyrations and Ululations from Lenin to Lennon’ in Strachan, John and O’Malley-Younger, Alison (eds), Ireland: Revolution and Evolution, Peter Lang, Bern, pp. 119–45. Maley, Willy and Jackson, Ellen-Raïssa (2002), ‘Celtic Connections: Colonialism and Culture in Irish–Scottish Modernism’, Interventions: The International Journal of  Postcolonial Studies, 4, 1, pp. 68–78. Manning, Susan (2002), Fragments of  Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing, Palgrave, Basingstoke. Middleton, Tim (1995), ‘Constructing the Temporary Self: the Works of  Iain Banks’, in Hill, Tracey and Hughes, William (eds) Contemporary Writing and National Identity, Sulis Press, Bath, pp. 18–28. Miller, Gavin (2005), ‘How Not to “Question Scotland” ’, Scottish Af fairs, 52, pp. 1–14. Morgan, Edwin (1982), ‘James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid’, in McCormack, W. J. and Stead, Alistair (eds), James Joyce and Modern Literature, Routledge, London, pp. 202–17. Muir, Edwin (1982), Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of  the Scottish Writer (1936; reprinted by Polygon, Edinburgh). Nicholson, Colin (1992), Poem, Purpose and Place: Shaping Identity in Contemporary Scottish Verse, Polygon, Edinburgh. Nolan, Emer (2005), ‘Modernism and the Irish Revival’, in Cleary, Joe and Connolly, Claire (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 157–72. Norquay, Glenda and Smyth, Gerry (2002), ‘Introduction: Crossing the Margins’, in Norquay, Glenda and Smyth, Gerry (eds), Across the Margins: Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago, Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 1–10.

Introduction: Twilight to Tiger

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O’Rourke, Donny (ed.) (1994), Dream State: The New Scottish Poets, Polygon, Edinburgh. Pittock, Murray (1999), Celtic Identity and the British Image, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Pittock, Murray (2008), Scottish and Irish Romanticism, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Punter, David (2003), Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Reizbaum, Marilyn (1992), ‘Canonical Double Cross: Scottish and Irish Women’s Writing’, in Lawrence, Karen R. (ed.), Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of  Twentieth-Century ‘British’ Literary Canons, University of  Illinois Press, Urbana, pp. 165–90. Riach, Alan and Grieve, Michael (eds) (1993), Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Poetry, with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, New York. Richtarik, Marilynn (1997/1998), ‘Counterparts: James Joyce and Stewart Parker’, Bullán 3, 2, pp. 71–86. Rees, Catherine (2010), ‘Theatrical Representations of  Easter 1916 and Sir Roger Casement: Flags, Walls and Cats’, in Strachan, John and O’Malley-Younger, Alison (eds), Ireland: Revolution and Evolution, Peter Lang, Bern, pp. 167–82. Ryan, Ray (2002), Ireland and Scotland: Literature and Culture, State and Nation, 1966–2000, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Scott, Walter (1829), The Waverley Novels, Cadell, Edinburgh. Smith, Andrew (2007), ‘Gothic Literature’, in McEvoy, Emma and Spooner, Catherine (eds), The Routledge Companion to Gothic, Routledge, London, pp. 73–82. Smith, George Gregory (1919), Scottish Literature: Character and Inf luence, Macmillan, London. Stroh, Silke (2011), Uneasy Subjects: Postcolonialism and Scottish Gaelic Poetry, Rodopi Press, Amsterdam/New York. Trumpener, Katie (1997), Bardic Nationalism, The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Welsh, Irvine (1993), Trainspotting, Vintage, London. Weygandt, Cornelius (1913), Irish Plays and Playwrights, The Riverside Press, Boston and New York.

JOHN STRACHAN

Charles Robert Maturin, Roman Catholicism and Melmoth the Wanderer

‘When they brought me to a Christian land, I thought I should have found them all Christians’. ‘And what did you find them, then, Immalee?’ ‘Only Catholics’. — C. R. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

In the early 1820s, the Reverend Charles Robert Maturin delivered a sermon at St Peter’s in Dublin, the church at which he had been a curate for over a decade, his hopes for preferment in the Church of  Ireland hampered by the controversies dogging his other careers as dramatist and novelist. In one of  the perorations which were later to be collected under the forthright title of  Five Sermons on the Errors of  the Roman Catholic Church (1824), Maturin preached on a theme close to his heart: the pernicious, even meretricious, nature of  Roman Catholic theology and its malign inf luence on his country: The Church of  Rome, it is well known, allows the commutation of penance; that is, that a person shall be allowed to take on himself  the penance enjoined on another for the commission of sin; and thus, in Italy, in Spain, in Portugal, even in deluded, besotted Ireland, a wealthy of fender may bribe, for a trif ling sum, a guiltless pauper to commute with the Almighty for his of fences! (Maturin, 1824a: 86)

‘This is a mournful exposure’, laments Maturin, ‘as if one sinner could atone for the iniquity of another, as if sin were an article of exchange, like a burden of corn or a bundle of  hay’ (Maturin, 1824a: 86).

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The notion of  the ‘commutation of penance’ which Maturin attacks in the Five Sermons also underpins the great Gothic novel which that remarkable clergyman had published in 1820, Melmoth the Wanderer. In that work, over many decades, the doomed, damned Irish gentleman John Melmoth, who has sold his soul to the devil for an extension of 150 years to his lifespan, tempts a series of people enduring extremes of suf fering – in gaol, in a madhouse, in the very dungeons of  the Spanish Inquisition itself – with the prospect of immediate freedom and (temporary) ‘relief ’ from their agonies, but cannot find anyone willing to take on his own dark ‘penance’. In this essay I want to examine the theological symbolism of  Melmoth the Wanderer, and to place the novel’s anti-Catholicism in both the tradition of  the Gothic novel and in the context of  Maturin’s pulpit oratory and his lifelong conviction of  the Roman Catholic Church’s unwelcome inf luence on what he saw as ‘deluded, besotted Ireland’. I shall also brief ly discuss the reception of  Maturin’s novel – which was published in Edinburgh by Archibald Constable – in Scotland, notably in the two most significant Scots periodicals of  the day, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Edinburgh Review.

I In April 1794, meditating on what it called the ‘Gothic tale’, a contributor to the Anthologia Hibernica, Dublin’s recently-established answer to the Gentleman’s Magazine, argued that ‘the whole of  the Gothic system, with its train of witcheries and magic, has a certain awful obscurity in its nature, that renders it peculiarly the fit abode of  fiction’ (Anthologia Hibernica, 1794: 278). This sentiment is indubitably Burkean in its emphasis upon the af fective power of  ‘awful obscurity’, but it is also testimony to contemporary Protestant British and Irish perceptions of  the Middle Ages as times of credulity, superstition and, to many eyes, outdated religion. In the foreword to his final novel, The Albigenses (1824), C. R. Maturin himself wrote that

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the ‘barbarism of  the feudal ages, with their wild superstitions and dubious Christianity, their knightly gallantry and baronial oppression, the native fierceness of  the Gothic conqueror, mingled with the levity, bigotry, of  his Italian and Gallic slave, of fer powerful materials to the painter of manners with the pen’ (Maturin, 1824b; 1, vii). The word ‘Gothic’, as we know, was originally used in the adjectival sense of  ‘pertaining to the medieval’ before being applied, from the second half of  the eighteenth century onwards, to the tonal register of supernaturally-inf lected novels set in the Middle Ages and in early modern Catholic Europe, in the wake of  Horace Walpole’s somewhat ludicrous but undeniably ground-breaking fiction The Castle of  Otranto. A Gothic Story (1764). From Walpole through to the 1790s heyday of  the early Gothic novel in the work of  ‘Monk’ Lewis and Ann Radclif fe there were a series of novels which exploited the ‘Gothic system’ at its most lurid, in sundry ghoulishness set among abbeys, nunneries, and inquisitorial chambers, all, of course, explicitly identified as Roman Catholic. Ann Radclif fe’s skill, for instance, was to exploit a fascination with an exotic, decidedly un-English past in the Spain and Italy of centuries ago. Jane Austen knew of  the profound dif ference between the society which surrounded the modern reader of  the supernatural romance and the Mediterranean past exploited in the settings and scenery of  those novels, and this informs Catherine Morland’s self-recriminations in Northanger Abbey (published 1818), after her quixotic attempt to read the English present in terms of  the Radclif fean representation of  Europe has led her to mortification and self-realisation, The ‘visions of romance’ are over: ‘Charming as were all Mrs Radclif fe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of  England, was to be looked for. Of  the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the South of  France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented … But in England it was not so’ (Austen, 2003: 147). Early Gothic fictions such as Walpole’s or Radclif fe’s exploit this contrast between the continental past – supposedly an age of superstition – and the British present – supposedly a time of enlightenment and rationality. Mediterranean scenes – as per the Italianate settings of much Elizabethan

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and Jacobean tragedy – are not uncommon in English literature before the eighteenth century, adding a pleasing exoticism to tales of  blood, but there is a certain self-congratulatory aspect to the Gothic novel, a conviction of  the superiority of modern British culture over the ‘foreign’, places which are mired in the past and, indeed, in Roman Catholicism. The last great traditional Gothic novel of  the Romantic era, Melmoth the Wanderer, written by a Church of  Ireland clergyman, clings to the anti-Catholicism of  Walpole, and especially Lewis, in its soapbox oratory condemning the religious system of  Catholicism, the novel’s religious convictions summed up in the fact that Immalee, Maturin’s ‘noble savage’ heroine, when taken to Spain from her island in the Indian Ocean, expects to find ‘Christians’ in a ‘Christian land’, but instead finds ‘only Catholics’ (Maturin, 1820: 340). In using a mixture of  Lewisian and Radclif fean plot devices, notably in his tales of  the Spanish Inquisition and the travails of monastic life, Maturin was consciously looking backwards to a tradition which was beginning to lose ground in the contemporary, post-Napoleonic tale of  terror. Francis Jef frey of  the Edinburgh Review, in his notice of  Melmoth the Wanderer is exactly right in identifying Maturin’s models, though he has no time for either, considering the tradition which they exemplified as beyond moribund: ‘No writer of good judgment would have attempted to revive the defunct horrors of  Mrs Radclif fe’s School of  Romance, or the demoniacal incarnations of  Mr Lewis’ ( Jef frey, 1821: 353). The word ‘defunct’ here is an interesting one. It is undeniable that in the same period in which Maturin’s huge and remarkable book appeared, the Gothic was taking new conceptual directions, both in the short story and the novel, away from the preoccupations evident in the supernatural romance from Walpole’s work through to that of  Lewis. In Scotland, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, established in 1817, began to publish its inf luential series of short Gothic tales which directly inf luenced the work of  Edgar Allan Poe in the 1830s and 1840s.1 In the same period that mon-

1

As Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick have written, ‘Blackwood’s was particularly interested in the ghastly and macabre. Novels of  terror and sensation like William Godwin’s Mandeville (1817), Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and

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strous, bloodthirsty figure which still possesses the popular imagination in our day – the vampire – made its first appearance in Gothic fiction, in John Polidori’s story ‘The Vampyre’, published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1819. As well as the tale, the Gothic novel was also rapidly mutating into new forms in this period, in James Hogg’s meditation on sin and suf fering in his religious satire on Calvinism, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and the ‘scientific Gothic’ of  Mary Shelley’s enduringly famous Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Maturin, on the other hand, consciously evoked conventional Gothic fiction. As well as looking backwards at what he saw as the outdated and tyrannous religious system of  Catholicism, Maturin was taking Gothic fiction back to its traditional settings and its thematic roots in anti-Catholicism. There were those who rebuked him for it. The Reverend Maturin was chided for his religious intemperance by that rationalist Scotsman Francis Jef frey, the editor of  the Edinburgh Review, who set about Melmoth in his journal in July 1821, in part on religious grounds, finding Maturin guilty of  ‘raking in the long-forgotten rubbish of  Popery for extinct enormities’. These, Jef frey argues, ‘he exaggerates as the inevitable result, rather than the casual abuse of  the system’ ( Jef frey, 1821: 358). He emphasises the particularly Irish religious context of  the novel, in declaring that ‘We shall not stop to stigmatize, as it deserves, the wild and f lagrant calumnies which he insinuates against three-fourths of  his countrymen’ ( Jef frey, 1821: 358). Jef frey was part of  the Whig cohort around the Edinburgh who were in favour of  Emancipation, their views exemplified in fellow contributor the Reverend Sydney Smith’s scorn – expressed in a letter of 1813 – of  ‘the great mass of  fools, of whom the public is composed, and who really believe there is danger in conceding so much to the Catholics’ (Smith, 1981: 68). To Jef frey, Maturin was indulging in the worst kind of anachronistic scare-mongering.

[ John] Galt’s The Omen (1825) were reviewed, complete with lengthy excerpts, while [ J. G.] Lockhart and [R. P.] Gillie’s critique of  E. T. A Hof fman’s The Devil’s Elixir (1824) had a profound ef fect on Poe’ (Tales of  Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine, ed. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1995), xi).

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Francis Jef frey also had no time for Maturin’s prose style and what he sees as the novelist’s immoral, obscene and relentless displays of  horror (which he quotes at length in the very act of condemning them) and tawdry rodomontade: We are presented with sybils and misers; parricides; maniacs in abundance; monks with scourges pursuing a naked youth streaming with blood; subterranean Jews surrounded by the skeletons of  their wives and children; lovers blasted by lightning; Irish hags, Spanish grandees, shipwrecks, caverns, Donna Claras and Donna Isidores, – all opposed to each other in glaring and violent contrast, and all their adventures narrated with the same undeviating display of  turgid, vehement, and painfully elaborated language. ( Jef frey, 1821: 354)

Significantly, Jef frey also interprets Maturin’s ‘gaudy and ornate style’ in terms of  his national antecedents. Addressing ‘the writers of  Ireland’ in general, the critic declares that ‘Their genius runs riot in the wantonness of its own uncontrolled exuberance’ ( Jef frey, 1821, 356). Maturin’s works, like those of  Thomas Moore (despite Jef frey’s conviction that he was ‘the sweetest lyric poet of  this or perhaps any age’), are garbed in ‘excessive finery’, and Jef frey concludes that this demonstrates that Ireland has not reached the cultural level of  Great Britain: ‘their imagination’, he concludes, ‘disdaining the restraint of judgment, imparts to their literature the characteristics of a nation in one of  the earlier stages of civilization and refinement’ ( Jef frey, 1821: 356). There is a paradox here: C. R. Maturin himself considered that Ireland was, indeed, in the ‘earlier stages of civilization’. However, unlike Jef frey, he believed that the reason that the country had not developed fully was because of its priest-ridden nature. Ireland, he declares in the Five Sermons, though the ‘first in valour and genius among the nations of  Europe’ is simultaneously ‘the last in the mighty march of mind towards intellectual liberty’. Even the ‘patriots and heroes’ of  his country, he laments, ‘were the dupes of priestcraft and bigotry’ (Maturin 1824a: 160). For Maturin, the ‘rubbish of popery’ – however ‘long-forgotten’ it might be in Jef frey’s Presbyterian Scotland – was, in Ireland, all too real. He shares the conviction exemplified in an anonymous Protestant pamphlet of 1819 which argued that the ‘advocates of  Catholic Emancipation have said that in the

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enlightened period of  the nineteenth century, the harsh, uncharitable and intolerant nature of popery no longer remains … but POPERY and the great body of  DOMESTIC and FOREIGN PAPISTS, still remains the same’ (‘One Thousand Eight Hundred and Twenty-Nine; or Shall it be So?’, 1819: 2). Maturin echoes these words in the Five Sermons: in contemporary Ireland, Roman Catholicism, he declares, is ‘the same in spirit, if not in power’ (Maturin, 1824a: 150).

II Maturin was born into a family heritage of  Francophobia, educated in a tradition of anti-Catholicism and passionately convinced of  the spiritual health of  the Protestantism into which he was born. He was descended (like his successor in the tradition of  Irish Gothic, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu) from Huguenot émigrés who left France in the anti-Protestant persecution which followed the revocation of  the Edict of  Nantes in the late seventeenth century. As Desmond Bowen writes, ‘many of  the Protestant leaders of  the nineteenth century were of  Huguenot extraction [and] these Irish Huguenots were raised on tales of oppression as recent and as violent as any remembered by the Catholics from Penal times … names like La Touche, Saurin, Lefroy, Fleury, Maturin and Perrin being easily identifiable’ (Bowen, 1978: 139). Maturin attended Trinity College, where he found nothing to make him doubt his family’s tradition, and then joined a profession in which anti-Catholicism, so to speak, came with the job. Indeed, in his day, as Anthony Trollope noted in 1866, anti-Catholicism permeated the university like the circumambient breeze: The Irish beneficed clergyman has almost always been educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and has there been indoctrinated with those high Protestant principles with which he has before been inoculated … in his cradle, at his father’s table, at university … the same two ideas, cheek by jowl, have ever been present to him – the state ascendancy of  his own church, and the numerical superiority of another church antagonistic to his own. (Cited in Bowen, 1978: 140)

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C. R. Maturin never wavered from these convictions, and before addressing myself  to the spiritual symbolism of  his novel I will examine the nature of  his objection to Roman Catholicism and draw out the political implications of  that position. In his study Charles Robert Maturin (1980), John B. Harris writes that ‘it is not the adherents [of  Roman Catholicism] but the system he is attacking’ (Harris, 1980: 292), and this is evident in the Five Sermons; ‘Here I must observe, in the strongest language, that I am about to direct my present address, not against Catholics, but against Catholicism – not against individuals, but against abstract opinions’ (Maturin, 1824a: 27–8) His central charge against Roman Catholicism – which for him almost always boils down to papal hegemony and its attendant political tyranny – is that it is a political and not a spiritual system: I can prove, moreover, that this system of opposition to the word of God was framed for no spiritual purpose … but solely for the purpose of acquiring earthly domination, wealth and aggrandizement – and that such powers were attained and exercised, even to the deposition of  kings, the overthrow of governments, the dissolution of  the allegiance of  the subjects, and the subversion of all order, social, civil and moral. (Maturin, 1824a: 22)

Rather than representing a benign spiritual order, Catholicism, in Maturin’s opinion, is actually a political ideology, and one constructed with the sole purpose of achieving ‘earthly domination’. This is a view which is best encapsulated in Maturin’s writings in the speech which he puts in the mouth of  the villainous Roman Catholic Bishop of  Toulouse in The Albigenses, set amid the French Roman Catholic persecution of  the heretical Cathars, who maintains – somewhat melodramatically – that ‘the vast system of which I am no feeble or inert engine hastens to the summation of its working – the conquest of  the world’ (Quoted in Idman, 1923: 297). This assertion is the direct counterpart of  Maturin’s contention in the Five Sermons of  the same year that the raison d’être of  Roman Catholicism is political power. The Catholic hierarchy are despotic and tyrannous: ‘the Church of  Rome, when established, did assume, maintain and exercise a temporal power beyond that of  the most absolute despot’ (Maturin, 1824a: 111).

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As well as Catholic ambitions for ‘earthly domination’ in general, Maturin is also much concerned with the political state of  Ireland in particular, and with Catholic Emancipation, one of  the most controversial subjects of  the late Georgian era in the years which led up to the Act of  Emancipation in 1829. Indeed, I would argue that Melmoth the Wanderer and the Five Sermons on the Errors of  the Roman Catholic Church are, in their dif ferent ways, contributions to the furious debate over Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s, during which hundreds of  books, sermons, pamphlets and collections of  Parliamentary speeches appeared on the subject. In his Five Sermons, Maturin places himself directly within this controversy, in his acerbic rebuttals of some of  the more well-known antiProtestant productions, from Thomas Ward’s Errata of  the Protestant Bible (1688), which had been republished in Dublin from 1807 onwards, to the Sermons of  the Rev. Richard Hayes, published in Dublin in 1822. For Maturin, agitation for Catholic Emancipation, rather than asserting religious freedom, was actually politically motivated, an attempt to ‘subvert the allegiance of  the [Irish Catholic] subject’. He argued that the basic aim of  those who espoused Emancipation was not religious tolerance; it was no more than an attempt to place political power in Ireland in the hands of  Rome and its agents. The Irish Catholic Bishops have more than toleration in mind, possessed as they are of an ‘of ficious and interfering spirit, not only with the religion, but the government of  the country’ (Maturin, 1824a: 64). Emancipation, he suggests, is but a pretext for the attempt to regain political hegemony in Ireland for the Roman Church. ‘There was not a nation in Europe where she had not deposed or created a sovereign’ he writes (Maturin, 1824a: 150). Rome was exercising her dark arts once again. (Here again, Maturin’s arguments ref lect the common anti‘papist’ rhetoric of  his age; someone using the martyrological pseudonym ‘Ridley Cranmer’ wrote in 1805 that ‘the object [of  Emancipationist agitation] is legislative Dominion and Ecclesiastical Ascendancy in Ireland’ and argued that preventing Roman Catholics from becoming enfranchised is ‘our safeguard against the return of civil and spiritual Tyranny’ (‘Ridley Cranmer’, 1805: 60)). Moving from the priests to the people, Maturin maintains that as long as the majority of  the Irish population acknowledge a higher authority than

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the British crown, their loyalty is suspect and that placing political suf frage in their hands is unwise. Irish Catholicism, in its allegiance to the Pope of  Rome, threatens the union and undermines the authority of  the British King and all he stands for. The ‘state of society’, states Maturin, ‘is under siege from a monstrous anarchy … when a man, on rising in the morning, must wait to hear from Rome of what king he was subject, and whether he was to take up arms against the sovereign of yesterday’ (Maturin, 1824a: 113). This is a standard Protestant argument against Emancipation. An undated pamphlet of  the time argues that ‘the Roman Catholics acknowledge the authority of a foreign potentate, but the Protestants acknowledge no power whatever beyond the precincts of  British authority’ (‘Candidus’, 1819: 7). Maturin puts it in scriptural terms: the ‘successors of  St. Peter’, he says, ‘have forgotten his words, “Fear God – honour the king” ’ (Maturin, 1824a: 113). Maturin, indeed, closes one of  his addresses with an explicit statement of  his opinion that Papal power undermines the State: Loyal Roman Catholics, would ye wish that power restored, which might this day depose your lawful sovereign, place an usurper on his throne, and distract your conscience and loyalty by the divided claims it had on both? … Would you bear this – would you see your … kings dethroned – your loyalty and your religion alike at the mercy of a decrepit priest [Pope Pius VII], at 2,000 miles distance from you? (Maturin, 1824a: 158)

Writing of  the Papacy in the Middle Ages, Maturin argues that ‘her power exceeded all that was ever known by the name of power on earth’. ‘The sway of  the most extensive conqueror, the despotism of  the most absolute tyrant, were but bands of straw’, he maintains, ‘compared with the chain of adamant in which she bound the bodies and the souls of men … from the western extremity of  Ireland to the confines of  Russia’ (Maturin, 1824a: 150). The Reformation, which Maturin saw as the master event of European history, has enabled Great Britain and large parts of northern Europe to escape this tyranny, but the Roman Catholic Church remains the same: What is she now? The same – the same, cry her adherents; the same in spirit, if not in power. That she is the same in spirit, I readily acknowledge, and bitterly lament; but can the most desperate and blinded bigot close his eyes against the obvious and increasing decline of  her power. (Maturin, 1824a: 150).

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The Pope, in Maturin’s view, presides over a rotting, though still dangerous empire, and the Irish people would do well to shed the imperialist yoke which binds them: Catholics of  Ireland … If  Rome, in evil hour, presumed to assert her former power over you, ye would quit yourselves like men, and repel it – repel it as ye valued the property ye have toiled for, the wives ye have wedded, the children ye have begotten, the land ye love and live in, and above all, the memories ye must leave behind you. In addressing you thus, I forget the odious names of party distinction … If ye are Irishmen – if ye are men … if ye have one honest, manly, natural feeling in your hearts, ye would exclaim, ‘We will not have this man to reign over us’. (Maturin, 1824a: 160)

To Maturin, political liberty is inseparable from religious liberty. He envisages a dif ferent sort of emancipation from that envisaged by the current agitation; the liberty of an Irish mind free from the mental despotism of  Rome, which he calls ‘the only true Catholic Emancipation, the emancipation of  the intellect and the conscience’ (Maturin, 1824a: 121). What this amounts to, in ef fect, is emancipation from Roman Catholicism: Roman Catholics of  Ireland hear me! Ye call on the rulers of  the land for emancipation – emancipate yourselves from the yoke that has pressed on your intellect and your consciences for centuries, – a yoke that neither you nor your fathers were able to bear. Whatever be the civil restraints you complain of, I do not judge, but remember this, that the restraints ye voluntarily bear are a thousand times more deadly than any earthly despot could possibly lay on man. The shackles of political restraint when once broken leave no marks, but the iron of priestcraft ‘entereth into the soul’. You are a high-feeling, a high-fated people. Wherefore art thou not a happy and a free one? – because you do not dare to think … Would you be free? Enfranchise yourselves. Say to your priests – we reverence your function, we respect your persons – but we will think for ourselves … we will decide for ourselves … In your struggle for what you call political freedom, remember that spiritual freedom is far above it, and that freedom every man can bestow on himself (Maturin, 1824a: 123–5)

In Maturin’s rhetoric every man should assert his right to self-determination and personal liberty. A campaign for political liberty is worthless if it is not accompanied by a concomitant freeing of  the conscience. It is pointless to have ‘political freedom’ without ‘spiritual freedom’, to repeal the Penal Statutes while the Catholic mind is still imprisoned.

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Maturin constantly insists on the impossibility of political freedom co-existing with spiritual bondage: Oh! my Roman Catholic brethren, you cannot be so monstrously ignorant, you must be willfully so not to see the inseparable union between religious and civil liberty … ye cannot deny that in every country where the Protestant religion is established, it is united with the blessings of a free or mixed government, and that wherever popery prevails, its inseparable associate is despotism. (Maturin, 1824a: 156)

Britain is free inasmuch as she has embraced the spiritual and political liberty inextricably linked to Protestantism. In his notion of  ‘the true Catholic Emancipation’, Maturin again echoes contemporary Protestant opinion; one anonymous Irish pamphlet of 1821 asks ‘how can [Roman Catholics] advocate legislative but oppose mental emancipation?’ (‘Why the Bible is not a Dangerous Book’, 1821: 4). This is exactly Maturin’s point; political liberty is worthless without a concomitant freedom of  the mind. Delivery from what Michael Banim once denominated ‘the overwhelming degradations of  the penal statutes’ (Banim, 1833: 65) should also be accompanied by delivery from the restricting system of  ‘popery’. This ‘mental liberty’, I want to argue, is the central theme of  Maturin’s masterpiece, Melmoth the Wanderer.

III In July 1834, the Christian Examiner, and Church of  Ireland Magazine, in an article ‘On the Eloquence of  the Irish Pulpit’, praised ‘the late Rev. C. R. Maturin, a name of deep and enduring interest’, and declared that ‘his five sermons on the errors of  the Roman Catholic Church have been considered masterpieces’ (Christian Examiner, 1834: 443). (‘They attracted, in the course of  their delivery, extraordinary crowds, and derive an additional and melancholy interest from the fact of  their being (as I believe) the last sermons that man of eloquence and genius ever composed’). The

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periodical lamented the fact that Maturin spent so much of  his time composing novels and writing for the stage, tactfully noting that ‘It is much to be regretted that his high gifts were not uniformly laid on the altar of  the Giver, and consecrated exclusively to the advancement of  that religion, of which he was … so bright and so able an advocate’ (Christian Examiner, 1834: 443). This sentiment, however, ignores the fact that Maturin’s greatest novel, Melmoth the Wanderer, certainly does advocate the ‘advancement of  that [Protestant] religion’ which was so close to his heart and spends much of its time attacking what he saw as that faith’s malign rival, the Roman Catholic Church. Melmoth the Wanderer is a novel of ideas. The anonymous November 1820 review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which was far more positive than Jef frey’s lacerating ef fort of  the following year, declared that Maturin (‘one of  the most genuine masters of  the dark romance’) could ‘make the most practised reader tremble as ef fectually as Mrs Radclif fe, and what is better, he can make him think as deeply as Mr Godwin’. The reference to William Godwin (‘the magnificent imagination that dictated the tale of  Caleb Williams’) is suggestive. Melmoth, like Caleb Williams, is what the Germans call a tendenzroman, and its moral tendency springs from the religious convictions of its author. Indeed, the tale is prefaced by the explicit admission that it was suggested by one of  his 1819 Sermons: The hint of  this Romance (or Tale) was taken from a passage in one of my Sermons, which (as it is to be presumed very few have read) I shall here take the liberty to quote. The passage is this: At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord, disobeyed his will, and disregarded his word – is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that man could bestow, or earth af ford, to resign the hope of  his salvation? – No, there is not one – not such a fool on earth, were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the of fer! This passage suggested the idea of  ‘Melmoth, the Wanderer’. (Maturin, 1820: 5)

The High Tory Quarterly Review, in the form of a vituperative notice by Maturin’s fellow Irishman John Wilson Croker, took exception to this notion, sarcastically noticing the ‘amiable modesty of confessing such a

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plagiarism – the clerical propriety of dilating a text into a novel’2 (‘we honour Mr Maturin’s profession even when he debases it’, Croker snif fs) (Croker, 1821: 303). However, it is clear that this novel which springs from a sermon has much of  the sermon about it, and there is also much of  the parabolic at its dark heart. Melmoth the Wanderer is a huge novel with several dif ferent subplots and I will confine myself in the present essay to the ‘Tale of  the Spaniard’, Alonzo Monçada, ‘a native of  Spain [and] a descendant of one of its noblest houses’ (Maturin, 1820: 69) who is the sole survivor, apart from the Wanderer, of a shipwreck on the Irish coast near Melmoth’s ancestral home. Monçada, it is revealed, has f led Catholic Spain and he recounts his suf ferings in a monastery, his imprisonment in the dungeons of  the Inquisition and his remarkable escape. Though the novel stretches back in time to the mid-seventeenth century, Monçada’s experiences are set in the nineteenth century. That much of  Melmoth the Wanderer should be set in contemporary Ireland and Spain is not surprising. Both countries haunted Maturin’s imagination, though the key dif ference between the countries in his opinion was that the former, despite its adherence to Catholicism, at least had the benefit of  the Union and ‘the blessings of a free or mixed government’ to prevent it sliding into tyranny and oppression. The latter, on the other hand, had no such good fortune and was a country where the untrammelled ef fects of  Catholicism were displayed. In the Five Sermons, Maturin is explicit about this: But it is not from this country that we are to take our estimate of  the state of  the Roman Catholic Church – here, under the eye of a more enlightened community, her laity are reserved and circumspect, and her priests cannot, as in other countries, ‘play such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as might make angels weep’ … Look to Spain. (Maturin, 1824a: 154)

2

‘Mr Maturin has contrived, by a “curiosa infelicitas”, to unite in this work all the worst particularities of  the worst modern novels. Compared with it, Lady Morgan is almost intelligible – The Monk, decent – The Vampire, amiable – and Frankenstein, natural’ (Croker, 1820: 303).

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What Maturin sees when he looks to Spain is not to his taste. The Spaniard is ‘the born vassal of  the deadliest of despots – priestly power’, and ‘dare not call his soul his own’. To Maturin, Spain is as much in the thrall of medieval institution as the heroine of a novel by Ann Radclif fe confined in some Gothic nunnery. The country has ‘a clergy without learning – a nobility without education … a population without subsistence – a mass of mendicants without number – a country without a national character, save that of indolence, beggary, sensuality, and superstition’ (Maturin, 1824a: 154). ‘Such’, Maturin contends, ‘are the ef fects of  that religion, where it is permitted to reign unbounded and uncontrolled’ (Maturin, 1824a: 154). In Melmoth the Wanderer some of  the same opinions are expressed, as per Monçada’s declaration that ‘Education was, and still is, on a very low level in Spain’ (Maturin, 1820: 404). But more important is the symbolic position of  Spain in the novel as a Catholic dystopia. In Melmoth Maturin ‘looks to Spain’, of fering an implicit warning that a Roman Catholic Ireland, no longer ‘under the eye or a more enlightened country’, would suf fer the same bondage and oppression as Monçada experiences in that country. The novel’s Spanish scenes, framed by the Irish setting of  Wicklow, represent the dark potentialities which threaten Irish society and which must not be allowed to develop once again. The fact that the novel’s settings move from Ireland to Spain and to the Orient and then back to Spain and thence to Ireland once more is suggestive given the author’s knowledge of  Irish myth (and the fact that he was author of a novel called The Milesian Chief. A Romance (1812)). Maturin, it might be argued, evokes the journey of  the Milesians, the legendary conquerors of  Ireland according to the medieval Lebor Gabála Érenn. Spain, for Maturin, represents a cultural heritage that the Irishman must reject. Ireland cannot return to the monastic oppression symbolised by that country. Whatever Francis Jef frey thought of  the matter, for C. R. Maturin employing the Gothic machinery of convents, wicked priests and the Spanish Inquisition was not anachronistic, nor a mere slander of Romanism. The framing sections of  Melmoth the Wanderer are set in the Ireland of 1816, not Walpole’s Middle Ages, and Monçada’s travails are contemporary ones. The description of  the Inquisitorial courts is more than what the Edinburgh Review called a ‘phantasmagoric exhibition’. In returning to

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the favoured devices of  the Gothic novelists, Maturin attempted to give a voice to the apprehensions of  his social and religious group, charging the Gothic machinery with a powerful contemporary significance once more. Maturin did not feel that he was ‘raking in the long-forgotten rubbish of  Popery for extinct enormities’. He saw authoritarian Catholicism as a direct threat to Irish society and, indeed, to that of  Europe in general, as the higher echelons of  the Roman Church had become increasingly Ultramontanist and insistent upon religious orthodoxy after Pope Pius VII was released from his Napoleonic captivity in 1814. And perhaps Monçada’s experiences at the hands of  the Spanish Inquisition have direct contemporary resonance. With the restoration of  the Bourbon dynasty under Ferdinand VII to Spain in 1814 the country returned to an authoritarian regime. The relatively liberal constitution of 1812 was abolished, the Jesuits restored and the Inquisition re-established. A large number of  Spaniards, like Monçada himself, became refugees from the repressive atmosphere of  the country which eventually provoked the revolt of 1820 led by Rafael del Riego in favour of  the 1812 constitution (a liberal government which outlawed the Holy Of fice once again lasted three years before Riego was executed and authoritarianism – and the Inquisition – was restored in 1823).3 ‘All Spain’, remarks Monçada in Melmoth, ‘is but one great monastery, – I must be a prisoner every step that I take’. In his Five Sermons, Maturin sees ‘that most direful instrument of popery, the Inquisition’ as a living threat, and explicitly warns of  the danger of  the establishment of  the Inquisition in Ireland. In his novel, it is a living thing, a serpentine presence in modern Europe rather than some ‘defunct’ nonsense belonging to an outdated novelistic tradition. The central metaphors of  Melmoth the Wanderer are the Gothic commonplaces of confinement and bondage. Maturin gives them the ideological gloss which is evident in the Five Sermons’ notion of  the ‘chain of adamant’ 3

Maturin blamed the priests for the failure of  this government: ‘Look to the feeble and fruitless struggles in Spain … the moment the infant Hercules of  freedom was born, superstition sent her serpents to his cradle to strangle him’ (Maturin, 1824a: 156). For Maturin and the 1820 Spanish revolt see Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Butler, 1981: 161–2).

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in which the Roman church ‘bound the bodies and the souls of men’. In the novel also, Catholicism is an imprisonment of  the intellect. The convent and the prison of  the Inquisition are objective correlatives of  this mental bondage. Monçada, lost in the Inquisitorial dungeon, is equitable with the Irish Catholic who is bound by the Roman ‘system’. The novel uses the same metaphor of  binding as the sermon. His Spaniard is ‘bound with [a] rope fast as a felon, or a galley-slave’ (Maturin, 1820: 139) and the rope which binds him is both literal and ideological. There is also hope in Melmoth the Wanderer, for in its world view imprisonment and indoctrination will always be resisted by those, like Monçada, whose ‘character[s] always struggled against dictation’ (Maturin, 1820: 119), those who are aware of  the ‘tantalizing image of escape and freedom, amid the withering certainty of eternal imprisonment’ (Maturin, 1820: 170). Monçada, it seems to me, is a figuration of  the independentlyminded ‘Catholics of  Ireland’ to whom Maturin appeals in his ‘Fourth Sermon’ (‘Emancipate yourselves … from the yoke …’). In his darkest hour, lost in the subterranean vaults of  his monastery, Monçada meditates on freedom and emancipation: Such appeared emancipation to us, – so near, and yet so hopeless. We lay thus, not daring to speak to each other, for who could speak but of despair, … This kind of  fear which we know already felt by others, and which we dread to aggravate by uttering, even to those who know it, is perhaps the most horrible sensation ever experienced. The very thirst of my body seemed to vanish in this fiery thirst of  the soul for communication, where all communication was unutterable, impossible, hopeless. (Maturin, 1820: 191)

The emancipation of  this particular Catholic and of  Catholics in general is to be achieved by freedom of  thought and of  language, of release from the bondage which surrounds them. In Monçada’s case the Catholic individual is eventually able to emancipate himself  from his heavy yoke and assert his right to self-determination. The novel, in the end, of fers a vision of escape, of  the breaking of physical and, more importantly, of mental bonds. Perhaps the fiery exuberance of  Maturin’s rhetoric (his ‘strong, though unregulated imagination and unlimited command of  language’ as Jef frey puts it’ ( Jef frey, 1821: 362)), its lack of

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restraint, mirrors its own subject matter. The power of  his language attacks oppressive ‘regulation’ and ‘limits’; however antipathetic Jef frey might be, he is perceptive on Maturin’s methods: he ‘transgresses bounds’, ‘violates the laws’ and has ‘an uncontrolled exuberance’. Maturin writes in Melmoth the Wanderer that ‘When a mind strong by nature, but weakened by fettering circumstances, is driven to make one strong spring to free itself, it has no leisure to calculate the weight of its hindrances, or the width of its leap, – it sits with its chains heaped about it, thinking only of  the bound that is to be its liberation’ (Maturin, 1820: 381). The unrestrained eloquence of  the language in which Maturin details that ‘leap’ to freedom is consistent with his endorsement of  the freedom of  the mind. And what, finally of  the Wanderer himself, and of  his penance? He, to borrow the language of  the Five Sermons quoted at the start of  this essay, is unable to tempt the ‘guiltless pauper[s]’ of  the novel to take on his own punishment. The novel’s most malevolent character, not the Wanderer but the parricide monk, rejoices that ‘in religious life this kind of  transfer, this substitutional suf fering, is adopted with anavidity indescribable’ (Maturin, 1820: 221), but he is mistaken. The same murderer laughs at the thought that ‘I need not repent, I need not believe; if you suf fer, I am saved’, but, again, he is wrong. The refusal of  Melmoth’s victims to pay his penance enacts the rejection of  Roman Catholic doctrine. Perhaps the Wanderer might be equated with the Roman Catholic priest contending for the souls of  the Irish people. In the Five Sermons Maturin describes the Catholic priest as ‘skilful, insidious and indefatigable … the tempter comes to you strong in wiles’ (Maturin, 1824a: 15–16). The Wanderer’s temptations are rejected, an example which, Maturin believed, Irish Catholics would do well to copy in their dealings with Rome, with the Catholic priesthood and, indeed, with Roman Catholicism itself.

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References Anon. (1819), ‘One Thousand Eight Hundred and Twenty-Nine; or Shall it be So?’, J. J. Stockdale, London. Austen, Jane (2003), Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, ed. James Kinsley and John Davie, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bowen, Desmond (1978), The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–70: A Study of  Protestant-Catholic Relations between the Act of  Union and Disestablishment, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin. Butler, Marilyn (1981), Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, Oxford University Press, Oxford. ‘Candidus’ (1819), ‘The Danger of  Unrestricted Political Power in the Hands of  Roman Catholics, Subversive of  the British Constitution in Church and State’, Richard Tivy, London. [Croker, John Wilson] (1821), ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’, Quarterly Review, 24 ( January), 303–11. Harris, John B. (1980), Charles Robert Maturin: The Forgotten Imitator, Arno Press, New York. Idman, Niilo (1923), Charles Robert Maturin: His Life and Works, Constable, London. [ Jef frey, Francis] (1821), ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’, Edinburgh Review, 35 ( July), 353–61. Maturin, Charles Robert (1820), Melmoth the Wanderer, Constable, Edinburgh. Maturin, Charles Robert (1824a), Five Sermons on the Errors of  the Roman Catholic Church, William Folds, Dublin. Maturin, Charles Robert (1824b), The Albigenses. A Romance, 4 vols, Hurst, Robinson and Co., London. Morrison, Robert and Baldick, Chris (eds) (1995), Tales of  Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford. ‘The O’Hara Family’ [Michael Banim in this instance] (1833), The Ghost Hunter and His Family, Smith, Elder and Co., London. ‘On the Eloquence of  the Irish Pulpit’, The Christian Examiner, 3 ( July 1834), 433–51. ‘Ridley Cranmer’ (1805), Catholic Emancipation Addressed to the Lords and Commons of  the British Parliament, Binns and Robinson, Bath. Smith, Sydney (1981), Selected Letters, ed. N. C. Smith, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford. ‘Why the Bible is not a Dangerous Book’ (1821), W. Walton, Dublin.

ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER

Doctors and Devils: Diagnosing Racial Degeneracy in Stevenson’s Gothic Fiction

Up the close and doon the stair Ben the hoose wi’ Burke and Hare, Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief, Knox the boy who buys the beef. — Anonymous skipping rhyme

If, as Stephen Regan has pointed out, ‘we should walk the haunted halls of  Irish Gothic with all the wariness of Jonathan Harker arriving in Transylvania’ (cited in Beardow and O’Malley-Younger, 2005: 69), then we should tread the hermeneutical and ideological labyrinth that is, for want of a better term, ‘Archipelagic Gothic’ with even more caution; ever-wary of the tropes, traps, traditions and tautologies which can ensnare us. Apparent ‘fundamentals’ such as ‘Irishness’ and ‘Scottishness’ are riven with ontological and epistemological questions regarding identity and origins which can entrap us in a navel gazing, essentialist maze; while arguments over nation, narration and nativism threaten to lead us up what Seamus Deane has described as ‘a cul-de-sac with a mirror at the end’ (Deane, in Brady, 1994: 241). To combine the two in a Hiberno–Caledonian Celtic periphery runs the risk of reproducing an evaluative taxonomy grounded in exceptionalism and based on Celtic cultural cringe: in short to serve up what Paul Muldoon has described as ‘old whine in new bottles’1 from a coalition of the conquered.2 1 2

accessed 14 January 2011. On the other hand, according to Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull (1989), The Eclipse of  Scottish Culture: Inferiorism and the Intellectuals, Polygon, Edinburgh: ‘The

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Added to this is the notorious indeterminacy of  the term ‘Gothic’, an indeterminacy succinctly summarised by Maggie Kilgour in her contention that the genre (or mode or tradition) is a ‘contested castle that is both attacked and defended for the secret it supposedly conceals in its hermeneutical dungeon’ (Kilgour, 1995: 10). Nonetheless, the purpose of  this chapter is to argue that despite the pitfalls of a comparative reading of  the Gothic tradition ‘across the water’, as it were, it has considerable merits, not least because some of  the key figures and texts have border-crossing aspects, as the story of  Burke and Hare, drawn on in Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story ‘The Body Snatcher’ (1884) attests. In what follows, I will argue that Stevenson’s ‘crawler’ and his later novella, The Strange Case of  Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde interrogate the contemporary debates on reverse evolution and phylogenics which came to represent the mal de siècle throughout the nineteenth century, but intensified as it drew to a close. These cultural anxieties became part of  the warp and weft of  fin de siècle Gothic manifesting themselves, as Patrick Brantlinger observes, in ‘insistent images of  the decline and fall or of civilization turning into its opposite … express[ing] anxieties about the ease with which civilization can revert to barbarism or savagery’.3 This resulted in part from a virulent Celtophobia based on notions of  Anglo Saxon racial supremacy which demonised ‘the Celt’ according to what Vincent Cheng describes as ‘unchanging, unalterable … universal, essentialized stereotypes’ (Cheng, 1995: 22). These stereotypes according to Luke Gibbons attributed to the Celtic peoples a ‘Jekyll and Hyde persona’ based on their depictions as a

3

concept of inferiorisation, developed by Fanon in his account of  the strategies and ef fects of external control in the Third World, seems to us to yield valuable insights and perspectives on the Scottish predicament. Fanon uses the idea to describe those processes in a relationship of national dependence which lead the native to doubt the worth and significance of inherited ways of  life and embrace the styles and values of  the coloniser. These processes are not to be seen as “merely superstructural”; it is through the undermining of  the native’s self-belief and the disintegration of  local identity that political control is secured’ (p. 5). Patrick Brantlinger (1988), The Rule of  Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, p. 229.

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‘contradictory amalgam of  tenderness and terror, sentiment and savagery’ – human society, in fact, reduced to its most elemental, primitive condition’ (Gibbons, 2004: 21). Gibbons’s metaphor is apt – relating the seemingly paradoxical yoking together of opposites ascribed to the Celtic temperament to that of  the apogee of  the divided self: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.4 The same analogy can be extended to what Cheng describes as a ‘dynamics of othering … used to create and consolidate an imagined national character’ (Cheng, 1995: 20) – particularly in a colonial context. In short, in an ‘us and them’ binarism – ‘ “they” are everything that “we” are not’ (Cheng, 1995: 20). For example, as Benjamin Disraeli thundered in 1836: They hate our order. They hate our civilization, our enterprising industry, our sustained courage, our decorous liberty, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their fair deal of  human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of  bigotry and blood. (Cited Cheng, 1995: 20)

‘They’ (the Irish in this instance) are the collective evil doppelgangers, ‘endowed’ as Conor Cruise O’Brien points out with ‘those traits most feared or despised in respectable English society’ (Cited Cheng, 1995: 21). This Anglo-Saxon supremacism extended to the Highlander who, like the Irishman veered between the noble savage and the gothic fiend as ‘uncivilised representatives of earlier stages of development’ (Reid, 2009: 123). In short like Mr Hyde the Celtic periphery represented an atavistic form

4

From the bucolic and rustic poems of  the Autodidactic tradition, through the mythic border ballad tradition to the Supernaturalism of  Scottish Gothic, the literature of  Scotland shares distinctive themes and exemplify communal traditions which express communal, regional and national concerns relating to his sense of  fractured identity within a culture in process of  being subsumed into a normative ‘British’ tradition wherein its status can only ever be seen as irreconcilably split, schismatic and peripheral. This paradigmatic duality and popularised in 1919 by George Gregory Smith under the term ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ and is later immortalised by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid to mean the antithesis, ambivalence and ambiguity which results from straddling opposing ideologies and national identities.

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of primordial primitivism, savagery and superstition which threatened to contaminate the rational, Jekyll-like civilisation of  English and Anglicised culture. It was a short leap to translate this into the machinery of  Gothic which became a framing device used to explore the unspeakable anxieties of monstrous Celtic bodies turning evolution into entropy by infecting the Anglo-Saxon body politic. These issues are reasonably commonplace in fin de siècle Gothic but as I will suggest are made manifestly clear in the cases of  William Burke and William Hare.

The Bodysnatchers On 25 December 1829, criminal proceeding opened against William Burke and his ‘drab’, Helen McDonald. On the opening day onlookers eager to glimpse the Irish malefactors, Burke and Hare whom the press would later describe as ‘cannibal butchers of  their own species’, besieged the courtroom.5 As William Hare, ‘the vilest of  the two monsters’ (Lonsdale, 1870: 74) took the stand, ‘expectation stood on tiptoe’ (MacGregor, 1884: 132) as the assembled crowds waited for ghoulish accounts of: Something they had often dreamed of, or imagined, or heard recounted around an evening’s fire, like a raw-head-and-bloody-bones story but which they never, in their sober judgement either feared or believed to be possible. (MacGregor, 1884: 148)

Notably, the press imaginatively dressed the trial in the garish garb of  Gothic and peopled it with the denizens of  the horror story. Here in the courtroom was an enacted tale of  terror based on the immensely topical notion of  bodysnatching – where modern medicine met the macabre with the added sensationalist appeal of degenerate Irishmen in the lead roles. This begs the question, was it the ‘Irishness’ of  the body snatchers that inspired what one might call ‘fear and Lothian’ in nineteenth-century Edinburgh? 5

John Bull (London, England), 5 January 1829, p. 4; Issue 421. ‘New Readerships’.

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This is a moot point, which deserves to be dissected: indeed as Willy Maley observes, it would be a grave error to overlook it. Furthermore, he suggests that by avoiding this point we are guilty of  ‘hushing up’ or ‘leaving a false trail’; by definition to ‘“burke” and “hare” ’ (Maley, 1994: 62). To avoid smothering this ‘crucial piece of social history’ (Maley, 1994: 62) it is worth employing a symptomatic reading of  the narratives, both fictional and ‘factual’, surrounding the body snatching causes célèbres. Read thus one can argue that the moral panic surrounding Burke and Hare, combined with their subsequent Gothic treatment are metaphors for socially specific fears, prejudices and anxieties such as Hibernophobia and xenophobic anti-Catholicism circulating in nineteenth-century Scotland fuelled by stadial6 theories of evolution, scientific racism and discourses of degeneration. Before discussing these issues it is worth pausing to ponder what had brought Burke into the shadows of  the gallows and Hare to the glare of  the witness box. I contextualise this with a quote from William Pitt Dundas’s Census Returns published in 1871 under the title of  The Races of  Men in Scotland. Under the heading of  ‘Irish Immigrants and their Ef fect on the Native Scots’, Dundas fulminates that in 1820: ‘an invasion … of  the Irish race began, which slowly increased until it reached enormous dimensions after 1840, when the railways began to be constructed over the country’ (Dundas, 1871: xix). In what can be described as a xenophobic rant he fumes over the ruinous ef fects of  this ‘alien invasion’ to the racial integrity of  Scotland and bewails the ‘deterioration’ of  the Scots before informing his readers that: The very high proportion of  Irish in Scotland … has lowered greatly the moral tone of  the lower classes, and greatly increased the necessity for the enforcement of sanitary and police precautions. (Dundas, 1871: xxxiv)

6

The theory, most famously hypothesised by Adam Smith that societies progress through four stages: hunter-gatherer, nomadic pastoralism, feudal agriculture and commercial civilisation. Celtic peoples were invariably placed in one of  the earlier, ‘uncivilised’ stages in nineteenth-century racial discourse.

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In a register which teeters dangerously close to the paranoid, liberally smattered with fears of miscegenation taken from nineteenth-century biological theories of race, Dundas Gothicises the Irish as a menacing alien race as ‘disease carriers [and] pollutants of  the modern city’ (Gibbons, 2004: 43). There is no question, as Vincent Cheng points out that ‘the image of  the Irishman as barbarian was a consolidated tradition in England and Scotland by the nineteenth century’ (Cheng, 1995: 21). As has already been noted, this cultural racism extended in Scotland to ‘that pejorative singular’ – the Highlanders who according to Kenneth McNeil ‘were an anachronism, a people on the first rung of  the ladder of social progress, sharing af finities with other contemporaneous “primitives” around the globe while living adjacent to, and sometimes venturing into, the civil spaces of  the modern nation’ (McNeil, 2007: 4). In the course of  the nineteenth century the fantastical and fanatical Celts responded to the call of  the industrial revolution, ‘invading’ to use Dundas’s word, urban centres throughout England and Scotland. Once in the city they were viewed as malign and deadly criminal contagions – agents of destruction, threatening the structure of cosmopolitan society – wreaking havoc with their lawless and indolent ways and debilitating and destroying the health of  the people. Widespread fear of social, physical and psychic decay and degeneracy, fuelled by crime reporting, pamphlets and broadsides resulted in moral panics and the inevitable Gothicisation of  the Celt. Against this background Messrs Burke and Hare arrived in Edinburgh to work as navvies on the Union Canal in 1818. In this moment, if contemporary accounts are to be believed, the double-headed Hibernian Hyde had entered the heart of  the Scottish Enlightenment.

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The Maniac Man-Monkey Some seventy years later, on 27 December 1884, Punch featured a cartoon of a simian creature wearing a placard which read: ‘The Maniac ManMonkey. A New Sensational Christmas Story by B. Bones.’7 As Katherine Linehan argues: This cartoon may include among its targets The Pall Mall Gazette’s method of advertising Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ on the streets of London shortly before Christmas 1884. Sidney Colvin reports that the tale was publicized ‘by sandwich men carrying posters so horrific that they were suppressed, if  I remember aright by the police’.8

If  Linehan is correct in her assumption of  the link between the image and Stevenson’s euhemeristic tale, the caricature is in accord with the recidivist tendency of  Gothic literature which summons, as Dale Peterson suggests: ‘the power of  the past to command a repeat performance’ (Peterson, 1987: 38). Here, while parodying the ghoulish sensationalism of shilling shockers the cartoon disinters an image of  homo criminalis as a dangerous anthropoid ape; an image readily deployed by Punch against the Irish as a consequence of  the Fenian uprisings in the 1860s. We can infer from the somatic indicators that the body-snatching malefactor of  the 1884 cartoon is a Celt and a criminal: congenitally depraved, beyond reform and a serious threat to healthy society. While on the surface this appears to veer away from the theme of  Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ the notion that race was a determining force in criminal behaviour is highly pertinent to the historical demonisation of  two of  the minor characters therein: Burke and Hare.

7 8

Punch, 87 (27 December 1884), p. 305. Robert Louis Stevenson (2002), The Strange Case of  Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. Katherine Linehan, Norton, New York & London, p. 121.

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Burke and Hare Though the stuf f of popular Gothic legend, the story of  Burke and Hare bears summarising as a context to Stevenson’s short story and the arguments underpinning this chapter. As previously mentioned, both men came to Scotland from Ireland to work as canal navvies in preference to starvation at home. By 1820 with the canal work finished both, according to Hugh Douglas, ‘drifted to Edinburgh’ (Douglas, 1973: 28) where Burke became an itinerant hawker of rags and later a cobbler living with his common-law wife, Nelly McDougal, in Micky Culzean’s low lodging house in the West Port. Hare’s passage to Edinburgh in comparison was somewhat more salubrious. By 1827, after the ‘convenient’ demise of  her husband, he had moved in with Maggie Laird (also known as Lucky Logue) and had become a ‘landlord’ of a West Port doss-house used by transients in Tanner’s Close. It is worth noting, following Lisa Rosner, that: The wynds along the Cowgate, Grassmarket, and West Port were referred to as ‘Little Ireland’ or ‘Little Dublin’. By the end of  the 1820s, at least three fourths of  the 250 second-hand dealers in Cowgate, St Mary’s Wynd and the West Port were Irish; so were most of  the porters; and so were many of  the hawkers selling all kinds of  food, silver watches, printed handkerchiefs, and cheap linens. Nearly all of  the 112 scavengers responsible for keeping the streets clean of  filth were Irish9 … the lamplighters were Irish and so were some of  the policemen. (Rosner, 2010: 67)

Such a description serves as a testament to the ghettoisation of  the Irish in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh. Forced into over-populated and unsanitary slums, the Irish were treated for the most part as human detritus – ‘scavengers’ scratching together a living by hawking cheap wares and cleaning the streets of excrement. In these foetid rookeries for crime fuelled by threats of miscegenation and miasmatism,10 the Irish became known

9 10

Edinburgh’s Old Town had no drainage system other than an open system of channels. The Irish were used to remove human and animal excrement from these channels. The danger of  living in unhealthy environments.

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as a vagrant, criminal class and Burke and Hare became key actors in a felonious milieu. Inasmuch as he became a householder, Hare thrived in this environment. Burke was less fortunate. After a fire in which they lost all of  their few possessions, Burke and McDougal were invited by Laird, now known as Maggie Hare, to lodge in a small room which served as a pigsty to the rear of  their squalid tenement. It was here that most of  the sixteen killings admitted to by Burke were undertaken between November 182711 and his arrest, accompanied by Hare, Logue and McDougal, in November 1828. Amid a frenzy of public interest Burke was tried, executed and dissected in January 1829. Hare, who had turned King’s evidence, was freed, as were McDougal and Logue, and the case became part of  lore of  Edinburgh – translated countless times in broadsides, ballads and bogey tales, amongst which Stevenson’s story stands as exemplary.

Spectres of  Ireland? While it is an exaggeration to suggest that Stevenson was unwaveringly pro-Irish, he did, as a result of  his research into the Highland Clearances take a ‘radical’ if  temporary ‘political position on Irish Home Rule’ (Reid, 2006: 124): ‘the ef fect on my mind of what I have read’ he argued, ‘has been to awaken a livelier sympathy for the Irish; although they have never had remarkable virtues, I fear they have suf fered many of  the injustices of  the Scottish Highlanders’ (Reid, 2006: 125). Elsewhere, in his unpublished Confessions of a Unionist he acknowledged that Ireland was ‘a perpetual and crying blot upon the fame of  England’ who had ‘majestically

11

In his confessions Burke insisted that the first corpse to be dispatched to the Anatomists, a lodger known as ‘Old Donald’, was not murdered but died of natural causes, in all probability dropsy.

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proved her incapacity to rule it’.12 Indeed as G. A. Hayes-McCoy argues, in 1887 Stevenson ‘believed himself  to be on the point of intervening in Irish af fairs’ but thought better of it stating that ‘the cause of  Ireland is not worth supporting’.13 Arguably Stevenson’s eventual opposition to the Home Rule Bill was motivated by his antipathy to outbreaks of  Fenian14 bombings across England and Scotland15 between the 1860s and 1880s, many of  them funded by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s ‘skirmishing fund’. Stevenson’s response to this, according to Hayes-McCoy was to answer ‘the work of  the dynamiters with an explosion of  his own’: I am in a mad fury about these explosions. If that is the new world! Damn O’Donovan Rossa; damn him behind and before, above, below, and round-about; damn, deracinate and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end. Amen. I write that for sport, if you like, but I will pray in earnest, O Lord, if you cannot convert, kindly delete him!16

It seems likely that Stevenson responded to his own call allowing O’Donovan Rossa, thinly disguised as ‘the redoubted Zero’ to blow himself up with his own bomb in The Dynamiter17 (1885).

12

In G. A. Hayes-McCoy (1950), ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and the Irish Question’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 39, 130–40, 154. 13 In Hayes-McCoy, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and the Irish Question’, 130–40. 14 Although it is generally thought that the Fenians were responsible for the bombings across England and Scotland during this period it is fair to say that the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (founded 1858) and Clan na Gael (founded in 1867) were heavily implicated. 15 Scottish targets included Glasgow’s Tradeston Gas Works on 20 January 1883 and the Buchanan Street Station of  Caledonian Railways on 15 March of  the same year. 16 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters of  Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Sidney Colvin, Vol. 11, p. 163. 17 Stevenson also mentions Parnell in the preface to the tale indicating further the Irish links: ‘Horror, in this case, is due to Mr. Parnell: he sits before posterity silent, Mr. Forster’s appeal echoing down the ages. Horror is due to ourselves, in that we have so long coquetted with political crime; not seriously weighing, not acutely following it from cause to consequence; but with a generous, unfounded heat of sentiment, like the schoolboy with the penny tale, applauding what was specious.’

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Such events were guaranteed to elicit a visceral response from Stevenson’s audience; alert as they were to Fenian violence and Irish agitation by popular periodicals such as Punch and, less famously, The Tomahawk. Irish monsters and Fenian vampires were liberally spread across the pages to represent the spectres which haunted the English imagination: ‘Rome Rule, republicanism, anarchism and revolution against the Empire’ (Cheng, 1995: 32). The Irish monster therefore became an animus to Englishness: a cipher used to represent a wide constellation of anxieties. These were projected onto the body of the beast which functioned as a scapegoat for the ills of society. Though primarily a fin de siècle phenomenon, it is evident that a similar scapegoating technique had occurred some fifty years previously in the journalistic and literary demonisation and debasement of the ‘degenerate’ Burke and Hare.

Resurrecting Scotland In Stevenson’s unfinished ‘Kailyard’ novel, Weir of  Hermiston (1896) he acknowledges the importance of  history as a standard bearer for Scottish culture and identity: That is the mark of  the Scot of all classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memories of  his forbears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation. (Stevenson, 1911: 71)

In this uncompromising observation Stevenson identifies a Scottish ‘attitude to the past’ which acknowledges the fraught relation with the dominant Anglo-centric historical narrative. The Scots, as Cairns Craig argues are ‘historyless’ because Scotland: Has been brought into a history whose shape no longer derives from the particularities of its own experience; rather the past of its present is the evolution of  English experience and Scotland’s own past becomes the arena of  local narrative no longer teleologically connected to the future. (Craig, 1996: 38–9)

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Thus, for Cairns, Scotland, due to the predominance of  England, has been assimilated into a historical script not of its own making – one which occludes or deracinates the ‘particularities’ of Scottish experience. In short, the Scots have been forced into ‘the world of  the historyless with its endless forgetting’ (Craig, 1996: 50). However, it is precisely because of  Scotland’s shattered and fragmented past that the Scots, according to Stevenson, are able to shape their identity from what David Lloyd describes as ‘fragments of a history still in progress’ (Lloyd, 1993: 11). Detached from the teleological imperative of of ficial history the Scots in Stevenson’s account can accept and preserve the complex legacy of  the past – memory – and bring this necessarily partial and imperfect inheritance into a dynamic relationship with the present. Discussing the impulse to commemorate, Craig observes that ‘English graveyards are the focus of  historical remembering; the Scottish one is the denial that there is any history’ (Craig, 1996: 32). Silenced and suf focated, the past will re-assert itself, returning inevitably to infect the present ‘according to the logic of  the phantom, the revenant and haunting’ (Punter, 2003: 193) in the familiar Gothic tropes of deferred retribution and inescapable guilt. This is the idée fixe of  the Gothic as a genre and the thematic nucleus of  Stevenson’s uncanny recollection of  Edinburgh’s ghastly and ghostly past ‘The Body Snatcher’.

Stevenson’s Demons As Julia Reid has pointed out, ‘Stevenson’s feelings about his neo-Gothic tales were ambivalent: he dubbed them “crawlers” or “bogey tales” ’ (Reid, 2009: 74). Amongst these, ‘The Body Snatcher’, conceived in Pitlochry in June 1881, ranked among his least favourite. Such was his discomfort with the story that he wrote to Sidney Colvin in July 1881 that ‘the tale, being

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horrid’ had been ‘laid aside in justifiable disgust’.18 Later, in 1884, while revising the text for the Pall Mall Gazette, he again wrote to Colvin informing him that ‘The Body Snatcher is a thing I long ago condemned as an of fence against good manners’.19 In part Stevenson’s distaste for the story resulted from ‘his aversion to the commercialisation of  literature’ (Reid, 75).20 This is a fair assumption – Stevenson, a thoroughgoing Tory, is amply recorded as recoiling from the vulgar world of mass-produced texts written to meet an insatiable public demand for penny bloods and shilling shockers. ‘I am pouring forth a penny dreadful; it is dam dreadful’21 he confided to Colvin about The Strange Case of  Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and ref lecting on the notion of  the popularity as a test of  literary worth he lamented to Edward Gosse: ‘there must be something wrong with me or I would not be popular’.22 While Stevenson clearly balks at moving from coterie writer to commercial hack he also echoes a belief, shared by many other Victorian intellectuals in the baneful ef fects of such ‘pernicious trash’ on the moral well-being of  England and the English people. Nonetheless as a contemporary reviewer of  the 1888 stage production of  The Strange Case of  Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde observed that a fascination with the dark side is compelling if anachronistic: The critic may curse the morbid and the horrible but the craving for them is deeply rooted. Scratch John Bull and you find the ancient Briton who revels in blood, who loves to dig deep into a murder, and devours the details of a hanging. (Cited in Smith, 2004: 77)

Notably, the article employs a Gothic register of decay and degeneracy, suggesting that the anachronistic ‘ancient Briton’ is a submerged persona

18 Letters ii, p. 158. 19 See McCay, iii, p. 954. 20 See also Richard Boyle and Patrick Brantlinger (1988), ‘The Education of  Edward Hyde: Stevenson’s “Gothic Gnome” and the Mass Readership of  Late Victorian England’, in Hirsch, Gordon and Veeder, William (eds), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after One Hundred Years, University of  Chicago Press, London, pp. 265–82. 21 Letter from Stevenson to Colvin, September to October 1885, Letters, 5, p. 128. 22 Letter to Goss dated 12 March 1885, quoted in Arata, p. 44. ‘The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde’ (2010) 35–53: 44.

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who lurks below a fragile veneer which allows him to masquerade as the civilised John Bull. The parallels with Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde are evident, articulating, as Stephen Arata suggests, ‘late Victorian anxieties concerning degeneration, atavism and what Cesare Lombroso called ‘criminal man’ (Arata, 1995: 233). An ape-like parasite with an infantile brain, Hyde undermines the fitness of  his host, Dr Jekyll, contaminating him from within until, in Robert Mighall’s words ‘the morbidity is transferred from the “patient” to the doctor’ (Mighall, 1999: 191). In this, he echoes the figures of  Burke and Hare as an image of degenerate savagery; a vilified (and in the latter case racial) alter ego deceitfully penetrating the heart of civilised society and threatening its potency, purity and power.

Milesian Monsters Despite Stevenson’s self-professed disgust, ‘The Body Snatcher’, after being ‘hastily retouched’23 was published at the request of  Charles Morley, editor of  the Pall Mall Gazette for the Christmas ‘Extra’ edition in 1884. A macabre revenge tale it resurrects local legends and sensational accounts of  the crimes committed in Edinburgh by Burke and Hare between February and November of 1828. The evidence is scanty as to how much Stevenson knew about this dark chapter in Edinburgh’s history though it is evident that he was acquainted with it. This is unsurprising bearing in mind it had been the subject of newspaper accounts, novels (some worse than others),24 ghost stories, children’s rhymes and folk tales since the first lurid accounts of  the murders had been circulated in penny chapbooks and broadsides

Roger G. Swearingen (1980), The Prose Writings of  Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide, Archon Books, Hamden, Conn., p. 93. 24 The anonymous Murderers of  the Close was issued in February 1829 and was largely based on Thomas Ireland’s fifteen-part serial, West Port Murders. Alexander Leighton’s The Court of  Cacus appeared in 1861. 23

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in 1829. It is fair to assume that Stevenson was aware of  these tales, and furthermore the way in which both Burke and Hare had become part of  Edinburgh’s lore and landscape, remarking in Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes: Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There was one window in a house at the lower end, now demolished, which was pointed out to me by the grave-digger, as a spot of  legendary interest. Burke the resurrection man, infamous for so many murders at five shillings a head, used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going forward to the green. (Stevenson, 1910: 35)

The image is more chillingly picturesque than accurate. Quite why Burke, who repeatedly denied the crime of resurrectionism, would watch burials (presumably covetously) at Greyfriars is a matter for conjecture. As to the remuneration he received for the ‘shots’25 he and Hare supplied to the dissecting tables, it was somewhere between £7 and £10 (depending on the condition of  the corpse) rather than the ‘five shillings a head’ recounted by Stevenson. Almost certainly Stevenson had read William Burke’s confessions to the Edinburgh Evening Courant and also extracts from Blackwood’s Noctes Ambrosianae of  March 1829 which recounted details of  the events in satirical terms. However, despite the obvious notoriety of  the scandalous felons and Stevenson’s apparent knowledge of  this they are not the central characters of  ‘The Body Snatcher’. In fact, with the exception of a brief mention of  ‘the execution of  Burke’ in relation to Mr K they are referred to apophatically as recalled in the nightmarish recollections of  Fettes, the competent but dour anatomist’s assistant who relieves the ‘unclean and desperate interlopers’ (Stevenson, 1920: 95) whom we assume to be Burke and Hare of  their grisly burdens: The ghouls had come later than usual, and they seemed more than usually eager to be gone. Fettes heard their grumbling Irish voices through a dream; and as they stripped the sack from their sad merchandise he leaned dozing, with his shoulder propped against the wall. (Stevenson, 1920: 97)

25

The term Burke and Hare used to describe bodies to Dr Knox. See Norman Adams (2002), Scottish Bodysnatchers: True Accounts, Goblinshead, Musselburgh, p. vi.

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It is worth pausing to note that Burke and Hare were neither the first nor the only felons to traf fic in corpses with the Edinburgh Anatomy Schools in the early nineteenth century. The immense popularity of  these centres of  learning combined with fierce competition amongst medics and legislation which restricted their use of corpses for anatomical purposes had resulted in a thriving black market in cadavers. By the 1820s gangs of professional resurrectionists (as sack-em-up men) vied with the amateur ‘shushy lifters’ and Noddies to supply an ever-growing demand. ‘Stif f y-tussles’26 took place regularly in Edinburgh kirkyards as rival gangs battled over their lucrative commodities: even medical students engaged in body snatching, plundering recently interred graves to produce the freshest specimens for the dissecting table. In short theses ‘ghouls’ were many and their appearances at an anatomy lab’s door a regular occurrence to the historical counterparts of  the fictional Fettes. In Stevenson’s tale, though they are not explicitly identified, the accents of  the body snatchers manipulate the readers’ perception based on their previous knowledge. Thus, Gestalt-like, we associate body snatching with Burke and Hare using the marker of  their Irishness (as indicated by their grumbling Irish voices). The hazy figures of  the Irish Burke and Hare are cunning, conspiratorial and clandestine – attributes which were shared with the public perception of  Irish secret societies such as the Fenians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Molly Maguires. Stevenson’s mysterious murderers, opaque and amorphous as they are, could thus be viewed as representative of  these impenetrable outsiders who had wreaked murder and mayhem on the streets of  England and Scotland in the late nineteenth century. Thus, it can be argued that Stevenson was exploiting the curiously Gothic nature of  ‘Fenian Fever’ – ‘a fear of  the resurrection of  the Irish political undead’ (cited Gibbons, 2004: 69).

26

Slang terms for Resurrectionists. See Norman Adams (2002), Scottish Bodysnatchers: True Accounts, Goblinshead, Musselburgh, p. v.

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Irish Ghouls Of fering as his evidence the lesson learned by the ‘outcry against Dr Robert Knox’, Owen Dudley-Edwards concludes that ‘neither the Edinburgh mob nor the Edinburgh polite world had any particular desire to shuf f le the horror away from Edinburgh to alien scapegoats’ (Dudley-Edwards, 1994: 2). Thus, for Dudley-Edwards the Irishness of  Burke and Hare was immaterial to their subsequent damnation. However, contemporary evidence would suggest otherwise. There was a decidedly anti-Irish drift to the press in the wake of  Burke’s arrest ranging from the absurd to the openly Hibernophobic. The Caledonian Mercury, for example damned the Irish with faint praise by claiming that: The West Port murder, judging from internal evidence is decidedly of  Scotch origin. There is a cool, methodical, business-like air about it, a scientific tact in the conception, and a practised ease in execution that no Irishman could ever yet attain! The Irish murder is hasty, sudden, impetuous – an English one phlegmatic, cunning, mercenary, – but it has been reserved for the Scotch, in this last unequalled atrocity, to blend the qualities of  both English and Irish guilt with a scientific ef frontery peculiarly and pre-eminently their own. (History of  Burke and Hare, pp. 248–9)

Here, in what one can only hope is a tongue-in-cheek assessment of  the situation Burke and Hare are inadvertently exonerated due to their racial inferiority and inability to carry out murder in the cool, methodical manner of  the Scotch. Elsewhere the word ‘Irish’ is used repeatedly as an abusive epithet designed to strike terror and disgust into the heart of  the reading public. This extended to England where aptly named ‘John Bull    ’ for example did its best to induce a moral panic, warning its readership: ‘The perpetrator of  the bloody deeds is an Irishman, professing the Roman Catholic faith, an alien in Scotland … we are fearful that one such should be among us …’.27 Such sentiments were echoed by Dr Henry Lonsdale in terms that are both

27

John Bull (London, England), Monday, 5 January 1829; pg. 4; Issue 421. New Readerships.

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paranoid and unequivocally Gothic: ‘Burke and Hare were Irishmen; They were also Roman Catholics; might they not be agents of  the Jesuits?’ and ‘Burke and Hare were but carnal weapons of  Satan; their concubines the alluring servants of  Romish priests keenly alive to the selection of  fitting instruments for plotting and ef fecting mischief ’ (Lonsdale, 1870: 76, 77). As Gibbons has forcefully argued, this ‘animus against Catholicism [was] inherently bound up with the subjugation of  the Celtic periphery – Gaelic Ireland and the Scottish Highlands – from the early modern period’ (2004: 11), and, to paraphrase Gibbons, in the case of  the Celts, religion had clearly gone to their heads. Citing Dr Isaac Taylor (1889) he notes that ‘craniological measurements’ (64) were allied with religious belief  to provide ‘impeccable … Unionist pedigrees for the master race’ (65). As Taylor observes ‘The doliocephalic Teutonic race is Protestant … the brachycephalic Celto-Slavic race is either Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox’ … and ‘the shape of  the skull if one of  the surest indicators of race’ (65). To risk a pun, Scotland’s capital was at the ‘cutting edge’ of science during the nineteenth century, and in the vanguard of  ‘research’ for highly contentious though popular pseudo-sciences such as phrenology and physiognomy.28 As Dr Taylor’s observations make clear, these implausible and unprovable observations were often racially motivated and used as cautionary tales against miscegenation. In short, such theories rendered criminality visible in the observable stigmata of race. In Georgian Edinburgh, as Gibbons suggests ‘The Celts’ were ‘a source of pollution in the body politic’,29 their ‘priest maddened … wolfish spirits at once contagious and incurable’.30

See John Strachan (2006), ‘ “ The mapp’d out skulls of  Scotia”: Blackwood’s and the Scottish Phrenological Controversy’, in Finkelstein, David (ed.), Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930, University of  Toronto Press, pp. 49–59. 29 Strachan in Finkelstein, David (ed.) (2006), Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930, University of  Toronto Press, p. 41. 30 Strachan in Finkelstein, David (ed.) (2006), Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930, University of  Toronto Press, p. 42. 28

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The ‘wolfishness’ of  the Irish was not, for some comparative physiognomists, confined to their spirits but evident in the appearance and character traits of what James W. Renfield31 describes as ‘these curs of  low degree’.32 He continues: Compare the Irishman and the dog’ in respect to barking, snarling, howling, begging, fawning, f lattering, back biting, quarrelling, blustering, scenting, seizing, hanging on, teasing, rollicking, and whatever traits you may discover in either, and you will be convinced there is a wonderful resemblance.

Mitigating this vicious canine behaviour are Irish women whom the author admires as resembling King Charles Spaniels in their long f lowing hair, large ‘sympathetic eyes’ and biddable natures. This placidity is not however endemic to the race as he warns that the snappish ‘beslavering’ Irish man has a ‘taste for the vinous fermentation which leads to the putrefactive’ during which times, ‘he himself is the monster that is to be dreaded’33 and will, cur-like bite the English hand that feeds him: ‘Bloody Irishman is a name applicable to the Irish in general’ warns Mr Renfield and ‘Kill is a word attached to half  the places in Ireland – Killdare, Killarney, Killkenny, Kilkerney etc.’. However, with the correct (stern) training (as befitting a dog) ‘he will become a faithful servant, who will say “go on master, I will follow you to the last gasp with truth and loyalty”’.34 Thus, in accord with nineteenth-century stereotypes the Irish are depicted as naturally aggressive,

31

Following Charles Le Brun (1690–1690). Le Brun’s comparative physiognomic theories date back to a lecture he delivered in 1688. These ideas were subsequently publicised and published in a 1750 pamphlet with engravings by John Tinney. See Caracteres des passions, sur le desseins de C. le Brun, A drawing book of  the passions, from the designs of  C. le Brun, J. Tinney, London, 1750. 32 James W. Redfield (1852), Comparative Physiognomy: or Resemblances between Men and Animals, Redfield, New York, p. 253. 33 James W. Redfield (1852), Comparative Physiognomy: or Resemblances between Men and Animals, Redfield, New York, p. 277. 34 James W. Redfield (1852), Comparative Physiognomy: or Resemblances between Men and Animals, Redfield, New York, p. 264.

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untrustworthy and vicious but capable of servility if  harshly handled and correctly trained. William Burke, though not from a town with the prefix ‘kill’, was a murderer. However what is truly remarkable about contemporary descriptions of  him is the unremarkable nature of  his appearance in every aspect other than its phenotypical Irishness. For example The Caledonian Mercury of  Thursday 25 December 1828 recounts: The male prisoner as his name indicates is a native of  Ireland. He is a man rather below the middle size and stoutly made and of a determined, though not peculiarly sinister expression of countenance. The contour of  his face as well as his features is decidedly Milesian. It is round, with high cheekbones, grey eyes, a good deal sunk in the head, a short snubbish nose and a round chin but altogether of a small cast … he had upon the whole what we call in this country a wauf   35 rather than a ferocious appearance, though there is a hardness about the features, mixed with an expression in the grey twinkling eyes that is far from inviting.

The editorial, which juxtaposes the ethnocentric rhetoric of phrenology with that of physiognomy,36 implies that Burke’s countenance, though not overtly ghoulish or villainous, displays hints of an inner, deviant character which is ‘decidedly Milesian’. For ‘decidedly Milesian’ read ‘decidedly Irish’ as an article in Blackwood’s of  the following year observes: Unfortunately, the domination of  the Celt over Irish character is modified chief ly by that of  the Milesian, whose large and dark eye, high and sharp nose, thin lips and linear mouth, declares his southern origin more surely than Irish history or Irish fable.37

Notably the appearance of  the Milesian ref lects sui generis a volatile melanic temperament, or one given as the article suggests to ‘love of splendour, want of  taste, voluptuousness and licence’ characteristic of  the Southern European. Unchecked, when combined with the ‘imagination and passion

35 Startling. 36 The notion that facial features are indicative of personality. 37 ‘Characters of  the English, Scots and Irish’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 26: 159 (1829, Nov.), pp. 818–25 (p. 824).

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of  the aboriginal population of  Ireland’ this leads to a people deficient in ‘reasoning and judgement’ who, according to the writer: Must naturally be less distinguished in the discrimination of good and ill, and the calm and patient discharge of duty, than in the love of  friends and the hatred of  foes, or in the devotion, even unto death, to any cause which they may espouse.38

The Milesian Irish are thus distinguished by their irrationality, their fanaticism, and their inability to distinguish between good and evil. ‘Not less obvious is it’ he argues: How utterly worthless and contemptible must seem Irish want of judgement, want of principle and want of industry; and how well deserved Irish wretchedness though it is to be feared that the inevitable ef fect of  this contempt is less salutary than for the sake of  Ireland one would wish it to be.39

The term ‘Milesian’ can thus be seen as a term of abuse indicating the nonrational propensities of  the bearer of such racial stigmata as discussed above. In the Mercury’s article however these facial features are specifically associated through phrenological and physiognomic discourse with criminality: the sunken eyes and the snubbed nose indicate ferocity, vanity and villainy; his singularly uninviting expression is described as ‘wauf ’ – ‘freakish’ or ‘startling’ – and yet, in comparison with descriptions of other criminals of  the time what is most surprising is that the source of  Burke’s evil is not immediately evident in his face.40 On closer inspection, however, the graphic pen of  the North paints a monster lurking beneath the Irishman’s uncannily normal appearance:

‘Characters of  the English, Scots and Irish’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 26: 159 (1829, Nov.), pp. 818–25 (p. 824). 39 ‘Characters of  the English, Scots and Irish’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 26: 159 (1829, Nov.), pp. 818–25 (p. 821). 40 In this he bears similarities to the fictional Edward Hyde who, according to Andrew Smith ‘provokes feelings of degeneracy without really manifesting them’ (Smith, 2004: 39). 38

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ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER Impenitent as a snake, remorseless as a tiger. I studied in his cell his hard, cruel eyes, his hardened lips which truth never touched nor moved from their cunning compression; his voice rather soft and calm but steeped in hypocrisy and deceit; his collected and guarded demeanour, full of danger and guile – all, all betrayed as he lay in his shackles, the cool, calculating, callous and unrelenting villain.41

The image produced is bestial and atavistic, stressing Burke’s cunning, hypocrisy and deceit, combined with his observable lack of remorse. This displays not only his evident culpability but also a capacity for deliberate and intentional evil. In the absence of clear somatic indicators, Burke’s diabolical depravity is defined as part of  his essence or soul and becomes more sinister because it is cunningly concealed by his cold and calculated manner. However, his inner monstrosity manifests itself in his facial expressions which mark him irrefutably in the eyes of  North as ‘an unrelenting villain’. Conversely, Burke’s compatriot and partner-in-crime William Hare has the observable physiognomic and phrenological attributes which mark him out immediately as an evolutionary throwback and genetic criminal. He was as North recalls: The most brutal man ever subjected to my sight, and at first looked seemingly an idiot. His dull, dead, blackish eyes, wide apart, one rather higher up than the other; his large, thick or rather coarse-lipped mouth; his high broad cheekbones and sunken cheeks, each of which when he laughed, which he did often – collapsed into a perpendicular hollow, shooting up ghastlily from chin to cheek bones – all steeped in a sullenness and squalor not born of  the jail, but native to the almost deformed face of  the leering miscreant, inspired not fear, for the aspect was scarcely ferocious, but disgust and abhorrence, so utterly loathsome was the whole look of  the reptile.42

North’s observations, though doubtlessly satirical, ref lect populist conceptions of physiognomy and phrenology and from these he interprets Hare as a hereditary delinquent, ugly and degenerate in extremis and biologically predetermined to be evil. Unlike Burke, Hare’s repulsive physiognomy accurately represents his inner evil, yet his apparent idiocy (indicated by 41 Blackwood’s Magazine, 1829, Ibid. 42 See ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’, March 1829, in Roughhead, William (1921), Burke and Hare, Hodge, Edinburgh, p. 14.

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his dead eyes and grotesque grimacing) mitigates his monstrosity and marks him as the lesser of  two evils set against the cold, calculating Burke. One might speculate that this, along with his turning of  king’s evidence, resulted in the former escaping the gallows while the latter was hanged, gibbeted, anatomised and dissected: taken in death by the profession he had so nefariously served in life.

Doctor’s Orders Given the amount of readily available Gothic tropes and images Stevenson had to hand it seems astonishing that he chooses to concentrate not on Burke and Hare but on the curiously occult practices of the medical community in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh. In brief, ‘The Body Snatcher’ concerns the competent but dour Fettes and murderous dandy Wolfe MacFarlane, two Edinburgh medical students studying under the tutelage of  the distinguished anatomist ‘Mr K’. In the course of  the narrative the two students repeatedly violate sepulchres in order to supply their tutor’s dissecting table – MacFarlane later resorting to murder when demand exceeds supply. Fettes the unwilling accomplice in these horrible events is drawn into a web of evil as he witnesses the disposal and dissection of  the unfortunate Janet Galbraith and the blackmailer Grey, finally acquiescing to the logic of  MacFarlane’s hubristic justification for his crimes: There are two squads of us – the lions and the lambs. If you’re a lamb you’ll come to lie on these tables like Grey or Jane Galbraith; if you’re a lion you’ll live and drive a horse like me, like K – like all the world with any wit and courage. (Stevenson, 1920: 105)

It is manifestly clear that MacFarlane, a metonym for the nineteenth-century medical establishment, embodies traits which have become critical clichés in discussions of  Stevenson’s works: antithesis and duality. Outwardly respectable and inwardly corrupt MacFarlane recalls and pre-echoes a number of  Stevenson’s Gothic characters including Deacon Brodie and,

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more famously Edward Hyde. Beyond this he represents also the irredeemably split nature of nineteenth-century Edinburgh, a city of  two distinct halves – the respectable New Town and the craven Old Town. On the surface MacFarlane observes the social niceties of  the diurnal world of  the former, adhering to its rigorous social conventions and seeming to be a brilliant and reputable surgeon-in-training. However his success in the New Town is only made possible by his nocturnal excursions to the warren-like wynds of  the Old wherein he preys upon the poor and defiles the sanctity of  the grave making a living out of  the dead. This is made manifest in his final act of grave-robbing which takes place not in the cemeteries of  Edinburgh but in the rustic neighbourhood of  Glencorse ‘a few miles south’ (Stevenson, 1920: 107) of  the Scottish metropolis. This movement from city to country allows Stevenson to dramatise what Julia Reid describes as ‘the conf lict between enlightenment and an ineradicable supernaturalism’ (Reid, 2009: 119). Edinburgh and Glencorse are poles on a temporal axis of progress – the latter representing the older verities and primitive beliefs repudiated by the Enlightened civilisation for which MacFarlane pars pro toto stands as a representative of  the apparently inexorable progress of science and medicine which both fascinated and repelled British society in the first decades of  the nineteenth century. Standing in the vanguard of debates about body and spirit he challenges orthodoxies and threatens religious dogma. In this he is the archetypal anatomist recast as the dark side of  the Enlightenment: a narcissistic monster dabbling in forbidden knowledge and hell-bent on self-advancement. However, in the pastoral setting of  Glencorse folk belief clashes with modern science leaving the latter confounded by the tangible reality of  the metamorphosed corpse. MacFarlane is damned because he cannot acknowledge that which exists outside of  his own temporal and scientific frame of reference. Fettes is damned because he adopts the belief of  the miscreant medic MacFarlane, a ‘Jekyll and Hyde personality who combine[s] behaviour of astonishing ferocity with a capacity for rational thought and skill’ (Walkowitz, 1992: 211).

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Conclusion Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ is Scottish in context and setting but more than this it resonates with a sense that the primitive past, despite being entombed can never truly be expelled but haunts the here-and-now with its ghostly presence. As Alan Bissett makes clear: Gothic … has always acted as a way of re-examining the past, and the past is the place where Scotland, a country obsessed with re-examining itself, can view itself whole, vibrant, mythic. When myth becomes channelled through the splintered prism of  the present, however … what emerges can only be something distorted and halfway monstrous. And while the Gothic has often been the conduit for collective fantasies and nightmares, there is something/someone/somebody that haunts the fringes of  the Scottish imagination … perhaps the whisper of  history, pain, feudalism, legend, all or none of  these things, but undoubtedly Scotland’s is a fiction haunted by itself, one in a perpetual state of  Gothicism. (Bissett, 2001: 6)

In short, when history is suppressed it is unleashed like the monstrously atavistic figures of  Edward Hyde or Burke and Hare to halt the seemingly unstoppable narratives of progress and rationality. For Stevenson Scottish history is not so deeply buried that it cannot be resurrected in the form of memory, in the sense of a lieu de memoire that can claim continuity from the past and transmit it into the future. This of fers a means by which history can be remembered and rewritten in a way that disrupts its linear f low and resurrects the silenced corpses in the graveyard of  the past, giving them the opportunity to relay their ghostly testimonies. In exhuming buried histories, it is Stevenson who is the resurrectionist and the Celtic proletariat, amongst them the racially degenerate Messrs Burke and Hare, the re-animated revenants stalking the shadowy side of  Scotland’s Enlightenment.

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References Arata, Stephen D. (1995), ‘The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde’, Criticism: a Quarterly Journal for Literature and the Arts 3 7, 233–59. Bissett, Alan (2001), Damage Land: New Scottish Gothic Fiction, Polygon, Edinburgh. Brantlinger, Patrick (1988), The Rule of  Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Cheng, V. (1995), Joyce, Race and Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Craig, Cairns (1996), Out of  History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture, Polygon, Edinburgh. Deane, S. (1994), ‘Wherever Green is Read’ in Brady, C. (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 234–45. Dudley Edwards, Owen (1980), Burke and Hare, Polygon, Edinburgh. Gibbons, Luke (2004), Gaelic Gothic, Race, Colonization, and Irish Culture, Arlen House, Galway. Hayes-McCoy, G. A. (1950), ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and the Irish Question’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 39, 130–40, 154. Kilgour, Maggie (1995), The Rise of  the Gothic Novel, Routledge, London. Lloyd, David (1993), Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Moment, Duke University Press, Durham. Lonsdale, H. (1870), A Sketch of  the Life and Writings of  Robert Knox, The Anatomist, Macmillan & Co, London. MacGregor, G. (1884), The History of  Burke and Hare, and of  The Resurrectionist Times: A Fragment from the Criminal Annals of  Scotland, T. D. Morison, Glasgow. Maley, W. (1994), ‘Review of  Owen Dudley Edwards’ “Burke and Hare” ’, History Ireland, 2, 2, p. 62. McNeil, Kenneth (2007), Scotland, Britain and Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760–1860, Ohio State University Press, Columbus. Mighall, Robert (1999), A Geography of  Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Miller, Nicholas Andrew (2002), Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of  Memory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Peterson, Dale (1987), ‘Russian Gothic: The Deathless Paradoxes of  Bunin’s Dry Valley’, Slavic and East European Journal, 1.31, pp. 36–49. Punter, David (1998), Gothic Pathologies, The Text, the Body and the Law, St Martin’s Press, New York.

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Punter, David (2002), ‘Scottish and Irish Gothic’ in Hogle, Jerrold E. (ed.), Scottish and Irish Gothic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 105–23. Punter, David (2003), Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Punter, David and Byron, Glennis (2004), The Gothic, Blackwell, Oxford. Redfield, James W. (1852), Comparative Physiognomy: or Resemblances between Men and Animals, Redfield, New York. Regan, S. (2005), ‘Irish Gothic’ in Beardow, F. and O’Malley-Younger, A. (eds), Representing Ireland: Past, Present and Future, University of  Sunderland Press, Sunderland, pp. 69–77. Roughhead, W. (1921), Burke and Hare, Hodge, Edinburgh. Smith, Andrew (2004), Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1910), Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, Seeley, London. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1911), The Letters of  Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Sidney Colvin, Vol. 11, Scribner & Sons, New York. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1911), The Letters of  Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Sidney Colvin, Vol. 5, Scribner & Sons, New York. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1911), ‘Weir of  Hermiston’, in Weir of  Hermiston and Other Stories, Scribner & Sons, New York, pp. 1–181. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1920), ‘The Body Snatcher’, in Tales and Fantasies, Chatto & Windus, London, pp. 87–114. Stevenson, Robert Louis (2002), The Strange Case of  Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. Katherine Linehan, Norton, New York & London. Swearingen, Roger G. (1980), The Prose Writings of  Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide, Archon Books, Hamden, Conn.. Stone, T. (1829), Observations on the Phrenological Development of  Burke, Hare and other Atrocious Murderers, Robert Buchanan, Edinburgh. Strachan, John (2006), ‘“The mapp’d out skulls of  Scotia”: Blackwood’s and the Scottish Phrenological Controversy’, in Finkelstein, David (ed.), Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930, University of  Toronto Press, pp. 49–59. Walkowitz. Judith R. (1992), City of  Dreadful Delight: Narratives of  Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London, Virago, London.

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Second Cities of  Empire: Celtic Consumerism Exhibited

Indulging in panoramic views provided from the camera obscura of  his Outlook Tower, Patrick Geddes famously conceived of a macrocosmic outlook on Edinburgh’s regional planning: How can anyone understand this world, not to mention improve it, if  he cannot even see it accurately to start with? We must re-educate our eyes so that we can first of all be in more ef fective visual contact with external reality […] every inhabitant from child to patriarch should strive to know what his region contains, not only its wealth of natural resources, scenic beauty, and heritage of culture but the opposite picture as well. (Boardman, 1944: 177–84)

Less familiar is the fact that he also waxed sociological in a microcosmic observation made about the 1886 Edinburgh Industrial Exhibition of which he remarked ‘there can be no better standpoint for an intelligent survey of modern progress than that af forded by an international exhibition’ (Geddes, 1887: 1). Flanked on all sides by model villages, marquees and artificially constructed halls of a sometimes colonial, occasionally imperial and very often architecturally temporary and crude inclination, the layout of industrial, international and civic exhibitions in Glasgow and Edinburgh by the end of  the nineteenth century seemed to be somewhat of a contrast with Geddes’ maxims of what town planners now brand ‘regional survey’. Indeed, by the arrival of  the 1911 Scottish Exhibition, Geddes’ promises of progressive inspection and subtle sociological introspection appeared more contradictory still. With Scottish exhibitions of  this period becoming fast accustomed to exhibiting their locus as a ‘Second City of  Empire’, boasting immense displays of industrial prowess and engendering nationalism, there

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is an interesting and unexamined juncture arrived at here in contrasting Geddes’ viewpoints on the micro and the macro. Building upon this contradictory notion of space, in this chapter it will be argued that it was consumerism of a ‘Celtic’ not an ‘international’ inclination that utilised the vagaries of  Scottish and Irish exhibitions from 1853 to 1911 as a vehicle to stimulate economic and civic advancement in both countries. A particular focus will be placed upon Scottish and Irish expositions from 1853 to 1911 in order that the Celtic inclination of  these spatial representations be made distinct from notions of  ‘modernity’ and ‘spectacle’ noted at the turn of  the century by Georg Simmel and Charles Baudelaire concerning continental European international exhibitions. Interestingly, Geddes’ contemporaries were even less complimentary about the sociological merits of exhibitions. The Saturday Review dubbed the 1886 exhibition as indistinct from other ‘organised hypocrisies’ of  the same ilk which, without advertisement, ‘the sole reason of  being of such places’ (Geddes, 1887: 13) would come to be regarded as culturally inert and without civilising ef fects. Whilst it is a testament to advertising prowess, this statement suggests that individual attendees’ yearnings for ‘self improvement’, by then a Victorian soundbite, prevailed over any wider establishment of a sense of civic identity in tune with consumer culture in Victorian Edinburgh. It is no secret that both Dublin and Edinburgh bore witness to f lourishing arts and crafts industries between the late 1880s and 1900s. Such increased artistic productivity, combined with increasing literary output made these enterprises part and parcel of  the Celtic Revival period which has been long labelled a project of  ‘cultural nationalism’ and imperial aloofness. That said, fifty years prior to the Revival, British journalistic accounts of  Dublin’s exhibition were decidedly sceptical of  the exhibition being in ‘national’ interests. The Illustrated London Magazine would inveigh against Dublin’s 1853 exhibition, painting it as a wasteful enterprise, contingent upon baf f ling polarities and illusions of guile: A strange subject for contemplation […] a gigantic anomaly in a land long celebrated for its paradoxes […] within hearing distance of the hammers of  the Great Exposition of  Industry, there was not a single soul in all that vast assembly which entertained a hope of  being able to live by labour in his native land! (Harnett, 1853: 43)

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To add to cynicism over the cultural and consumerist viability of exhibitions, there is a perspective of fered in the scant comparative contemporary ref lections on Victorian Scottish and Irish exhibitions which considered these ‘organised hypocrisies’ feeble attempts to trump the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851’s legacy, if not each other. Stephanie Rains’ recent study Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin 1850–1916 (2008) deftly agues that following on from the 1853 Exhibition, Dublin’s emergent urban middle classes were poised to become prime movers of consumer development throughout the city. By physically and economically donning the accoutrements of commodity and materialist progress in a city unhindered by the legacy of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, Dublin’s urban middle classes attending the 1853 exhibition enabled its primary inf luence to be interpreted in terms of  ‘patterns of consumption’ as opposed to ‘self-conscious attempt[s] to stage Ireland’s supposed recovery from the devastation of  the Famine’ (Rains, 2008: 489). Part of  the denigration of  late nineteenth-century exhibitions as valid sources for socio-economic and socio-historical study in the academy could well emanate from the side-lining of  Victorian Scottish and Irish advertising history and consumer studies as uncomfortably unexplored aspects. Advertising and consumer culture are too frequently nudged under the umbrellas of  ‘cultural studies’ or ‘heritage studies’ without being credited for their distinct Irish or Scottish socio-historical value. In terms of exhibitions occurring in Scotland and Ireland from the 1850s until respective Scottish and Irish Gaelic Revival periods at the turn of  the century, archives in Glasgow, Belfast, Edinburgh and Dublin are replete with exhibition catalogues, advertising, photo albums, entry tickets and other valuable ephemera.1 Given that there is no drought of material to make Celtic connections, what then binds Scottish and Irish exhibitions with sociohistorical study, Victorian consumerist enterprise and Geddes’ seemingly illusory sense of modern civic development? What makes cultural analyses

1

Including the collections of  the National Library of  Scotland, Edinburgh Central Library, Mitchell Library Glasgow, Special Collections at the University of  Glasgow, the National Library of  Ireland and the Linen Hall Library, Belfast.

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of  Victorian exhibitions worthy of consideration in the context of evolving Celtic identities? Further, must exhibitions in Scotland and Ireland from the Victorian period be considered ‘esteemed’ testaments to empire to risk trespassing on the territory of revered socio-historical and critical studies? Although Queen Victoria patronised exhibitions in the Second Cities of empire, a number of  factors would suggest that there is an advantage in exhibiting cultural nationalism in terms of its consumerist edge. Moreover, the study of consumerism and commodity culture acts enables a stronger understanding of  Scottish and Irish politically nationalist aspirations. These factors include Ireland’s complex colonial status throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century; Ireland’s lack of industrial development when compared with Scotland’s immense industrial powers and Scotland’s first Home Rule Party, conveniently established under Gladstone in the 1880s when Ireland’s Home Rule bills were being discussed in Westminster.2 If  the comparisons and similarities between isolated nationalist developments in Ireland and Scotland are worthy of contemplation, then so too ought to be the countries’ respective tackling of national consumer culture and economic development as exhibited in major expositions. Celtic consumerism was, I will argue, covertly challenged and at times blatantly encouraged in Scottish and Irish exhibitions ostensibly promoting other identities – namely international, industrial, artistic and civic – from 1853 to 1911. A discussion of  the origins of mobilised mass consumerism dating from 1853 will provide some background as to the identities on of fer at local fairs in Ireland in the wake of  the 1853 exhibition. As Patrick Geddes maintained in the 1890s, moving from micro to macro circumspection of urban and greater national development bodes well for sociological and socio-historic survey. Apparently, town planners and economic specialists have shied away from venturing to make similar cultural conclusions about the consumerism evidenced in chronological accounts of  Ireland and 2

The link between an 1886 split in the Liberal Party over Irish Home Rule and the establishment of  Scotland’s Home Rule Party is examined in more detail in Addison, R. (2002), ‘Corporate Images, 1886: Advertising at the International Exhibition of  Industry, Science and Art’, in Addison, R., Beavan, I., Holmes, H., and Thomson, E. (eds), Images and Advertising, Merchiston Publishing, Edinburgh, pp. 23–46.

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Scotland’s major exhibitions. This is an especially curious omission to make in studies of what was a monumental era of exhibiting progress in Great Britain making the exhibition, as we know it, a fundamental constituent of  Western cultural history.

Celtic Consumerism in Second Cities of  Empire? Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow and Edinburgh were referred to as ‘Second cities’ and ‘Second cities of empire’ throughout the nineteenth century by dint of  their respective advancements in industry and in particular, their bustling ports which allowed for the transportation and trade of peoples and goods in the British Empire. Although Glasgow is nominally conceded to be Victorian Britain’s designated ‘Second City of  Empire’ according to Glasgow City Council’s historical accounts, studies including J. M. MacKenzie’s ‘“The Second City of  the Empire”: Glasgow – Imperial Municipality’ (1999) and the city’s very hosting of  the Empire Exhibition of 1938, it is also true that Dublin, Edinburgh and Belfast were each considered secondary cities. From the mid-seventeenth century, Belfast’s booming commercial linen industry and its involvement in transatlantic trade following the development of  Belfast’s harbour in the 1830s enabled it to be considered the ‘“First Town in Ireland for Trade”, with the value of exports, mainly linen an provisions, exceeding imports by some £900,000 a year’ (Sweetnam, 1988: 61). Together with shipbuilding and engineering, Belfast’s industrial involvement in empire matters from the Victorian to the early Edwardian period extended to the printing, chromolithography and bookbinding enterprise of  Marcus Ward and Co. who would disseminate children’s books of a trenchant British orientation.3 Furthermore, the

3

These include; Crane, T. and Houghton, E. (1883), At Home Again, Marcus Ward and Co. Ltd, Belfast and Crane, T. and Houghton, E. (1883), London Town, Marcus Ward and Co. Ltd, Belfast.

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production of  Cantrell and Cochrane’s mineral waters and soft drinks were said to be popular in the British colonies from the 1880s until after the turn of  the century. Moreover, the establishment of  the Belfast Empire Theatre of  Varieties in 1894 of fered greater expansion to the Star Theatre of  Varieties which was already a great success in Dublin. Although Edinburgh staged an industrial exhibition in 1886, its industrial growth was secondary to that of  Glasgow’s rapid expansion in the late nineteenth century and in terms of displaying objects of industry and/or empire at exhibitions, Edinburgh of fered little contest. What did develop in the 1880s in Edinburgh was a move towards municipal enterprise in hand with the development of  Celtic revival arts and crafts industries as staged at the Edinburgh International Exhibition of 1886 and aided by Patrick Geddes’ and Lady Aberdeen’s (the wife of  the Scottish Viceroy to Ireland) support of exhibiting Celtic cultures through art schools, associations and exhibitions. Whilst Dublin and Glasgow in particular were ‘secondary’ to London in engaging in the expansion and growth of  the British Empire by involvements in the East India Company and the triangular trade up until the 1850s, their tacit implication in a project of imperial colonisation through means of  trade and slavery cannot be denied. The term ‘Second cities of empire’ will be applied here as the most appropriate terminology to introduce Celtic consumerism as an emergent trend which traced the process of internal colonialism that came to animate Ireland and Scotland’s major cities at the same time as the agendas of  the British Raj and opium wars. Irish and Scottish populations in the middle of  the nineteenth century were highly cosmopolitan and demographically heterogeneous following the events of  the Irish famine. At the time of  the famine, it was recorded that more than 7,000 Irish emigrants were arriving in Glasgow on a weekly basis and by the 1860s over half of  the population were not native to the city. As J. M. Mackenzie shrewdly notes, immigration led to a strain of municipal socialism in Glasgow which has been read by historians as a resistance to the vice of imperialism in the city’s attempts to ‘self-image’:

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This combination of growth and grandeur with poverty and social degradation created an imperial self-image which combined healthy pride and strength with social weakness, if not terminal illness […] The politics of imperial identity and power are thus reconfigured in an adjacent space. Analyses of  Glasgow’s class dif ferentiation similarly need to adopt the spatial, social and cultural perspectives of internal colonialism. (Mackenzie, 1999: 218–20)

Mackenzie’s interpretation of  the polarities of wealth and impoverishment upon which imperial entrenchment would rest for late nineteenth-century Glasgow also applies to the interactions Edinburgh, Dublin and Belfast had with Celtic consumerism as a means to medicate the seeming social ills of  ‘internal colonialism’. This is not merely a matter for postcolonialists but for examiners of internal and external cultural, national, social and above all consumerist binaries. The growth of  the Cuala and Belfast Linen Industries, the founding of  the Irish national theatre and launch of  D. P. Moran’s The Leader in 1900 occurred within a twenty year period where, over the Irish Sea, home-grown Scottish artistic and industrial outputs were thriving in Edinburgh and Glasgow. One need only think of  the Glasgow School of  Art’s formation and the success of  the Glasgow Boys as part and parcel of a ‘self-imaging’ artistic impetus which rejected dominant British gothic styles. Moreover, events which led to the founding of  Glasgow’s People’s Palace and Edinburgh’s Social Union and the Edinburgh Arts and Crafts club made for the culmination of an expressive nationalism which was subtly dissenting but acutely linked to a f lourishing Celtic-aligned (not maligned) consumer culture. Elizabeth Cumming is unhesitant in her response to the arts and crafts culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the fin de siècle period which she maintains amounted to: [A]n intellectual imperative [and] the integration of a wide social commitment to art with a deepening sense of place [which] gave early Scottish Arts and Crafts design its power and identity and began to establish networks of activists. (Cumming, 1988: 24–5)

Considering the development of spatial planning under Patrick Geddes and the poised and ready artistic ‘networks of activists’ in both Scotland and Ireland come the early 1900s, exhibitions in the Second cities of empire were

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to be a centrifugal force in expanding and publicising national consumer culture and the economy. This is not to say that major industrial, international and artistic exhibitions of  these cities were anti-imperial, rather that the national understanding of consumption had broadened to implicate collective agency as well as the many individual merits of solitary makers, users, movers and shakers, utilising goods and services. From a tangential position in Dublin’s Industrial Exhibition of 1853, Celtic consumerism became a tangible concept and acceptable marketing practice by the end of  the century. Raymond Williams observed that the meaning of  ‘consumer’ altered radically in the nineteenth century. Williams’ definition is fundamental to any understanding as to the vacillation of national space, place, identity and the marketing of it in Victorian Ireland and Scotland for it indicates that the concept was subject to changeable semantic boundaries associated with the broaching of private and public borders: ‘unfavorable connotations of consume persisted, at least until C19, and it was really only in mC20 that the word passed from specialized use in political economy to general and popular use’ (Williams, 1988: 78–9).

Carleton and Classic Ephemera: Broadcasting Consumerism in Ireland before 1853 At an early stage in his seminal work Transformations in Irish Culture, Luke Gibbons pinpoints the awkward interplay between recorded historical narratives and cultural studies in the Irish sphere throughout the nineteenth century. The negations, myth conceptions and allegories which constrict expressions of  ‘popular’ Irish identity and threaten the autonomy of art by constricting imagination, Gibbons argues: [G]loss over the multiple ways in which cultural practices intervene in the unfolding of events [and] do less than justice to the diversity and complexity of  human behaviour. It is not just that such investigations are incomplete; rather, they are distorted without due provision being made for cultural factors. (Gibbons, 1996: 18)

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Whilst provision has been made for the academic study of universal and international exhibitions in terms of colonial enterprise, imperialism and modernity in Europe, in a Celtic context, the ‘cultural factors’ pertaining to how these expositions impacted upon consumer culture have been neglected in place of a less diverse and less complex sphere which engenders cultural sets of dogma of greater respectability. In a manner which is both intelligent and modest, A. Jamie Saris footnotes successful recent studies on the subject of  Victorian fairs by dint of  their attribution to ‘more respectable academic’ systems of redress; namely, ‘political authority, economic power and symbolic legitimacy’ (Saris, 2000: 67). To complement Saris and Gibbons’ statements, it might be suggested here that an inchoate consumer presence at fairs and exhibitions in Scotland and Ireland in the middle of  the nineteenth century can be not only observed in exhibition catalogues, advertising and guidebooks but in popular literature too. As such, a receptive cultural consciousness of  Celtic consumerism can be revealed to compliment political, economic and symbolic legitimacies. In this sense, consumer culture was an implicit part of  Irish and Scottish exhibitions and one need not call upon the externality and abstractions of political, economic and symbolic legitimacies to justify an exclusively materialist or indeed, cultural approach. Where and how might detection of  Celtic consumerism begin? 1853 is a moveable but legitimate marker being the year of  the Dublin Industrial Exhibition.4 It is ironic that some of  the most attentive commentaries on Ireland’s fairs and 1853 Exhibition appeared not in the national press but in London’s leading periodicals such as the Illustrated London News and The Illustrated London Magazine (ILM), between July and September of  that year. Commentaries within these periodicals tracked the duration of  the Dublin Exhibition as it ran from May until October that year 4

Earlier examples of exhibitions and consumer culture were undoubtedly present in Ireland and Scotland but are out with the remit of  this study. One need only think of  the work of  travelling philanthropists, antiquarians, the consul general’s awareness of commerce and trade, land ownership patterns, philanthropist’s investments and the work of collectors of all kinds to note the array of material which cultural theorists and historians might feast upon.

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but often without making exclusive reference to its consumerist viability. As evidenced by Harnett’s scornful caveat mentioned above, a number of  British journalists sought to critique the expense of  the 1853 buildings’ construction and predicted the social ruptures which would follow such diversionary investment from rural Ireland. This is markedly at odds with Geddes’ socially complimentary perceptions about the Edinburgh Industrial Exhibition in 1886. Further on in Harnett’s account, stark claims are made that building development is heedlessly taking place in the middle of a city whose ports were teeming with emigrants. In an account which relates emigration with a dialogic configuration reminiscent of  the departure of  Frank in Joyce’s ‘Eveline’, Harnett adopts a grave journalese to paint a family of  ‘respectable class’ waving goodbye to Ireland from an Atlanticbound steamer each bearing, ‘a sod, a pot of shamrock, or a little earth, labelled “to be put in my cof fin if  I die abroad” ’ (Harnett, 1853: 44). Not surprisingly, as Stephanie Rains has astutely noted, the contents of  the on-site published of ficial Exhibition circular, The Exhibition Expositor and Advertiser depicted events far more favourably and included advertisements promoting the wares of  local businesses and exhibitors. Like Geddes, these publications prophesised the social enrichment such an exhibition would bring to Dublin in 1853. Nonetheless, it is to the ‘Fair of  Emyvale’ by William Carleton which one must turn to find incipient commentary and warnings of inchoate consumer presence at Irish fairs. This tale appeared in the ILM from July to September 1853, coinciding with Harnett’s and other journalists’ reportage of  the Industrial Exhibition. ‘The Fair of  Emyvale’ is based around sectarian ‘faction fights’ and other events occurring in and around a genuine fair held in County Monaghan which ran from the late eighteenth century until the famine period. The tale was omitted from Traits and Stories of  the Irish Peasantry (1830) and appears to have only been serialised in 1853 and published some forty years later alongside Carleton’s The Master and Scholar. The plot involves a group of  Ribbonmen who attempt to kidnap a local beauty named Mary Goodwin after the main assailant, Shawn Dhu (Black John), becomes instantly enamoured with her after visiting Emyvale. Molly, much akin to an exotic exhibition piece, is the focus of attention in Emyvale’s inherently masculine trading space where, it is remarked,

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‘[t]he whole fair was afther her’ (Carleton, 1853: 56). With the abduction bungled and after an amusing intervention by a local drunken henpecked husband Pat Rattigan, the story concludes with Mary’s father selling the tenant rights of  his farm in order that his daughter can af ford to marry James Murray. In a final ref lection, newlyweds James and Molly are said to board a boat bound for America in Dublin and Carleton masterfully alerts ILM readers to three of  the major social concerns of  the post-famine period: sectarianism, emigration and the survival of  the Irish peasantry. Disturbingly, as Seamus McCluskey observes, the story was probably based on real events as ‘the names of several “goodies” in the narrative were real characters and some of  their descendants still reside in the area’ (McCluskey, 2006: 112). Given the enduring legacy of  Donnybrook, the fact that the fair of  Emyvale was the site of numerous riots throughout the early nineteenth century makes Carleton’s rendering of events far more politically stirring than the maligned transactions enacted in other nineteenth-century literary fairs and markets. Hardy’s ‘furmity tent’ in Casterbridge and Joyce’s description of  the Dublin cattle-market for example, are notably devoid of riots, Whiteboys, Orangemen, Ribbonmen, abductions and lynch mobs. That said, reading an absolute and modern conception of consumer culture into Carleton’s literary descriptions of  the markets and fairs of  the eighteen-teens might make for a significant leap in conjecture and an historicisation as f leeting as the temporality of  the exhibitions which illustrated nineteenth-century Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Carleton though, having experienced the fair of  Emyvale first-hand, performs an historical enactment of proceedings without speculation as to encroaching modernism or consumerism and with no f lippancy as to the fair’s transient nature. The author’s keen awareness of  the monetary inclinations of  local fairs is evidenced in the arcane agricultural business acumen of  the narration which stipulates that ‘it is not until the business of  the day has been transacted that either the party or the faction fights take place’ and later ventriloquises the peasants’ discontent of  ‘landlords [who] refused to adjust their rents to the reduced marketable value of all farm produce’ (Carleton, 1853: 17–20). There are vivid descriptions of  traders tirelessly toiling at the fair and later, the drunken revelry enjoyed at the close of  business. Even as she wanders through the fair, the

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number of  times Molly Goodwin is referred to as an ‘object’ or an ‘unconscious object’ in the narrative and her elevation to a purchasable entity is worthy of significant feminist critical clout. Yet, in terms of encroaching Victorian consumerism as it relates to cultural studies, in 1853, Carleton’s story provides an ambiguous insight into the benefits that any exhibiting of industry, at rural Ireland’s ruin, would bring to Ireland’s middle classes and peasant communities. In fact, Carleton can be seen here to be extolling the economic intelligence and discerning patterns of  land ownership practiced by peasants of  this period. Only relatively recently have revisionist historians commended the commercial awareness of  the early nineteenth-century Irish peasantry and these factors are too often overlooked in restrictive and uncomplimentary literary, historical and journalistic accounts of  the Irish peasantry. Undeniably, a number of  these pejorative accounts still pepper the Irish literary canon. The ILM’s inclusion of  this story is deliberately provocative in that it would call for a focus to be placed upon the parochial infighting which took place at Irish traders’ settings in the pre-famine era and which continued to cause concern by the time of  the Westminster Report on Markets and Fairs in 1852.5 This report led to the closure of  fairs where riots, sectarian and agrarian, had become a permanent feature. As such, in reading of  Carleton’s unruly provincial markets, one might question the sociological and consumerist viability that a large-scale industrial exhibition would bring to Dublin. Might not the 1865 Dublin Exhibition’s ‘international’ perspectives later def lect attention from a greater provincial impoverishment in trade and, most pointedly, the perplexing issue of post-famine Ireland’s recovery in rural communities? The case was in fact proven to be the reverse by 1865. To successfully challenge West British slurs on Irish markets and the riotousness of  her fairs and exhibitions and

5

Details of  this report can be found in Brian Ó Dálaigh’s chapter ‘The origins, rise and decline of  the Ennis fairs and markets’ in Cronin, D., Gilligan, J. and Holton, K. (eds) (2001), Irish Fairs and Markets: Studies in Local History, Four Courts, Dublin, pp. 45–76.

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in turn, to restore their monetary impulse, a significant brand of  Celtic consumerism was covertly introduced at Dublin’s 1853 exhibition. By the time of  the staging of  the Dublin International Exhibition in 1865, Celtic consumerism was set to be advertised on an even larger scale.

Covert Celtitude: Product Placement at the 1853 and 1865 Dublin Exhibitions In the months leading up to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, gloomy forecasts of  the event’s failure, predicted structural damage and embittered speculations on the squandering of  the national workforce’s ef forts were common in both Scottish and Irish newspapers. Accounts in Edinburgh’s Blackwood’s Magazine were similarly lacking in ef fusion. An anonymous brief and bleak article entitled ‘The Proposed Exhibition of 1851’ which appeared in September 1850, strove to highlight the social dangers such an exposition would bring to Britain: We say this in no narrow or illiberal spirit. Were it for the credit, or, what is more, for the good of  the nation and the millions of industrious workmen which it contains, that this Exhibition should go forward, it ought to have been made essentially a national show, and the nation should have undertaken its expense, instead of  leaving it for individual contribution […] If it is proposed that the working population – by which we mean the great body of  the British artisans – should profit by it, a new dif ficulty arises. How are they to find their way to London on the occasion? Are men of  that class so rich that they can af ford to pay for their railway transit to and from the metropolis, deserting their homes and occupations in Glasgow, Birmingham, Shef field, Bristol, Dundee, Paisley or Leeds and further, maintain themselves for at least a week, while inspecting the productions of  the foreigner […] Socially, we believe that the Exhibition, if carried into ef fect, will do a vast deal of  harm and on that account alone we deprecate it. If only the wealthier classes throughout Great Britain and Ireland, and the working men in the neighbourhood of  London, are to enjoy the spectacle, it is scarce worth having. (1850: 281–2)

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This appears an unsurprisingly hierarchical caveat given Blackwood’s political inclinations, yet the concern over how classes might retreat from and then back to the ‘Second cities of empire’ in order to aid the Great Exhibition is revealing. That the exposition of 1851 fell short of what would be considered a ‘national show’ is apparent in the lustrous objects of empire which animated the Crystal Palace’s exhibition halls and which ‘men of  that class’ bore no relation to in the sphere of  bourgeois political economics. Although the Dublin Industrial Exhibition of 1853 was considered an attempt to outdo the Great Exhibition in journalese de jour, what was beginning to be exhibited in the exposition’s literature was material of a ‘national’ inclination which verged tantalisingly upon defiant celtitude. Although the suf fix ‘-tude’, is maintained in Latin-based languages’ adjectives to describe the ambiguity of national identities (such as ‘anglitude’ meaning ‘Englishness’ in French) it is not utilised to the same ef fect in current English. Rather the suf fix is applied to English nouns describing physical or emotional states i.e. solitude, certitude, attitude etc. Celtitude is applied here not as a convenient jeu de mots but as a testament to the varieties of  Celtic representations of identity (both physical and emotional) which were on of fer in the coverage of  the 1853 exhibition in press and in the exhibition catalogue itself. John Sproule, who edited the catalogue for the 1853 Irish Industrial Exhibition boasted, ‘I am glad to refer to this catalogue as a specimen of  Irish workmanship generally, being the result of native enterprise in every department’ (Sproule, 1854: viii). Was this the case for every department in the exhibition however? Irish industries featured only twice in a concentrated fashion in the ‘Raw Materials’ and ‘Textile Fabrics’ classes of exhibits. Together with a three page supplement on the Irish mining industry and quarrying endeavours, there is little to apply Sproule’s claims of Celtic craftsmanship to the exhibits on of fer at the exposition itself. Aside from M. H. Gill’s publishing of  the Exhibition catalogue, on the face of it, the most outstanding examples of  Irish involvement are evidenced in Dublin businessman William Dargan’s generous underwriting of  the entire event and the in-house ‘Exhibition Expositor.’ In a dispiriting report of  the extent of  Irish mineral wealth and the mining industry in Ireland, it is observed that owing to the small scale

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copper, gold, iron and lead fields, all statistical information had to be amalgamated with that of  England and Scotland to give a favourable overview of  the progress of  the commerce. However, the dominant nations cropping up in classes II, III, XVIII and XIX of  the exhibition, displaying over 60 per cent of  the listings for foodstuf fs, pharmaceuticals and tapestries, were Scotland and Ireland. Bolstered by a subtle disclaimer, ‘the finer class of goods is scarcely at all produced in England […] we are year by year making rapid advances upon our neighbours’ (Sproule, 1854: 338), the predominance in Celtic material in the tapestry section is remarkable. Out of  the 151 exhibitors listed here only six are English manufacturers. The remaining manufacturers, charities and individuals exhibiting originate from Cork, Limerick, Paisley, Tipperary, Kilmarnock, Airdrie, Galway, County Down, Dublin, Wicklow and Glasgow. The pharmaceutical section pays explicit compliments to ‘T. and H. Smith of  Edinburgh’ for their ‘magnificent specimen of caf feine’ (Sproule, 1854: 117) and of  the potions and chemicals exhibited, very few are of  English or Welsh origins. The relationship between a preferential endorsement of  Scottish and Irish products and manufacturers and the proviso of  Celtic consumerism may be shrugged of f as inconsequential by analysts of pure economics. As such, Scotland and Ireland were certainly chief producers of upholstery, crafts, foodstuf fs and medicinal products in the early 1850s but on what scale? The Times and other contemporary newspapers of fered some rebuttal to the charge of  being a producer of inferior classes of goods by suggesting that the multiple Irish exhibitors were minor producers. These allegedly small-time industrialists did not avail of modern advances in machinery and preferred an artisan approach which was ironically indicative of a decline in industrial produce.6 That said, I would contend, together with analysts of  the phenomenon of encroaching Victorian consumer culture, that the underrating of  Ireland’s ‘neighbours’ productions in the of ficial

6

Further analysis of  the economics behind Ireland’s changes in industry are noted in Ó Gráda, C. (1994), ‘Industry, c. 1780–1914: An Overview’, Ireland: A New Economic History, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 273–313.

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exhibition catalogue was tantamount to ‘inconspicuous consumerism.’7 In so doing, the attendees of  the Irish Industrial Exhibition would be faced with artisanal produce which was backward-looking economically. Thus, consuming Irish artisan goods at the exhibition would result in middle class attendees relating to the products of small time industrialists and rural manufacture as opposed to Thorsten Vebelen’s notion of  ‘conspicuous consumerism.’ This idea of conspicuously purchasing one’s way into a greater social status by investing in objects signifying luxury was vouched for by Vebelen in his Theory of  the Leisure Class (1899). Publications emanating from the 1865 Irish International Exhibition appeared even more heavily weighted towards promoting Scottish and Irish industries as producers of objects for national consumption. Alongside the shilling exhibition catalogues on sale at the event, each containing advertisements for Irish industries, a local barrister Mr Henry Parkinson also compiled a beautifully illustrated and sizeable commemorative volume; the Illustrated Record of  the Dublin International Exhibition (Parkinson, 1866). It is in this volume that Ireland’s heuristic approach to exhibiting national production as a means of stimulating consumerism is perhaps most recognisable. In a prefatory statement which renders the 1865 ‘International’ aspect of  the Dublin International Exhibition somewhat redundant, Parkinson asserts: Especial attention and extended space have been given […] to the description and details of  Irish industries, in order to mark the progress which has been made in the last ten years, so that on the occasion of any future International Exhibition being held in Ireland a retrospective comparison may the more easily be made. (Parkinson, 1866: v–vi)

The exposition was divided into three groupings; the British department, the colonial department and the foreign department. In accordance with Parkinson’s promises of  ‘retrospective comparison’, the ‘International’ 7

Alternatively, the distinctly English exaltation of empire and advertising of it at the Great Exhibition is discussed in Thomas Richards’ study (1991), The Commodity Culture of  Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914, Stanford University Press, Stanford.

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exhibition was rather top heavy in British exhibits which filled 250 pages of  the catalogue compared to the mere sixty pages devoted to colonial exhibits. By any measure, the classes displaying raw materials, machinery and textile fabrics in the catalogue were abundantly Irish in their written commentaries. These were unashamedly approving of national purchase and the most profuse even of fered up codified marketing packages to readers: ‘About forty firms are engaged in the trade [sewed muslins], some being Irish houses and others agents for Scotch firms, and the gross value of the manufactured goods amounts to about £1, 400, 000’ (Parkinson, 1866: 273). Some of the industrially attractive reports included accounts of  the national ‘Pharmacy at the Dublin Exhibition’ (126–35), ‘Woollen Manufactures of Ireland’ (244–7), ‘Flax Growth and Industry in Ireland’ (259–62), ‘Lace Making in Ireland’ (273–4), ‘The Porter Trade of Dublin and Messrs. Guinness’s Brewery’ and, as in the 1853 catalogue, a series of apologetic articles on Irish mining (101– 17). The abundance of  Irish and Celtic-based entries in the 1865 catalogue ref lects a recovering economic situation in Ireland where artisanal trades such as linen and f lax making were becoming successful with the assistance of  Scottish settlers in the North of  Ireland. Far from providing a superficial analysis, an examination of  the ephemera detailing exhibitions on show at each of  the 1853 and 1865 exhibitions in Dublin reveals deliberate attempts to valorise Irish industry and national consumerist development and an intentional ostracising of British imperial equivalents. Although apparently ‘Industrial’ and ‘International’ in inclination, this terminology is speculative in view of  the Irish artisanal trades and top-heavy Irish exhibits on of fer at each exhibition. Furthermore, in light of  the luxury of  the commemorative exhibition catalogues which contained fine examples of wood prints and colour illustrations, the publication itself would have been af fordable chief ly to the wealthier classes and particularly the emerging Catholic middle classes who would be later recast as significant consumers and capitalists in Dublin. Parkinson and Sproule were clearly keen to preserve the memory of  the exhibition as a f louting of  British consumer dependence in their commemorative catalogues by their preferential puf fing of industries native to Scotland and Ireland. Between 1888 and 1914, even greater evidence of  Celtic consumerism was exhibited at major arts, crafts, international and industrial expositions in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

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Scottish and Irish Consumerism vs. European Modernism A cultural historian of exhibitions A. Geppert argues that many fin de siècle European exhibitions came furnished with analogues relating to ‘representations of space’ and ‘intertextual accessories’ (Geppert, 2010: 4) which would be repeated at many major European cities. ‘Old London’ and ‘alt Berlin’ were amongst a number of recurring representations of pre-consumerist cities staged at the 1908 Franco-British exhibition in London. These mock towns acted as microcosms of  historical cities to attract tourists and incited the consumption of traditionally produced goods because, I imagine, these wares were of such a stark contrast to the machinery exhibits, bronze busts, art and objects of a colonial orientation featured elsewhere. Thus Geppert observes that a leading Irish soap manufacturer McLinton set up a traditional Irish rural dwelling named ‘Ballymclinton’ to give a ‘real idea of  Irish life’ (Geppert, 2010: 124–6) and to enable visitors to partake of  the launch of  their new soap product ‘Colleen.’ At the modest price of sixpence entry, visitors could witness 200 Irish ‘colleens’ hired from the West of  Ireland animating the setting and performing traditional home industries such as lace making, weaving and of course, soap making. Three years later, at the 1911 Scottish Exhibition in Glasgow, a similar strategy was adopted by Highland Home Industries’ deployment of a mock Highland village named ‘An Clachan’ (Figure 1) where, after paying the entry fee, consumers could witness Gaelic-speaking highland women weaving tweeds and plaids before being urged to purchase highland refreshments.8 Where ‘An Clachan’ and ‘Ballymclinton’’s promotional strategies dif fer is in their strivings to represent an illusory and patriotic sense of space which is marketable not by the hand of individual agency interloping at an otherwise international exhibition (as McLinton did in 1908) but by the creation of a national, self-contained exhibition designed to feature Celtic consumerism at its zenith. 8

Fuller discussion of  the Highland Home Industries’ involvement and the patriotic ends of  this exhibit can be found in Kinchin, P. and Kinchin, J. (1995), Glasgow’s Great Exhibitions: 1888, 1901, 1911, 1938, 1988, White Cockade Publishing, Bicester, pp. 121–3.

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Figure 1. ‘In the Clachan’, Souvenir Album of  the Scottish Exhibition 1911, p. 41.

Geppert’s analysis of  European exhibitions in the fin de siècle period is, conveniently enough, laced with the rhetoric of modernism. If  this is to be believed, advertising and promoting national identity for economic means (Celtic consumerism in Scotland and Ireland) might be readily accepted as a turn of  the century phenomenon staged primarily in the glamorous culture capitals of  London, Berlin, Vienna or Paris. Cultural studies have mentioned elsewhere however that the modernist impulse appeared prematurely in both Scotland and Ireland’s plastic arts, theatre and literature in comparison to that of  the rest of  Great Britain. Does the currency of  Virginia Woolf ’s estimation that ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed’ hold any purchase in relation to exhibitions then? Or have the three major Scottish International expositions of  this period been short-changed? These exhibitions were held prior to conceptions of  ‘intertextual accessories’ and modernist ‘representations of

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space’ and clearly legitimised the Victorian exhibition as a viable forum for promoting a more sophisticated brand of  Celtic consumption which had already been in circulation in Ireland since the 1850s.

The Glasgow International Exhibitions of 1888 and 1901 A momentum for promoting Irish and Scottish wares in exhibition catalogues had already been established in the Dublin events some forty years prior to Glasgow’s exhibitions. Both expositions were held in the area surrounding the University of Glasgow by the river Kelvin and boasted specially commissioned buildings such as the Grand Central Dome, Kelvingrove Art Gallery (1901), a Japanese Pavilion (1901) and the Doulton fountain which was moved from Kelvingrove Park to Glasgow Green two years after the exhibition and which still stands today. The reciprocity of  Celtic consumerism in Glasgow was fervently displayed in the 1888 International Exhibition where two thirds of  the exhibits on of fer were Scottish and an unprecedented display of  Irish goods was available in the Women’s Arts and Industries section. In this section, to vouch for the ‘International’ nature of  the exhibition a scant number of  German, Czech, Canadian, Greek, Italian and a solitary Jamaican ‘women’s self-help group’ are recorded. Despite a warning in the ‘Regulations for Exhibitors’ advising exhibitors that ‘[T]hey will in all cases be forbidden […] to invite or allow visitors to purchase goods for removal at the time of purchase, the Exhibition being intended for the purposes of display’ (Of ficial Catalogue, 1888: 52–3) the hawking of goods did nonetheless occur. The of ficial catalogue set forth a consumerist current, awash with fifty pages of advertisements at the front and back of  the catalogue and even as footers to the listings. Amongst the most eye catching are ads for ‘Summer Tours in Scotland’ by shipping magnate David MacBrane, ‘James & Robert Young Flax and Tow Spinners’ who employed a double page image of  their Belfast warehouse, summer holidays to ‘Rothesay – the Madeira of  Scotland’, and a lithographed image of a polar bear bearing the brand ‘Sieber’s Fur Store’ of 49 Buchanan Street,

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Glasgow. The Corporation of  Irvine unashamedly addressed their pitch for property developers ‘To Capitalists’ and Robert Scouler & Sons banked upon their Ayrshire base by advertising ‘Land O’ Burns’ oats and cereals.

Figure 2. ‘To Capitalists’, Corporation of  Irvine advertisement, Glasgow International Exhibition 1888: Of ficial Catalogue, p. 311.

Figure 3. ‘Land O’ Burns’, Robert Scoular advertisement, Glasgow International Exhibition 1888: Of ficial Catalogue, p. 462.

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At this ‘International’ exhibition, Scotland took centre stage and as Kinchin observes the ‘genuinely foreign section number[ed] [only] about 70 exhibitors’ (Kinchin, 1995: 34). The 1901 International exhibition featured some of  Glasgow’s finest industrial equipment including sugar refineries, print works, iron mongers and within the Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed Kelvingrove Art Gallery, journalists remarked on the Glasgow Boys’ portraits and the overbearingly large bronze sculptures of  Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. Amidst frenzies of  tartan and in an attempt to the redress the indictment of parochialism with which commentators had besmirched the Old Glasgow Exhibition of 1894, the 1901 International Exhibition promoted Scotland’s consumer revival culturally as part and parcel of a Celtic consumerism through advertising the wares of an artistic Celtic Revival occurring in both Scotland and Ireland from the 1890s onwards. The material on of fer to promote Scottish identity at both International Exhibitions displays a neglect of what observers might expect to be the dominant concerns of second cities of empire, namely, the tobacco trade and shipbuilding. Irish and Scottish self-advertising at purportedly industrial or international exhibitions may appear less sleekit or contentious and more circumstantial to cultural observers who might fail to recognise the Victorian exhibition as a valid space for testing consumer identities. Newspaper reports of  the period seemed too outwardly embarrassed by the lack of suf ficiently international and colonial exhibits at Glasgow and Dublin’s exhibitions to comment on the brazen f launting of  Celtic consumerism in catalogues, exhibit descriptions and advertisements. Of course, a definitive discussion of a Celtic consumer agenda lurking behind the Irish presences at Scottish exhibitions and vice versa would call for a more in-depth analysis, accounting for broader selections of civic events. A Victorian ‘exhibitionary complex’, to borrow the title of  Tony Bennett’s article,9

9

Bennett’s 1988 article – ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, New Formations, Spring (4), pp. 73–102 – builds upon the theories of  Foucault and Gramsci to dissect the role of  the nineteenth-century state’s knowledge and power in promoting popular

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could be suf ficiently aligned with Celtic consumerism if  Victorian Irish and Scottish advertising and consumer studies continue to develop. Pat Cooke has recently accounted for the cultural and economic interplay of  Irish ‘economics of identity’ by examining cultural heritage in the postindependence era. In an answer to the ‘protests of disenchanted culturalists’ who would discredit cross-contamination of cultural practice with economics, Cooke asks ‘Can we be economical about heritage without being entirely economical about the kind of  truth that the search for cultural identity embodies?’ (Cooke, 2009: 68–86). In terms of exhibiting an innovative form of consumerism which is of  Celtic interest, Victorian Ireland and Scotland would have had equally uncomfortable truths to acknowledge at the suggestion that Celtic consumerism was colonially therapeutic. In examining exhibitions, cultural resolve and Celtic consumerism emerge not from hindsight or inconvenient economic truths but by the very delicacies in observation which Patrick Geddes employed to establish ‘regional survey.’ Celtic consumerism, although painted as somewhat garish at times in my own analysis, was in fact a matter for subtle sociological and economic deliberation for Victorian consumers and entrepreneurs attending exhibitions. As such, Celtic consumerism might well continue to fall under the radar in Irish and Scottish cultural studies for those unwilling to avail themselves of  the micro and macro aspects of  Geddes’ viewfinder.

culture through museums and exhibitions. The stealth with which these exhibitions appeared in the United Kingdom from the mid- to late nineteenth century is also discussed by Bennett as enabling a mass psychological complex to arise whereby individual agency is sacrificed in the attendance of museums and exhibitions in order that participants become the ‘subjects rather than the objects of  knowledge’ exhibited (Bennett, 1988: 76).

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References (1888), Glasgow International Exhibition: Of ficial Catalogue, T. & A. Constable, Glasgow. (1901), Pearson’s Gossipy Guide to Glasgow, The Clyde District and the International Exhibition of 1901, C. R Pearson, London. (1901), Photo Album of  the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition, Special Collections University of  Glasgow Library. (1911), Souvenir Album of  the Scottish Exhibition of  National History, Art and Industry, T. & R. Annan, Glasgow. (1911), The ‘News’ Pictorial Book of  the Glasgow Exhibition, The Glasgow Evening News, Glasgow. Addison, R. (2002), ‘Corporate Images, 1886: Advertising at the International Exhibition of  Industry, Science and Art’, in Addison, R., Beavan, I., Holmes, H. and Thomson, E. (eds), Images and Advertising, Merchiston Publishing, Edinburgh, pp. 23–46. Beckett, J. C. et al. (1988), Belfast: The Making of a City, Appletree Press, Belfast. Bennett, T. (1988), ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, New Formations, Spring (4), pp. 73–102. Boardman, P. (1944), Patrick Geddes: Maker of  the Future, University of  North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. Bowe, N. G. and Cumming, E. (1998), The Arts and Crafts Movements in Dublin and Edinburgh 1885–1925, Irish Academic Press, Dublin. Cooke, P. (2009), ‘The Economics of  Identity: Heritage as a Cultural Resource in Ireland, 1922–89’, Journal of  Irish and Scottish Studies, 2, (2), pp. 67–80. Cronin, D., Gilligan, J. and Holton, K. (2001), Irish Fairs and Markets: Studies in Local History, Four Courts, Dublin. Cumming, E. (2006), Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland, Birlinn Limited, Edinburgh. Geddes, P. (1887), Industrial Exhibitions and Modern Progress, David Douglas, Edinburgh. Gibbons, L. (1996), Transformations in Irish Culture, Cork University Press in Association with Field Day, Cork. Greenhalgh, P. (1988), Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Harnett, A. W. (1853), ‘The Dublin Industrial Exhibition of 1853’, The Illustrated London Magazine: A Monthly Journal, Vol. 1, July, pp. 43–5.

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Johnson, J. and Rosenburg, L. (2010), Renewing Old Edinburgh: The Enduring Legacy of  Patrick Geddes, Argyll Publishing, Edinburgh. Kinchin, P. and Kinchin, J. (1995), Glasgow’s Great Exhibitions: 1888, 1901, 1911, 1938, 1988, White Cockade Publishing, Bicester. Litvak, L. (2000), ‘Exhibiting Ireland, 1851–3: Colonial Mimicry in London, Cork and Dublin’, in Litvak, L. (ed.), Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity, Four Courts Press, Dublin, pp. 15–57. MacKenzie, J. M. (1999), ‘ “ The Second City of  the Empire”: Glasgow – Imperial Municipality’, in Driver, F. and Gilbert, D. (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 215–37. McCluskey, S. (2006), ‘The Fair of  Emyvale’, Clogher Historical Society, 19, (1), pp. 111–20. Parkinson, H. and Simmonds, P. L. (1866), The Illustrated Record and Descriptive Catalogue of  the Dublin International Exhibition of 1865, John Falconer, Dublin. Rains, S. (2008), ‘Here be monsters: the Irish Industrial Exhibition of 1853 and the growth of  Dublin department stores’, Irish Studies Review, 16, (4), pp. 487–506. Rains, S. (2010), Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin 1850–1916, Irish Academic Press, Dublin. Robertson, D. (1896), ‘Glasgow, Printers, Publishers and Booksellers’, in Glasgow Institute of  the Fine Arts, Exhibition Illustrative of  Old Glasgow 1894, Galleries Press, Glasgow, pp. xxx–xxxii. Saris, J. A. (2000), ‘Imagining Ireland in the Great Exhibition of 1853’, in Litvak, L. (ed), Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity, Four Courts Press, Dublin, pp. 66–86. Sproule, J. (1854), The Irish Industrial Exhibition of 1853: A Detailed Catalogue of its Contents, James McGlashan, Dublin. Sweetnam, R. (1988), ‘The development of  the port’, in Beckett, J. C. et al.(1988), Belfast: The Making of a City, Appletree Press, Belfast, pp. 57–70. Williams, R. (1988), Keywords, Fontana, London. Young, W. (1896), ‘Views, Maps and Plans’, in Glasgow Institute of  the Fine Arts, Exhibition Illustrative of  Old Glasgow 1894, Galleries Press, Glasgow, pp. xxi–xxiii.

MASAYA SHIMOKUSU

‘True poetic comrades’: Mineko Matsumura and the Reception of  Fiona Macleod in Japan

Introduction The Oxford Book of  Scottish Short Stories (1995, reissued 2001 and 2008), edited by Douglas Dunn, can be taken as something of a touchstone for what is currently understood to constitute the canon of short Scottish fiction in Britain. It includes no stories by William Sharp and/or Fiona Macleod. This situation contrasts with a recent surge in the popularity of  this writer in Japan, both among general readers and scholars connected with the Japan Caledonia Society, the central association for the study of  Scottish cultures in Japan (Matusi, 2001; Arimoto, 2008). The striking popularity of  Fiona Macleod in modern Japan can be traced back to the appearance of  Kanashiki jyō-ō (The sad queen), a collection of  Macleod’s short stories first published in 1925. In recent years it has been reset and issued twice by dif ferent publishers – in 1989 and in 2005. Kanashiki jyō-ō was translated and edited by Mineko Matsumura, a pseudonym of  the tanka poet, Hiroko Katayama (1887–1957). This essay will explore the context and nature of  Matsumura’s translation, and examine the way in which it has become something of a classic in modern Japan. In doing so, it will trace some interesting literary connections between Ireland, Scotland and Japan.

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Hiroko Katayama and Tanka It is worth starting with some account of  Katayama herself, and her work as a poet. Her maiden name was Yoshida. She had a Christian education (but was not baptised) and was introduced to various works of  English literature by Beatrice Lane Suzuki, the wife of  the famous Zen-priest, Daisetsu Suzuki. Katayama married a banker, and in many ways was the typical modest, professional man’s wife, but she was a highly cultivated lady and joined a tanka circle. She started publishing poems in poetry magazines, but did not seek great literary success. She published two collections of  tanka: Kawasemi (A kingfisher, 1916) and No ni sumite (Living in the country, 1954). To her first collection, Kawasemi, Yone Noguchi contributed a dedicatory poem written both in English and in Japanese (Noguchi, 2006). In general, Katayama has not been recognised as a major tanka poet. Nevertheless, Yukitsuna Sasaki (2006) argues that Kawasemi can be regarded as the first tanka collection in which a female poet successfully treats philosophical subjects. Later, synchronising with the general tendency to reevaluate the work of  female poets that has been going on since the mid-twentieth century, her second tanka collection, No ni sumite, was published when she was seventy-five years old. I give two examples of  Katayama’s tanka here to illustrate her artistic personality. First, it might be worth saying a few words about the form. Though much less well known than haiku in the West, it is in fact the older form. Indeed it is said that the first poem in Japanese (recited by the god Susanō) was written in this form (Keene, 1988). While haiku has seventeen syllables, usually arranged in 5–7–5 sound sections, tanka has thirty-one syllables, usually arranged in 5–7–5–7–7 sound sections. In recent times some Western poets have employed the form: Seamus Heaney’s serial poems, ‘Midnight Anvil’, published in District and Circle (2006), are a good example.1 The two tanka given here were, according to Japanese convention, 1

The marvellous anthology of contemporary Irish poetry with Japanese motifs, Our Shared Japan, features a number of  the poems following the tanka scheme: Dermot

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written on one line; the translations, however, are divided into five lines to transplant the original 5–7–5–7–7 sound combination most ef fectively.2 Neither appears in her collections, but they were selected by Mayumi Tsuruoka as highly characteristic of  her tanka style, which, as Tsuruoka (2004) notes, often included unusual themes because of  her educational background and exposure to English literature. The first poem was published in 1915, a year before the appearance of  Kawasemi. The Christian theme and defiant attitude toward patriarchal culture are very unusual in tanka poetry of  this period, especially that written by female poets: It is a pity. If  thinking like this is sin, I have surely sinned. However I feel no shame Even when in God’s presence.

The second was written in 1951, and is very autobiographical as an attached explanatory note in prose made clear (Katayama/Matumura, 2006: 470). Katayama was then seventy-three years old, and had not translated Irish literature since around 1930. Far beyond the sky, There are poets in Ireland. Once I thought of  them As true poetic comrades: But that was a passing dream.

2

Bolger’s ‘Westport Tanka’, Francis Harvey’s ‘A Tanka and Four Haiku’, Seamus Heaney’s ‘Midnight Anvil’ and Eileen Kato’s ‘Sakurajima’, for instance (De Angelis and Woods, 2007). The following poems were translated by me and lyricised by Dr David Chandler, Doshisha University. The first poem may be found in Katayama/Matsumura, 2006, p. 245; the second in ibid., p. 470.

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Katayama and Irish Literature in Japan: The Background Katayama’s remarkable thought that the ‘poets in Ireland’ had once been ‘true poetic comrades’ serves as a useful bridge to a consideration of  her activities as a translator. She published many translations of  English literary works, mostly with the pseudonym Mineko Matsumura.3 Most of  her translations were published in the 1910s and ’20s, and her translations of  Irish literature in particular brought her a high reputation in the contemporary literary world. Her attraction to Irish literature, and the public appetite for translations, need to be understood within a larger context. As is well known, after the Meiji Restoration (1868), Japan made a very ambitious attempt to Westernise itself. This included embracing Western culture, and in the late 1800s a f lood of  Western literary works were introduced to Japanese readers. By the early 1900s, Japanese writers had begun to discover and explore the work of such contemporary Irish writers as Lady Gregory, Yeats, Synge, Shaw and Lord Dunsany. The career of  Kan Kikuchi (1888–1948) is central here. In the 1910s and 1920s he was a leading critic and popular novelist. He was a great enthusiast for Irish literature, and did much to popularise it (Kōno, 1997; Tsuruoka, 2004; Yamada, 2007). Having graduated from the University of  Kyoto, Kikuchi subsequently declared that Kyoto or Osaka (the second biggest city in Japan) should seek to become the Dublin of  Japan – it was the Irish Literary Revival he had in mind. Starting with Shaw, he successively discovered and praised various Irish writers, showing a consistent obsession with the Irish literary scene. He wanted Irish literature to be translated into Japanese, but insisted on high standards: his vehement attack on a mistranslation of  Lady Gregory’s Hyacinth Harvey by Teiichi Nakagi, a contemporary novelist, in 1914 has become famous. In his literary criticism, Kikuchi also tried to clearly distinguish Irish dramas from British ones. The introduction to a book he

3

It is said that Katayama picked up the pseudonym from the name on the umbrella of a school child. She did not know the girl, but happened to be riding on the same bus (Kiyobe, 1997).

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co-authored with Shūji Yamamoto, Eikoku/Airurando kindaigeki seizui (Essences of  British and Irish modern dramas, 1925), best illustrates this. Among contemporary Irish writers, Kikuchi most admired Synge. In 1917, he published an article on Synge and Irish ideas, in which he identified an ‘emotional’ or ‘fantastic’ nature in the Irish or the ‘Celt’, and insisted that the Japanese, living simple, natural lives in an insular country, are people who can understand such nature. Kenji Kōno (1997) points out that the style of Kikuchi’s well-known drama, Chichi kaeru (The father returns, 1917), is heavily inf luenced by his obsession with Ireland, especially Synge (46). (Kikuchi’s dramas, including Chichi kaeru, were translated into English by Glenn W. Shaw and published by Hokuseidō, a Japanese publisher, in 1925.) In the early 1900s, Kikuchi was not the only Japanese writer interested in Irish literature. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1897–1927), regarded as one of  the best writers of modern Japan, is another example. Indeed it is clear that in the 1910s and 1920s, reading and talking about Irish literature was something of a fashion among Japanese literary circles. It was in this context that Katayama began publishing translations of  Irish literature as Mineko Matsumura, and her skilful and beautiful translations soon attracted the admiration of  the Japanese literary world.4 Her first translation was Lady Gregory’s one-act play, The Full Moon (1910), published in a literary magazine in 1914. In 1917, her translation of The Playboy of  the Western World was published in book form, and was warmly appreciated by Kikuchi in 1921 (Kikuchi, 2006). Later she published collections of  both Lord Dunsany’s dramas (1921) and Synge’s plays (1922). Her other key translations from Irish literature include Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well and his collaborative work with Lady Gregory, Cathleen Ní Houlihan. All this made Matsumura the centre of  the boom in Irish literature. However, she stopped translating Irish literature around 1930, perhaps no longer feeling that the Irish writers were her ‘poetic comrades’.

4

Katayama had an intimate friendship with Akutagawa just before his suicide. Their relationships became the model of  Tatsuo Hori’s short story, ‘Seikazoku’ (‘A holy family’, 1930).

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Mineko Matsumura and Fiona Macleod Now I come back to Fiona Macleod. When Katayama/Matsumura compiled a collection of  her translations of  Irish dramas in 1922, she included Macleod’s play, ‘The House of  Usna’ (Matsumura, 1925a). The setting of  ‘The House of  Usna’ is Ulster, and in that sense it might be tendentiously called an ‘Irish’ drama. But the inclusion of  Macleod’s work with that of  Irish writers suggests that Katayama/Matsumura regarded it as closely related: ‘Irish’ in spirit, if not in fact. She had good grounds for doing so, as the relationship between the Scottish William Sharp/Macleod and Irish writers had already been well established. In 1895, The Sin-Eater by Macleod, a collection of stories based on folk tales from the Highlands of  Scotland, was published by the firm of  Patrick Geddes which had been established with the intention of promoting the Scoto-Celtic movement. The Sin-Eater, in fact, immediately drew vivid reactions from the centre of  the Irish Literary Revival. Douglas Hyde wrote to William Sharp: ‘I think Fiona Macleod’s books the most interesting thing in the new Scoto-Celtic movement, which I hope will march side by side with our own’ (Sharp, Elizabeth A., 2004, vol. 2: 59). In 1896, the same publisher brought out another collection of Macleod’s folkloric stories, The Washer of  the Ford. The deep relationship between Sharp/Macleod and the Irish Literary Revival must have been one of  the reasons why Katayama/Matsumura began paying attention to Macleod’s works. Katayama owned the Uniform edition of  the Collected Works of  William Sharp edited by his wife, Elizabeth A. Sharp, and published in 1910. Her collection of  books is presently held by the library of  Japan Women’s University, and her copy of  the Collected Works can be found there, though the second volume is lost (Imura, 2005). Katayama/Matsumura made her translations from this edition, and clearly knew that the Macleod works were written by Sharp, and that Sharp was a Scottish writer. Her own use of a pseudonym probably made her particularly interested in the strange Sharp/Macleod relationship. In 1920, the Japanese literary critic Takeshi Kimura published an article fully devoted to an analysis of  Sharp’s mental

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condition when he wrote as Fiona Macleod (Kimura, 1920). Katayama/ Matsumura knew this article, and it is cited in the postscript of  her translation of one of  the Macleod stories.

Kanashi Jyō-ō, or The Sad Queen In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Matsumura translated some of  Macleod’s short stories and began to publish them. Most of  the stories she chose are based on Gaelic myths or folk tales, and in some Gaelic words appear. In 1917, her first Macleod translations, ‘The Sad Queen’ and ‘The Laughter of  Scathach the Queen’, appeared in Mitabungaku, a literary magazine. The later translations all appeared in Kokoro no hana, a tanka poetry magazine, where they are juxtaposed with many tanka poems. In some cases, Matsumura just translated part of a short story, or translated one from a connected series of stories. All but one of the translated stories were taken from the second volume of  the Collected Works. However when Matsumura brought all twelve of  her translations together into book form, she completely altered the sequence of  the stories. In the Collected Works there is a clear continuity of storylines and characters: Sharp’s wife, Elizabeth, had carefully sequenced them according to their contents and motifs. But Matsumura seems to have ignored this, and simply to have lined up the stories like individual pictures exhibited in a gallery. Similarly, though the stories nearly all come from The Sin-Eater and The Washer of  the Ford collections, Matsumura chose neither of  these titles for her translated volume. Rather, she took her title from a story included in The Washer of  the Ford section, ‘The Sad Queen’. This story was not in the original Washer of  the Ford collection, but had been added to it by Elizabeth Sharp (Sharp, Mrs. William, 1910: 449). Kanashiki jyō-ō, or The sad queen, was published in 1925. The first story in Kanashiki jyō-ō is a good illustration of  Matsumura’s free approach. The story is entitled ‘Azarashi’, meaning the marine animal

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‘seal’ in Japanese. (Matsumura’s translation had originally appeared in Kokoro no hana in 1924.) This was originally the third part of  the trilogy entitled ‘Three Marvels of  Hy’, and had the subtitle ‘The Moon-Child’. So Matsumura broke up the story group, put the last part first in her collection, placed the second part, ‘The Sabbath of  the Fishes and Flies’, later, and did not translate the first part at all. Clearly she did not think much of  the connections between the stories; she seems to have been attracted to the imagery or impression created by individual tales. In ‘Azarashi’ or ‘The Moon-Child’, St Colum suf fers remorse for having crucified a seal man named ‘Black Angus’. He did this because Black Angus let a human lady bear a child ‘who had no soul’ (Macleod, 1910b: 296). The story is based on a Scottish folk tale of  Seal People or Selkie, which is why Matsumura entitled the story ‘Seal’. The Moon-Child however is the child with ‘no soul’, not a seal child. He has a human form and is called the ‘Moon-Child’ when he is with the Light of  God at the end of  the story. Katayama thus ignored the original title in her translation. Macleod’s story ends with a Christian prayer: ‘What is it, O Lord my God?’ whispered the old servant of  God that was now glad with the gladness: ‘what is this, thy boon?’ ‘Perfect Peace.’ And that is all. (To be the Glory. Amen) (Sharp, William, 1910b: 300)

Matsumura’s translation ends: ‘Ō waga kami yo, nani wo kudasarunoka.’ Kami no oitaru shimobe ha yorokobi ni michite tsubuyaita. ‘Ima, watakushi ni, nani wo kudasarunoka.’ ‘Mattaki heiwa.’ (Macleod, 1989: 20–1. Original Japanese phoneticised)

In her translation, the final two italicised lines in the original are cut, just as she deletes the beginnings or endings of some of  the other stories. The quoted passage also illustrates the style of  Matsumura’s translation of  Macleod: it is rhythmic and recites well. Many brief phrases are connected with each other, and many short sentences used, especially in conversational sections. Some sentences are incomplete; they finish in the

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middle with nouns, or are just noun phrases. This writing technique is called ‘taigen-dome’ (‘stopping with indeclinable words’) in Japanese, and it can be often seen in haiku or tanka because of  the five- or seven-syllable restrictions. Although Matsumura’s prose translations are not in any sense dominated by five- or seven-syllable phrases, her style of compiling short phrases can be called poetic, or tanka-like. Of course it is also true to say that in Macleod’s original stories many short phrases and remarks are employed to create the atmosphere of a folkloric or ‘primitive’ Celtic world. Macleod’s stories sometimes have clearly modern aspects. Jason Marc Harris (2008) argues that in Macleod’s stories with the seal-people or selkie motif complicated psychological conf licts and ref lections of  Darwinian evolutionary or degenerating ideas can be seen. Nevertheless, as Harris (2008) states, the tales also have an ‘ancient and allegorical’ aspect (185). The stories Harris discusses are those in volumes 2 and 3 of  Sharp’s Collected Works. These were the volumes from which Matsumura made her selections, but interestingly she did not choose to translate the stories that Harris is principally concerned with. Most of  the stories in Kanashiki jyō-ō seem to be ‘ancient and allegorical’, or romantic and/or religious. For example, ‘Azarashi’ or ‘The Moon-Child’, the story I have focused on here, sees St. Colum, who desperately repents his deeds against the fantastic creatures, miraculously received ‘Perfect Peace’. In general, Matsumura seems to have avoided stories with more overtly modern themes. On the other hand, in Matsumura’s translation the rural f lavour of  the stories is often lost in translation. She slightly distinguishes the speech of peasants, kings and priests, but basically most of  the characters speak elegant Japanese. No strong rural or class dialect is adapted for the peasants. The world of  the stories thus becomes a rather unreal, stateless one. A final point on the style of  Matsumura’s translation: she had great dif ficulty accurately fixing the pronunciations of  Gaelic words, or Irish or Scottish proper nouns, because of a lack of information and reliable scholars. To write such words in Japanese, translators have to first decide exactly how they should be pronounced, and even then there are often dif ficulties. In one of  her afterwords, Matsumura (1925b) complains that she could not accurately write ‘Ulster’ in Japanese (6). She tried to overcome the dif ficulties in various ways. In some cases, Gaelic words are not translated

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and are kept in the text as they are; in some they disappear from the story; in some they are translated into archaic Japanese words. In some cases she simply guessed the sounds and often made mistakes, sometimes causing unexpected defamiliarisation. In ‘Azarashi’, for example, ‘Black Angus’ is called ‘Kuroki [Black] Angūsu’ (sounding like ‘Angoose’). The name of  the wild bestial creature is here read and pronounced like a Latin name.

The ‘Celtic’ Boom and Fiona Macleod Matsumura’s Kanashiki jyō-ō, though it had enjoyed some popularity in the 1920s, had been long forgotten by the time it was republished in a second edition in 1989. This second edition caused a surprising stir, attracting more praise and popularity than the first had six decades earlier. I will brief ly digress here to point out a serious textual error in this second edition. The fact that it was apparently not noticed by readers and reviewers, and that it reappears in the third edition (2005), makes a striking comment on the way Macleod has been read in Japanese and suggests that her recent popularity may have a good deal to do with Matsumura’s translation style. Near the beginning of  ‘Azarashi’ nearly a whole page was omitted, probably editorial inadvertence. In the original, Colum blesses his dead brethren with his followers, returns to his cell, then descends to the sea by himself and meets the Divine Light at the shore. In the second edition of  the translation, however, just after Colum blesses his followers he suddenly begins to talk with the Light. It seems obvious that something is missing, and the fact this was not spotted suggests perhaps a readership not looking for logical connections, but rather content to ‘lose’ themselves in the poetic suggestiveness of  Matsumura’s language.5

5

For further details of  this remarkable omission, see Shimokusu 2010. The article is written in Japanese.

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The success of  Matsumura’s Kanashiki jyō-ō in 1989 and later, and the fact that it was republished at all, clearly had much to do with the fashion for ‘Celtic’ culture that had developed in the preceding years, mainly on the back of  the enormous popularity of  the singer Enya (who had rapidly risen to international fame after being featured in the 1986 BBC documentary series, The Celts). In Japan, ‘Celtic’ meant ‘Irish’ in most cases. Irish music became popular; many fantastic novels with a ‘Celtic’ f lavor were translated; and there was a steady f low of academic and popular books on Irish and ‘Celtic’ subjects. The mysterious images of the Celts pervasive in the age of  the Celtic Renaissance – in the young Yeats’s folkloric books, for example – impacted on various cultural media in Japan. The ‘Celtic’ and strongly fantastic f lavour of  Kanashiki jyō-ō, expressed in elegant, poetic Japanese, seems to have been central to its renewed appeal. It is noteworthy that it did not revive interest in Matsumura’s other translations of  Irish writers’ works where these elements were less pronounced. The 1989 edition added a revealing subtitle: ‘Keruto gensō sakuhinshū’, ‘Celtic Fantastic Stories’. This subtitle was retained for the third edition of 2005. A more specific inf luence on the reappearance of  Matsumura’s Kanashiki jyō-ō was probably another collection of  Fiona Macleod’s short stories translated by Hiroshi Aramata, an erudite novelist and writer. Aramata translated most of  the stories found in the first edition of  The Sin-Eater; he thus translated a few stories earlier translated by Matsumura. Aramata’s translation, published in 1983, was entitled Keruto minwasyū, that is A Collection of  Celtic Folk Tales: a rather misleading choice of  title. In the explanatory notes, Aramata (1991) mentioned Matsumura’s translation of  Macleod, long forgotten at that time. His translation was republished by a dif ferent publisher in 1991 – in the middle of  the ‘Celtic’ boom – when it followed the appearance of  the second edition of  Kanashiki jyō-ō. The publisher republishing Aramata’s translation, Chikumashobō, is also the one responsible for publishing the third edition of  Matsumura’s translation.

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Conclusion I have shown that Irish literature began to attract the serious attention of  Japanese writers in the 1910s and 1920s. A key figure in the process of  translation and reception was the tanka poet, Hiroko Katayama, using the pseudonym Mineko Matsumura. Well known as a fine translator of  Irish literature, Matsumura also translated Fiona Macleod probably because of  Macleod’s perceived relationship with the Irish Literary Revival. Her collection of  translations of  Macleod’s short stories was published in book form in 1925. It was republished in 1989, in the middle of  the ‘Celtic’ boom in Japan, and again in a dif ferent edition in 2005. At present, it is the best known of all Matsumura’s translated works, and Fiona Macleod’s fame in Japan is largely derived from the translation, and directly and indirectly from her association with Irish literature.

Acknowledgements The study from which this paper was developed was funded by Grant-inAid for Scientific Research (C) No. 21520295: Research on the Change of  Folk Tales into Artistic Works and their Globalisation. I also thank my university, Doshisha, for its financial support of  this study. I would like to express sincere gratitude to participants at the 8th Conference of  the North-East Irish Culture Network (NEICN) for their valuable comments and great inspiration. Dr David Chandler, my irreplaceable colleague, lyricised the poems quoted in this article and read an earlier version of  this essay, contributing precious suggestions and editorial assistance. I also thank Mr Joseph Woods, Director of  Poetry Ireland, for reading the translated poems of  Mineko Matsumura and providing helpful suggestions.

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References Aramata, Hiroshi (1991), ‘Kaisetsu: hoppō no kurai hoshi’ [‘Explanatory notes: a dark northern star’], in Fiona Macleod, Keruto minwasyū [A collection of  Celtic folk tales], Chikumashobo, Tokyo, pp. 217–41. Arimoto, Shiho (2008), ‘Uiriamu Syāpu niyoru “Fiona Makuraudo” no perusona kōchiku’ [‘The construction of  the persona of  “Fiona Macleod” by William Sharp’], in Japan Caledonia Society (ed.), Scotland no rekishi to bunka, Akashishoten, Tokyo, pp. 515–34. De Angelis, Irene and Joseph Woods (eds) (2007), Our Shared Japan: An Anthology of  Contemporary Irish Poetry, Dedalus Press, Dublin. Dunn, Douglas (ed.) (1995), The Oxford Book of  Scottish Short Stories, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Fujita, Fukuo (1965), ‘Katayama Hiroko no sakufūgaikan narabini nenpu’ [‘An overview on Hiroko Katayama’s poetic style and chronology of  her life and works’], The Bulletin of  Faculty of  Education, Kanazawa University, 14, pp. 1–22. Harris, Jason Mark (2008), Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-century British Fiction, Ashgate, Surrey. Imura, Kimie (2005), ‘Kaidai: Airurando bungaku honyakuka Matsumura Mineko’ [‘An explanatory essay: Mineko Matsumura, a translator of  Irish Literature’], in Macleod, Kanashiki jyō-ō, Chikumashobo, Tokyo, pp. 279–304. Katayama, Hiroko/Mineko Matsumura (2006), No ni sumite [Living in the country], edited by Kaori Ōnishi, Getsuyōsha, Tokyo. Keene, Donald (1988), The Pleasures of  Japanese Literature, Columbia University Press, New York. Kikuchi, Kan (2006), Foreword to Danseini gikyoku zensyū [A collection of dramas of  Lord Dunsany] in Katayama/Matsumura, 2006, pp. 559–60. Kikuchi, Kan and Shūji Yamamoto (1925), Eikoku/Airurando kindaigeki seizui [Essences of  British and Irish modern dramas], Shinchōsha, Tokyo. Kimura, Takeshi (1920), ‘Kojinnai niokeru ryōsei no kattō’ [‘A conf lict of  two sexes in an individual’], Shinchō 33, (6), pp. 49–55. Kiyobe, Chizuko (1997), Katayama Hiroko: Kokō no shijin [Hiroko Katayama: a nobly solitary poet], Tankashinbunsha, Tokyo. Kōno, Kenji (1997), ‘Kikuchi Kan and Irish Theatre’ [‘Kan Kikuchi and Irish dramas’], Éire (Ireland-Japan Society), 17, pp. 43–56. Macleod, Fiona (1924), ‘Azarashi’ [‘The Seal’], translated by Mineko Matsumura, Kokoro no hana, 28, (12), pp. 11–16.

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Macleod, Fiona (1925), Kanashiki jyō-ō: Fiona Makuraudo tanpenshū [The sad queen: a collection of  Fiona Macleod’s short stories], translated by Mineko Matsumura, Daiichishobō, Tokyo. Macleod, Fiona (1989), Kanashiki jyō-ō: Keruto genso sakuhinshū [The sad queen: a collection of  Celtic fantastic stories], translated by Mineko Matsumura, Chūsekisha, Tokyo. Macleod, Fiona (1991), Keruto minwasyū [A collection of  Celtic folk tales], translated by Hiroshi Aramata, Chikumashobo, Tokyo. Macleod, Fiona (2005), Kanashiki jyō-ō: Celt genso sakuhinshū [The sad queen: a collection of  Celtic fantastic stories], translated by Mineko Matsumura, Chikumashobō, Tokyo. Matsui, Yuko (2001), ‘Sukottorando to 19seikimatsu Keruto fukkōundō: “Fiona Makuraudo” koto Uiriamu Syāpu no baai’ [‘Scotland and the Celtic Revival at the fin de siècle: the case of  William Sharp or “Fiona Macleod” ’, in Chūō daigaku Jinbunkagaku Kenkyūjyo (ed), Keruto fukkō [Celtic revivals], Chūō University Press, Tokyo, pp. 473–505. Matsumura, Mineko (ed. and trans.) (1925a), Airurando gikyokushū [A collection of  Irish dramas], vol. 1, Genbunsha, Tokyo. Matsumura, Mineko (1925b), afterword, in Airurando gikyokushū [A collection of  Irish dramas], vol. 1, Genbunsha, Tokyo, pp. 1–8. (The main text is also given Arabic page numbers.) Matsumura, Mineko (1921), appendix in Sharp, William, 1921, p. 34. Noguchi, Yone (2006), ‘Lines’, in Katayama/ Matsumura, 2006, pp. 2–5. Sasaki, Yukitsuna (2006), ‘Kaisetsu: Katayama Hiroko no “kyōchi” ’ [‘Explanatory notes: the “position” of  Hiroko Katayama’] in Katayama/ Matsumura, 2006, pp. 643–71. Sharp, Elizabeth A. (2004), William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir, 1912, University Press of  the Pacific, Honolulu. Sharp, Mrs. William (1910), bibliographical notes in Sharp, William, 1910b, pp. 448–9. Sharp, William (1910a), The Dominion of  Dreams and Under the Dark Star, the works of  ‘Fiona Macleod’, vol. 3, arranged by Elizabeth A. Sharp, Heinemann, London. Sharp, William (1910b), The Sin-Eater, the Washer of  the Ford and Other Legendary Moralities, the works of  ‘Fiona Macleod’, vol. 2, arranged by Elizabeth A. Sharp, Heinemann, London. Sharp, William (1921), ‘Ichinen no yume’ [‘A one-year dream’], translated by Mineko Matsumura, Kokoro no hana, 25, (1), pp. 28–34. Shimokusu, Masaya (2010), ‘Notes for the studies of Mineko Matsumura’s translations of  the works of  Fiona Macleod’, Shuryū (English Literary Society of  Doshisha University), 72, pp. 51–62.

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Tsuruoka, Mayumi (2004), ‘Kaisetsu: hirugaeru nishoku Hiroko to Mineko’ [‘Explanatory notes: waving two colours, Hiroko and Mineko’], in Hiroko Katayama/ Mineko Matsumura, Tōkasetsu [Candlemas], Getsuyōsha, Tokyo, pp. 739–802. Yamada, Tomomi (2007), ‘Kikuchi Kan’s perception of  Ireland’, in: Éire (IrelandJapan Society), 27, pp. 57–74.

Appendix 1 Chronology of  Mineko Matsumura’s Translations of  Anglo-Irish Literature and Fiona Macleod. (This chronology is based on and expands upon Fujita, 1965 and Imura, 2005. The titles of anthologies below are translated into English.) Lady Gregory, The Full Moon in tanka magazine Kokoro no hana, vol. 18, no. 1 G. B. Shaw, The Dark Lady of  the Sonnets in Kokoro no hana, vol. 19, no. 1 J. M. Synge, In the Shadow of  the Glen in Kokoro no hana, vol. 19, no. 8 G. B. Shaw, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (Publication form unknown) G. B. Shaw, Press Cutting in Kokoro no hana, vol. 20, no. 1 Lord Dunsany, King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior in literary magazine Mitabungaku, vol. 7, no. 8 W. B. Yeats, The Old Men of  the Twilight in Mitabungaku, vol. 7, no. 9 Lord Dunsany, short story ‘The Bride of  the Man-Horse’ in Mitabungaku, vol. 7, no. 11 1917 G. B. Shaw, Androcles and the Lion in Kokoro no hana, vol. 21, no. 1 Lord Dunsany, ‘After the Fire’, and four other stores in Mitabungaku, vol. 8, no. 2 J. M. Synge, The Playboy of  the Western World, Tōkyōdōshoten, Tokyo. William Sharp, ‘The Sad Queen’ and ‘The Laughter of  Scathach the Queen’ in Mitabungaku, vol. 8, no. 5 1918 Lord Dunsany, The Gods of  the Mountain in Kokoro no hana, vol. 22, no. 1 Lord Dunsany, The Tents of  the Arabs in Mitabungaku, vol. 9, no. 4 1919 Lord Dunsany, The Queen’s Enemies in Kokoro no hana, vol. 10, no. 9 1920 W. B. Yeats, three poems from The Wild Swans at Coole in Mitabungaku, vol. 11, no. 12 1921 William Sharp, ‘The Birds of  Emar’ in Kokoro no hana, vol. 25, no. 1 Two Irish ballads translated by Lady Gregory in Mitabungaku, vol. 12, no. 6 Collected Works of  Lord Dunsany, Keiseishashoten, Tokyo 1914 1915 1916

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1922 Lord Dunsany, short story ‘The Prayer of  Boob Aheera’ in poetry magazine Myōjyō, vol. 1, no. 7 Padraic Colum, short story ‘The Sad Sequel to Puss in Boots’ in Mitabungaku, vol. 13, no. 5 W. B. Yeats, Calvary in drama critic magazine Geki to hyōron, vol. 1, no. 1 Collected Works of  Irish Drama, vol. 1, Genbunsha, Tokyo 1923 Lord Dunsany, short story ‘Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of  Shadow Valley’ in Kokoro no hana, vol. 27, no. 4 Collected Works of  Synge, Shinchōsha, Tokyo 1924 Padraic Colum, The Miracle of  The Corn in Kokoro no hana, vol. 28, no. 1 Anthology of  British and Irish Drama, Selected Works of  Modern Drama, vol. 9, Kindaigekitaikeikankōkai, Tokyo. Fiona Macleod, ‘The Moon Child’ in Kokoro no hana, vol. 28, no. 12 1925 Fiona Macleod, the 1st part of  ‘The Harping of  Cravetheen’ in Kokoro no hana, vol. 29, no. 1 Fiona Macleod, the 2nd part of  ‘The Harping of  Cravetheen’ in Kokoro no hana, vol. 29, no. 2 Fiona Macleod, The Sad Queen, Daiichishobō, Tokyo 1927 Anthology of  Irish Drama, Selected Works of  Modern Drama, vol. 25, Daiichishobō, Tokyo 1928 Selected Works of  British Drama, Anthology of  World Literature, vol. 33, Shinchōsha, Tokyo (including two plays of  Synge) Liam O’Flaherty, short story ‘The Wild Sow’ in literary magazine Nyoningeijyutu, vol. 1, no. 1 Selected Works of  Irish Drama, Anthology of  World Dramas, vol. 9, Sekaigikyokuzensyūkankōkai, Tokyo 1929 Anthology of  Modern Drama, Selected Works of  World Literature, vol. 35, Shinchōsha, Tokyo (including Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of  the Mountain) 1930 Anthology of  British Drama, Selected Works of  Modern Drama, vol. 39, Daiichishobō, Tokyo (including two plays of  G. B. Shaw) 1947 Irish Folk Legends, Iwanamishoten, Tokyo 1948 W. B. Yeats, The Hawk’s Well, Kadokawashoten, Tokyo (with Cathleen Ní Houlihan and The Land of  Heart’s Desire) 1951 J. M. Synge, Riders to the Sea, Kadokawashoten, Tokyo (with The Playboy of  the Western World) 1989 Fiona Macleod, The Sad Queen, Chūsekisha, Tokyo 1991 Collected Dramas of  Lord Dunsany, Chūsekisha, Tokyo 2005 Fiona Macleod, The Sad Queen, Chikumashobō, Tokyo

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Appendix 2 Contents of  Matsumura’s Translation, The Sad Queen Titles of  Original Stories

Titles of  Translation

  1.  The Moon Child     (The third episode of  ‘The Three Marvels of  Hy’)

Azarashi

  2.  The Laugher of  Scathach the Queen

Jyō-ō Scathach no warai

  3.  The Last Supper

Saigo no bansan

  4.  The King of  Ys and Dahut the Red

Kami akaki Dahut

  5.  The Sabbath of  the Fishes and the Flies Sakana to hae no     (The second episode of  ‘The Three Marvels of  Hy’) shukujitsu   6.  The Fisher of  Men

Ryōshi

  7.  Cathal of  the Woods

Sei

  8.  The Birds of  Emar     (Only the first section of  the story is translated.)

Yakusoku

  9.  The Harping of  Cravetheen

Koto

10.  The Washer of  the Ford

Asase ni arau onna

11.  The Song of  the Sword

Ken no uta

12.  The Sad Queen

Kanashiki jyō-ō

Except for no. 8, all the stories in the list above are from vol. 2 of  the Uniform edition of  the Collected Works of  ‘Fiona Macleod’, arranged by Mrs. William Sharp (Heinemann, London, 1910). No. 8 is the story from vol. 3 of  the Uniform edition of  the Collected Works.

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The contents of vol. 2 of  the Uniform edition of  the Collected Works of  ‘Fiona Macleod’ are as follows: The tales marked * were not included in the original editions of THE SIN-EATER or of  THE WASHER OF THE FORD THE SIN-EATER Prologue – From Iona The Sin-Eater The Ninth Wave The Judgment o’ God The Harping of  Cravetheen Silk o’ the Kine *Ula and Urla THE WASHER OF THE FORD Prologue Legendary Moralities:   1. The Washer of  the Ford   2. St. Bride of  the Isles   3. The Fisher of  Men   4. The Last Supper   5. The Dark Nameless One   6. The Three Marvels of  Hy   7. The Woman with the Net Cathal of  the Woods Seanachas:   1. The Song of  the Sword   2. The Flight of  the Culdees  3. Mircath *4. The Sad Queen   5. The Laughter of  Scathach the Queen *6. Ahèz the Pale *7. The King of  Ys and Dahut the Red Bibliographical Note  (Sharp, William, 1910b, pp. vii–viii)

WILLY MALEY AND NIALL O’GALLAGHER

Coming Clean about the Red and the Green: Celtic Communism in Maclean, MacDiarmid and MacLean Again

From Sorley Boy MacDonnell to Sorley MacLean One of  the great opponents of  English rule in Ireland in the sixteenth century was Sorley Boy MacDonnell (Somhairle Buidhe MacDhomhnaill). Sorley Boy, according to the New DNB, was: the sixth and youngest son of  Alastair or Alexander MacDonald of  Dunyvaig and the Glens (d. 1536x9), chieftain, of clan Iain Mhòir or clan Donald south in Scotland, and his wife, Katherine or Caitirfhiona, daughter of  John MacIan, lord of  Ardnamurchan. He was called Boy (Gaelic, Buidhe [yellow]) because of  his fair hair. During Sorley’s youth his father, a cousin of  John MacDonald, fourth lord of  the Isles, built up a power base for his family in both Scotland and Ulster, receiving land grants on Islay, Colonsay, and Kintyre from Colin Campbell, third earl of  Argyll, and his brother in 1519. (McDonnell, 2008)

Sorley Boy MacDonnell was one of  the MacDonnells of  Antrim, part of  the two-way traf fic between Scotland and Ireland that was transformed by the Anglo-Scottish Union of  Crowns in 1603 and the Ulster Plantation of 1609 that followed on the heels of  that rapprochement between two old enemies and sundering of  two old friends. Sorley also bears the same name as the third figure in the triptych we are of fering here, three twentiethcentury Scots with a keen interest in Irish af fairs: John Maclean, Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley Maclean.

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Ireland’s Tragedy, Scotland’s Disgrace (1920): John Maclean and the Greening of  Red Clydeside Praised by Lenin and Gramsci, dramatised by Freddy Anderson’s Krassivy (first staged in 1979; published in 2005) and John McGrath’s Little Red Hen (first staged in 1977; published in 2008), John Maclean (1879–1923) is a formidable figure in Scottish radical history, yet a neglected and overlooked one, as David Howell’s ground breaking study, A Lost Left: Three Studies in Socialism and Nationalism (1986), amply illustrates (the other two figures, also with Celtic connections, are Edinburgh-born James Connolly and Waterford-born John Wheatley). In Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem ‘Krassivy, Krassivy’, this Russian word, meaning both ‘beautiful’ and ‘red’, recalls MacDiarmid’s famous early lyric, ‘The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’: ‘Mars is braw in cramasie, / Venus in a green silk goun’ (MacDiarmid, 1978: 1, 604–5). The street in Saint Petersburg which bore John Maclean’s name as ‘Maklin Prospekt’ while that city was called Leningrad, has now gone back to its original name, ‘Angliyskiy Prospekt’ – ‘English Street’. According to Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘we have to look for [Connolly’s] immediate heirs not among the Irish republicans but with such figures as John Maclean of  Scotland’ (Edwards, 1979: 424). Many Irish and Scottish socialists had cross-cultural connections and cross-water connections. They included Willie Gallacher (1881–1965), born in the Irish ghetto of  Sneddon, Paisley in 1881, who played a key role in founding the Communist party of  Great Britain in 1920–21; and Ulster Scots Socialists like William Walker (1871–1918), the Belfast Protestant who challenged Connolly, and David ‘Davy’ Robb Campbell (1874/5–1934), the Belfast Protestant who supported Connolly. John Wheatley (1869–1930) is another key crossover figure. Born in Bonhamon, Co. Waterford, in 1869, his family moved to Bargeddie, near Glasgow, in 1876. Wheatley became a leading Scottish socialist, joining the Independent Labour Party in 1906, and founding the Catholic Socialist Society in the same year. The Dublin Lock-out of 1913 and the Glasgow Rent Strike of 1915 showed solidarity across the water (Smith, 1984: 37). Speaking in March 1918, Cathal O’Shannon claimed

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that: ‘Glasgow and Dublin are the two cities in these countries that lead the van in the militant army of  Labour, and from them, if  from nowhere else, we may expect a bold lead’ (Cited Young, 1990: 30). According to James Hunter: ‘Both Connolly and MacLean – the two most outstanding Marxist revolutionaries so far produced in these islands – were born to Gaelic-speaking parents. And they devoted no small part of  their considerable abilities to reconcile socialism with the nationalisms of  their respective countries’ (Hunter, 1975: 198). In the aftershock of  Easter 1916, and after a spell in prison for breaching the Defence of the Realm Act, Maclean moved closer to Connolly’s views. James D. Young has tracked the emergence of a new Irish–Scottish form of class struggle arising out of colonial conf lict: ‘An epoch-making event in Irish workers’ history, the Belfast dockers’ and carters’ strike of 1907 marked the beginning of  the Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin socialist triangle. It also saw the development of a firm and warm friendship between Maclean and Larkin’ (Young, 1990: 24). Maclean was closer to Larkin and Skef fington than Connolly. According to Young: ‘The role of  Forward in providing Maclean, Connolly and Larkin with space to expound their views testified to the developing links between the left of the Scottish and Irish workers’ movements’ (Young, 1990: 26). This Irish–Scottish nexus was at its most intense in the years leading up to Irish Independence/Partition: ‘In America, Larkin predicted that the Irish working class would resist “the draft”. In what was probably his first public identification with the agitation of  the Irish in Scotland for the complete independence of  Ireland, John Wheatley, together with Neil Maclean and Agnes Dollan, opposed the introduction of conscription. Though John Maclean did not come out of prison until December 1918, the Voice of  Labour reported on the growing militancy of  the Scottish and Irish workers’ (Young, 1990: 30). That ‘growing militancy’ was a cross-water dialogue: ‘From 1 May, 1919, Maclean was committed to the Irish cause as a part of a worldwide antiimperialist struggle. When he, John Wheatley, and Countess Markievicz spoke at the Glasgow May Day in the presence of 100,000 workers, Irish tricolours were openly carried among the crowd and the Soldiers’ Song was sung along with the Red Flag’ (Young, 1990: 31). Gavin Foster notes that when Maclean visited Dublin for the first time in July 1919, ‘he was

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exposed to the large British military build-up in Ireland and was forced to confront several of  his ideological blind spots on the “Irish Question” ’ (Foster, 2008: 34). In 1920, Maclean wrote one of  the most forceful pamphlets on the Irish situation of  the period, The Irish Tragedy: Scotland’s Disgrace (1920), to which the postscript read: ‘Since writing this pamphlet the Glasgow Herald in a leader on Tuesday, June 8, 1920, entitled The Army in Ireland, gloats over the fact that Scots regiments are pouring into Ireland and others are held in readiness. It seems the Scots are being used to crush the Irish. Let Labour ef fectively reply’ (Maclean, 1920). In his General Election Address of 1922, standing in the Gorbals, Maclean declared: ‘When Jim Connolly saw how things were going in Edinburgh he resolved on the Easter Rebellion in Dublin, the beginning of  Ireland’s new fight for freedom, a fight that can only end in an Irish workers’ republic based on communism’ (Maclean, 1922). Connolly had spoken in Glasgow on 15 October 1910, so he was certainly attuned to events there. Young confirms Maclean’s views on Connolly’s awareness of  Scottish developments in the run-up to Easter 1916: ‘Connolly was aware of what was happening on Red Clydeside. In the 20 November 1915 issue of  the Workers’ Republic, he attacked the suppression of  “Free Speech in Scotland” … At much the same time, he published an article entitled “Glasgow Gaels Will Fight” in which he reported on a meeting in the Sinn Fein Hall, London Street, Glasgow … In an article on “Scots Labour Men and Lloyd George”, Connolly published a report in the Workers’ Republic saying that the majority of  Clydeside workers at the famous meeting in Glasgow were anti-war’ (Young, 1990: 26–7). Connolly’s intimate knowledge of the Scottish scene was mirrored by the growing activism of other Irish–Scots increasingly exercised by events across the water.

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Scottish Writers in Praise of  Connolly and Maclean According to David Lloyd, one of a number of critics to revisit Connolly’s work in recent years: ‘There is no doubt that the concept of  “Celtic communism” lends itself potentially to an idealizing nationalism that seeks to trace in the past the contours of a benevolent and undegraded national spirit. But Connolly’s deployment of  the concept in Labour and Irish History, The Reconquest of  Ireland and elsewhere, though a consistent element of  his socialist project, is if anything precisely opposed to such idealizing’ (Lloyd, 2003: 351). The phrase ‘reconquest of  Ireland’ was given a Gaelic dimension in the words of  the modernist Irish-language novelist and IRA volunteer Máirtín Ó Cadhain, ‘Sí an Ghaeilge athghabháil na hÈireann agus is í athghabháil na hÉireann slánú na Gaeilge’ (‘The Irish language is the reconquest of  Ireland and the reconquest of  Ireland is saving the Irish language’). Ó Cadhain called for ‘Éire a bheas ní hé amháin Gaelach ach saor agus ní hé amháin saor agus Gaelach ach arb í Éire Shéamais Uí Chonaola í, Poblacht na n-Oibrithe’ (‘an Ireland that will not only be Gaelic but free and not only free and Gaelic but the Ireland of  James Connolly, the Workers’ Republic’). Several Scottish writers have certainly drawn inspiration from Connolly as an activist rather than an idealist. According to Chris Harvie, Hugh MacDiarmid ‘had several streams running through him, one of  them Ireland and the Easter Rising of 1916, where poets had apparently changed a nation’. Harvie points out that ‘to younger Scottish socialists like MacDiarmid, politicised by the war and the industrial struggles of  the “Red Clyde”, Connolly became a hero’ (Harvie, 1999: 14). Sorley MacLean was another great admirer. His lines on Connolly’s shirt in the National Museum of  Ireland – ‘Ard-Mhusaeum na h-Eireann’ (‘The National Museum of  Ireland’) – testify to his sense of  Connolly as a bridging figure between an Ireland and Scotland divided by England (Ní Annracháin, 1991: 45–6). In the short story collection, If  You Liked School, You’ll Love Work (2007), Irvine Welsh has a character say of a stirring speech that it was ‘Pure James Connolly or John McLean [sic]’, and he alludes to ‘Willie

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Gallagher [sic]’ and the ‘Soviet Socialist People’s Republic’ of  Fife (Welsh, 2007: 371–2). James Kelman is another Scottish writer who acknowledges Connolly and Maclean as relatively unsung Scottish socialists, pointing to the lost legacy of  the left nationalism of  the early twentieth century, a nationalism that was thoroughly internationalist in outlook: ‘Now it’s just assumed that if you are not parliamentarian, then you have no politics, and that’s a really extraordinary reaction to what started happening about a hundred years ago when the debate was much more sophisticated politically, and there was such a great divergence amongst socialists. It was probably valid to have a belief in self-determination, to have a position like James Connolly or John MacLean’ (Cited Toremans, 2003: 576–7). Elsewhere, Kelman speaks of  the way the Irish question dropped out of sight in Scottish political culture: ‘Part of  the extraordinary thing is the marginalisation of  Irish politics in relation to Scottish radical history. I would say that you cannot get an understanding of radical politics, probably throughout the UK, but certainly in Scotland, without understanding the significance of  Irish politics as well … James Connolly was actually an Edinburgh man, he’s Scottish. He didn’t go to Ireland until his early twenties’ (cited Harris, 2009: 23). Actor and film director Peter Mullan observed in a recent interview: ‘What stunned me when I was over in Ireland was how few people had a clue that he was Scottish and that the tricolour was down to him’ (Archibald, 2005: 11). Maclean has fared no better. In James Robertson’s magisterial political novel, And the Land Lay Still, Maclean is a figure who haunts the Scottish landscape but whose radical rhetoric appears out of place in a post-war culture of compromise and class collaboration: The Scots were the same as the English, just less civilised, more indecipherable. Their culture was non-existent if you discounted Burns Night, their politics a joke, parish-pump stuf f. Once maybe, when Glasgow was second city of  the Empire and Clydeside was Red, Scottish politics might have mattered. John Maclean: We are in the rapids of revolution. Not in 1963. By then the tanks in George Square were a fading legend. (Robertson, 2010: 269).

A lost left of  fading legends – that is how Connolly and Maclean are perceived in a period of somnolence and reaction.

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Red Clydeside, Green Clydeside The key to ‘Celtic Communism’ lies in a radical critique of colonialism developed by the likes of  Lenin, but also the ideas around primitive communism mapped out earlier by Engels. According to David Lloyd: we can begin to understand Connolly’s apparently paradoxical assertion … that, although the Irish were politically behind the English and Scottish, a separate Irish labour movement would allow for the ‘organization of  Irish workers on a more revolutionary basis than was usual in England and Scotland’ … Ireland’s relative backwardness becomes the means to a more revolutionary organization than is possible in the more advanced political culture of  Great Britain, precisely because it of fers the possibility of an alternative counter-culture. The pivotal element in this direction of  Connolly’s theory is also its most easily misconceived; that is, the concept of  Gaelic or Celtic communism … Deriving almost certainly from Friedrich Engels’ Origins of  the Family, Private Property and the State, Connolly’s conception of  the primitive communism of  the Gaelic clans, and of  Celtic society in general … is specifically seen as a moment in the historical development of early society. (Lloyd, 2003: 351)

The Irish Diaspora in the wake of  Famine was a key driver for political change and the force behind a new international radicalism, as Marx and Engels had recognised in their writings on Ireland. Likewise, Catherine Morris observes that: The huge numbers of  Irish emigrants living in countries all over the world represented for Connolly the international worker. For instance, he appealed directly to Edinburgh’s working classes through its large Irish population when he stood as the first Socialist candidate for the Scottish Socialist Federation in the municipal elections of  October 1894. His election address made clear the transnational dimensions of  his political ethic, refusing a separation that was based on national identity or interest: ‘The Irish worker who starves in an Irish cabin and the Scots worker who is poisoned in an Edinburgh garret are brothers with one hope and one destiny … The same Liberal Government which supplies police to Irish landlords to aid them in the work of exterminating their Irish peasantry, also imports police into Scotland to aid Scots mine owners in their work of starving the Scottish miners.’ (Morris, 2008: 103)

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Chris Harvie outlines the Irish–Scottish radical milieu from which sprang figures such as Hugh MacDiarmid, a seedbed of revolutionary thought: The phrase ‘Liberal-imperial’ would have captured the ethos of  Scots culture in 1914. But a war that saw Scots – Haig, Bonar Law, the Geddes brothers – in key positions slaughtered a disproportionate number of  their compatriots and distorted their industry: after 1920 ‘the workshop of  the world’ soon became ‘that distressed area’. ‘Organic’ cosmopolitanism was sidelined as the new literati turned to nationalism and science while industry crumbled. Responses varied from unionist collectivism to the intellectual nationalism of  the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ revived by the poet Christopher Grieve: alias ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’. He had several streams running through him, one of  them Ireland and the Easter Rising of 1916, where poets had apparently changed a nation. One of  the Rising’s executed leaders, the socialist trade unionist James Connolly, was born in Edinburgh and had been the Irish correspondent of  Forward, which was baf f led by his self-sacrifice; but to younger Scottish socialists like MacDiarmid, politicised by the war and the industrial struggles of  the ‘Red Clyde’, Connolly became a hero. An ethnic nation, of  the sort which proliferated after Versailles in 1919, was the new goal. (Harvie, 1999: 14)

Belfast poet John Hewitt (1907–87), author of  ‘The Bloody Brae’ (1936), about vexed relations between Scottish settlers and natives in the north of  Ireland, wrote poems in praise of  Connolly in his youth (Walsh 1999), and Scottish poets too found inspiration in Scottish socialist revolutionaries like Connolly and Maclean.

Hugh MacDiarmid: ‘John Maclean (1879–1923)’ John Maclean was a crucial figure in the political imagination of  the poet Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve). MacDiarmid founded the Voice of  Scotland (first issue dated June-August 1938), a quarterly magazine supporting ‘Scottish Republicanism and the Leninist line in regard to Scotland of  the late John Maclean, and the detailed analysis of  Scottish issues in the light of dialectical materialism’ (quoted in MacLean 2002: 198). As Alan Riach explains:

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‘This is not a Communist periodical’, the magazine’s first editorial began, ‘although the editor is a member of  the Communist Party. But it will be restricted to left-wing writers, and may be defined as left in tendency […] our principal aim is advocacy of  Independent Workers’ Republicanism à la John Maclean!’ (Riach, 2011: 43)

Recalling his father, MacDiarmid’s son Michael reminds us that ‘One of the founders of  the National Party of  Scotland (later to merge with the Scottish Party and become the Scottish National Party), he was expelled for his Communist sympathies, and later expelled from the Communist Party for being a Nationalist’ (MacDiarmid, 2004, xxiii). Often presented as evidence of  MacDiarmid’s eccentricity, of  his desire, in the words of  the intoxicated narrator of his famous long poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ to ‘aye be whaur / Extremes meet’ (MacDiarmid, 2004: 30), MacDiarmid’s failure to find a settled political home suggests the dif ferent path that Scottish political life might have taken had nationalism and socialism in Scotland not become so separate. The Scottish Labour Party, which preceded the Independent Labour Party before it too ef fectively merged with British Labour, was founded by Keir Hardie, and Cunninghame Grahame, future founder with MacDiarmid of  the National Party of  Scotland, on a proindependence platform. The meeting which formed the Scottish Labour Party, in Glasgow in May 1888, was chaired by John Murdoch (1818–1903), a Gaelic-speaking journalist and land-rights campaigner from Perthshire who had lived in Dublin in 1853. But these two paths diverged, a process cemented by the founding of  the Communist Party of  Great Britain and the failure to establish a separate Scottish organisation, leading to a polarisation in Scottish politics still evident today. MacDiarmid joined the Communist Party of  Great Britain in 1934, a year after his expulsion from the National Party of  Scotland – which merged with the Scottish Party to become the SNP later in the same year – and the beginning of  his geographical exile to Whalsay, in the Shetland Islands. For Scott Lyall By the mid to late 1930s MacDiarmid sought Scottish liberation through Celtic communism, a position personified for the poet by the Scottish revolutionary John Maclean, who in 1918 was appointed Scotland’s Bolshevik consul. (Lyall, 2011: 74)

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1934 also saw the publication of  Stony Limits and Other Poems, the death of  MacDiarmid’s mother and would be followed by the onset of a nervous breakdown the following year. MacDiarmid’s poem on Maclean, though written in 1934, had to wait until Stony Limits was republished in 1956 to be included alongside better-known items, such as the great philosophical poem of  MacDiarmid’s Shetlandic exile, ‘On a Raised Beach’. ‘John Maclean (1879–1923)’ praises Maclean’s courage in the face of  the imprisonment in 1918 that caused his health to deteriorate, hastening his death five years later: All the buildings in Glasgow are grey With cruelty and meanness of spirit, But once in a while one greyer than the rest     A song shall merit Since a miracle of  true courage is seen For a moment its walls in between. Look at it, you fools, with unseeing eyes And deny it with lying lips! But your craven bowels well know what it is     And hasten to eclipse In a cell, as black as the shut boards of  the Book You lie by, the light no coward can brook. It is not the blue of  heaven that colours The blue jowls of your thugs of police, And ‘justice’ may well do its filthy work      Behind walls as filthy as these And congratulate itself  blindly and never know The prisoner takes the light with him as he goes below. Stand close, stand close, and block out the light As long as you can, you ministers and lawyers, Hulking brutes of police, fat bourgeoisie, Sleek derma for congested guts – its fires Will leap through yet; already it is clear Of all Maclean’s foes not one was his peer.

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As Pilate and the Roman soldiers to Christ Were Law and Order to the finest Scot of  his day, One of  the few true men in our sordid breed, A f lash of sun in a country all prison-grey. Speak to the others of  Christian charity; I cry again For vengeance on the murderers of  John Maclean. Let the light of  truth in on the base pretence Of justice that sentenced him behind these grey walls. All law is the contemptible fraud he declared it. Like a lightning-bolt at last the workers’ wrath falls On such castles of cowards whether they be Uniformed in ermine, or blue, or khaki. Royal honours for murderers and fools! The ‘fount of  honour’ Is poisoned and spreads its corruption all through, But Scotland will think yet of  the broken body And unbreakable spirit, Maclean, of you, And know you were indeed the true tower of its strength, As your prison of its foul stupidity, at length. (Riach and Grieve, 1993: 161–2)

For Lyall, in this poem ‘MacLean is Christ-like. With its angry, direct, soapbox-prophet style of delivery, “John Maclean (1987–1923)” demonstrates how easily MacDiarmid’s declarative poetry can be confused with class propaganda’ (Lyall, 2011: 74). Yet there is little to confuse readers in this poem by MacDiarmid for whom the term ‘propaganda’ would not have carried the same pejorative ring it has for Lyall here. MacDiarmid’s intention to include this piece of agitprop alongside ‘On a Raised Beech’ in Stony Limits is in keeping with the catholicity of  his poetics in this period. In his attitude to Maclean, MacDiarmid comes close to the poignant praise of  Joyce and Yeats for an Irishman with a Scottish name, Charles Stewart Parnell (Maley, 2007). Despite its author’s willingness once again to be ‘whaur extremes meet’ in poetic as well as political terms, this poem, with its incitement to violence against the of ficials of  the British state, had to wait another twenty years, until the febrile atmosphere of  the 1930s had passed. In a recent essay on Louis MacNeice, John Kerrigan maps out the historical moment when Scottish writers engaged with Ireland as a source of  literary and political energy:

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WILLY MALEY AND NIALL O’GALLAGHER This appeal to Ireland is typical of  the Scottish Renaissance, especially for such participants as MacDiarmid and Compton Mackenzie who were active in nationalist politics. They saw in the Free State a template for Scottish independence, and in the role of poets in the Irish struggle an attractive model for themselves. Admiring James Connolly and John MacLean (‘Scots steel tempered wi’ Irish fire / Is the weapon I desire’), MacDiarmid hoped for the establishment of a string of  Celtic Soviet republics from Scotland to Brittany. Mackenzie, a nostalgic Jacobite, harked back to the old ways of  Irish and Scottish Gaeldom, and discussed, unsatisfactorily, an alliance with De Valera. In 1930 he and MacDiarmid attracted the attention of the Special Branch because of  their involvement in Clan Albainn, a shadowy organisation inspired by Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. (Kerrigan, 2011: 61)

Leaving aside the fact that from another perspective ‘Special Branch’ itself may be viewed as ‘a shadowy organisation’, Kerrigan’s scrupulously argued essay marks a new high-point in Irish–Scottish studies, sensitively teasing out the tangled strands of culture, history and politics. MacNeice emerges in Kerrigan’s capable hands as a major figure for anyone interested in the Irish–Scottish paradigm, and someone, as he suggests who should be read alongside – or against – MacDiarmid. Kerrigan’s allusion to ‘the old ways of  Irish and Scottish Gaeldom’ leads us neatly onto Sorley Maclean, another of  the Macs who liked to mix with the Micks.

Sorley MacLean and Gaelic Socialism The occlusion of  John Maclean, and his Edinburgh counterpart Connolly, from accounts of  Scottish political and literary history is not simply a result of political amnesia or selective memory. Specific acts of censorship and suppression, carried out with or without the collusion of  the authors under discussion meant that analysis of  Maclean in their work was, as in the case of  MacDiarmid’s ‘John Maclean (1987–1923)’ deferred until the dust had begun to settle on decades of agitation. A similar process of defusing through deferral can be seen in the work of  the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain, 1911–96). As for MacDiarmid, John Maclean

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was a crucial figure in Sorley MacLean’s poetic and political imagination. Christopher Whyte writes that Sorley MacLean ‘felt a personal connection with this working-class hero and martyr’ (MacLean, 2002: 161). In a letter to Douglas Young, dated 7 September 1941, MacLean wrote, ‘No Seceder minister showed the least trace of saint-like qualities, but I occasionally heard hints from two of my uncles that they had come into contact with a saint and a hero – John Maclean’ (MacLean, 2002: 142). He provided the link Sorley needed between the history of  Gaelic peasant resistance to the oppression of previous centuries and the proletarian radicalism of  his own time. John Maclean’s background – the descendent of  Gaelic-speaking crofters from the Isle of  Mull – made him a perfect candidate to fulfil this role in Sorley MacLean’s poetry. Their shared surname, more than merely a helpful coincidence, allowed the poet to propose a new kind of clan history: Chan e iadsan a bhàsaich an àrdan Inbhir-Chéitein dh’aindeoin gaisge is uabhair ceann uachdrach ar sgeula; ach esan bha ’n Glaschu, ursann-chatha nam feumach, Iain mór MacGill-Eain, Ceann is fèitheam ar sgeula. (‘Clann Ghill-Eain’, MacLean, 1999: 46) Not they who died in the hauteur of  Inverkeithing in spite of valour and pride the high head of our story; but he who was in Glasgow the battle-post of  the poor great John MacLean the top and hem of our story. (Trans. Sorley MacLean)

MacLean regards his namesake’s heroism here as superior to that displayed at the Battle of  Inverkeithing, fought between Scottish Covenanters and English parliamentarians on 20 July 1651. Writing again to Douglas Young on 30 March 1942, MacLean tells Young that he wrote the ‘two things on John Maclean’ in ‘November or December 1939’, while he was stationed in

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Hawick (MacLean, 2002: 139). Yet ‘Clann Ghill-Eain’ had to wait several decades before it eventually appeared in print. The other poem, ‘Do ’n bhreitheamh a thubhairt ri Iain Mac Ghill-Eathain gum b’ e gealtair a bh’ ann’ (‘To the judge who told John Maclean he was a coward’), appeared in MacLean’s 1943 volume ‘Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile’ among the ‘Other Poems’ that accompanied MacLean’s famous sequence of  love poetry: Chuala mi gàireachdaich nan reultan, lasganaich gealaich agus grèine, mothar a’ chruinne-cè ’s e ’g iathadh luine ’s farsaingeachd na bliadhna. Gàireachdaich, lasganaich is èisgeachd bho mhullaichean gorma anns na speuran, mothal gàire aig na bèistean a’ magadh ortsa, mo cho-chreutair. (MacLean, 2011: 162) I heard the laughter of  the stars, the pealing laughter of sun and moon, the muf f led laughter of  the universe encircling the bareness and expansiveness of  the year. Laughter, peals of  laughter, from blue summits in the skies, belly-laughter of  the brutes mocking you, my fellow creature. (Trans. Sorley MacLean)

Here, Sorley MacLean’s choice of  Gaelic may have provided the cover he needed to publish a poem in praise of  John Maclean’s anti-war stance at the height of  the Second World War. 1939 was also the date of  Sorley MacLean’s long political poem, ‘An Cuilithionn’ (‘The Cuillin’), dedicated to Hugh MacDiarmid and to the eighteenth-century Gaelic poet Alasdair MacDonald (Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair). Like MacDiarmid’s poem on John Maclean, ‘An Cuilithionn’ had to wait many years before its eventual publication, in redacted form, between 1987 and 1989. The poem has only recently – in 2011 – appeared in its full original form. In his introduction to the poem in his collected volume O Choille gu Bearradh / From Wood to Ridge, MacLean tells us that When I was invalided out of  the army in 1943 there was talk of publishing it, but W. D. MacColl’s objections to almost every line of my own translations of it delayed that until the behaviour of  the Russian Government to the Polish insurrection in 1944 made me politically as well as aesthetically disgusted with most of it. I reprint here what I think tolerable of it. (MacLean, 1999: 63)

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MacLean’s most polemical and politically radical poem was absent from the Scottish scene from its initial composition on the eve of  the Second World War until the final Chapman instalment was published in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. This absence contributed to the silence about crucial elements of  Scotland’s radical history and, in particular, to those elements that connected Scottish left-wing radicalism with revolution in Ireland. References to both James Connolly and John Maclean feature heavily throughout ‘An Cuilithionn’ ’S ged sgaoilteadh guth eile an ceathach, Lenin, Marx no MacGill-Eain, Thaelmann, Dimitrov, MacMhuirich, Mao Tse Tung no a chuideachd, bhàthadh an caithream diabhlaidh guth nan saoi is glaodh nam piantan. ’S ged bhiodh neart is misneachd Stàilin agamsa ri uchd na h-àmhghair, chlaoidhteadh le sgread na fuaim mi ’s an Cuilithionn mòr a’ dol ’na thuaineal. (MacLean, 2002: 45) And though another voice split the fog, Lenin, Marx, Maclean, Thaelman, Dimitrov, MacPherson, Mao Tse Tung and his men, the devilish revelry would drown the voice of  the wise and cry of  the tortured. And though in the face of distress I had the strength and courage of  Stalin, the screeching noise would oppress me while the great Cuillin reeled dizzily. (Trans. Sorley MacLean)

When ‘An Cuilithionn’ was finally published in instalments in Chapman, MacLean removed the couplet in praise of  Stalin. While in 1939, MacLean felt able to mention the Soviet dictator in the same breath as his Red Clydeside hero, by the time the poem came to be published half a century later, this no longer seemed palatable. As Scotland debates its political future, a fuller understanding of  Scotland’s recent political history becomes all the more essential. The

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contribution of  Scotland’s writers to that history is crucial to any such understanding. For John Maclean, Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean, literary and political activism went hand in hand. As socialists convinced of  the need for Scottish independence, all three looked to the emancipation struggles in Ireland for inspiration and solidarity. The subsequent occlusion of  this Irish inf luence from Scotland’s twentieth-century history and literature has led to blind-spots in our understanding of  how political thought developed in twentieth-century Scotland, and how Scottish writers contributed and were inf luenced by that development. Far from being an exceptional case in the history of  Britain’s imperial decline, each of  the three figures considered here viewed the national and socialist movements in Scotland as part of an international struggle for worker’s emancipation and national self-determination. For contemporary nationalists and socialists, and for students of  Scottish, Irish and postcolonial literatures, making the Celtic connection is essential for a proper understanding of our recent past, and an informed debate about the future.

References Anderson, Freddy (2005), Krassivy: A Play About the Great Socialist John Maclean, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow. Archibald, David (2005), ‘ “… Knocking on the Door of  Moronville …”: In Conversation with Peter Mullan’, Drouth 18: Class, pp. 9–11. Connolly, James and Walker, William (2003), ‘The Connolly Walker Controversy: On Socialist Unity in Ireland (1911)’, Cork Workers Club, Cork (first published in Forward between 27 May and 8 July 1911). Dudley Edwards, Owen (1979), ‘Connolly and Irish Tradition’, The Furrow 30, 7, pp. 411–24. Dudley Edwards, Owen and Ransom, Bernard (eds) (1974), James Connolly: Selected Political Writings, Grove Press, New York (first published 1973). Duncan, Ian (2007), ‘ “Upon the thistle they’re impaled”: Hugh MacDiarmid’s Modernist Nationalism,’ in Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 246–66.

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Foster, Gavin (2008), ‘ “Scotsmen, Stand by Ireland”: John Maclean and the Irish Revolution’, History Ireland 16, 1, pp. 32–7. Foster, John (1990), ‘Strike Action and Working-Class Politics on Clydeside 1914–1919’, International Review of  Social History 35, pp. 33–70. Girod, Gary (2011), ‘ “ We Were Carrying On a Strike When We Ought to Have Been Making a Revolution”: The Rise of  Marxist Leaders in Glasgow During WWI and the Illusion of a Communist Workers’ Republic in Scotland’, Voces Novae: Chapman University Historical Review 2, 2, pp. 97–118. Harris, Roxy (2009), ‘An Interview with James Kelman’, Wasafiri 24, 2, pp. 21–6. Harvie, Christopher (1999), ‘Ballads of a Nation’, History Today 49, 9, pp. 10–16. Howell, David (1986), A Lost Left: Three Studies in Socialism and Nationalism, University of  Chicago Press, Chicago. Hunter, James (1975), ‘The Gaelic Connection: The Highlands, Ireland and Nationalism, 1873–1922’, The Scottish Historical Review 54, 158, pp. 178–204. Kerrigan, John (2011), ‘Louis MacNeice Among the Islands’, in Mackay, Peter, Longley, Edna and Brearton, Fran (eds) (2011), Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 58–86. Knox, W. W. (1988), ‘Religion and the Scottish Labour Movement, c. 1900–39’, Journal of  Contemporary History 23, 4, pp. 609–30. Lloyd, David (2003), ‘Rethinking National Marxism: James Connolly and “Celtic Communism” ’, Interventions 5, 3, pp. 345–70. Lloyd, David (2005), ‘The Subaltern in Motion: Subalternity, the Popular and Irish Working Class History’, Postcolonial Studies 8, 4, pp. 421–37. Lloyd, David (2008), ‘Why Read Connolly?’, Interventions 10, 1, pp. 116–23. Lyall, Scott (2011), ‘MacDiarmid, Communism and the Poetry of  Commitment’, in Lyall, Scott and Palmer McCulloch, Margery (eds) (2011), The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 68–81. MacDiarmid, Hugh (1978), Complete Poems 1920–1976, ed. by Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken, Martin Brian & O’Keefe, London. MacDiarmid, Hugh (2004), Selected Poetry, ed. by Alan Riach and Michael Grieve, Carcanet, Manchester. MacLean, John (1920), The Irish Tragedy: Scotland’s Disgrace, , accessed 12 September 2011. Maclean, John (1922), General Election Address, November 1922, , accessed 10 November 2010. MacLean, Sorley (Somhairle MacGill-Eain) (1999), O Choille gu Bearradh / From Wood to Ridge: Collected Poems in Gaelic and in English translation, Carcanet and Birlinn, Manchester and Edinburgh.

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MacLean, Sorley (Somhairle MacGill-Eain) (2002), Dàin do Eimhir / Poems to Eimhir, ed. by Christopher Whyte, Association of  Scottish Literary Studies, Glasgow. MacLean, Sorley (Somhairle MacGill-Eain) (2011), An Cuilithionn 1939 / The Cuillin 1939 & Unpublished Poems, ed. by Christopher Whyte, Association of  Scottish Literary Studies, Glasgow. McDonnell, Hector (2004), ‘MacDonnell, Sorley Boy (b. in or before 1508, d. 1590)’, Oxford Dictionary of  National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford. , accessed 16 July 2011. McGrath, John (2008), Little Red Hen, Fairplay Press/Capercaillie Books, Edinburgh (first published 1977 by Pluto Press, London). Maley, Willy (2007), ‘Better Dead, Then Read: Joyce, Yeats, and the Tolling of  Parnell’s Death Knell’, in Strachan, John and O’Malley-Younger, Alison (eds), Essays on Modern Irish Literature, University of  Sunderland Press, Sunderland, pp. 1–10. Maley, Willy (2010–11), ‘James Connolly, Colonialism, and “Celtic Communism” ’, Perspectives (Magazine of  Scotland’s Democratic Left) 28, pp. 15–18. Morris, Catherine (2008), ‘A Contested Life: James Connolly in the Twenty-First Century’, Interventions 10, 1, pp. 102–15. Ní Annracháin, Máire (1991), ‘The Highland Connection: Scottish Reverberations in Irish Literary Identity’, Irish University Review 21, 1, pp. 35–47. O’Gallagher, Niall (2005), ‘Alasdair and Ulster: Fumbling with Gray behind the Partition’‚ in O’Malley-Younger, Alison and Beardow, Frank (eds), Representing Ireland: Past Present and Future, University of  Sunderland Press, Sunderland, pp. 119–32. Patterson, Henry (2004), ‘Walker, William (1871–1918)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford. , accessed 7 November 2010. Patterson, Iain D. (1993), ‘The Activities of  Irish Republican Physical Force Organisations in Scotland, 1919–21’, The Scottish Historical Review 72, 193, pp. 39–59. Pitt, Robert (1995, revised 1996), ‘John Maclean and the CPGB’, , accessed 19 July 2011. Reid, Alastair J. (2004), ‘Red Clydesiders (act. 1915–1924)’, Oxford Dictionary of  National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford. , accessed 19 March 2009. Riach, Alan and Grieve, Michael (eds) (1993), Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Poetry, with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, New York. Robertson, James (2010), And the Land Lay Still, Hamish Hamilton, London. Smith, Joan (1984), ‘Labour Tradition in Glasgow and Liverpool’, History Workshop Journal 17, 1, pp. 32–56.

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Toremans, Tom (2003), ‘An Interview with Alasdair Gray and James Kelman’, Contemporary Literature 44, 4, pp. 564–86. Walker, W. M. (1972), ‘Irish Immigrants in Scotland: Their Priests, Politics and Parochial Life’, The Historical Journal 15, 4, pp. 649–67. Walsh, Patrick (1999), ‘ “ Too Much Alone”: John Hewitt, Regionalism, Socialism, and Partition’, Irish University Review 29, 2, pp. 341–57. Walsh, Maurice (2010), ‘A Very Modern Rising’, History Workshop Journal 70, 1, pp. 274–9. Welsh, Irvine (2007), If  You Liked School, You’ll Love Work, Jonathan Cape, London. Wood, Ian S. (2006), ‘Review: Ulster and Scotland’, Scottish Af fairs 54, pp. 121–4. Wood, Ian S. (2004), ‘Wheatley, John (1869–1930)’, Oxford Dictionary of  National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford. , accessed 11 November 2010. Young, James D. (1983), ‘Marxism and the Scottish National Question’, Journal of  Contemporary History 18, 1, pp. 141–63. Young, James D. (1985), ‘Nationalism, “Marxism” and Scottish History’, Journal of  Contemporary History 20, 2, Working-Class and Left-Wing Politics, pp. 337–55. Young, James D. (1990), ‘John Maclean, Socialism and the Easter Rising’, Saothar 16, pp. 23–33. Young, James D. (1993), ‘A Very English Socialism and the Celtic Fringe 1880–1991’, History Workshop Journal 35, pp. 136–42.

DEIRDRE O’BYRNE

‘My ways are my own’: Female, Family and Farm in Hanna Bell’s December Bride

Sam Hanna Bell’s 1951 novel December Bride is set in a rural Presbyterian community in the North of  Ireland in the early twentieth century. The narrative centres on the life of  transgressive Sarah Gomartin, who comes with her mother Martha to live with farmer Andrew Echlin and his two sons, Hamilton and Frank. After their father’s death, she forms sexual liaisons with both men, and bears two children out of wedlock. The plot is drawn from Bell’s family background, so that the novel functions as a fictional imagining of  his ancestors, as well as a parable of  the autodidactic Bell’s own progressive path. It cannot escape our notice as readers that the composite surname Hanna Bell has a feminine ring to it, and while I am not for a moment questioning either the writer’s gender or sexuality, I am concerned here with exploring his adoption/adaption of a female protagonist in December Bride, his first novel and his most famous work. I will discuss the writer’s representation of  the links between female, farm and family in the text, concentrating specifically on the characterisation of  Sarah. The most remarkable passages are the ones in which the writer ventriloquises this young woman, and her direct speech often functions as a personal manifesto, a particularly female, and demonstrably feminist, Declaration of  Independence. The narrative is, for the most part, focalised through her, with some digressions which I aim to demonstrate are the author’s own disruptive and occasionally self-contradictory voice. Bell asserted that he modelled December Bride on ‘the pattern of rural life that had existed for three hundred years […] that remote and idyllic past’ (McMahon, 1999: 8), and critics agree that this is a novel firmly rooted in rural, Northern-Irish–Scots culture. James Simmons’s prefatory comment in the Blackstaf f 1974 edition concurs: ‘it goes to the heart of  the Ulster

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experience, the look and the feel of  the place, and the nature of  the people’. However, as Gillian McIntosh af firms, it is ‘more than a pastoral portrait of rural Ulster’ (1999: 196), in that it interrogates as much as it ref lects that culture. McIntosh, Caroline Magennis (2010) and others convincingly demonstrate that the Unionist Loyalist tradition in the North of  Ireland is primarily self-defined as masculine and manly, in binary opposition to a feminised, childlike representation of  the Nationalist tradition. It is interesting therefore, that the most active agent in Bell’s book is the young woman Sarah Gomartin, who demonstrates and even embodies the ‘vigour, enterprise, dogged determination and much individuality’ that John Blake attributes to Presbyterian-Scot settlers (McIntosh, 1999: 157). As well as being the most active in a physical sense, Sarah is the most vocal and outspoken character, and her dialogue conserves dialect. December Bride is liberally sprinkled with Ulster-Scots terminology, drawing on the writer’s own cultural heritage. As befits the work of a person integral to the development of radio broadcasting in Ulster (McMahon, 1999: 192), this novel showcases the unique voice of  the region. Bell was born in Glasgow in 1909 of a Scottish father and Ulster-Scots mother (McMahon, 1999: 4), and when his father died in 1918, the boy was brought back to the grandparental home farm on the Ards peninsula in County Down. This period was formative, and later referred to by the author as a ‘terribly impressionable three or four years’ (McIntosh, 1999: 196). In most critical assessments of  this novel, it is Bell’s maternal grandparents’ rural way of  life that is seen as the most significant inf luence on the novel set on their native peninsula. However, there are other remarkable parallels between Sam Bell’s childhood and the life he creates for Sarah Gomartin. His independent-minded widowed mother Jane resented being once more reliant on her father, and moved to Belfast to take in ‘sewing and lodgers’ (McMahon, 1999: 7). One can see echoes of  this independent-minded womanhood in the novel: the self-reliant path carved by widowed Jane Bell and son are analogous to the economically-dictated removal of  Martha Gomartin and daughter from the cottage at Banyil to the farm at Rathard. The redoubtable Sarah follows a path of self-improvement also trodden by her author, as it was by his father, albeit in the men’s case, in intellectual and cultural rather than agricultural fields. Moreover, sewing skills are highlighted in December

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Bride; Frank Echlin lusts after Sarah as she sits ‘f lowering’ (Bell, 1974: 23), an Ulster-Scots dialect term for embroidering which carries within it an image of  the seamstress’s blossoming sexuality. Indeed the novel itself is a work of art which employs a craftsman’s skill in its weaving together of  the common threads of country life and Protestant work-ethic, thus constituting a tapestry of  the Ulster-Scots rural scene. Naomi Doak points out that ‘In the context of  Ulster, where religious divisions were deeply politicised, the audience for novels exploring alternative perspectives on female subjectivity seems to have been limited’ (Doak, 2008: 130). Doak is writing about female authors, but Bell’s December Bride valiantly champions female subjectivity, and interestingly, Doak goes on to discuss Bell’s role in fostering the writer Olga Fielden in his 1950s radio work. This novel can be seen as an attempt to imaginatively address women’s role in a farming community which sometimes sought to silence them, or to take their labour for granted. As I have discussed elsewhere (O’Byrne, 1992), women’s contribution to the farm economy was much overlooked, especially in the lifetime of  Sam Hanna Bell, but in this novel the author shows a real understanding of  the crucial part females play in farming. When Margaret Echlin dies, ‘only then did her husband Andrew realise what part she had filled in Rathard. It was as if  the whole framework of  the farm’s daily life had been withdrawn’ (Bell, 1974: 17). Significantly, at first it takes two women to replace her, though Sarah eventually becomes the sole woman of  the house. From the outset, as befits her migratory and fatherless status, Sarah is shown, like her mother, to be chief ly interested in finding a stable place in the world. Martha Gomartin, however, takes a more passive role than her daughter in carving out a niche at Ravara. With a defiant ‘quick upward lift of  her head’, she tells the recently widowed Andrew Gomartin that a ‘widow’s seat is aye a lonely seat’ (20), but as the text reveals, Sarah’s father has disappeared and his death, though rumoured, is not certain (50). Martha is claiming the respectable mantle of widowhood rather than the potentially-shameful status of abandoned wife, but that is as close as she gets to promoting herself, and it is actually her daughter who subsequently develops a personal relationship with farmer Echlin, to the mother’s discomfiture, and arguably, jealousy. The narrator tells us that Sarah was ‘impelled by a

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trait in herself, not uncommon in those who have tasted poverty, which made her prefer the father to the son, the master rather than the steward’ (22). Yet, Martha her mother, similarly poor, demonstrates no such preference, and ‘always felt uneasy when her daughter asked favours [of  Andrew] in such a self-assured way’ (25). Like her biblical namesake, Bell’s Martha is forced to concede status to the woman who more directly engages the master’s attention. As a young woman, urged by her scandalised mother to leave the now parentless brothers’ house, Sarah makes a speech that is a manifesto for her future: ‘always (here she mimicked her mother cruelly) it’s “be humble, Sarah, God will reward ye”. Well, I’m tired o’ it. My ways are my own’ (50). It’s a declaration of independence, defying and separating herself  from a mother whom she accuses of  ‘talking o’ me as if  I was a helpless wean’. Much of  the novel centres on Sarah’s hunger – lust, even – for the land, and reveals her ambition to better herself in the liaison with the brothers. She and her mother ‘had come as servants and labourers to Rathard, and now she at least, had attained the position of mistress in the Echlin household. It was not avarice, but the fear of returning to a life of drudgery that filled her with hatred’ (64). Having declared autonomy from mother and mother-church, Sarah will not accept rule by a lover either. Once embroiled in a sexual relationship with Frank, she feels ‘a great need to retract and be free’. However, she is shown to be yearning, not for some wild untrammelled liberty, but for freedom from financial instability: ‘She wanted to find her feet again’ (77). Status and stability are important to her; we read that she has a ‘hatred of subordination and its drudgery’ (65–6). Just as she cultivates a closeness with Andrew Echlin when he is master, after his death she is shown to judge the two men in the household in terms of  hierarchy, attempting to ‘weigh her chances for her own future advantage […]. She retracted and drew away from Frank a little, watching Hamilton all the time’ (78). When she eventually begins a relationship with the older brother, it’s on a day when he drives her to Belfast. She sits on his cart and thinks it is ‘pleasant […] to sit up here beside Hamilton, a strong farmer going to market’ (86). The lexis – up, strong – signals the possibility that Sarah can raise and fortify herself  by association with Hamilton. They have

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sex in the back of  the same cart on the way home, thus beginning their relationship, which eventually outlasts Sarah’s af fair with the younger brother. Akin to the Scottish settlers before her, once Sarah finds a foothold in fertile farmland, she doggedly refuses to leave. She ensures the continuation of  her line, and displaces Catholic neighbours, the Dineens, when she persuades her menfolk to buy the property containing their rented cottage. She could arguably be seen as a coloniser, though she is far from the stereotypical Irish concept of  the landlord’s consort. Sarah’s attachment to her adopted place is shown to be both instinctive and proprietorial: ‘When Sarah went out in those grey unwakened mornings, scratching herself and yawning, there was nothing she loved better than to isolate those fields, trees, loanens and roofs that had passed into the hands of  her and her men’ (238). The woman here is portrayed as analogous to a newly-risen animal in her corporeal scratching and yawning, but it is significant that in her territorial gloating, the textual order places her before the male legal landowners. The narrative also places her consideration of  their joint property in an order worth noting: (1) cultivated land (fields); (2) natural growth (trees); (3) loanens (man-made access routes to one’s territory which in rural tradition would often follow the paths first created by animal hooves); and (4) last of all, human habitation (roofs). Sarah’s bond with the earth is thus shown to be primarily primordial, surpassing the mere requirement of shelter over her head. There is a significant theme of nature versus culture (that is, conventional religious, Presbyterian culture) in the text. The minister Sorleyson visits Sarah after the birth of  her first child, attempting to persuade her to marry one of  the two Echlin brothers. On his way home, he thinks about ‘Sarah with the child in her arms. She had seemed so natural, so essentially right. How futile it was to appeal to a woman like that for convention’s sake! […] He envied them. These people had grasped what he had always secretly longed for’ (138). Minister Sorleyson’s own marriage is portrayed as ‘tepid’. He admits to himself  that ‘His insistence that [Sarah] should marry one of  the men was only a nod to the world’ (147). The narrative juxtaposes, in his train of  thought, ‘the world’ of people’s conventions against the natural world: ‘He had come to the conclusion that Nature, with her continual and invariably indiscreet fertility, was a bad example to simple folk’ (144).

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The ‘natural’ and unconventional Sarah is thus placed in opposition to the pious world of  Sorleyson’s church. If we follow Kristevan theory, we might assume that this space between nature and culture is a liberating one for women. However, nature versus culture can never be a clear-cut distinction for people who live by agriculture. By definition, farming is an integration of nature and culture. Sarah Gomartin is allied to both tamed and untamed features in the physical description of  her body. In the opening scene of  the novel she is described as having a ‘furrow[ed]’ face, ‘mouse-coloured hair’ (12), and a ‘knuckle hard and dented as a chestnut’ (10), in a lexicon drawn from a cultivated and uncultivated world. As the novel develops, Bell continues this practice of using images of nature and agriculture to describe people who inhabit the land, and vice versa. Occasionally, he describes landscape in human terms: we read that ‘rain and winds [… ] had beaten the corn until it lay tangled like the hair of a sleeping man’ (21–2), and ‘furrows gleamed [… ] like fresh-combed hair’ (79). So, throughout the text, we are alerted to the bond between people and place, and the potential for control and chaos in both. Nature, and perhaps by analogy, Sarah, can be harnessed but never fully tamed. When the brothers first meet her, the younger brother Frank ponders on her honey-coloured hair (20), but the story of  him attempting to control a swarm of  bees and failing (120) presages his inability to manage Sarah. Bell is no kinder to the minister in this scene than he is to the layman. ‘The reverend gentleman was f lapping his hand aimlessly round his head’ in a classic Freudian enactment of emasculation, while interrogating the equally inef fectual Frank: ‘Did you get the queen?’, whereupon ‘Frank shrugged his shoulders and turned away’. We are forewarned that neither f lapper nor shrugger will tame Queen Bee Sarah. In a similarly Freudian and apian vein, we read Sorleyson’s comment to Sarah: ‘I see you’re having trouble with your honey-makers’. She regally denies knowledge of any dissent among her drones: ‘It’s Frank that’s having the trouble – I know nothing about them’ (120). The shattering of moral codes by this woman is signalled by her dropping, and occasionally breaking, of vessels symbolising domesticity. On Frank’s first physical approach, ‘Her elbow knocked over the f lour-mug which starred out with a little explosion on the f loor’ (47). The action

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carries a forewarning which Frank does not heed: that mischievous limb will eventually elbow him out of  the way in favour of  the older brother, and he would do well to be wary of  the explosive and stellar quality of  the woman he desires. As in the scene of  the bees, Bell’s writing is metaphorically powerful. When Sarah first has sex with Hamilton, the lustre jug, which she bought in Belfast as a present for her mother, ‘shattered into fragments’ (101). When she first realises she is pregnant, not knowing which brother is the father, ‘A plate slipped from her fingers and shattered on the f loor’ (115). Given Sarah’s natural dexterity as a worker, these mishaps alert the reader to her ability to break conventions as easily as crockery. However, the narrative resists the reading of  Sarah as a woman who is wild and driven mainly by animal desires. We are shown minister Sorleyson’s mental assessment of  the new mother ‘crooning over her child’ (134) as ‘natural’ and ‘essentially right’ (138), but Frank, one of  the two possible fathers for her baby, undercuts this on his entrance by commenting that the scene is like ‘a picture of f a grocer’s calendar’ (135). His sardonic remark highlights Sarah’s commercial acumen, as well as the clichéd nature of  the minister’s male gaze in assessing the maternal scene before his eyes. Pastor of a church which, like all Christian churches, valorises a motherhood which embodies ‘virtue’ (134), and trapped in a marriage of  ‘half-fulfilment’ (147) with a ‘gentle and attentive’ (145) woman, Sorleyson is shown to be prey to his own fantasy of  the archetypally assertive, fertile female. Regarding Sarah and her infant, the narrative has him question himself: ‘Was this not the very thing that he himself  had pictured in his most secret thoughts?’, and when she signals to him that he should leave so that she can breastfeed the child, he feels ‘that in some way he was being cheated’ (134). It’s a doublebarrelled image: he is denied the fulfilment of  his fantasy of observing her nursing her child, and concurrently displaced by the child in his own desire for Sarah’s breast, which in a later scene, he touches (148). Frank’s ironic comment about the grocer’s calendar, coming from the practical farmer whom Sarah lives with, rather than the would-be intellectual minister who is sexually attracted to her, strikes a truer note. Sarah is not romantic; she is pragmatic. She acts not just from instinct, nor from conventions of a culture imbued with stereotypical myths of virtuous motherhood, but from reason, driven by economic considerations.

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The characterisation of  Hamilton, the man she finally chooses as her legal partner (but only after Frank’s death), firmly identifies him with the farm: ‘Slow and powerful as the animals he worked among. Hamilton set his life by the sun and seasons and moved as irresistibly […]. He grew out of  the soil and a man and a bush and a beast kept their appointed places in his world’ (103). Sarah wins him by demonstrating that she has a valuable role to play in this world. In Belfast, he finds he no longer needs to write a shopping-list as Sarah knows what is needed, and he acknowledges: ‘I couldna have carried a better list to market’ (87–8). She makes herself indispensible, and therein lies her strength. It’s not a case of  trading sexual favours for protection; Sarah is shown to be a fully-functioning member of  the farm, in house, yard and field. We see her grinding corn, bringing food to men in the fields, and working hard even as she is ready to give birth. She begins her first labour while active in the hayfield, working to the last moment despite being ‘in a blindness of pain’ (129), and moments after giving birth she orders midwife Agnes to ‘Chase the hens from the garden’ (130). The author depicts the younger Sarah as enamoured of  the farm as much as the farm-owners: ‘Slowly, like a late spring in her life, her desires were budding to fulfilment. A hearth, a home to preside over, the daily life of cattle and fowl in her hands, the desires of  her own body’ (86), a list which puts material comfort before sexual desire. I began this article by saying that an occasional authorial intrusion jars on the narrative; while depicting Sarah as an archetypal Earth Mother while she is still fertile, Bell’s representation of  her in early middle-age betrays ageist and sexist preconceptions: ‘When a woman is forty and the faint colour that time has left on her face and bones is burned into her body like enamel, what does it matter if a man is clumsy and uncouth when they were alone?’ (239). Apparently unable to imagine female sexual desire outlasting a woman’s youth, Bell depicts her first as honey-haired siren, then magnificent matriarch, and finally, a female Bull McCabe (Keane, 1991), regarding her grassland as a miser might his gold. The older Sarah apparently lusts only after the land, as opposed to the lovers that have ‘passed into [her] hands’ (238), and Frank, we are told, tires of  her ‘love in which there was neither passion nor endearment’ (179). Sarah is represented as scrupulous in her management of  her af fairs, commercial as well as sexual.

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Her neighbours say of  her: ‘Fair’s fair. She’ll never take a penny too much, or give ye a penny less’ (164). She is similarly even-handed in her dealings with the two brothers: ‘She never wavered in her calm attention to the men, never setting one above the other’ (111). She retorts to Sorleyson’s urgings to marry one of  them as follows: ‘it would only be putting a scab on a sore. What right have I to give myself and the child to one man over the other?’ (146). ‘To marry one of  the men’, in her estimation, would be ‘To bend and contrive things so that all would be smooth from the outside, like the way a lazy workman finishes a creel’ (135). Despite her renunciation of organised religion, Sarah knows her bible: her outburst places Sorleyson in the camp of  the pharisaical ‘whited sepulchres’ denounced by Jesus. McIntosh writes that ‘it would be tempting to see Sarah’s beration of  the minister as an articulation of  Bell’s own philosophy’ (1999: 197). However, I propose that Sam Hanna Bell cannot quite accept the behaviour of  the woman he has created, despite putting forward a perfectly reasonable, and often honourable, explanation for her actions. As her neighbour Agnes Sampson puts it, ‘It’s wonderful what happens tae black-clocks when they get intae long grass’ (Bell, 1974: 55), a comment which paradoxically admires and derides Sarah’s social climbing. Bell’s narrative betrays a similarly mixed reaction to the character he creates. For instance, some passages of  the novel betray a suspicion that a female f louting sexual mores must carry some sense of shame and guilt for defying both kin and kirk. Earlier, I discussed a list of  Sarah’s wish-fulfilment: her acquisition of  hearth, home, cattle, fowl, and sexual partnership. The narrative undermines her triumphalism immediately afterwards, by telling us that ‘she winced and turned away again from that impalpable shadow that hung in the depths of  her mind’ (86). According to Bell’s biographer, Sean McMahon, ‘The persistent enigma […] is how to interpret Sarah’s character: is she instinctively manipulative or an independent woman born out of her time?’ (1999: 72). In my opinion, this confusion in the reader’s analysis stems from her creator’s ambivalence. Like Tolstoy in Anne Karenina, Bell fashions a woman of powerful desires, then, in a Freudian panic over the femme fatale who threatens to take over his fictional universe, contrives to mould her into more manageable proportions. While she does not, like Anna, end up under a train, Sarah’s trains of  thought cause her much agony.

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When she realises she is pregnant, the narrative tells us, she lies awake at night worrying, while ‘all the possible and impossible consequences of  her guilt that a heated brain could imagine were drawn to her pillow’ (Bell, 1974: 115). It’s certainly credible that a woman in her situation, who is after all still a servant impregnated by her employer, might be worried about her future, but I question Bell’s use of  the word ‘guilt’, which betrays a moral judgement more allied to the novel’s characterisation of  the minister than the defiant woman who tells her mother: ‘There’s nothing wrong wi’ my ways o’ going […]. Ye can go to your church if ye will, but you’re no taking me!’ (64). In chapter 20, we’re told that: ‘In teaching little Andrew to say his prayers, Sarah revealed one of  those inconsistencies in her behaviour which, when considered sympathetically, showed plainly that her estrangement from her church was not one of conviction, but of  fear and shame’ (219; my emphasis). The phrase ‘when considered sympathetically’ carries within it its binary opposite, the notion that this woman is leaving herself open to unsympathetic readings. The supposition that she feels ‘fear and shame’ about her ‘estrangement from her church’ suggests to me that it’s her creator, Sam Hanna Bell, that’s suf fering from some ‘inconsistencies’. After all, a more rational explanation for her teaching the child prayers would be so that he could fit in easily when he goes to school, an attitude congruent with Sarah’s subsequent marriage to Hamilton for the sake of  her daughter’s status in the community, even when it means compromising her own dearly-held principles. The narrative shows a society that is not of one mind in its assessment of  Sarah: the women, those shapers of opinion and prejudice, would hear nothing in Sarah’s favour, and the men for peace’s sake, agreed that she was a shameless bisom and worth the watching. Yet, among themselves, as they gathered at the crossroads, there could be detected a tickled humour at the idea of  this matriarchal household set up among them, and one man expressed the opinion that if  there was any truth in the old saying that ‘a man maun ask his wife’s leave to thrive’ then the Echlins would do rightly with Martha Gomartin’s girl. (164–5)

The author shows himself of a similarly divided mind. His text veers between a characterisation of  Sarah as a practical woman who has turned her back on craven obedience to religious or social convention, and portraying her

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as a meeker and more morally-compromised person carrying a burden of shame and guilt. There is mileage in the argument that a character, even in a rigorously realist novel such as this, may be complex and contradictory, but my assessment is that the contradiction exists in the creator’s own mind. Sarah looks askance at Frank’s return to church attendance, deeming it ‘odd’ (246), and does not agree with Hami’s assessment of it as a potential source of comfort (247). Bell shows that the decision whether or not to marry is all hers, for when Sorleyson asks Hamilton ‘Will you not marry her?’ (136), he answers: ‘I’d marry her f lying. But she won’t have me’ (137). Sarah seems about to change her mind when she suspects that Frank is interested in another woman, as ‘she knew that it would be impossible to live with another woman – a married woman – in Rathard’. She decides to ‘ask Hamilton … to marry her’, having ‘no doubt about how that request would be received’ (219). She doesn’t go through with it, however, when Frank’s plans are forcibly terminated. Once her place is no longer threatened, Sarah sees no reason to wed. How do we account for the apparent authorial confusion over his own creation? It may be because Sarah is based on a real-life figure, and however fully he imagines her, the writer cannot quite conceive of such a transgressive female. The author admits that he ‘fell about with laughter’ when he heard the story first of a servant girl who forms a liaison with two brothers, and that when he tried to write it as a short story, it ‘ran all over the edges’ (McMahon, 1999: 82). This account of  his reception of  the original story is revealing: his laughter signals embarrassment at the breaking of  taboo, but it also betrays a sexual excitement, and the personification of a story which ‘ran all over the edges’ conjures a similar character to the wayward, uncontrollable Sarah whose ‘ways are [her] own’. As she tells her mother about the ‘pain and evil’ she expects in the life she has chosen, ‘I’ll thole it – and it won’t be on my knees!’ (Bell, 1974: 50). When she finally agrees to appear before the minister, son of  the first Sorleyson, and take Hamilton as her husband, the text presents Sarah as ‘stooped, huddled’ (9) but still not on her knees, and it’s clear that she has returned to the church merely for the sake of her daughter, another Martha, and only when the minister presents her unmarried status as the single impediment to young Martha’s future. The father of  her daughter’s suitor

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refers to Sarah as a ‘Jezebel’ (253), and throws his son Joe out of  home for continuing the relationship with a family he denounces as ‘a crew o’ libertines and whores’ (279). Joe does not pass on the derogatory terms, but he doesn’t have to; ‘Joe knew that she knew’ (283). Despite this, Sarah shows no sign at this stage that she is prepared to become a wife. She approaches Joe in a characteristically upfront manner: ‘Have ye any money by ye, Joe?’ When he replies that he has £180, she of fers to match the sum and ‘set the both of ye up in a shop’ (284). It’s surely no coincidence that 180 + 180 = 360. In mathematical terms, 360 degrees is a full revolution. Sarah is revolutionary in two senses: willing to rebel against convention, but also instrumental in aiding her daughter’s advancement in life. In contrast to this pragmatism, Bell’s text tells us that she knows ‘that she was criticised by a standard which she herself accepted, and was being rightfully blamed for falling below it’ (154). So, while Bell’s narrative attributes external moral courage to Sarah, albeit following a moral code deplored by her neighbours, he paradoxically endows her with internal pusillanimity. There is no sign in the character’s outward behaviour that she accepts the mores of  her community, any more than she admits their blame to be ‘rightful’. The speech she makes before her mother leaves Ravara displays cynicism about socially accepted standards as well as her community’s moral or godly codes. When her mother warns her: ‘Ye can’t prosper, Sarah, if ye forget your duty to God’, she responds with heavy sarcasm: ‘Aye! Our folks prospered, didn’t they, with their running tae Church on a Sunday! My father died on the roads, and ever since I can mind my life has been nothing else but slaving for other folk’ (50). I suggest that the severe judgemental mores of  his forebears have left a mark on the writer, and however much he admires the character he has created, or the original servant who inspired her, he has not totally silenced, and has to some extent internalised, church-going ancestral voices that would condemn women for non-standard sexuality. I began by looking at the apparent rivalry between nature and church for Sarah Gomartin, and I’ll conclude with some further explorations on that theme. Lest there is any suspicion that because she ends up married that Sarah has come back to the fold, like the lost lamb that her mother compared her to (59), Bell negates this interpretation. The wedding ring

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the minister tries to force onto her gnarled finger will not fit. Sorleyson says ‘I think we should manage to do it properly’, but Sarah’s hand remains ‘too large for the ring’ (10), clearly signifying that the enclosure of marriage is not one to which she is suited. Later, Bell reveals the minister’s realisation that ‘I trapped her into it. I failed just as much as my predecessors failed; as much as my father failed’ (15). According to Patrick Grif fin, in The People with No Name, ‘Ulster’s dissenters had a long tradition of challenging their pastors and embracing life beyond the bounds of  the meeting-house’ (2001, 37). This argument is put forward by Patrick Walsh and Marcus Free in their discussion of  the 1990 film December Bride (O’Sullivan), based on the novel. They write that ‘Sarah’s independence is a logical outcome of  the trajectory of  Presbyterianism’, which emphasises the individual over the organised church (Ramblado-Minero, 2006: 171). It’s interesting that Grif fin’s book characterises the Ulster-Scots as ‘people with no name’, as the question of naming is crucial in this text. Sarah tells the minister that the brothers favour the name Ben for the child, but she stif fens when he tells her that it means ‘son of a right hand’ (146), apparently af fronted that it seems to favour one side – Sarah, as we have heard already, is even-handed. She registers the child as Andrew Gomartin, thus forging her own bond between its parentage, giving it its paternal grandfather’s name as well as her own. However, we later learn that the children are given the surname Echlin (227) by their schoolmates, and ‘in the farm-houses scattered through the townlands, Sarah was known as Mrs Echlin’ (240). She feels that ‘No one could dispute Hamilton as her husband and as father to the children’ (239). However, when the minister comes to tell her that her unmarried status is a hindrance to Martha’s marriage, he calls her ‘Miss Gomartin’, and she ‘looked up sharply at the strange title’ (295). So here again, we get a conf lict concerning what has apparently happened ‘naturally’ in the course of  time: despite their legal position, the woman and children have acquired Hamilton’s surname, but the minister can still point out the illegitimacy of  their claims to it. It’s not just Sarah who comes into conf lict with her minister. When he remonstrates with a farmer for keeping his children out of school to work, he is told ‘to attend to his own af fairs and not hinder their work under the drying sun that God had granted them [and] he learned that the most important thing in

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the lives of  farm people is saving their crops’ (122). Sorleyson may assume in pressurising Sarah into finally marrying that she is coming under his jurisdiction, but it could be read equally as her finally ‘saving her crops’ – the future of  her of fspring.

References Bell, S. H. (1974), December Bride, Blackstaf f, Belfast. First published Dobson, London, 1951. Doak, N. (2008), ‘Assessing an absence: Ulster Protestant women authors, 1900–60’, in Busteed, M., Neal, F. and Tonge, J., Irish Protestant Identities, Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 126–37. Grif fin, P. (2001), The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.. Hickey, R. (2002), A Source Book for Irish English, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Keane, J. B. (1991) The Field, Mercier, Cork. Madden, D. (2003), One By One in the Darkness, Faber, London. Magennis, C. (2010), Sons of  Ulster: Masculinities in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel, Peter Lang, Bern. McIntosh, G. (1999), The Force of  Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-century Ireland, Cork University Press, Cork. McMahon, S. (1999), Sam Hanna Bell: A Biography, Blackstaf f, Belfast. O’Byrne, D. (2002), Irish Women’s Rural Writings since Independence, PhD thesis, Loughborough University, Loughborough. O’ Sullivan, T. (dir.) (1990), December Bride, Channel 4. Ramblado-Minero, M. C. and Pérez-Vides, M. A. (eds) (2006), Unmarried Mothers in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultural Ref lections, edited by Maria Cinta and Maria Auxiliadora, Edwin Mellen, Lampeter. Storey, M. L. (2004), Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction, Catholic University of  America Press, Washington D.C..

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Note Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s 1990 film December Bride brought Bell’s source text back to public attention, but a new edition of  the original novel is needed. Ideally, this would incorporate a useful introduction, explaining how the so-called Amendment years of 1980s Ireland provided many real-life sisters to the revolutionary Sarah Gomartin, thus sparking interest in the book and the film, a glossary of  the Ulster-Scots vocabulary, and correction of  the punctuation, specifically but not solely, the aberrant apostrophe.

MARTYN COLEBROOK

‘There is something narcotic in watching a war unfold on your doorstep, knowing all the while it can’t hurt you’: Liam McIlvanney’s All the Colours of  the Town

Scotland will be reborn the day the last minister is strangled with the last copy of  the Sunday Post. — Nairn, 1970: 34 Advocates of  Tartan Noir should not be satisfied to see crime fiction considered an equal genre to literary fiction but a superior one. Literary fiction has now detached itself into its own hermetic bubble away from the rest of  the world, where people do and say things that are excused from reality because they are ‘literary’. Despite its faults (and it has many) crime fiction is more relevant to us and our situation because, from leaders declaring war for ropey reasons, to smokers daring to puf f in an enclosed public space, everyone has broken the law. We are all criminals. — O’Connor, 2007: 58

Tom Nairn’s polemical article, ‘Three Dreams of  Scottish Nationalism’, published in The New Left Review in 1968 of fers a resounding clarion call to Scottish national aspirations. Nairn (1970: 34) argues two reasons, firstly because it of fers ‘a blow against the integrity of  British imperialism’ and secondly, ‘because it represents some transfer of power to a smaller arena’. Whilst these suggestions range from the eminently supportable to the potentially problematic, they correlate and resonate with the on-going principal of  how fiction responds to regional feelings of social, cultural and political fragmentation.

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Edmund O’Connor’s own assertive assessment of  the dominance of crime fiction over literary fiction reinforces the pertinence of  the popular genres in responding with urgency and immediacy to contemporary events. Hughes (1991: 6) highlights the point that ‘The major response to Northern Ireland has been in the form of  the thriller’ and this contentious and collective ‘criminalisation’ of  the crime-reading public highlights a cross-cultural bridging between the respective heritages in Scotland and Ireland. As Bell (2008: 53) suggests, with a comment that can be applied to the thriller as well: ‘ “Good” crime fiction therefore encourages an active sociological reading, where the reader becomes an armchair detective of  the world around him or her’. As much an ef fective narrative as a continued thesis under revision, contemporary popular fiction and particularly crime fiction and the thriller genre rely on the successful relationship between reader and novelist in order to reinforce the emphatic commentary both of fer. To this ef fect, Goldring, Minne and Newsinger observe that ‘there is an “artistic” connection […] between social reality and fiction. Any student of political power and domination is aware that power and domination in a complex society are not one dimensional phenomena, they are generally subtle, multi-layered’ (1997: 54). In keeping with the overarching theme of  this volume, this chapter will consider the detective fiction of  Scottish novelist Liam McIlvanney, whose debut novel, All the Colours of  the Town (2009) is set in and between the cities of  Belfast and Glasgow, exploring the long arm of sectarianism as it sprawls across the cities. The title references the on-going conf licts between Catholicism and Protestantism, their distinctive colours characterising their history and longevity. Significantly, the title also reduces two major cities to the status of  towns, maintaining a long cultural history of such representation. Admittedly it reads with greater f luidity but there exists an underlying possibility that ‘town’ also refers to the sentiments with which McIlvanney views the contemporary conf lict in Glasgow: two parochial sides competing for bragging rights and petty status within the locale of a town for whom the residents remain trapped in their own histories, stubbornly refusing to budge until old scores are settled. Their ‘bitter’ memories, am adjective the protagonist uses to describe religious sentiments in Scottish towns, latching onto a long-fought conf lict which

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mimics like the attention-seeking sibling but is forever in the shadows when compared with the violence over the water. The younger novelist draws on a lineage established by his father, William McIlvanney – author of  the renowned Scottish detective trilogy featuring Jack Laidlaw and based in Glasgow. McIlvanney is seemingly posited as the progenitor for the rise to eminence that Scottish crime fiction has undergone, the ‘Tartan Noir’ that Ian Rankin refers to (Rankin 1999). The tensions between the popular and the literary are exemplified by the manner in which crime fiction straddles boundaries and genres but notable in All the Colours of  the Town is the way in which McIlvanney successfully draws on certain elements of  the ‘Troubles thriller’, producing a novel which openly resists arrest and shifts rapidly between its target audiences. By attempting to read this work as a Troubles thriller, we must identify the correlative elements of what Caitlin McGuinness, writing about David Park’s novel Swallowing the Sun (2005), calls: a blueprint for interpreting the violence and tension it contains; we can expect that there will be a hunt for a master criminal, and that the central figure will need to piece together clues from his past and present in order to bring this about. (2009: 331)

Furthermore there are the recognisable commonalities with the thriller genre which, for the purposes of  this chapter, is linked directly as being congruous with the trappings of  the crime thriller. These three main points are the prologue, the body, its significance and treatment, and the resolution to the novel. Reviewing McIlvanney’s novel for The Telegraph, Thomas Marks explains: When the Glaswegian reporter Gerry Conway sees a grainy old photo of a Holyrood bigwig posing with UVF gunmen, he’s in two minds: Peter Lyons is Minister for Justice and one of  Conway’s most valuable contacts, but old-fashioned scoops are rare and this one seems too good to ignore. It’s a story that eventually leads him beyond the cosmopolitan façades of  Glasgow and Belfast to reveal the ugly links between the cities during the Troubles, when the dark currencies of crime ‘slipped back and forth between Ireland and Scotland like the phantom “e” in whisky’. (2009: n.p)

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The ‘grainy old photo’ containing ‘a Holyrood bigwig posing with UVF gunmen’ highlights the emphasis on history and the roots of conf lict and crime in the past. The personal and the political collide here, exposing the collusion between crime and the State. Marks highlights further the ‘cosmopolitan facades’ which characterise Glasgow and Belfast, exteriors that ooze culture and sophistication but consciously mask an underlying complicity between money, violence and power. The lingual commonality of  Gaelic is a further Celtic connection between the two cities, Glasgow’s ‘Gles Chu’ meaning ‘dear green place’ whilst Belfast takes its origins from Béal Feirste, meaning ‘mouth of  the sandbars’ (Room, 1986 [1994): 27). Significantly Marks identifies the ‘currencies of crime’, perhaps consciously rif fing on the shifts between Glasgow and Belfast as notable shipbuilding cities, sea-facing ports which are simultaneously connected by the ravages of  boom and bust, economic expansion followed by the problems of postindustrial decline, the latter a regular site for contemporary crime fiction, but cities which are dislocated by the estrangement of dif ferent forms of  financial exchange. The noun ‘currency’ is also synonymous with the noun ‘transmission’, suggesting that it remains the financial transactions which underpin the transnational exchanges, their slipping and shifting across the waters as part of  the virulent spreading of  terror, catalysed through the medium of commerce. Marks comments further that McIlvanney’s novel represents ‘A bold, impressive debut [which] turns the conventions of noir fiction on the politics of devolution to find individuals compromised and nations wanting’, further emphasising the machinations at work behind the scenes where there exists the legacy of  being ‘turned’ one way or the other, a punishment beating for a tout or an informant turned grass, ‘turning’ here suggesting a joining of  the dots between agencies and people, exposing the interrelationships at work behind the scenes. The pervasive feeling is similar to the ethics of fiction that Rankin discussed. McIlvanney and other novelists such as Eoin McNamee (Resurrection Man, 2004) and Glen Patterson (Lapsed Protestant, 2006) is revealing or reinvigorating truths about the cities of  Glasgow or Belfast respectively, using a genre of  fiction that functions as well as it does because it is so close the public that consumes it. Writing directly from the experiences of  his upbringing and articulated in his subsequent

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fiction, Glen Patterson echoes this talking about his own experiences in writing about the Troubles. He lays emphasis on the feeling that: [w]e draw heavily on the communities … which nurtured us, and even when we write out of a desire to inform, in the broadest sense, it is hard sometimes not to feel, in the narrowest sense, like an informer. (2006: 181)

The authorial position in McIlvanney’s novel is one of distance, where he witnessed the local conf lict between factions and fans channelling religion into football (and the other way around?) but did not directly experience the Troubles of  Ulster and Belfast. The front cover artwork exemplifies this, a shadowed figure overlooking a city, safe from the heart of the conf lict but with the headshot placed directly to the right of a fractured bullet hole in the title, glass splintered across the print. The novel opens with an interior domestic scene in the home of  Eamonn Walsh and his family: ‘Already she is smiling, one foot on the stairs. She stops to listen. She isn’t scared. This is a game they play most nights. It’s important to have a story, a pretext.’ (McIlvanney, 2009: 1) The reader is unaware at this point as to who the narrator is, only told the gender and can seemingly deduce age from her declaration that she isn’t ‘scared’, which locates her as a young child. That it is ‘important to have a story, a pretext’ possesses a multiplicity of meanings, punning on the journalist’s story which foregrounds the book, anticipating the crime scene and the genre where the ‘story’ is the body, a starting point, with the importance of a ‘pretext’ being the reason for Conway’s visit to Belfast, the justification for the murder which underpins the investigation and significantly, the rationale for the decision to publish the initial story ‘exposing’ Peter Lyons, which ultimately costs Conway his job. Recalling parties from the past when she dared not enter the living room, the child makes her way into the guest bedroom of  the house, and finds herself amongst the coats and clothing discarded by the family’s visitors: ‘Her fingers trace train tickets, paper hankies, loose coins, stif f  folded banknotes, glasses-cases, bubble-moulded sheets of aspirin. They pat car keys and ballpoint pens and cigarette lighters’ (McIlvanney, 2009: 2). These are markers for the familiar domestic comforts that are enjoyed by the

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visitors, the ‘stif f  folded banknotes’ suggesting recent acquisition rather than a long-standing preservation or the requisite nervous glances until the next payday which are accustomed to the discomforts of a workingclass life. More significantly their status as cash suggests a non-traceable form of  transaction, an air of deniability freshly retrieved from the bank and ready for distribution, reward and coercion. The ‘train tickets’ and ‘car keys’ suggest a multitude of people travelling for social engagements and entertainment, re-acquaintance with old friends. This time she sees someone in the hall after making her way down the stairs: ‘a man like her father, with brown hair and glasses, but younger. His face is kind, he has a kind face, and she smiles at him, a smile that expects his complicity, a smile that says, Don’t tell’ (McIlvanney, 2009: 3). McIlvanney here subverts the continuum of  the genre, the child demanding secrecy and silence to enhance the drama of  the game while a more elaborate and brutal game takes place in the room where her father is. That she identifies this man and his colleague as her father’s ‘clients’ is telling, their formal anonymity conveying a respectable business practice, possessing the trappings of  financial or legal meetings, the established habits of an accomplished businessman masking the more illicit attributes or reasons for requiring legal assistance or exchanging services for financial inducement. As the pair leave, moving swiftly from the home into the night, the child gazes out of  the door, realising that: already, the bright room at her back is a foreign land. It’s not the living room but a room in a fairy tale, a dragon’s cave. And now, for the first time she can remember, she regrets having left her bed. (McIlvanney, 2009: 3)

The foreignness of  the land indicates a sense of estrangement, the living room being transformed from the familiar domestic and familial preserve into an abstraction, the reference to the dragon emphasising not just the dangerous creature who temporarily invades fairy tales before being beaten of f  by the hero, but also of fering a knowing glance to Raymond Chandler’s ‘knight’, acknowledging the tradition from which the novel emerges.

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As the child moves into the living room she sees her mother ‘kneeling by the sofa’ over her father who is ‘slumped on the couch’ (McIlvanney, 2009: 4). At first the child believes her mother is saying the Rosary, juxtaposing religious ceremony and forgiveness with the death of  her husband, until she slips in her father’s blood and the surrounding neighbourhood lights come on. The Rosary is significant, suggesting personal responsibility and retribution for the unknown acts which have taken place, enhancing further the element of  ‘punishment’ which characterises beatings and killings during the Troubles and later in the novel. That this occurs in the past is significant in the crime narrative, a point with which Skenazy (1995: 114) concurs (when discussing Raymond Chandler) using the term ‘gothic causality’ for the ‘hauntings that structure most crime narratives’ where ‘a secret from the past […] represents an occurrence or desire antithetical to the principles and position of  the house (or family)’. The secret from the past occurs with the murder of  the child’s father within the domestic sphere and the lack of  knowledge about why the killing occurred. McGuinness observes that the first structural characteristic of  the Troubles Thriller is: a prologue, a dramatic ‘primary scene’ that establishes character, place and motivation through a closely observed and violent event. The sense that you have been dropped into the middle of a crisis in the first few lines of  the book is a standard feature of many Troubles thrillers. (2006: 331)

Here McIlvanney establishes the primary scene, the child witnessing her father’s murder. The close observation, intimately bound up with the unintended sharing of  bodily f luids, suggests an inherited trauma, a legacy from parents to daughter, husband to wife. The killing is the violent event and the ‘crisis’ we have been dropped into the middle of is significant: the father’s death is a major event within the domestic locale, the loss of a parent with (at this point) unknown motivations. The reader witnesses the transferral of  fear, intrigue and conspiracy from the national to the domestic sphere. However, in the context of  Northern Ireland, it lacks the significance that would be ascribed to it in Glasgow. Brookmyre quoting from a later section of  McIlvanney’s novel, observes:

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The treatment of violence and killing is rendered starkly apparent here: a murder in Belfast, in the Troubles, is an almost daily occurrence and the body becomes a tool for political capital, a trophy or a warning, representative of  local codes and regulations, territories not to be traversed. Noticeably, Christopher Brookmyre too reinforces the Celtic Connection, describing Glasgow’s own diluted brand of  the Troubles – the selection of words specifically indicating the abhorrent commercial exploitation of violence within the period of  time itself – as the ‘pale shadow in the West of  Scotland’. In Glasgow a murder represents a moment of  transgression, a ritual and symbol. Later Gerry Conway claims: Gangsters are a local speciality […] People connect them to an older Glasgow, a darker, truer city before the stone-cleaning and the logos, Princes Square and the City of  Culture. We take solace in their formalised acts of violence, these murders in which everything – location, timing, the disposition of  the corpse – has an emblematic aptness, a rhetorical neatness. Bodies dumped in cars, the bullet up the anus, the dead tout clutching a bag of dogshit: the codes being respected, you feel, protocols observed. (McIlvanney, 2009: 33)

Murder and its place in Glasgow’s culture form both a gesture to history and a process of resistance to the commodification and sanitisation associated with the City of  Culture. The ‘formalised acts of violence’ suggest that, like Belfast, there is an unspoken linguistic quality to the murders, a grammar and order with which the witnesses are to become intimately acquainted if  they are to understand its significance and its warning, ultimately to avoid the same fate themselves. The ‘rhetorical neatness’ reinforces the concept of murder as a codified language, a sequence of rules and ‘protocols’. Aaron Kelly contends that Troubles thrillers reveal subtle yet conspicuous references to the material and therefore historical circumstances under which they were produced: ‘the historical raw materials which the “Troubles” thriller simultaneously strives to utilize, transform and repress,

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encode themselves in determinate structures of  formal absence and aporia’ (2005: 9). This is representative of  McIlvaney’s portrayal of  both Belfast and Glasgow and in the extract under consideration, it is apparent that the clashes between dif ferent ‘layers’ of  the cities have informed his depiction. Allen Feldman argues that ‘Political enactment becomes sedimented with its own local histories that are mapped out on the template of  the body’ (1991: 4) and so the bodies in both cities constitute sites upon which historical, spacialised narratives are played out between dif ferent sides, the template ef fectively dehumanising the people who have been murdered or attacked, they represent an assemblage of recognisable symbols for the State and the law-enforcement organisations to appropriate for their own propaganda and decode to identify the ‘enemy’s’ next move. ‘Sedimented’ is also a particularly apt term for the sense of preserving history through preserving the body, figuratively inscribing messages to be passed from generation to generation. Feldman argues further for a reading of  bodies as signifiers of  both past and present structures of violence in the state: ‘The body, altered by violence, re-enacts other altered bodies dispersed in time and space; it also re-enacts political discourse and even the movement of  history itself ’ (1991: 7). Violence against the body, whether it be a punishment beating, a kneecapping or a murder, bears the marks which are recurrent with other politicised acts, hence the parallels between police interrogation tactics and other tactics adopted by opposition groups. Gill Plain reinforces this: ‘At the root of nearly all twentieth-century criminal fictions lies the literal body of  the corpse. The corpse is a contradictory site within criminal fictions: the end point of a life that simultaneously signifies the beginning of a narrative’ (2001: 12). Murder as a link to a ‘darker, truer Glasgow’ is the city of  William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw novels and a further connection with the dark post-industrial Gothic legacy of  Belfast. The gangsters representing a connection with the past are replicated through the figure of  Isaac ‘Kiwi’ Hepburn, a former Kesh Commander and enforcer who claimed to ‘run the Shankhill’ (McIlvanney, 2009: 119). His status as the owner of a local boxing club, partly funded by European money, demonstrates a bridge between the old Belfast where physical strength and discipline was embodied in community ‘hard men’ and the next generation of  Belfast youth and young men who are trained in a sport

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requiring both. Kiwi embodies a tension between the ‘hardmen’ and the ‘gunmen’, two dif ferent categories of individual within locales who represent separate periods of  time during the Troubles. Following the murder, the narrative switches to Conway’s of fice at the Tribune on Sunday as he scans his email. He is presented with a photocopy of a photograph from an anonymous source which provides information concerning one of  his major contacts, the Scottish Minister for Justice, Peter Lyons: It’s an interior shot. Seven men are grouped against a bare white wall. The two men in the foreground wear black balaclavas, army pullovers and webbing wear belts. They stand with their legs apart and their hands clasped in front of  them. The clasped hands grip pistols, the barrels pointing to the f loor. The other men, unmasked and in civilian clothes, stand behind the gunman. Two of  them hold up a UVF f lag. The head of one of  the men has been ringed with a marker pen, and the words ‘Minister for Justice’ have been written beside it. (McIlvanney, 2009: 25)

The enforced anonymity of  the shot renders it infused with the menacing sensation of  being in the room at the time but the indicator of an Ulster Volunteer Force f lag in the background, pistols being displayed in a deliberate execution-style posture politicises the image. Ringing the head of  Peter Lyons with a marker pen conveys the image of  him as a target within a rif le sight but his presence establishes a tangible link between the Scottish Parliament and Ulster volunteers. His attire as a ‘civilian’ marks him out from the ‘paramilitaries’ with their uniform of  balaclavas and army wear and his positioning at the rear of  the photograph seems to undermine his authority and status, being a mere amateur around professionals. Significantly the anonymity rendered by the balaclava also suggest that the individuals in this photograph could be anyone, their identities interchangeable, their personae f luid but their motives underpinned with a coherent commonality. That it has been reproduced suggests it functions as a material residue of cultural memory and preservation, an object intended for dissemination, for gaining status or leverage, for self-promotion. The original photograph in which Lyons appears is markedly dif ferent:

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It looked a lot dif ferent. Lighter and paler, like someone had upped the brightness too far. The black smudges, the violent chiaroscuro of  the photocopy had gone. The five civilians had features now, eyes and mouths in place of savage black holes. Everything was sharper, more professional, but something vital had gone, some quality of impromptu brutality, a sense of  the makeshift and illicit. (McIlvanney, 2009: 26)

The original brings humanity and a clear sense of personal engagement with the photograph. That Conway detects a ‘violent chiaroscuro’ brings to mind a rendering of scratches in the margins and across the page, replacing ‘savage black holes’ with ‘eyes and mouths’ detracts from the sinister and monstrous anonymity suggested in the photocopy. The significance of  lacking ‘impromptu brutality, a sense of  the makeshift and illicit’ brings to mind the theatrical element of performance and spectacle which is foundational to such posturing. The ‘makeshift and illicit’ reinforces further how the forced ‘professionalism’ means regulation, a sense of  the of ficial, an adherence to agreed standards, a legitimising of  the publicity as representative of  the group’s status and desire to be treated with seriousness and respect. The group that Conway identifies Lyons as primarily liaising with is an organisation known as the New Covenanters: It wasn’t a paramilitary group. It wasn’t even a street gang of  the Billy Boys type. It was dif ficult to know what to call it. A pressure group, maybe. They sent menacing letters to Catholic MPs and known Republican sympathisers. They disrupted Republican marches, wrestled banners to the ground. (McIlvanney, 2009: 31)

The function of  the pressure group, with an organised publication, reinforces the presence of an audience for which journalistic and creative license can be exercised to disseminate information about events in Ulster and Belfast. Like the hard currencies exchanged for weapons, the word and the language functions as a further tool to unite two sections of  two cities in their common purpose. In his visit to Belfast, Conway comes to see the city at night using this analogy: ‘After dark, Belfast was a movie-city, a post-apocalyptic ghost town’ (McIlvanney, 2009: 106). Eamonn Hughes comments that the reason for Belfast functioning so well as a ‘a fictional location’ is that the predominant association of  Belfast with the thriller genre is part and parcel of  the

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recurrent conceptualising of  the city as an empty space, simply waiting to be inscribed with the demands of  ‘novelists and film-makers with stock properties’, of which the most frequently employed are ‘Belfast’s imputed attributes of danger, violence and mayhem’ (1996: 141). The use of  ‘ghost town’ also suggests a link with the past, a haunting of  the present by the past and the ‘fictional location’ also correlates with the stock requirements of genre: an empty structure waiting to be used as a template by the novelist and other artists. This is similar to the symbolism of  the body which remains a template to be manipulated and contextualised by the opposing power structures of  State and Opposition. Writing about the Scottish perception of  Northern Ireland, Conway describes how: The violence thrilled us. All the northern carnage. Bombs and executions just out of earshot. Army choppers shot down over the hills that looked like Ayrshire. We were close to this slaughter. We understood it. More at least than the English did. People were fighting and dying in the name of  those acronyms that littered our walls. It was our war too. Only it couldn’t touch us. Nobody here was dying. We weren’t being smithereened in our shopping malls and pubs. Our high streets and town crosses retained their integrity, unedited and unabridged by fertiliser bombs. (McIlvanney, 2009: 132)

The ‘thrill’ of  the violence renders the entire conf lict as a piece of shock entertainment, Belfast as the movie set for the consumption of viewers from across the water. That ‘bombs and executions are just out of earshot’ demonstrates not just the proximity of  Scotland to the conf lict but also the sense of safety they enjoyed, not exposed to the visibility of  the murders. The geographical similarities with ‘hills that looked like Ayrshire’, generates feelings of  kinship with the respective sides reproduced in Scotland and Conway’s key assertion that they understood it ‘more than the English did’ reduces the Troubles to an act of cultural Tourism, a trophy spectacle used by the nation for the purposes of  ‘getting one over’ their neighbours, for claiming a greater level of identification with the Troubles and ascribing authenticity to the Scottish Sectarian spats. The ‘acronyms’ for which people died represent a linguistic solidarity between Northern Ireland and Scotland, a code known only to those who follow the groups they represent.

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The use of  the terms ‘unedited’ and ‘unabridged’ to describe the Scottish cities in their untainted state further reinforces the analogy that there is a grammar of violence and destruction which underlies the acts committed within Glasgow and Belfast. The retention of  ‘integrity’ suggests Conway believes there is a truth to the lack of destruction, a greater honesty in the undamaged and ‘real’ cities. In the course of  his investigations in Belfast, Conway discovers the origins of  the New Covenanters: They had rowed it, I remembered. The Covenanters – the original Covenanters. Those principled, grim Presbyterians, hated and harried by prelate and king. This stretch of water – the Sea of  Moyle, the North Channel, the Scheuch – was the hinge of  their kingdom. During the Killing Time the Scots sought refuge here; Peden the Prophet had sojourned in Ulster when the redcoats f lushed him from his Ayrshire glens. At other times, the Irish sought succour in Scotland. Forbidden to worship in their own meeting houses, the Antrim Presbyterians rowed across to Ayrshire on Sunday mornings, and rowed back to Ulster after the divine service. (McIlvanney, 2009: 214)

The historical interpretation suggests refuge and the opportunity to worship without harassment or persecution from the monarchy. These two countries represent both an exchange and a mutual safe-house as they unite against a common enemy; in this instance the religious elements prove to be the uniting factor between Scotland and Northern Ireland. Connecting the murders in the old Glasgow with killings in Ulster, Conway comments that: Ulster has its Disappeared. People who went astray, mislaid like a scarf or a pair of glasses. Lost, like a half-drunk glass of wine, set down on a shelf and forgotten. A troubling skelf in the back of  the mind. But the Disappeared weren’t many. Mostly the dead turned up. The rhetorical power of a bloodied corpse – stricken, bested, conspicuously wrong – depended on the body being found. Dumped at a roadside, slumped in an alley, left where it fell on a cinderblock path. And this is how it mostly worked: for every killing a body, for every body a claim. (McIlvanney, 2009: 313)

The ‘rhetorical power of a bloodied corpse’ echoes the ‘rhetoric’ of  the Glasgow underworld, the visual, visceral impact of  the blood-stained body, ‘conspicuously wrong’ meaning there is a telling mark or sign that is

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recognisable to convey the reasons for this killing. That it depends on the ‘body being found’ also imposes a recognisable process on the procedure from killing to discovery, a mutually identifiable set of contingencies and conditions which are acknowledged between killer and those who find the body. The process is that which allows political capital to be made from ‘claiming’ the body, another entry in the records and another act visible to the seemingly unwilling but watching public. As Caitlin McGuinness identified, the Troubles thriller typically has three elements: prologue, treatment of  the body and resolution. McIlvanney’s resolution sees the relationship between Peter Lyons, Scottish Minister for Justice, and Glasgow gangster Walter Maitland exposed. Lyons is prosecuted for the murder of  the father at the beginning of  the novel, his involvement coming because he ‘He asked to go on the job. He wanted to go. He wanted more responsibility. It was his idea’ (McIlvanney, 2009: 309). Taken from Glasgow and tried in a Belfast court Lyons is recorded as being sentenced to life imprisonment. Under the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 Lyons serves no sentence but is forced to resign his position. The internecine entanglements between business and conf lict are also thoroughly exposed: Walter Maitland was a gunrunner. He shipped weapons to the UVF from the early seventies right through the worst of  the Troubles. […] These crates were unloaded in Antrim and the contents found their way to the back-rooms and cellars of drinking clubs in Donegall Pass and the Upper Shankhill. (McIlvanney, 2009: 319)

Walter Maitland’s status and occupation see him as an exemplar of  the ‘big business’ of  the Troubles, the complicity between commercial enterprise and political violence and instability which is found in the extension of  the tentacular arms of  his business into Belfast. Such relationships provide us with what McGuinness calls ‘an awareness of  the interconnectedness of sectarian and criminal violence to daily life that suggests a new blueprint for reading history and agency in Northern Ireland’ (2009: 331). This new blueprint can be applied to McIlvanney’s work, his self-conscious interrogation of  the dark underside of  Glasgow, which adopts the conventions of  the Troubles Thriller and exposes not only this national agency and history, but

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also the relationship between Northern Ireland and its unsung compatriots over the water in Scotland: an underworld facilitator and economically illicit beneficiary of  the on-going and all too present spectre of conf lict. If  McIlvanney’s work has a weakness it is the preoccupation with the overwritten divorce and personal life of  his protagonist. Its presence in the background distracts from the sustained theme of  the Celtic Connectors that draw us from Glasgow to Belfast and back again, seamlessly shifting and passing like the proverbial gunrunning ships and their complicit crews, both in and of  the night. This novel combines the essence of a literary and lyrical McIlvanney in his representation of  the Scottish and Northern Irish political psyches and their responses to and formation by dif ferent violent impulses. Indeed he continues a heritage of engagement with crime writing and through it produces a work which exposes the unspoken allegiances and the representation of  Scottish and Northern Irish lives with their respective histories.

References Anonymous, , accessed June 2011. Bell, E. (2008), ‘Ian Rankin and the Ethics of  Crime Fiction’ in Clues: A Journal of  Detective Fiction, 26 (2) pp. 53–63. Brookmyre, C. (2009), , accessed June 2011. Feldman, Allen (1991), Formations of  Violence: The Narrative of  Body and Terror in Northern Ireland, University of  Chicago Press, London and Chicago. Goldring, M., Minne, J. and Newsinger, J. (1997), ‘A few doubles more’ in Irish Studies Review, 5(19) pp. 53–6. Hughes, E. (1991), Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland, Open University Press, Buckingham. Hughes, E. (1996), ‘ “ Town of  Shadows”: Representations of  Belfast in Recent Fiction’, Religion and Literature, 28, nos. 2/3 pp. 141–60. Kelly, A. (2005), The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969, Aldershot, Ashgate.

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Marks, T. (2009), , accessed 1 June 2011. McGuinness, C. (2009), ‘Domestic espionage: David Park’s Swallowing the Sun as Troubles Thriller’, Irish Studies Review 17, 3, pp. 331–45. McIlvanney, L. (2009), All the Colours of  the Town, Faber and Faber Ltd, London. McIlvanney, W. (1977), Laidlaw, Hodder and Stoughton: London. McIlvanney, W. (1983; 1984), The Papers of  Tony Veitch, Sceptre Press Ltd, Frensham. McIlvanney, W. (1991), Strange Loyalties, William Morrow: New York. McNamee, E. (2004), Resurrection Man, Faber and Faber Ltd, London. Nairn, T. (1970), ‘Three Dreams of  Scottish Nationalism’, in Miller, Karl (ed.), Memoirs of a Modern Scotland, Faber and Faber Ltd, London. O’Connor, E. (2006), ‘Tartan Noir’ in Chapman, 108, pp. 50–8. Park, D. (2005), Swallowing the Sun, Bloomsbury London. Patterson, G. (2006), Lapsed Protestant, New Island, Dublin. Plain, G. (2001), Twentieth-century Crime Fiction, Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago. Rankin, Ian (1999), ‘Why Crime Fiction Is Good for You.’ Edinburgh Review 102 pp 9–16. Room, Adrian 1986 [1994], A Dictionary of  Irish Place Names, Appletree Press, Belfast. Skenazy, Paul (1995), ‘Behind the Territory Ahead’ in Fine, David (ed.), Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of  Essays (revised edition), University of  New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, pp. 151–62.

EMILY A. RAVENSCROFT AND JAMES MOLLISON

Macbeth in Maghaberry: Corrupting Power Relations with the Scottish Play in a Northern Irish Prison

Macbeth, or ‘The Scottish Play’ for the more superstitious, is Shakespeare’s most gruesome work. The text was recently given new purchase when a group of  twenty-five inmates serving life terms in one of  Northern Ireland’s maximum-security facilities, HMP Maghaberry, for crimes ranging from intimate partner violence to the murder of a stranger in public, created an adaptation of  this classic for film titled Mickey B. With the guidance of  the Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC) the prisoners wrote the script, built the sets, performed the roles and eventually were the recipients of prestigious awards for their work, including the Roger Graef award for Outstanding Achievement in Film at the Arthur Koestler awards (ESC, 2011). Prisoners reset Macbeth in a ‘fictional private prison called Burnam, where gangs run the wings with violence and drugs as their common currency. Duncan is the number one drug dealer who is about to be released. Mickey B is his muscle collecting on his behalf ’ (Magill and MarquisMuradaz, 2009: 109). After being held for three years post-production,1 the film is now available for public viewing. The director, Tom Magill, and the producer, Jennifer Marquis-Muradaz, ref lected on their experiences filming in the Dramatherapy and social theatre: necessary dialogues chapter, ‘The making of  Mickey B, a modern adaptation of  Macbeth filmed in a maximum security prison in Northern Ireland’ (2009). They claim that the prison personnel were resistant to the production every step of  the 1

After concerns that the film glorified prisoners and compromised prison security, the crew was required to promise never to screen Mickey B in Northern Ireland and agreed to hold the public release of  the film for three years (Magill and MarquisMurdaz, 2009).

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way, explaining ‘prison staf f reacted to the film and to our presence with suspicion and inf lexibility, appearing either blatantly apathetic or downright hostile’ (Magill and Marquis-Murdaz, 2009: 110).2 At the end of  the filming, Magill and Marquis-Murdaz ref lected, ‘Our film crew went into the prison expecting to learn a lot about prisoners. Instead, we learned a great deal that scared us about the people who care for them, the people we put in charge of our most vulnerable, our most violent, our most damaged’ (Magill and Marquis-Murdaz, 2009: 111). In an insightful analysis of the film Ramona Wray describes the production as a series of  ‘interconnections between film proper and documentary footage as mutually constitutive, with “fictional” construct and “reality” commentary speaking to each other in often conf licting but always illuminating ways’ (Wray, 2011: 3). Wray additionally notes that ‘films made in and about Northern Ireland have nearly always contributed to, and become implicated in, broader political conf licts surrounding the region’ (Hill, 2006, cited in Wray, 2011: 3). This claim is further bolstered by an interview in the bonus material of  the DVD, in which a prisoner articulates his time in jail around the hunger strikes by Republican paramilitary prisoners during the ‘Troubles’.3 Wray draws parallels between the discourse of  the institution in which these twenty-five men circulate and the well-publicised and oft-analysed history of Republican struggles to attain political status in gaol. Wray argues these prisoners’ demand to wear their own clothes while filming is a ‘spectre’ of earlier Republican paramilitary prisoner demands to be visually marked as distinct from Ordinary Decent Criminals (ODCs) by being permitted

2 3

This insight clashes sharply with the ref lections of  the director and others in the Category A Mickey B documentary, in which the crew broadly praised prison staf f  for their helpfulness. The ‘Troubles’ were a period of violence in Northern Ireland commonly dated from 1969–1998. There has been increasing discussion about the validity of  the term ‘Troubles’ which some argue trivialises the suf fering of all people involved and af fected. While understanding these concerns, we do not wish to impose a dif ferent term on that history, given that most locals still refer to that period of violence as such.

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to wear their own clothes (Wray, 2011: 7).4 The failure of  this connection becomes apparent when one is reminded of  the way Republican prisoners died to separate themselves from ODCs in the face of  the Thatcherite policy of criminalisation. While the request of  these actor-inmates to wear their own clothes may be a political act in and of itself, it is nonetheless quite distinct from the politics and actions endorsed by the Republican political prisoners of 1978–81. Articulating the actions of  the former as an appeal to the politics of  the latter invites such a misreading rather than attempting to judge the prisoners on their own terms. This amounts to a failed attempt to acknowledge the agency of  the prisoners. While one cannot get away from writing about the ‘Troubles’ when dealing with the North, one also must be careful not to suggest the ‘Troubles’ were only about paramilitaries. Paramilitary action punctuates the manner in which most academics write about the ‘Troubles.’ The bombings, shootings, ceasefires and funerals have become the de facto timeline around which ‘ordinary’ experiences of  the society’s members must cluster.5 However, the very presence of  these ODC prisoners and their narratives in Category A Mickey B of  the impact that the paramilitary violence had on their own understanding of  their role within society, indicates that while individual and communal history may be responding to the spectacular, carnivalesque performances of  the paramilitaries, the prisoners remain a separate nodal point in the broader Northern Ireland narrative. Their responses to the paramilitary violence cannot be subsumed under paramilitary interpretations because doing so only conceals and perpetu-

4

5

Republican prisoners established five demands in 1978 to reclaim political status: 1. the right not to wear a prison uniform. 2. The right not to do prison work. 3. The right of  free association with other prisoners, and to organise educational and recreational pursuits. 4. The right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week. 5. Full restoration of remission lost through the protest. The prisoners engaged in extended protests including the dirty protest, the blanket protests and the hunger strikes to achieve these aims. This is not a new insight. Most feminist historians begin their work with the understanding that history is written around wars and other masculine-defined political acts instead of  from the perspective of  the ‘common’, often female, citizen.

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ates the victimhood they experience as a consequence of  that paramilitary violence. The use of  the prisoner’s own rhetoric, through narratives and vernacular, is movement toward autonomy and recognition as an act of reclamation – from the focus on and fetishisation of paramilitary behavior, from the language of  the national and socio-economic other, and from the gendered impositions of prison heteronormativity. Though one may contest the manner in which this moment is linked to paramilitary prison history, we do not deny that the individuals in the film will be understood by most viewers as inextricably linked to the political violence in which they were raised. One could equally argue in response, however, that the primary reason for this view is because of  the manner in which the film, and subsequent reviews of it, encourages the audience to view these prisoners in such a light, thereby creating a closed circuit or self-fulfilling prophecy. The documentary is described as ‘a bonus feature about the impact of violence on prisoners who grew up during Northern Ireland’s Troubles’ (ESC, 2011). While none of  these individuals is marked with paramilitary membership, nonetheless, ‘it is the “Troubles” that loom most large as a subsuming presence in player-prisoner strategies of evocation’ (Wray, 2011: 8). Magill and Marquis-Muradaz specifically mark the prisoners with the discourse surrounding the ‘Troubles’ division when they share that ‘Some staf f  thought we had too many Catholics and not enough Protestants in the cast’ (2009: 110).6 Furthermore, they indicate prison-authority resistance to their script, because ‘the plot, the prisoners controlling the jail, was too close for comfort given the recent memory of  the Maze Prison where prisoners did run their own wings’ (2009: 110). Again, the prisoners who ran their wings in the Maze were not ODCs but were marked, and sanctioned before 1978 and ef fectively between 1981 and 1998, as political pris6

The terms ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ have become over-determined both in academic writing on the Northern Irish conf lict and in the everyday lived experiences of  the people of  the North who ascribe to or are ascribed by these identities. These terms do not necessarily correlate with regular church attendance by the individuals they describe. As to the role that religion itself played in the conf lict, that particular relationship is not the aim of  this paper.

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oners. Again, it is not that these prisoners were unaf fected by the context in which they were raised, but that there was more to their context and their creation of identity than merely paramilitary-perpetuated violence. That said, during the filming and release of  Mickey B, the political violence of  the North did continue to intersect with the actor-inmates in Maghaberry. During the November filming, ‘freelance dissident loyalist’ Michael Stone attacked Stormont in an attempt to assassinate Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness (McDowell, 2006). He was captured and sent to Maghaberry prison where he ‘denied the charges, claiming this incident was performance art’ (BBC News, 2006). Stone’s defence lawyer, Arthur Harvey, QC, explained that ‘It was, in fact, a piece of performance art replicating a terrorist attack’ (McDowell, 2006). Stone’s act and explanation collapse the ‘mask of a character’ that ESC was relying on to help prisoners address ‘the motivations and implications of  their crime’ (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, 2009: 114). In December 2009, after the three-year injunction expired and the film was released, the governor of  Maghaberry Prison, Steve Rodford, resigned from his post after his personal and family details were found inside a dissident Republican’s prison cell in HMP Maghaberry, ostensibly marking him as an assassination target (McDonald, 2009). According to the ESC, the prisoners were unable to productively change the prison system, indeed ‘the drama group itself was disbanded for fear that the prisoners would begin to feel they had too much personal power’ (Magill and Marquis-Murdaz, 2009: 111). Yet, the threat of paramilitary action created immediate change in the prison regime through the removal of  the prison governor. The prison is often referred to within the context of  the paramilitaries’ roles in the ‘Troubles’ as well. When the BBC released a story on the 2009 review of  the Northern Ireland Prison Service, they followed the typical prison narrative by explaining that ‘For more than 30 years it was expected to deal with thousands of paramilitaries, many of  them intent on escape. Twenty-nine members of staf f were murdered. As paramilitary violence lessened and prisoners were released the service faced major changes’ (BBC News, 2009). Within the context of  the paramilitary spectacle in the media, academic writing, and prison discourse, the ODCs struggle to find a voice that can be taken for itself; a voice that may be inf luenced by

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the ‘Troubles’ without being characterised entirely by sectarian organisations or personalities. This nodal point of identity marking is synecdochal of  broader articulations of subjectivity. The prisoners are marked with a religion, nationality and sex. Their religious identifiers are apologetically articulated as something one cannot avoid when working in or on Northern Ireland. This constant reference to the nation and the conf lict of nationhood makes the selection of a Scottish play all the more interesting. The history of  Scottish Protestant settlers in Northern Ireland and the dissection of some Scottish regions, such as Glasgow, along lines mimicking those in Belfast, make the play ‘fit’.7 The reclamation of  the play from the words of an Englishman, who is equated with ‘high culture,’ to the vernacular of northern, socioeconomically oppressed populations, puts the Scottish-ness of  the play itself into a set of quotation marks, so to speak, which at once reminds one of  the Republican claim that the Scottish and their descendants were and are invaders on their island from which the land must be reclaimed, while also alluding to the Loyalist claim that the nation of  Northern Ireland should not be conf lated with any other national marker (either Ireland for the Republicans or Scotland for Shakespeare). Similarly, the bracketing of  the gender of  the character Ladyboy, Mickey B’s cross-dressed take on Lady Macbeth, allows for a series of inquiries as to the way normative conceptions of gender8 function in the context of  the production of  Mickey B specifically and prisons more broadly – a subject to which we will return shortly. Many other labels are af fixed to the prisoners aside from broad, categorical markers. ‘Prisoners also label themselves, and this process can have even more detrimental ef fect on their self-esteem and well-being than being labeled by others’ (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, 2009: 113–14). Again, we are given a unitary self with which one may fix ‘esteem,’ and ‘active citizenship awards’ (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, 2009: 112). The one 7 8

The most visible demonstration of  this divide is the rivalry between perceived Protestant football club, Glasgow Rangers, and perceived Catholic football club, Glasgow Celtic, in Glasgow. Sex is biologically determined, though not in the form of a binary as we socially assume. Gender is the socially constructed meanings we attach to sex.

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label the ESC specifically wishes to avoid is the specificity of  the crimes committed by the individuals involved. They explain how they do not want to replicate the process that ‘to be a prisoner is to be defined by the worst thing you have ever done’ (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, 2009: 115). However, they do articulate a ‘problem’ when ‘our make-up girl was developing a serious f lirtation with a lifer convicted of murder’ (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, 2009: 111). This is only one instance in which the intended silence was broken and labels were assigned to prisoners once a threat to the ESC community was perceived. In light of  this context, an evaluation of  the current discourses of and about Mickey B should be advanced. Rather than attempting a position concerning the subtleties of  Shakespearean analysis and adaptation expertise, such as that of  Dr Wray, the present work attempts to analyse the consequences of  the production of  Mickey B for the subjectivity of  the prisoners involved with it. Particular attention should be paid to the ability of prisoners to articulate a strategy of resistance through self-authorship that removes them from the obligation to mimic the ‘good’ national example of  Scotland in Macbeth and empowers them to provide an alternate reading of  the story as related to the politics of  Northern Ireland that is not predicated upon a paramilitary perspective of  the ‘Troubles’. Accordingly, the prisoners adopt a dual performance of performing theatre through the adapted discourse of  the ‘Troubles’ without limiting themselves to the heteronormative confines of a ‘Troubles’ identity. The Scottish end to Macbeth, where all conf lict is resolved and a nation is reconciled, is thus acknowledged through storyline pastiche, while still rejecting the notion of a ‘good’ nationhood. Mickey B performs a dissonance that will not be solved simply through ‘Troubles’ paramilitary-focused post-conf lict resolution projects. A Foucauldian analysis of  the Mickey B adaptation of  Shakespeare’s Macbeth reveals the ability of  this theatrical performance to engage integral components of  Foucault’s work – namely, the genealogical method and his conception of  the subject – in a way which af fords the possibility of restructuring the power relations which govern status quo discourse on Irish prisoners. This analysis can be further extended to Judith Butler’s notion of performativity in a way which, through the consequences of  Foucault’s

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conception of  the subject, avoids the reactive pitfalls of  liberal politics by promoting a radical openness while nonetheless facilitating pragmatically viable and culturally specific political strategies. This allows prisoners to successfully resist the prison regime on their own terms, not on those of a paramilitary discursive platform. Furthermore, the prisoners articulate a political stance on the state of  Northern Ireland that, while intersecting with the rhetoric of paramilitaries and political parties in particular places, still presents a queered reading of  their society. The main theoretical contribution for which Foucault is known is, of course, a productive theory of power: ‘power produces: it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of  truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of  him belong to this production’ (Foucault, 1995: 194). Although we may be inclined to think of prisons as the foremost embodiment of  the institutionalisation of power as a repressive force, Foucault’s point in Discipline and Punish is just the opposite. Even those concepts which power seems to explicitly repress are revealed to be ef fects of its functioning; delinquency, for example, is shown to be ‘an ef fect of penalty (and of  the penalty of detention) that makes it possible to dif ferentiate, accommodate and supervise illegalities’ (Foucault, 1995: 277). This production of delinquency was already argued in the context of  the framing employed by reviews of and publicity for Mickey B, but it is also the case that such delinquency is produced directly by the way legal rhetoric is framed. The production of delinquency becomes less counterintuitive when we realise the supposedly universal language of  the law, ‘if it is to be ef fective,’ is actually ‘the discourse of one class to another, which has neither the same ideas as it nor even the same words’ (Foucault, 1995: 276). ‘An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of  forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it’ (Foucault, 1984: 88).9 The success of prisons, thus, lies in whether or not

9

A clear example of  the political weight which rests on discursive designations can be seen in the change of  Republican prisoners from political prisoners to Ordinary Decent Criminals (ODCs), which not only amounted to a direct de-politicisation

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they succeed ‘in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous – and, on occasion, usable – form of illegality’ as defined in contrast to normatively accepted forms of illegality engaged in by dominant groups (Foucault, 1995: 277). Additionally, Foucault’s work reveals the necessity of categories such as delinquency shifting endlessly, as the extent to which deviance persists and is reconceived justifies the continued revision and extension of a system of discourse that meticulously defines the norm and its ef facement alike, which in this case is the prison system and the disciplinary power which pervades society (Foucault, 1995: 301). In this way, Foucault reveals a fundamental contradiction between the strategies deployed by disciplinary and carceral power and the ends they purport to achieve. Throughout his work, Foucault switches between describing power via the rhetoric of production and characterising it as a force relation; Foucault describes disciplinary power specifically as ‘an art of conf licting energies … of quantitative dif ferences between opposing forces’ also known as a power relation (Foucault, 1995: 104). Herein lies the optimism of  Foucault’s thought, for ‘in order for power relations to come into play, there must be at least a certain degree of  freedom on both sides;’ in other words, ‘in power relations there is necessarily the possibility of resistance because if  there were no possibility of resistance … there would be no power relations at all’ (Foucault, 2003: 34). So even during incarceration, which tends to be thought of as the foremost example of a unilateral relation of power, running underneath each and every extension of power are new possibilities of resistance. Some of  the most memorable demonstrations of  this point provided in Discipline and Punish concern the strategic possibilities of resistance af forded to those about to be executed: the ability to speak before a crowd without fear of any recourse from the law (Foucault, 1995: 60); the sympathy inspired between this crowd and those about to be executed (Foucault, 1995: 63); the mutual distrust and disrespect of the law, resulting in centres of illegality throughout the mob (Foucault, 1995: 63); the

of an ideology but also resulted in a loss of rights of fered exclusively to inmates with political prisoner status.

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romanticisation of  the criminal through songs and stories (Foucault, 1995: 67); and so on. Insofar as the attempt to carve out a normative archetype is co-determined by the production of  the deviant, negative space against which it is defined, to refine the texture of  the norm is to equally grant clarity as to how this norm may be violated. An additional consequence of  Foucault’s view of power relations is the realisation that concepts are not eternal; the power relations which govern the discourse surrounding particular concepts require constant maintenance and production. The purpose of  the genealogical method is to trace the shaky history of conceptual development and, in so doing, reveal that although a given configuration of power relations may govern a discourse in a specific way, this configuration is nonetheless lacking in necessity. Lurking behind the grand narratives of eternal concepts, the genealogist uncovers ‘the secret that [concepts] have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms’ (Foucault, 1984: 78). By pointing out the inconsistent nature of conceptual foundations, genealogy cuts to the lowly historical beginnings of institutions and discourses in a way that is ‘derisive and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation’ (Foucault, 1984: 79). Indeed, this is what Foucault does in all his major works, providing genealogical criticisms of  the asylum, the hospital, the prison, and sexuality as ‘the accidents, the minute deviations … the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but at the exteriority of accidents’ (Foucault, 1984: 81). In pursuing the implications of  this line of  thought, Foucault even goes so far as to deny an essential notion of  humanity. Within the context of disciplinary power, humanity is merely a conceptual limit placed on punishments, ‘the respectable name given to this economy and to its meticulous calculations’ (Foucault, 1984: 92).10 As a result of revealing the way concepts, including the determinations of what constitutes a subject in/of a particular discipline, are the result of extrinsic and accidental determinations of  historically 10

See also ‘The Ethics of  the Concern of  the Self,’ p. 26.

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contingent power relations, Foucault preserves an irreducible possibility of  freedom by which a subject may strategically distance themselves from particular configurations of power. That concepts originate from historically contingent networks of power does not amount to an insistence that a transcendental gaze of  knowledge can be achieved with enough historical accuracy. Foucault is aware of  being locked within a particular historical horizon of which statements are acceptable within ‘a field of scientificity’ (Foucault, 1980: 197). In outlining the genealogical response to this situation, Foucault turns to alternative ways of using history, the first two of which are a parodic or farcical criticism of  history and a use of  history to dissociate identities. If  the artifacts of  history are (retro)actively (re)construed to support the relations of power which govern the discourse of  the status quo, ‘the genealogist will know what to make of  this masquerade. He will not be too serious to enjoy it; on the contrary, he will push the masquerade to its limit and prepare the great carnival of  time where masks are constantly reappearing … Genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival’ (Foucault, 1984: 94). The second strategic relation to history is the use of it for ‘the systematic dissociation of identity. This is necessary because this rather weak identity, which we attempt to support and to unify under a mask, is in itself only a parody’ (Foucault, 1984: 94). This analysis, albeit truncated, is already suf ficient to initiate a Foucauldian discussion of  the production of  Mickey B in Belfast’s Maghaberry prison. The performance does not attempt to access the content of  the Shakespearean play ‘in itself,’ but openly admits of  being an adaptation locked within a particular configuration of relations governing the actors’ discourse, as evidenced by the choice to abandon original setting in favor of  that of a prison and translate the original text into the vernacular of working-class Northerners. This method is a clear attempt to think – not outside of our current episteme, but – through to the limits of  the status quo’s configuration of power relations, challenging the normative roles of everyone from inmates (one of whom is the lead), to bookies (who play the role of  the witches), to the prison’s governor (who plays the role of  the English King). In this way, Mickey B has the capacity to engage in the sort of masquerade of  historical roles earlier advocated under the genealogical

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method, ref lecting on Macbeth – a play largely about the violent, constitutive crime which is concealed at power’s foundations – in a way which dissociates the discursive practices which govern our conception of  the prisoner generally and Northern Irish prisoner specifically. For example, the choice to translate the text into the vernacular of  Northern Ireland and setting of a vaguely Northern Irish prison is one which juxtaposes the inner-workings of  the highest political powers with the conf licts of  the lowest of deviant society, thereby calling into question the foundations for the power relations which govern the status quo while granting a cultural legitimacy to the imprisoned. Moreover, the choice to translate the play’s conf lict between the English and Scottish into the conf lict of  the two wings of  the prison is another instance of using the determinations of particular social roles to dissect one another, af fording space for people to rethink their individual identity. The prisoners displace the overarching national narrative of  the Northern Irish conf lict from one of ethno-national identity to spatially, temporally contingent identities. Importantly, these prisoners reject the paramilitary prisoner’s use of ethno-national and religious identity within the prison to determine which wing to house in, and instead perform an identity predicated upon the geography of prison wings in and of  themselves. The prisoners give the wings meanings that are not predetermined such as they are in the political prisoner narrative. This is a specific articulation of a larger process at work in acting which requires a minimal dissociation from one’s own subject position and identification with another perspective, thereby af fording unique opportunities for ref lection which are conducive to empathy. The act of distancing oneself  from one’s social role is one of  the most fundamental expressions of  the subject’s irreducible freedom. In addition to asking viewers and participants alike to reconsider their notion of prisoners as violent and uncultured, Mickey B also has the ability to challenge the gender binary which opposes the machismo of a prison to the femininity of  theatre. Although this applies broadly to the play as a whole, the clearest site for its expression is the role of  Ladyboy, a transvestite take on Lady Macbeth, who carefully manipulates her husband behind the scenes of  his public life. In clarifying her performative theory of gender, Judith Butler explains ‘to claim that all gender is like drag … is to suggest

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that “imitation” is at the heart of  the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated ef fort to imitate its own idealizations’ (Butler, 1993: 125). This is also applicable to other normative definitions of  the subject which try to pass themselves of f as essential, concealing the way they are actively produced by networks of power which govern our discourse. Similar to the way Butler claims all gender is drag, we may then claim all normative functions of  the subject are mere roles to be acted. Far from being mere theoretical abstraction, this Foucauldian reading of  Mickey B reveals the possibilities for resistance opened up by the production, the most fundamental expression of which is an irreducible sense of self-authorship. In light of  these readings, a few observations should be made. First, prisoners have used Mickey B to not only resist the institution of  the prison proper, but moreover to resist the dominating discourse of the paramilitary prisoner as the primary site of resistance. These prisoners reclaim a power for the ODC that is distinctly opposed to narratives that celebrate paramilitary prisoner resistance. The discursive class that articulates crime as such is not solely the state, but is also the political prisoners who rhetorically detest the criminals whom they reject a community with. In this way, the political prisoner ironically reifies Thatcher’s discourse regarding criminals as ‘our most damaged’ because even a fellow prisoner, albeit acting under the auspices of political action, articulates the ODCs act as non-political, despite the fact that texts of all forms consistently tell the ODCs that they access a similar history and context (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, 2009: 110). The prisoners bring to light the dual-delinquency narrative that paints them not only as delinquents within society but delinquents within the prison regime because their reason for crime is ostensibly non-political. Second, the prisoners use their own vernacular not only to reclaim power from the marked political prisoner, but also to reclaim the celebrated Shakespearean language of a manageable national conf lict in the form of  Scotland for the unmanageability of  the Northern Irish conf lict. Though Scotland has significant divisions – it is currently governed by a party that consistently calls for the secession of  Scotland from the United Kingdom – they remain outside of  the media discourse that paints rebellion in the

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North, both against the State and against those who oppose the State, as unmanageable and undesirable. Scottish rebellion is broadly understood as a cultural marker of manageable masculinity, rather than the excessive and chaotic violence of  Northern Ireland, because the movement for Scottish separation has remained primarily linguistic and safely within the confines of  the ‘political sphere’ of democracy. Separatists are understood as masculine/rebels rather than the feminine/colonised people, while at the same time not making that rebellion too inconvenient for the colonial power or the apathetic or unionist Scottish citizens. As ef forts to rehabilitate Northern Irish society focus on bringing Protestant and Catholic, Republican and Loyalist, together, these prisoners instead call for attention to those who have been silenced by this society without the silencing being predicated upon religious dif ference. In this way, the prisoners argue not for the clear, neat Scottish ending of convenient divide as is seen at the end of  Macbeth, but instead call for a carnivalesque reading that recognises that unmanageable masculinity that is controlled through national reconciliation discourses is not enough to make a neat, happy ending for Northern Irish society.11 Third, by coming ‘onto the set high on drugs’ (Magill and MarquisMuradaz, 2009: 111) and rejecting an entirely ‘drama therapy model’ (Wray, 2011: 1), the prisoners also disrupt the charity narrative of  those committed to enabling ‘non-conforming life prisoners to act out and understand the implications of  their crimes’ (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, 2009: 113). The prisoners distance themselves not only from their roles within the show proper, but also from the roles ESC and the prison system create

11

Some Republican groups, including Éirígi, are focusing on bringing together individuals on the basis of socio-economic oppression, rather than on religious dif ference. These ef forts are slow to take because individuals in socio-economically oppressed areas have been conditioned around non-class identity markers such as religious division that lead to a denial of  the similarities of other forms of oppression. This mirrors ef forts by third wave feminists to acknowledge similarity between women with overlapping oppressions that continue to work against each other along racial, class and gender dif ferences rather than working to form coalitions along the basis of perceived sex.

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for them. ESC sets itself up as working against the prison regime through their creative investment in rehabilitation and their desire to get the prisoners to alter their self-talk so that they won’t engage in recidivism. The director emphasises that he ‘[felt] compelled to try and reduce the level of recidivism in our prisons. If we can reduce it by one person, that means one less victim’ (Acharya, 2010). The assumption of  this discourse is that society’s rules are reasonable and a prisoner who has the ability to discover the ‘wrongness’ of  their crime will be able to move within the social system in a more productive way. Magill and Marquis-Muradaz hope that ‘empowering violent criminals to transform and heal themselves will hopefully reduce recidivism and consequently, the number of victims’ (2009: 115). The ESC narrative relies upon a repentant individual who is willing to perform acceptance of  the label ‘violent criminal’ from individuals who claim to reject such normative impositions. These prisoners meet the expectation of a grateful, emotionally changed prisoner while on camera only to disrupt this role of f-camera by way of continued delinquency. Indeed, several of  the actor-inmates reof fended after their release and ended up back in jail, including ‘one important cast-member [who] failed to return to prison after being sent home on compassionate leave’ (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, 2009: 111). The crime committed against the production was by the media, according to Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, insofar as ‘the horrific details of  his original crime were all over the press and the prison took an embarrassing public beating’ (2009: 111). They fail to explain that the prisoner was jailed for attacking a man who was sleeping in his home with a hammer in an ef fort to get his car keys. They fail to take the prisoner’s crime at face value and in so doing silence the prisoner as ef fectively as other disciplinary power structures. Instead, viewers are expected to understand the limits of dramatherapy, and appreciate the hard work of  ESC, in the face of  this personal slight. We are conditioned to understand that any good citizen would appreciate the two months of investment by the cast and crew, making them return to the prison filled with a sense of gratitude. We are asked to read this as a tragic, rather than a queer, response to the social need for a happy resolution to every narrative. ESC would like the prisoners to ‘come to terms with their crimes, in order to make the internal journey from understanding to

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acceptance and forgiveness that is necessary for them to move on’ (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, 2009: 113). The ESC narrative is predicated upon the prisoners playing their part in the broader prison narrative in which ‘authoritarianism breeds dependence and resistance that frequently end in destruction’ (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, 2009: 110). They believe ‘telling through fiction, through the mask of a character is a step towards addressing the motivations and implications of  their crime’ (Magill and MarquisMuradaz, 2009: 114). Instead, the prisoners resist the prison regime and the therapeutic narrative that ultimately reifies the normative archetypes which it produces. The prisoners perform behind the bars of  the prison only until the moment when the doors are opened. This queered response is found furthermore in the prisoner who insists ‘I’m straight. Let’s get that down just in case. We’re in gaol. People have dodgy thoughts these days’ (Category A Mickey B, 2009, as quoted in Wray, 2011: 12). The assertion of  heterosexuality within the feminised theatre project rejects ESC’s expectation that the prisoners will be more ‘open-minded’ after this production. When confronted with a cross-dressing prisoner, the other prisoners maintain masculinity insofar as they work toward socioeconomic success and social status via fame in the film medium, despite the fact that a primary fear of  the security department was that ESC was ‘grouping the “bad boys” together and rewarding them by making them into movie stars’ (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz, 2009: 109). Capitalism is inherently patriarchal insofar as economic success is viewed as both good and masculine while simultaneously granting men greater access to economic success. In this film, gender and sex binaries constantly turn back on themselves. It is not that a cross-dresser is interesting and revolutionary because it necessarily indicates an awareness of alternative sexualities. This performance turns back on itself and becomes a heteronormative expression once disgust at the ‘real’ performance of drag is expressed.12 The prisoner articulates a normative identity within the carnival of  theatrical,

12

Wray’s reading of  Ladyboy’s gender performance and its implication for the prisoners outside of  the ESC narratives is highly recommended.

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queer sexuality that reifies resistance even to those performances of  therapy imposed by the charitable power structure of  ESC. Ultimately, these prisoners are in the process of making and remaking their subjectivity constantly. They react to and act upon the various discourses of power that intersect with their bodies, from gender expectations to political prisoner fetishisation, and therapeutic charity narratives of prison regimes. The prisoners reshape the broader national narrative of  Northern Ireland and question whether there can ever be such a neat, Scottish ending to the ‘Troubles’ in the broadest sense. The resistance of  these prisoners does not fit conveniently into a narrative of reform, either of  their subjectivity or the prison regime, but instead parodies that subjectivity through the masquerade of  layered roles. As a result, the prisoners’ performance moves away from a binary existence of good-bad, prisonercitizen, giver-receiver, straight-gay, Catholic-Protestant, Good Nation-Bad Nation, to a layered, multiple existence that asks individuals, imprisoned or otherwise, to re-conceive of  their strategies of resistance.

References Acharya, K. (2010), ‘Mickey B shot at Maghaberry’, Culture Northern Ireland, 12 October. , accessed 17 May 2011. BBC News (2009), ‘Jailhouse blues for prison service’, 9 June. , accessed 17 May 2011. Butler, J. (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of  Sex, Routledge, New York. ESC (2011), ‘Buy Mickey B DVD’. , accessed 17 May 2011. Foucault, M. (1980), ‘Power/Knowledge’, in Gordon, C. (ed), Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, Pantheon, New York. Foucault, M. (1984), ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in Rabinow, P. (ed), The Foucault Reader, Pantheon, New York, pp. 76–100.

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Foucault, M. (1995), Discipline and Punish: the Birth of  the Prison, trans. by A. Sheridan, Vintage, New York. Foucault, M. (2003), ‘The Ethics of  the concern of  the self as a practice of  freedom’, in Rabinow, P. and Rose, N. (eds), The Essential Foucault, The New Press, New York, pp. 1–54. Magill, T. and Marquis-Muradaz, J. (2009), ‘The making of  Mickey B, a modern adaptation of  Macbeth filmed in a maximum security prison in Northern Ireland’, in Jennings, S. (ed), Dramatherapy and Social Theatre: Necessary Dialogues, Routledge, New York, pp. 109–16. McDonald, H. (2009). ‘Northern Ireland prison boss quits over “dissident threats”: Steve Rodford leaves Maghaberry prison after personal details allegedly found in cell holding Irish republican inmate’, Guardian, 7 December. , accessed 17 May 2011. McDowell, L. (2006). ‘In an amazing letter to the Telegraph, Michael Stone reveals his plan for murder at Stormont’, Belfast Telegraph, 29 November. , accessed 17 May 2011. Wray, R. (2011), ‘The Morals of  Macbeth and Peace as Process: Adapting Shakespeare in Northern Ireland’s Maximum Security Prison’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Fall (1–2), pp. 1–19.

STEFANIE LEHNER AND CILLIAN MCGRATTAN

The Confidence Game: Rebranding Irish and Scottish Cultures

In a revealing intervention in the debate over Scottish devolution, the former Conservative Prime Minister (and close ally of  the current Conservative Prime Minister), John Major, stated that the implications of recent political developments must be tackled ‘head-on’. Addressing the landslide victory of  the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the May 2011 Scottish Parliamentary elections, Major claimed that ‘[e]ach year of devolution has moved Scotland further from England. Scottish ambition is fraying English tolerance. This is a tie that will snap – unless the issue is resolved’ (Robinson, 2011). For the political commentator Gerry Hassan, Major’s speech was further evidence of  the strategy of  the Conservative establishment (which he considers to include the usual suspects of  The Daily Mail, The Spectator, The Economist, among others) to reframe the debate in terms of  the politics of constitutionalism. Hassan claimed that ‘[t]he Tories are going to do everything they can to retain Scotland in the union, drawing on their adaptive, f lexible unionist tradition, and do so in a way which maintains the status quo and current deformed nature of  the central British state’ (Hassan, 2011a). Yet, it was the conscious avoidance of  the nationalistic debate over the Union as much as the Labour Party’s relentless negative campaigning that, in some commentators’ eyes, was instrumental in securing that SNP triumph (Carrell, 2011a; Hassan 2011b). Instead, the very idea of  ‘Scottishness’ was painted in a new language of cultural confidence and diversity. ‘Scotland is on a journey’, announced the SNP’s election manifesto, ‘and the path ahead is a bright one. Now is a time for Scotland to keep moving forward’ (SNP, 2011). Furthermore, the appeal to, and construction of, cultural distinctiveness – if not uniqueness

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– is cleverly used by the SNP to forge the goal of independence almost as an inevitability. As Neal Ascherson points out: The 40-page SNP manifesto is a gaudy encyclopedia of visions, promises and relentless optimism … But Salmond’s plans for Scotland’s recovery and progress – full taxation powers for Holyrood, control of immigration, rights to at least some oil and gas revenue, a Scottish voice in the European Union – could be brought up short by the limits of devolution and of  the Union itself. And then – making the large assumption that Salmond’s grand programme was already showing results – independence could come to seem practical, necessary, even a way of keeping Scotland on a course already chosen. Getting the Scots to that point of view within five years appears improbable. But so did the scale of  the election victory. (2011: 8)

Hence, the SNP-promoted notion of  Scotland as a distinct cultural entity provides the cultural rationale for political independence: political autonomy and sovereignty is presented as the logical and necessary outcome for ratifying what has already taken place in cultural terms. Stripped of  the rhetorical f lourishes that cloak the independence option, the SNP’s project is actually little more than a reheated version of its long-standing progressivist, nationalistic project. In a similar, if arguably more crude fashion, elite political discourse in the Republic of  Ireland has sought to harness ideas of cultural self-assurance and pluralism to undercut pressing issues of institutional, political, social and economic reform. For example, introducing Barack Obama to the crowds in Dublin’s city centre on the occasion of  the President’s state visit in May 2011, the recently elected Fine Gael Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, celebrated Ireland’s ‘unique, untouchable wealth’: Wealth that can never be accumulated in banks, or measured by the markets or traded on the stock exchange. Because it remains intact and alive … deep inside our people. In the heart-stopping beauty of our country. In the transforming currency of  the Irish heart, imagination and soul. (Kenny, 2011)

Kenny is literally correct: given the size of  Irish state debt, it will be down to Irish workers to pay it of f  for generations to come (Kinsella, 2011). The linguistic dexterity at the heart of  Kenny’s bombast is twofold. Firstly, it is evident in the sleight of  hand that writes out the inheritors of  Irish debt

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at the same time as it emphasises the country’s cultural wealth. Secondly, by unwittingly admitting that the beauty of  the country and its cultural inheritance are naturally the only wealth that is left since the banking collapse, Kenny reveals himself as symptomatic of  the moral decline of  the Irish state in which responsibility is evaded in a smokescreen of nationalistic handwringing or xenophobic attacks on the ‘Brits’, the EU, France, and Germany (or a combination of all). This tendency is, however, not limited to fringe nationalists but extends to business leaders and economists (see, for example, McConnell, 2011). By comparing recent political developments in Ireland and Scotland, this chapter suggests that a fundamental rebranding is taking place as a direct response to economic circumstances, which harnesses culture for political ends. Borrowing the language of post-nationalism and postmodernism and thus bearing all the hallmarks of pluralism, diversity and multiculturalism, the recent reinvention of  ‘Scottishness’ and ‘Irishness’ ef fectively works to suspend all other questions of identity and belonging, whether they are filtered through the categories of class, gender, age, ethnicity, and locale. It should also be noted that this rebranding also plays into the hands of  the ‘Tories’ whose ‘Big Society’ proceeds from the foundational intellectual insight that the new age of austerity depends on everyone pulling together, regardless of economic status. In this way, the economic dimension, which we regard as including questions of class and social responsibility, is tamed and put to use for what are essentially middle-class and nationalistic ideas of  ‘community’, ‘nation’ and ‘society’. As we point out, this is only partially successful simply because the ef fort put into taming and harnessing class and social justice merely awakens suspicion in the motivation of  those doing the harnessing, together with the import of  their ideas. Of course, the intervention of politicians and their supporters in the realm of culture and the attempts to rebrand national identity are not completely new phenomena in either Scotland or Ireland. Prior to the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary Election, the long-time supporter of the SNP and all things Scottish-nationalist, Sir Sean Connery, sought to rouse his compatriots through an af fectionate ref lection on the role of culture in Scottish life along with a call to arms:

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Sadly, for the SNP at least, Connery was correct. The ‘opportunity’ he envisioned was stillborn: overtaken by the global economic collapse in 2008, the SNP’s new Scotland faces a future of  Tory-imposed cuts. Our argument is twofold: firstly, what is new in the project of national rebranding is the attempt to use the language of cultural renaissance to write-out the new social, political and economic reality. Secondly, in this project, culture is being harnessed as a harbinger of a new, post-nationalist age. In other words, culture is used to rewrite the traditional idea of a kernel of  Irishness and/or Scottishness as being simply not-English (or, even more pertinently, not-Tory). In place of  these traditional imaginaries a ‘new’ vision of  Irish and Scottish ‘uniqueness’ is being enshrined in the political discourse in both countries. So if  Ireland was conceived as the first postcolonial country (and, for some, also the last to be decolonised) (see, for example, Kiberd, 1996; Deane, 1990; Lloyd, 1993; see also Howe, 2000, for an alternative interpretation), it is now seen as a harbinger of a postmodern/ post-nationalist age: Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, for instance, considers the ‘entire history of  Anglo-Irish literature … as a perennial site of  the postmodern’ (2006: 6). Similarly, Scotland was formerly presented by critics such as Robert Crawford as both inspiration for postcolonial writing and also as the very origin of  the colonial cultural hegemony which it had to resist – namely, as the title of  Crawford’s 1998 book suggests, the ‘inventor’ of  English Literature (Crawford 1998; Craig 2004: 238). More recently, it has been reconsidered as a precursor of what is now considered as the postmodern conception of identity (McCrone, 2001: 152). The paradoxical content of  the repainting of  Scottishness as newly exceptional helps to bring together ostensibly distinctive critical visions just as it creates a congruence of cultural visions among what are ostensibly contradictory political forces in the Irish Republic. For example, it lies at the heart of  the protests against the Queen’s visit to the Republic by Sinn Féin president, Gerry Adams, the erstwhile ideological opponent of  Fine

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Gael. Adams argued that the visit contravened the principles of  the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. That agreement, he stated, provided the ‘foundation upon which new relationships can be forged’ – a process that would entail, he said, a reassertion of  Irish sovereignty and independence and a reshaping of political identities: The new Ireland must embrace our island’s diversity in its fullest sense. This includes English and Scottish inf luences, the sense of  Britishness felt by many unionists, as well as indigenous and traditional Irish culture and the cultures of people who have come to Ireland in recent times. (Adams, 2011)

Thus, it is the politics of inclusivity, of identity-as-plurality, of sovereigntyas-diversity that are to be upheld and extolled. Culture(s) are, in this vision, still utilitarian and to be placed at the service of nation-building. What is taking place essentially is that the economic is being displaced in favour of  the identitarian. In other words, issues that underline the economic aspect of  life, such as class and social responsibility, are sidelined and/or subsumed within questions of identity politics. While the subjugation of  the historical realm to political concerns is a widespread and prevalent practice in which the mores and lessons learned by one generation or governing cohort are written onto other classes or generations (McGrattan, 2011), the subjugation of culture to political imperatives often involves what Colin Graham has in other circumstances described as an ‘aestheticisation of national achievement’ (2001: 88). The SNP’s recent electoral campaign epitomised this process by recruiting prominent cultural figures to promote a confident Scottishness (Kane, 2011). Through a special SNP YouTube channel, actor Alan Cumming and artist Jack Vettriano declared their endorsement of  the SNP and its causes,1 while Scottish literati, such as novelist and painter Alasdair Gray – after a brief defection to the Liberal Democrats – as well as national poet Edwin Morgan, who left the SNP £1m in his will, and Liz Lochhead, the

1

See and , accessed 10 June 2011.

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newly appointed Scots Makar in succession to Morgan, reaf firmed their longstanding support (Carrell, 2011b). Such an artistic vanguard seems indeed intended to secure not only political but also cultural hegemony for the SNP, as Pat Kane (2011: n.p.) suggests in an article in The Guardian’s ‘G2’ supplement on Scottish independence. For this strategy of constructing Scotland’s cultural icons as the figureheads of a neo-nationalist movement aims not only to detoxify ‘the Nationalist brand’ but, more importantly, to turn a vote for them into ‘an expression of confidence in, and optimism about, Scotland’s prospects’ (Kane, 2011). This tactic resonates in the ways in which Scottish culture – specifically literature – has been forged as the expression (and stronghold) of a resurgent nationalism following the 1979 devolution debacle. In an example that is typical of  this sentiment, Christopher Whyte asserts: ‘In the absence of an elected political authority, the task of representing the nation has been repeatedly devolved to its writers’ (1998: 284). However, it was previously Scotland’s ‘democratic deficit’ and lack of political power that was considered to be both a reason and an inspiration for Scottish literature’s role in disseminating and sustaining confidence in the Scottish nation, as, for instance, is apparent in Douglas Gif ford comments in his contribution to The Edinburgh History of  Scottish Literature: It is tempting to see this change in confidence as somehow related to the 1979 Devolution referendum and the growing assertion of  Scottish identity and its varieties that emerged almost in defiance of  that quasi-democratic debacle. With this new confidence, Scottish fiction approached the millennium as a standard bearer for Scottish culture … (2007: 237)

Initially, it was hoped by many critics that the reconstitution of a Scottish Parliament would free Scottish writing of  that representational burden towards its imagined community, to allow it ‘at last … to be a literature first and foremost, rather than the expression of a nationalist movement’ (Whyte, 1998: 284). This sentiment was, for example, echoed by Catherine Lockerbie, director of  the Edinburgh Book Festival, who stated that ‘now that devolution has been achieved, people don’t have to prove they are Scottish writers anymore’, and adds that it will also absolve authors of  the

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obligation ‘to write those quasi-political novels’ (cited in Massie, 2002: 1). Equally, where critic Alex Massie acknowledges that the ‘rebirth’ of  the Scottish Parliament has actually been for many a disappointment, he considered that it will ultimately ‘prove a blessing for literature in this country since it may free novelists from overtly political writing. Devolution, so banal in other ways, may perversely liberate the imagination’ (2002: 2). This reduction of  the political to the national ref lects and prefigures the shift that we earlier identified as the appropriation by the national of  the cultural realm. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that Scottish writers have often addressed a more complex matrix of concerns that transgress an exclusively national question, while also challenging such nationalistic limitations (Lehner, 2011). Notably, very similar opinions have been expressed in terms of  Irish writing where Ireland’s new status and role in the twenty-first century elicited numerous self-referential encomiums and eulogies. For instance, Colm Tóibín celebrates in his preface to The Penguin Book of  Irish Fiction the fact that recent Irish (women’s) writing has proven itself as ‘post-Freudian, post-feminist and, of course (three cheers!), post-nationalist’ (1999: xxxiii). Such praise depends on a shift in analytical lens and in Ireland’s prof fered status from being post-colonial to post-national. As Eve Patten argued, ‘the fiction of  the contemporary period is better categorised as post-national than as post-colonial’ (2006: 259). In other words, for Patten’s analysis to be maintained in any kind of way a re-periodisation must be assumed whereby the ‘contemporary’ is implicitly defined in terms of the Celtic Tiger period and projected onto literature. Just as the Scottish critics discussed above define the contemporary in terms of devolution, the import of  this strategy is to subsume questions of class, gender and marginality within mainstream nationalistic discourse(s) and understandings. This anticipation of a post-nationalist state was pioneered by the Irish critic and philosopher, Richard Kearney, who galvanises the linkage with post-modernism. Kearney, for example, directly references post-modernist ideas about the decentralisation of power:

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STEFANIE LEHNER AND CILLIAN MCGRATTAN It has been suggested that postmodern theory can have radical implications for politics … The postmodern theory of power puts the ‘modern’ concept of  the nationstate in question. It points towards a decentralising and dissemination of sovereignty which, in the European context, at least, signals the possibility of new configurations of  federal-regional government. (1997: 61)

For Kearney, this has occurred in post-1998 Ireland, in which ancient antagonisms are laid to rest under the mantle of  the European Union. This is essentially a teleological and tautological vision that supports and promotes a postmodern morality. For in this vision, adolescent nationalistic emotions are exorcised and the 1998 Agreement is simply an of fshoot of  the EU enlargement process, with all its grown-up promises of peaceful co-existence, tolerance and plurality: as Kearney explains ‘both sovereign governments signed away their exclusivist sovereignty claims over Northern Ireland – and came of age’ (2000: 21). For Kearney, as for Scottish critics, the contemporary is constituted by a postmodern version of nationalism. As Colin Graham has pointed out, post-nationalism is part of  the same teleology and discourse as the traditional nationalistic, self-determination and state-building project. He explains, ‘[p]ost-nationalism evolves from rather than rejects the nation; but its dependency on the maintenance of  the conceptual value of  the nation goes unrecognised’ (2001: 98). In this regard, the ‘new’ multiculturalism of post-devolution Scotland and post-Celtic Tiger Ireland can be seen as regurgitating and, at the same time, revitalising the ‘old’ nationalistic tropes of dif ference, cultural uniqueness and parochial egoism. The Irish Times’ cultural commentator, Mick Heaney, for example, recently questioned the proposals by the Minister for Arts in the Irish Republic to convert the site of  the Bank of  Ireland at College Green in the centre of  Dublin into a ‘cultural space’. For Heaney, the attractiveness of culture for solving the nation’s economic woes is clear: Supposedly untainted by the avarice of  the boom years, the arts are now seen as one of  the country’s few remaining valuable assets. If  harnessed properly, the theory goes, the country’s inherent artistic richness will aid recovery, projecting positivity, inviting tourism and even, outlandishly, spurring growth in so-called ‘creative industries’ such as software. (2011: 16)

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Heaney’s assessment that the commodification of culture has at best ‘added a patina of cultural respectability for a population that continued to delude itself  that it was living in a prosperous nation’ is compelling (ibid). Furthermore, it resonates with the re-periodisation of culture and the contemporary in ushering in a new (post-nationalist) age that is also apparent in studies of  Northern Irish literature. Ref lecting the self-congratulatory verbiage of  the consociational victors of  the peace process (as distinct from the self-exculpatory verbiage of  the perpetrators of  the violence), this vision depicts Northern Ireland in solidly post-modern terms (Kelly, 2005). Seemingly unaware of  the moral vacuity involved in that depiction, Laura Pelaschiar, for instance, rejoices in Northern Ireland’s new era. Believing (or claiming) that Northern Ireland’s postmodernity seems to have become almost a necessity for the ‘redemption and rediscovery of  the Northern capital and of its spirit’, she describes ‘a post-modern [Belfast] as the only space where it is possible to build and articulate a (post)national conscience, the only location for any possible encyclopaedic, multivoiced and multi-ethnic development of  Northern society’ (2000: 117). Here the ideological tendency of postmodernism to proclaim itself as the end of  history and meta-narratives is reproduced, unthinkingly, and its thrust as a hegemonic and totalising force is vouchsafed. Where the victims of  terrorist or state-sponsored violence feature in this redemptive, reconciled utopia is never mentioned. Indeed, to paraphrase Adorno, when in the house of murderers – or when singing the praises of a peaceful postnational Northern Ireland – it is unseemly to mention the fact that ethnic entrepreneurs and, increasingly, terrorist gunmen and gunwomen sit at the heart of government.2 This (re)periodisation is not simply academic or historical. Insofar as it obscures resilient and deepening structural inequalities, the very act of periodising a post-national Scotland or Ireland implies a deferral; and one that that involves unsettling ethical implications. That these have become blatant since 2008 reveals the inadequacy of  the hitherto existing and

2

‘In the house of  the hangman one should not speak of  the noose, otherwise one might seem to harbour resentment’ (Adorno, 2003: 3).

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mainstream critical framework deployed in the three state-formations across the Irish Sea. In this framework, the post-national is almost unconsciously linked to the ‘contemporary’ and applied to literary and cultural analysis without regard to historical inequities, in much the same way as the postmodern ideology proclaims its victory over class-based struggles (and all other ideologies). The pluralistic, multi-vocal inclusivity of  these ideologies is deceptive. And it is in that very deception that the moral malaise and malignancy lies. For, in alignment with Graham’s critique, what the post-national impulse does is to usher back in an age of surreptitious nationalism. In the post-2008 world, this nationalism is fundamentally conservative and bourgeois. Indeed, as Aaron Kelly has pointed out, the seeds of  this middle-class conservatism were always present within the post-nationalist ideological project: post-nationalism pursues the final repression of class in its discourse of cultural dif ference, its normative society of dif ferentiated individuals. Therein, class antagonism is rewritten as cultural diversity, a revalued sign of the post-nation’s healthy polyphony, so that, divested of its own terms and context, the language of class becomes simply one register amongst others of a cultural relativism that rewords bourgeois hegemony as social pluralism. (2007: 258)

As we have discussed above, the ploy of a pluralistic rewording is evident in Scottish cultural criticism, where the resort to devolution on the one hand, and the ideas of a ‘nationalist movement’ on the other, while seeming to critique (and/or bolster) the SNP’s bid for culture hegemony, become inappropriate for the current dispensation. Indeed, read in a post-2008 context, simplistic ideas about wrapping devolution, nationalist emergence and political hegemony in cultural terms reproduce rather than undercut the SNP’s project. Not only are such analyses out-dated, but their argumentative structure and the import of  their logic are redundant: in the same movement in which they prioritise the cultural/aesthetic, such modes of analysis also defer the economic. Secondly, such arguments have already been undercut by the SNP’s own rhetoric. For example, in a 2004 pamphlet written by Kenny MacAskill (then an SNP leadership hopeful and current Cabinet Secretary for Justice), the party identified (admittedly, somewhat belatedly) the demands of

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what Robert Cooper has called ‘the post-modern state’ (Cooper, 2002). Addressing the apparently contradictory demands of  ‘Independence in an Interdependent World’, MacAskill states that since ‘a competitive economy is essential’, Scotland’s nationalist camp should unambiguously promote ‘Devolution, Globalisation, and a New World Order’, as his chapter title proclaims (MacAskill, 2004: 16, 27). The ‘order’ of  the day therefore is not only nationalism, but a purported post-nationalism: an aesthetic that is saturated with political import. Analyses that miss that economic dimension simply play into the hands of what is a tried-and-tested strategy of nationalistic entrepreneurs. The problem is that the kind of cultural analysis that forsakes the economic in favour of  the identitarian risks taking the claims of  those entrepreneurs at face value. Essentially, it misses the fact that the assertion of multiculturalism, interdependence and pluralism by nationalists in Scotland and Ireland is also an af firmation of end goals of self-suf ficiency, independence and self-determination. It is this Janus-faced, chameleon-like quality of nationalism that enables it to secure hegemony through what the Marxist critic Antonio Gramsci called ‘transformism’: a process wherein popular discourses and sectional interests are appropriated and absorbed and then rewritten in the language of  the dominant classes (Gramsci, 1971: 58–60). Hence, through the language of pluralism and multiculturalism, the demand for universal equality becomes rewritten as inclusiveness; an inclusion which entails the assimilation and containment of various identity struggles and forms of otherness within the hegemonic norms of  the bourgeoisie that pertain, as Wendy Brown points out, ‘to the white masculine middle-class ideal’ (1995: 61). That the transformative energies of (post-)nationalism retain their power is apparent in the way that they have turned cultural critics and erstwhile analysts of state power into parodic versions of  Gramscian organic intellectuals. Styling themselves as part of an anti-establishment vanguard that is disruptive of  the prevailing order (Gramsci, 1971: 5–9), the travesty of  their role lies in their unarticulated reinforcing of  that order. Thus, just as with the post-nationalistic drive of  Scottish critics, so too is Pelaschiar’s mode of analysis serviceable to the nationalistic imperatives of state-building. Whereas in Scotland, these imperatives are defined

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largely by a centre-ground that has been vacated by Labour and left to the SNP and its aficionados, in Northern Ireland it resides in the ethnic tribune parties of  the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin. In the Irish Republic, the essentially conservative outlook falls under the auspices and guardianship of  the representatives of  the urban and rural bourgeoisie (with the urban-based, ultra-nationalists of  Sinn Féin waiting in the wings) (Coulter, 2011).3 Accounting for context, the result is similar in each case: the prioritisation of progress and state-, nation-, and party-building and a subsequent marginalisation of class politics in Edinburgh and Dublin as well as a (re)marginalisation of victims’ voices in Belfast. The role of such critics is to lend an appearance of democratic legitimacy to these projects: critical voices who, through (at the very least) dint of over-exuberance, end by buttressing that which they purport to critique. What does this all mean for culture and politics? Hegemonies may not necessarily be a bad thing – certainly not for those who profit. The key point is that despite the benefits that accrue to political and cultural elites, hegemonies are never complete. As we discussed above, its very claims to f luidity and incompleteness belie its absorptive and totalising qualities and its encompassing desire. In other words, the post-national agenda is haunted from without and within. For what the post-nationalist vision seeks to exorcise is the economic. The various forms that exorcism takes – writing-out, repression, bad faith – are unsustainable in the long run. Certainly, the particular deferral that is involved in the post-national – namely, the economic and the associated and intertwined questions of class and social responsibility – is no longer tenable, and has been revealed in its ugly glory since the banking collapse of 2008. So just as Sean Connery’s 3

Of course, since Sinn Féin is not presently a party of government in the Republic it remains to be seen whether its emphasis on grassroots activism may turn into a populist right wing approach similar to Fianna Fáil, or a radical left of centre critique of  the nationalistic ideology that provides the framework for the state. Its previous track record in attempting to ‘out-green’ its rivals – with its continued emphasis on commemorating Irish Republican Army volunteers (or paramilitaries), along with its tokenistic protests at Conservative-driven cuts in the North – do little to convince us as to its leftist credentials.

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dream of a resurgent, prosperous Scotland f loundered on the rocks of economic upheaval, the Ireland of  Enda Kenny and, in albeit a dif ferent way, Gerry Adams (both in his previous roles North of  the border and his present incarnation as a member of  the Irish Dáil), is haunted by the ghosts of  the ‘Celtic Tiger’. What has been notable is how the responses to the banking collapse have been ref lected in new forms of exorcism in both Scotland and Ireland. These responses make present that absence within post-nationalism. The lack of social consciousness and responsibility, the simultaneous absorption and muting of class and related inequalities that sustain the post-national have become more and more visible and urgent. The attempt to fill the hollow moral centre has, unsurprisingly, been filtered and managed by the proponents of post-nationalism donning a moralistic attire. On the one hand, in Scotland, a nationalist party is voted in on the basis that it is left-wing but not Labour; in Ireland, on the other hand, a middle-class coalition has taken of fice with a promise of  ‘Let’s Get Ireland Working’ (Fine Gael, 2011). In Scotland, this exorcism is evidenced in the claim of a new and culturally confident Scotland. According to Alex Salmond, for example, the SNP’s victory illustrated the fact that ‘Scotland had shown faith in itself ’. As political commentator Libby Brooks remarks: ‘It was a vote not for imminent separation but for a [new] cultural understanding of independence more nuanced than the fantasy politics of  the late 70s’ (2011). This includes not only a belief  but a pride in a new social agenda and progressive politics that have made Scotland the putative ‘land of milk and honey’ (Fraser and Cusick, 2001). As the biblical reference implies, the appropriation of culture for political purposes brings with it a moral agenda. The point is clarified in a January 2010 statement by the Minister for Culture, Fiona Hyslop. Extolling Scotland’s world-renowned ‘distinctive cultural life’, Hyslop claimed that I firmly believe that a Scotland with more control over its own af fairs – a Scotland more confident in itself – would see fresh creativity shine through as a result. In turn, a more confident nation leads to an even more creative one – a virtuous circle of increasing confidence and creativity. (Scottish Government, 2010)

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Thus, as devolution purportedly inspires not only cultural confidence but also artistic creativity, it demands individuals to follow suit. But political buoyancy gives way to moral imperatives: the underlying implication here is that the current creativity is not enough – for a fully independent nation, artists musts live up to their assigned role, and their reward for so doing is that they will in turn fully evolve. Culture and politics, intertwined and working together usher Scotland into the neo-political, postmodern global order; and, as Hyslop outlines, the rewards are there for all who are willing to recognise them: There is a hard edge to this, of course, as Scotland trades on the international recognition of its culture and heritage. It is a major attraction for visitors and showcases our country as a diverse and exciting place to live and work; so increased confidence and creativity can only be good for business. (Ibid.)

Unfortunately, the prospect of a ‘virtuous circle’ might mean that the moral centre itself is hollow or ringed-in and therefore cut of f  from public examination. While Scotland has been embracing a future of assurance and moral upstanding, the debate in Ireland has at least begun to explore what might lie at the heart of  that circle. Yet, similarly to Scotland, this debate is often limited by nationality. The trauma provoked by the banking collapse has led to a revival of national sentiment and a return to past glories. For example, the Irish Times columnist, John Waters, described the responses to the banking collapse as bearing all the features of a religious impulse. Just as ‘people tend to find religion when bad things happen’ according to Waters (2011), so too has the Irish body politic been ‘hankering after our nationalistic past’. One objection to the notion that a national reappraisal has begun is the idea that actually there is nothing new in all of  this: Irish and Scottish politics and culture have not only ‘hankered’ but have remained stuck in the past. Yet, this is to miss the point, for it is only by working with and through our past experiences that we can engage in the present and the future. The core of  the debate concerns how that engagement is taking place. Joe Cleary, for example, voiced disquiet on this issue at the height of  the Celtic Tiger years: ‘to date, very little Irish writing … can be said to

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have contemplated the vagaries and vicissitudes of  the new global order of which Ireland is a constituent part’ (2007: 12). More recently, the point was taken up and given spark in a coruscating reproach of contemporary Irish fiction by the Berlin-based Irish novelist, Julian Gough, who complained that Irish writers have Become a priestly caste, scribbling by candlelight, cut of f  from the electric current of  the culture … We’ve abolished the Catholic clergy, and replaced them with novelists. They wear black, they preach, they are concerned for our souls. Feck of f. (Flood, 2010)

Taking up the baton, the Irish Times cultural and political commentator Fintan O’Toole has alluded to the fact that this is essentially a moral issue. Specifically, O’Toole gestures towards the idea that the debate is about how society comes to view the trauma of national bankruptcy in ethical terms: It is certainly true that, for the most part, Irish writing (indeed Irish art as a whole) was not very good at ref lecting boom-time Ireland. It is also true that this has been a problem for the culture – a society without resonant images of its present self is prey to precisely the kind of self-delusion and false consciousness that had such disastrous consequences for our economy and society. (2010)

The point is, therefore, not simply to look to the past for lessons for contemporary (or future) life; rather, it lies in the act of  looking: who is doing the looking and why their vision is clearer or standpoint higher than others. What is at stake, then, is not simply the question of whether artists are engaging but rather how that engagement is taking place and how individuals in Scottish and Irish society are responding to that engagement. One notable recent example of  this refusal to indulge in nationalistic sentiment is addressed in James Kelman’s short story collection, If it is your life (2010). The character in ‘talking about my wife’ refuses to concede class politics to ‘the crowd’: They actually believe the Scottish Nationalists are a left-wing party, them and the Lib Dems. Honest! At the same but if ye want to vote socialist ye vote for the Labour Party. Unless ye’re an extremist. In that case ye vote for the Scottish Socialists! Honest, that’s what they think. Ye ever heard such crap! But they actually believe it. (2010: 30)

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The character addresses the lack of choice open to his own beliefs and, in growing despair, emphatically stumbles over the word ‘politics’, adding extra ‘p’s (‘pppolitical’) the longer he talks as if  to distance himself  from the apoliticised mode that marks the current discourse in Scotland and elsewhere. While culture may not be able to save the economy, in Kelman’s characters, it remains capable of giving voice to those who are rendered voiceless and choiceless by the all-encompassing catch-all-ism of  the new post-nationalist dispensation. In Kelman’s works, literature opens up a space to harness a critique and, thereby, to remain as critical of  Salmond as of  Cameron – or, for that matter, of  Enda Kenny and Gerry Adams. The style of politics that reduces culture to commodity is out of joint with this aesthetic vision. Indeed, in contrast to the pseudo-communalism of  Salmond’s nationalism, Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, and Kenny’s new Ireland, Kelman’s character remains ambiguous. Whereas that communalism depends on writing social responsibility out of everyday relationships, Kelman places it centre-screen with reference to Bruegel’s ‘Massacre of  the Innocents’. Yet, initially, his character collapses the painting with a (almost wilfully) mis-remembered mythical ‘village scene’ that plays into his escapist dreams of absconding to Ireland. However, the fact that this vision is, in reality, a phantasmagoric delusion, based on a post-nationalist displacement of  the brutality of socio-economic realities, is exposed as his wife reminds him of  the painting’s title, ‘the slaughter of  the innocents’ (as she calls it) (Kelman, 2010: 36). As we have argued, a similar ef facement of economic realities has taken place on both sides of  the Irish Sea, concealed by a rhetoric of optimism and cultural confidence. Yet, as with the character in Kelman’s story, that evasion is ephemeral: despite the circular logic of  the progressive nationalisms that we traced, which treats imagination as a political imperative, in the imagined ‘nations’ of  Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland the deferred realities of  the social and economic continue to haunt politics.

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Massie, A. (2002), ‘Sir Walter’s Scoterati’, The Review in Scotland on Sunday, 16 June: 1–2. McConnell, D. (2011), ‘We will default, so let’s get on with it’, Irish Independent, 5 June. , accessed 15 June 2011. McCrone, D. (2001), Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation, Second Edition, Routledge, London. McGrattan, C. (2010), Northern Ireland, 1968–2008: The Politics of  Entrenchment, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. McGrattan, C. (2011), ‘Spectres of  History: Nationalist Party Politics and Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland’, Political Studies 60.2: 455–73. O’Toole, F. (2010), ‘We live in the 19th century as well as the 21st’, The Irish Times, 6 March. , accessed 14 July 2011. Patten, Eve (2006), ‘Contemporary Irish Fiction’, in Wilson Foster, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to The Irish Novel, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 259–75. Pelaschiar, Laura (2000), ‘Transforming Belfast: The Evolving Role of  the City in Northern Irish Fiction’, Irish University Review 30.1, pp. 117–31. Scottish Government (2010), ‘Confidence in Scottish Culture’. , accessed 14 July 2011. SNP (2007), ‘Connery: It’s time for a new renaissance of cultural confidence’. , accessed 12 July 2011. SNP (2011), ‘Scottish National Party Manifesto 2011’. , accessed 12 July 2011. Waters, John (2010), ‘Maastricht rules were what really sunk us’, The Irish Times, 3 December. , accessed 12 July 2011. Whyte, C. (1998), ‘Masculinities in Contemporary Scottish Fiction’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 34.3, pp. 274–85.

Notes on Contributors

LAUREN CLARK graduated from the University of  Glasgow with an MA in French and English Literature in 2008. She completed her doctorate at the University of  Sunderland as part of  the Leverhulme Trust-funded Consumer Culture, Advertising and Literature 1848–1921 project. Her current research interests include Victorian Irish fiction, advertising, consumer studies and children’s writing and she maintains an interest in French, Scottish and cultural studies. She guest-edited the second edition of  the Journal of  Franco-Irish Studies and is currently co-editing a book of collected essays on Scottish and Irish studies with Colin Younger entitled Border Crossings: Narration, Nation and Imagination in Scots and Irish Literature and Culture. MARTYN COLEBROOK recently completed a PhD focusing on the novels of  Iain Banks in relation to British fiction after 1970. He has wider research interests in contemporary American literature, transgression and contemporary culture and apocalypse fictions. He has published a number of chapters on topics such as ‘J. G. Ballard and The Atrocity Exhibition’, ‘Paul Auster, The Music of  Chance and Alienation’, ‘The Gothic and Mental Disorder’, ‘Don DeLillo and Terrorism’, ‘Novelistic Representations of  the Yorkshire Ripper’ and ‘The Troubles Thriller and Contemporary Scottish Crime Fiction’. He has also organised a number of conferences focusing on topics such as ‘The Representation of 9/11 in Contemporary Narratives’, ‘Millennial Fictions’, ‘Jeanette Winterson’ and ‘Angela Carter’, and is currently organising a conference focusing on ‘Popular Fiction and Popular Revolt’. He is co-editing a collection of essays focusing on Iain Banks (forthcoming, 2012), and an edited collection focusing on Jeanette Winterson, and is a regular book reviewer for Critical Engagements and Literary London.

224

Notes on Contributors

STEFANIE LEHNER is Lecturer in Irish Literature at Queen’s University Belfast. She was previously Visiting Professor in Irish Studies at the University of  Vienna and Postdoctoral Fellow at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at University College Dublin. She has published in the areas of  both Scottish and Irish literary studies, and she is author of Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature: Tracing Counter-Histories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). WILLY MALEY is Professor of  Renaissance Studies at the University of  Glasgow. He is the author of  A Spenser Chronology (1994), Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997), Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2003), and Muriel Spark for Starters (2008). He is editor, with Andrew Hadfield, of  A View of  the Present State of  Ireland: From the First Published Edition (1997). He has also edited eight collections of essays: with Brendan Bradshaw and Andrew Hadfield, Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of  Conf lict, 1534–1660 (1993); with Bart Moore-Gilbert and Gareth Stanton, Postcolonial Criticism (1997); with David J. Baker, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002); with Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare and Scotland (2004); with Alex Benchimol, Spheres of Inf luence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas (2006); with Philip Schwyzer, Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (2010); with Michael Gardiner, The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark (2010); and with Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard (2010). CILLIAN MCGRATTAN is Lecturer in Politics and Cultural Studies at Swansea University. His books include Northern Ireland, 1968–2008: The Politics of  Entrenchment (2010); The Northern Ireland Conf lict: A Beginner’s Guide (2010, co-authored with Aaron Edwards); Everyday Life after the Conf lict: The Impact of  Devolution and North-South Cooperation (2012, co-edited with Elizabeth Meehan); and Memory, Politics and Identity: Haunted by History (2012).

Notes on Contributors

225

JAMES MOLLISON completed his undergraduate degree in Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. He is now pursuing a Masters in Philosophy from the same institution. DEIRDRE O’BYRNE lectures in the Department of  English and Drama at Loughborough University, specialising in contemporary Irish fiction. She is particularly interested in writings in the rural context, and focuses in her work on issues of gender, identity and class. She is Chair of  Nottingham Irish Studies Group. NIALL O’GALLAGHER is an Honorary Research Associate in Celtic and Gaelic at the University of  Glasgow, where he taught from 2004 to 2007 while writing his doctoral thesis on empire in the work of  Alasdair Gray. He is co-editor, with Michael Gardiner and Graeme Macdonald, of  Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature (2010) and, with Peter Mackay, of  Sùil air an t-Saoghal (2012), a collection of essays on international contexts for Scottish Gaelic writing. ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of  Sunderland. With Professor John Strachan (University of  Northumbria), she is co-director of  NEICN (The North East Irish Culture Network). Her primary research interests lie in Irish Literature, particularly Irish Drama from the nineteenth century to the present day. She has published in the fields of contemporary critical theory, Irish cultural history, Women’s writing in Ireland, Advertising and Commodity Culture, Blackwood’s Magazine and Irish Drama. She has edited and contributed to Representing Ireland: Past, Present and Future (2005), with Frank Beardow, Essays on Modern Irish Literature (2007) and Ireland at War and Peace (2011), both with John Strachan, and No Country for Old Men: Fresh Perspectives on Irish Literature (2008), with Paddy Lyons. She is currently working on a further edited collection, Consumer Culture and Literature in Ireland from the Famine to Independence with John Strachan, and completing a monograph entitled The Business of  Pleasure: Advertising, Spectacle and the Irish Culture Industries at the Fin de Siècle.

226

Notes on Contributors

EMILY A. RAVENSCROFT is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She completed her doctoral degree at the University of  North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010 after spending her final year abroad at the National University of  Ireland, Galway, as an Irish Language Fulbright Scholar. Her dissertation on Northern Irish Republican political ideology was based on a year of  fieldwork in Belfast on a Graduate School Research Grant provided by the University of  North Carolina at Chapel Hill. MASAYA SHIMOKUSU is a Professor of  the Faculty of  Letters, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. He is a member of  Ireland-Japan Society Executive Board and the former secretary of  IASIL JAPAN. His main research interests are James Joyce and Bram Stoker. He translates both literary and critical works. His recent co-translation is Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days. JOHN STRACHAN is Professor of  English Literature at the University of  Northumbria. His books include Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (2007) and, edited with Alison O’Malley-Younger, Ireland at War and Peace (2011). He is Associate Editor of  the Oxford Companion to English Literature and a Fellow of  the Royal Historical Society.

Index

A. E. (see George Russell) Aberdeen, Lady Ishbel Maria Gordon  94 Act of  Emancipation (1829)  49 Adams, Gerry  189, 206, 207, 215, 218 Adorno, Theodor  211 Advertiser, The  98 Advertising  67, 90, 91, 97, 107, 109, 110, 111 Airdrie 103 Akutagawa, Ryunosuke  119 All Ireland Review  32 Alspach, Russell K.  31 Anderson, Freddy  134 Krassivy  134 Anglo-American 12 Anglo-Irish  26, 34, 35, 129, 206 Anglo-Scottish 9 Anglo-Scottish Ulster Plantation (1609) 3 Anglo-Scottish Union of  Crowns (1603) 134 Anthologia Hibernica  42 Anti-Catholic / Anti-Catholicism  26, 42, 44, 45, 47, 65 Anti-Protestant / Anti-Protestantism  47, 49 Anti-Unionist 14 Antisyzygy  5, 17 Antrim  133, 181, 182 Aramata, Hiroshi  125 Celt minwasyū (A Collection of  Celtic Folktales) 125 Arata, Stephen  74 Archetype  194, 200

‘Archipelagic Gothic’  62 Arnold, Matthew  15, 29, 32 Arthur Koestler awards  185 Ascherson, Neal  204 Austen, Jane  43 Northanger Abbey  43 Bakhtin, Mikhail  7 Banim, Michael  52 Baudelaire, Charles  90 BBC  125, 189 Belfast (Béal Feirste)  10, 28, 34, 91, 93, 94, 95, 99, 108, 134, 135, 140, 154, 156, 159, 160, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 190, 195, 207, 211, 214 Belfast Empire Theatre of  Varieties  94 Bell, Eleanor  15, 17, 170 Questioning Scotland  15 Bell, Sam Hanna  34, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167 December Bride  34, 153, 154, 155 Bennett, Tony  110 Berlin  106, 107, 147, 217 Berresford Ellis, Peter  20 Beveridge, Craig  15, 17, 18 ‘Big Society’  205, 218 Bissett, Alan  22, 85 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine  23, 36, 37, 43, 58, 61, 76, 78 ‘The Proposed Exhibition of 1851’ 101 Noctes Ambrosianae  75

228 Index Blake, John  154 Bold, Alan  7 Bowen, Desmond  47 Brantlinger, Patrick  62 ‘Britishness’ 207 Bristol 102 Brookmyre, Christopher  175, 176 Brooks, Libby  215 Brown, Wendy  213 Bruce, Robert  19 Bruegel, Pieter  218 ‘Massacre of  the Innocents’  218 Bullán  10 Burke, Edmund  42 Burke, William  36, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85 Burns, Robert  2, 3, 10, 21, 110, 138 Butler, Judith  191, 196, 197 Caledonian antisyzygy  1, 6, 16, 17, 29, 30 Caledonian Mercury, The  77, 80 Calvinist / Calvinism  45 Cameron, David  218 Campbell, Colin  133 Campbell, David ‘Davy’ Robb  134 Cantrell and Cochrane  94 Carleton, William  21, 96, 98, 99, 100 ‘Fair of  Emyvale’  98 Traits and Stories of  the Irish Peasantry  98 The Master and Scholar  98 Carnivalesque  187, 198 Category A Mickey B  187 Catholic / Catholicism  4, 9, 14, 24, 25, 26, 29, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 65, 77, 78, 105, 143, 157, 170, 179, 188, 198, 201, 217 Catholic Emancipation  46, 49, 51, 52 Catholic Socialist Society  135

‘Celtic Communism’  20, 133, 137, 139, 141 ‘Celtic Consumerism’  28, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111 ‘Celticism’  3, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32 Celtic periphery  22, 24, 25, 61, 63, 78 Celtic Renaissance  125 Celtic Tiger  209, 210, 215, 217 Celts, The  125 Chandler, Raymond  174, 175 Cheng, Vincent  62, 63, 66 Christian Examiner and Church of  Ireland Magazine, The  52 Clan Albainn  144 Cleary, Joe  216 Coates, Paul  16, 17 Colonialist / Colonialism  7, 9, 12, 24, 94, 95, 139 Colvin, Sidney  67, 72, 73 Communist / Communism  134, 141 Connery, Sir Sean  205, 206, 214 Connolly, James  18, 19, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 112 Labour and Irish History  102 The Reconquest of  Ireland  102 Conservative 203 ‘Conspicuous consumerism’  28, 104 Constable, Archibald  42 Consumer culture  90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 99, 103 Consumerism  28, 90, 92, 99, 100, 104, 111 Contemporary Review, The  32 Cooke, Pat  111 Cooper, Robert  213 Co-operative movement  28 Corcoran, Neil  6 Cork 103 Craig, Cairns  2, 15, 17, 18, 22, 34, 72, 72 Crawford, Robert  10, 14, 18, 21, 22, 206 Devolving Scottish Literature 18 ‘Devolving Irish Literature’  18

Index Croker, John Wilson  53 Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851)  91, 101, 102 Cuala 95 Cuchulin 31 Culzean, Micky  68 Cumming, Alan  207 Cumming, Elizabeth  95 Daily Mail, The  203 Dargan, William  102 Deane, Seamus  1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 14, 15, 22, 61 Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880–1980 5 de Friene, Sean  11 De Valera, Eamon  144 Decolonised 206 Defence of  the Realm Act  135 del Riego, Rafael  56 Democratic Unionist Party  12, 14 Disraeli, Benjamin  63 Doak, Naomi  155 Dollan, Agnes  135 Douglas, Hugh  68 Down  103, 154 Doyle, Roddy  15 The Commitments  15 Dramatherapy and social theatre: necessary dialogues  185 Dublin  9, 19, 28, 41, 42, 47, 49, 68, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 118, 135, 136, 141, 204, 210, 214 Dublin Industrial Exhibition (1853)  97, 102 Dublin International Exhibition (1865) 101, 104 Dublin Lock-out  134 Dudley-Edwards, Owen  77, 134 Duncan, Ian  24 Dundee 102

229 Dunn, Douglas  116 The Oxford Book of  Scottish Short Stories  115 Dunsany, Lord Edward John Plunkett 118, 119 East India Company  94 Easter Rising (1916)  137, 140 Economist, The  203 Edgeworth, Maria  2 Edict of  Nantes  47 Edinburgh  8, 20, 23, 28, 42, 64, 66, 68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 83, 84, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101, 103, 105, 134, 136, 138, 139, 140, 144, 208, 214 Edinburgh Arts and Crafts Club  95 Edinburgh Book Festival  208 Edinburgh Evening Courant, The  75 Edinburgh Industrial Exhibition (1886) 89, 98 Edinburgh International Exhibition (1886) 94 Edinburgh Review, The  2, 26, 42, 44, 45, 55 Edinburgh’s Social Union  95 Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC)  34, 185, 189, 191, 198, 199, 200, 201 Edward I  20 Edward II  20 Eliot, T. S.  7, 8 Ellmann, Richard  30 Empire Exhibition (1938)  93 Engels, Friedrich  139 Origins of  the Family, Private Property and the State  139 English language  6, 7 ‘Englishness’  71, 102 Enlightenment  2, 24, 25, 66, 84, 85 Enya 125

230 Index Essentialist / Essentialism  5, 15, 16, 17, 18, 29, 61 Europe  3, 14, 15, 25, 43, 46, 49, 50, 56, 80, 90, 97, 106, 107, 177, 204, 210 European Union  204, 210 Evolue  18 Exhibition Expositor, The  98 Fanon, Frantz  17 Feldman, Allen  177 Feminist / Feminism  12, 13, 14, 100, 153 Fenian / Fenianism  67, 70, 71, 76 Ferdinand VII  56 Fielden, Olga  155 Fin de Siècle  29, 62, 64, 71, 95, 106, 107 Fine Gael  204 Finn 31 Forward  135, 140 Foster, Gavin  135 Foster, Roy  25 Foucault, Michel  191, 192, 193, 194, 195 Discipline and Punish  192, 193 France  22, 43, 47, 205 Franco-British Exhibition (1908)  106 Free, Marcus  165 Freudian / Post-Freudian  158, 161, 209 Gaelic League, the  27 Gaelic Revival  91 Gaeltacht 32 Gallacher, Willie  134 Gaze, the  159, 174, 195 Geddes, Patrick  28, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 111, 120, 140 Gender  5, 11, 12, 13, 153, 173, 188, 190, 196, 197, 200, 201, 205, 209 Genet, Jacqueline  27 ‘Gentle Highlander’  13 Gentleman’s Magazine, The  42 Geppert, A.  106, 107 Germany 205

Gibbons, Luke  16, 25, 62, 63, 78, 96, 97 Transformations in Irish Culture  96 Gif ford, Douglas  208 The Edinburgh History of  Scottish Literature  208 Gill, M. H.  102 Gladstone, William  92 Glasgow (Gles Chu)  9, 28, 34, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 134, 135, 136, 138, 141, 142, 154, 170, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 181, 182, 183, 190 Glasgow Boys, the  95, 110 Glasgow Herald, The  136 Glasgow Rent Strike (1915)  134 Glasgow School of  Art  95 Globalisation 213 Godwin, William  53 Caleb Williams  53 Goldring, Maurice  170 Good Friday Agreement (1998)  182, 207 Gosse, Edward  73 Gothic / Gothicism  22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 55, 56, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 72, 73, 76, 78, 83, 85, 95, 177 ‘Gothic causality’  175 Gothic novel, the  42, 43, 44, 45, 56 Gough, Julian  217 Graham, Colin  207, 210, 212 Grahame, Cunninghame  141 Gramsci, Antonio  19, 134, 213 Grand Central Dome  108 Gray, Alasdair  9, 207 Lanark  9 Great Britain  2, 46, 50, 93, 101, 107, 134, 139, 141 Great Exhibition  28, 102 Gregory, Lady Augusta  31, 32, 118, 119 Hyacinth Harvey  118 The Full Moon  119

Index Grieve, Christopher Murray  140 Grif fin, Patrick  165 The People with No Name 165 Guardian, The  208 HMP Maghaberry  34, 185, 189, 195 Haiku  116, 123 Hare, Maggie, née Laird (‘Lucky’ Logue) 68, 69 Hare, William  26, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 83, 85 Harnett, A. W.  98 Harris, Jason Marc  123 Harris, John B.  48 Charles Robert Maturin  48 Hart, Francis Russell  17 Hart, Matthew  7, 19 Harvey, Arthur  189 Harvie, Chris  137, 140 Hassan, Gerry  203 Hayes-McCoy, G. A.  70 Heaney, Mike  210, 211 Heaney, Seamus  116 ‘Midnight Anvil’  116 District and Circle  116 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  10 Heteroglossia / Heteroglossic  7, 21 Heteronormative / Heteronormativity 188, 191, 200 Heterosexuality  197, 200 Hewitt, John  140 ‘The Bloody Brae’  140 Hiberno-Caledonian 61 Hiberno-English 7 Highland Home Industries  106 Hogg, James  16, 17, 26, 45 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner  16, 45 Home Industries  28, 106 Home Rule  69, 92

231 Howell, David  134 A Lost Left: Three Studies in Socialism and Nationalism  134 Hughes, Eamonn  170, 179 Hunter, James  135 Hybridity 16 Hyde, Douglas  33, 120 Hyslop, Fiona  215, 216 Illustrated London Magazine, The  90, 97, 98, 99, 100 Illustrated London News, The  97 Imperialist / Imperialism  3, 5, 19, 51, 94, 97, 135, 169 Independent Labour Party  134, 141 Internationalism  5, 6, 20 Intra-nationalism 5 IRA (Irish Republican Army)  137 IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood)  77, 144 Irish Free State  144 Irish language  137 Irish Literary Revival  5, 118, 120, 126 Irish Literary Theatre  31 ‘Irishness’  26, 61, 64, 76, 77, 80, 205, 206 Irish peasantry  99, 100, 139 Irish Times, The  210, 216, 217 Isle of  Mull  145 Jacobite / Jacobitism  25, 144 Jackson, Ellen-Raïssa  14 James I  9 Jamieson, John  8 Etymological Dictionary of  the Scottish Language  8 Japan Caledonia Society  115 Japanese Pavilion  108 Jef frey, Francis  44, 45, 46, 53, 55, 57, 58 ‘John Bull’  73, 74, 77

232 Index Joyce, James  1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 21, 35, 98, 99, 143 ‘Gas from a Burner’  4 ‘Eveline’ 98 Ulysses  8, 9 Kailyard  13, 27, 71 Kane, Pat  208 Katayama, (Nee Yoshida) Hiroko  33, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 126 ‘Azarashi’  121, 122, 123, 124 ‘Celtic Fantastic Stories’  125 ‘The Moon-Child’  122, 123 ‘The Sabbath of  the Fishes’  122 ‘Three Marvels of  Hy’  122 Celt gensō sakuhinshū’ 125 Kanashiki jyō-ō (The sad queen) 115, 121, 123, 124, 125 Kawasemi (A Kingdisher)  116, 117 No ni sumite (Living in the Country) 116 Kearney, Richard  18, 209, 210 Keir Hardie, James  141 Kelly, Aaron  176, 212 Kelly, Stuart  16 Kelman, James  138, 217, 218 If it is your Life  217 Kelvingrove Art Gallery  108, 110 Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer  206 Kennedy, Liam  14 Kenny, Edna  204, 205, 215, 218 Kerrigan, John  144 Kiberd, Declan  11 Kidd, Colin  10 Kilfeather, Siobhan  23 Kilgour, Maggie  62 Kilmainham Gaol  19 Kilmarnock 103 Kikuchi, Kan  118, 119 Chichi kaeru (The father returns)  119 Kimura, Takeshi  120, 121

Kinchin, J.  110 Kinchin, P.  110 Knox, Robert  23, 24, 61, 77 Kokoro no hana 121 Kōno, Kenji  119 Kristeva, Julia  158 Kyoto 118 Labour Party  203, 217 Laing, R. D.  1 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan  47 Leader, The  95 Lebor Gabála Érenn  55 Leeds 101 Lewis, Matthew  43, 44 Liberal Democrats  208 Limerick 103 Linehan, Katherine  67 Lloyd, David  72, 137, 139 Lloyd George, David  136 Lochhead, Liz  207 Lockerbie, Catherine  208 Lombroso, Casare  74 London  67, 94, 97, 101, 106, 107, 136 Longley, Edna  14 Lonsdale, Henry  77 Loyalist / Loyalism  154, 189, 190, 198 Lyall, Scott  141, 143 Lyons, Pater  172, 173, 178, 179, 182 MacAskill, Kenny  212, 213 MacBrane, David  108 MacColl, W. D.  146 MacDiarmid, Hugh  4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 17, 20, 21, 133, 134, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148 ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ 4, 141 ‘In Memoriam James Joyce’  4 ‘John Maclean’  140, 142, 143, 144 ‘Krassivy, Krassivy’  134

Index ‘On a Raised Beach’  142 ‘The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’  134 A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle 5, 7 Stony Limits and Other Poems  142, 143 MacDonald, Alastair/ Alexander  133, 146 MacDonald, John  133 MacDonnell, Sorley Boy (MacDhomh­ naill, Somhairle Buidhe) 133 MacKenzie, Compton  144 Mackenzie, J. M.  93, 94, 95 ‘The Second City of  the Empire: Glasgow – Imperial Municipality’ 93 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie  110 Maclean, John  19, 20, 133, 134, 135, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148 The Army in Ireland  136 The Irish Tragedy: Scotland’s Disgrace  19, 136 Maclean, Neil  135 Maclean, Sorley (Somhairle MacGillEain)  20, 133, 137, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148 ‘An Cuilithionn’ (‘The Cuillin’)  146, 147 ‘Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile’  146 ‘Do ’n bhreitheamh a thubhairt ri Iain Mac Ghill-Eathain gum b’ e gealtair a bh’ ann’ (‘To the judge who told John Maclean he was a coward’) 146 ‘Other Poems’  146 Chapman 147 O Choille gu Bearradh / From Wood to Ridge 146 Macleod, Fiona (see William Sharp) MacNeice, Louis  143, 144 Macpherson, James  2, 30, 31, 33, 34

233 Magennis, Caroline  154 Magill, Tom  185, 186, 188, 199 Maitland, Walter  182 Major, John  203 Mal de Siècle  62 Maley, Willy  65 Manning, Susan  34 Marcus Ward and Co.  93 Markievicz, Countess Constance  135 Marks, Thomas  171, 172 Marquis-Muradaz, Jennifer  185, 188, 199 Marxist / Marxism  19, 135, 213 Massie, Alex  209 Matsumura, Mineko (see Hiroko Katayama) Maturin, Charles Robert  22, 23, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47 Five Sermons of  the Errors of  the Roman Catholic Church  41, 42, 46, 47, 48, 49, 54, 56, 58 Melmoth the Wander  25, 41, 42, 44, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58 The Albigenses  42, 48 The Milesian Chief: A Romance  55 Maze, the (HM Prison)  188 McArthur, Colin  14 McCluskey, Seamus  99 McCormack, William (Bill)  9 Field Day Anthology of  Irish Writing 9 McDonald, Helen  64 McDougal, Nelly  68, 69 McGrath, John  134 Little Red Hen  134 McGuinness, Caitlin  171, 175, 182 McGuinness, Martin  189 McIlvanney, Liam  34, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 182, 183 All the Colours of  the Town  34, 169, 170, 171

234 Index McIlvanney, William  171, 177 Laidlaw  177 McIntosh, Gillian  154, 161 McMahon, Sean  161 McNamee, Eoin  173 Resurrection Man  173 McNeil, Kenneth  66 Meiji Restoration  118 Mickey B  28, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150 Middleton, Tim  7 Mighall, Robert  74 Milesian  55, 74, 80, 81 Miller, Gavin  15 Minne, J.  170 Mitabungaku  121 Modernist / Modernism  5, 6, 7, 8, 21, 99, 107, 137 ‘Molly Maguires’  76 Monoglossia / Monoglossic  6, 7 Moore, Thomas  46 Moran, D. P.  95 Morgan, Edwin  4, 207, 208 Morley, Charles  74 Morris, Catherine  139 Muir, Edwin  21 Muldoon, Paul  61 Mullan, Peter  138 Murdoch, John  141 Nairn, Tom  15, 169 ‘Three Dreams of  Scottish Nationalism’ 169 Nakagi, Teiichi  118 Nation, The  23 Nationalist / Nationalism  4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 27, 28, 89, 92, 95, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 144, 148, 154, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 Neo-Nationalist 208 New DNB  133

New Left Review, The 169 New Monthly Magazine, The  45 Newsinger, J.  170 Noguchi, Yone  116 Nolan, Emer  27 Northern Ireland  34, 35, 170, 175, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 196, 198, 201, 210, 211, 214, 218 Ó Cadhain, Máirtín  137 O’Brien, Connor Cruise  63 O’Connor, Edmund  170 O’Donovan Rossa, Jeremiah  70 O’Grady, Standish  32 O’Rourke, Donny  3 O’Shannon, Cathal  134 O’Sullivan, Thaddeus  34, 167 December Bride  165, 167 O’Toole, Fintan  14, 217 Obama, Barack  204 Old Glasgow Exhibition (1894)  110 ‘Ordinary Decent Criminals (ODCs)’ 186, 187, 188, 189, 197 Osaka 118 Ossian  2, 25, 30, 34 Outlook Tower  89 Paisley  30, 101, 103, 134 Pall Mall Gazette, The  67, 73, 74 Pan-Celtic / Pan-Celticism  11, 27, 31 Paramilitary / Paramilitaries  179, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 196, 187 Paris  6, 107 Park, David  171 Swallowing the Sun  171 Parker, Stewart  10 Lost Belongings 10 Parkinson, Henry  104, 105 Illustrated Record of  the Dublin International Exhibition  104

235

Index Parnell, Charles Stewart  143 Patriotic / Patriotism  27, 106 Patten, Eve  209 Patterson, Glen  172, 173 Lapsed Protestant  172 Pelaschiar, Laura  211, 213 People’s Palace, Glasgow  95 Performative / Performativity  191, 196 Peterson, Dale  67 Phrenology / Phrenological  78, 80, 81, 82 Physiognomy  78, 81, 82 Pitt Dundas, William  65 ‘Irish Immigrants and Their Ef fect on the Native Scots’  65 The Races of  Men in Scotland 65 Plain, Gill  177 Poe, Edgar Allen  44 Polidori, John  45 ‘The Vampyre’  45 Political Prisoners  187, 197 Postcolonial / Postcolonialism  14, 15, 22, 24, 95, 148, 206 Postfeminist / Postfeminism  209 Postmodernist / Postmodernism  12, 205, 206, 209, 210, 211, 213, 216 Postnationalist /Postnationalism  206, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 218 Pound, Ezra  7 Presbyterian / Presbyterianism  46, 153, 154, 157, 165, 181 Protestant / Protestantism  24, 25, 29, 42, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 78, 134, 155, 170, 188, 190, 198, 201 Provincialism  6, 21 Punch; Or The London Charivari  67, 71 ‘The Maniac Man-Monkey. A New Sensational Christmas Story by B. Bones’  67 Quaker 11 Quarterly Review, The  53

Queen Victoria  92 Radclif fe, Anne  43, 44, 53, 55 Rains, Stephanie  91, 98 Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin 1850–1916  91 Rankin, Ian  171, 172 Red Clydeside  20, 134, 136, 139, 147 Rees, Catherine  19 Reformation, the  50 Regan, Stephen  61 Reid, Julia  72, 84 Reizbaum, Marilyn  10, 12, 13, 14, 18 Renan, Ernest  32 Renfield, James W.  79 Renton, Mark  3 Republic of  Ireland, the  19, 204, 206, 210, 214 Republican / Republicanism  19, 71, 134, 141, 144, 179, 186, 187, 189, 190, 198, 204, 206 Revisionist / Revisionism  100 Riach, Alan  140 Richtarik, Marilynn  10 Rodford, Steve  189 Roger Graef award  185 Rosner, Lisa  68 Russell, George  32, 33 Sage, Victor  24 Salmond, Alex  204, 215, 218 Saris, Jamie A.  97 Sasaki, Yukitsuna  116 Saturday Review, The  90 Scoto-Celtic movement  33, 120 Scots Makar  208 Scott, Sir Walter  2, 3, 110 The Waverley Novels  2 Scottish devolution  203 Scottish Exhibition (1911)  89, 106, 110

236 Index ‘Scottishness’  11, 17, 30, 61, 203, 205, 206, 207 Scottish Renaissance  140, 144 Scottish Review, The  16 Second Cities of  Empire  28, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 102, 110 Semicolonial 14 Sermons of  the Rev. Richard Hayes  49 Shakespeare, William  34, 35, 185, 190, 191, 195, 197 Macbeth  34, 185, 191, 196, 198 Sharp, Elizabeth A.120, 121 Collected Works of  William Sharp 120 Sharp, William  30, 31, 33, 115, 120, 121, 123 ‘The House of  Usna’  120 ‘The Laughter of  Scathach the Queen’ 121 ‘The Sad Queen’  121 The House of  Usna 31 The Immortal Hour  31 The Sin-Eater  120, 121, 125 The Washer of  the Ford  120, 121 Shaw, George Bernard  10, 118 Shaw, Glenn W.  119 Shef field  101 Shelley, Mary  45 Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus  45 Shetland Islands  141 Simmel, Georg  90 Simmon, James  153 Sinn Fein  27, 136, 144, 206, 214 Skenazy, Paul  175 Smith, George Gregory  17, 29 Smith, Sydney  45 Sneddon 134 SNP (Scottish National Party)  141, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 212, 214, 215

Socialist / Socialism  5, 19, 20, 94, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 141, 144, 148, 217 Spain  41, 43, 44, 54, 55, 56 Spanish Inquisition  42, 44, 55, 56 Spectator, The  203 Sproule, John  102, 105 ‘Stage Irishman’  13 St Andrews Agreement (2006)  18 Star Theatre of  Varieties  94 Stevenson, Robert Louis  10, 26, 61, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 83, 84, 85 ‘The Body Snatcher’  62, 67, 72, 73, 74, 75, 83 The Strange Case of  Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde  1, 62, 73 Confessions of a Unionist  69 The Dynamiter  70 Weir of  Hermiston  71 Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes  75 Stone, Michael  189 Stormont 189 Sunday Post, The  169 Suzuki, Beatrice Lane  116 Suzuki, Daisetsu  116 Synge, John Millington  21, 118, 119 The Playboy of  the Western World  119 ‘Synthetic Scots’  7, 21 Taigen-dome 123 Tanka  115, 116, 117, 121, 123, 126 Taoiseach 204 ‘Tartan Noir’  169, 171 Taylor, Isaac  78 Telegraph, The  171 Thatcher, Margaret  187, 197 Times, The  103 Tipperary 103 Toibin, Colm  209 The Penguin Book of  Irish Fiction  209

Index Tolstoy, Leo  161 Anna Karenina  161 Tomahawk, The 71 Tory / Tories  53, 73, 203, 205, 206 Tourist / Tourism  106, 180, 210 Translation  33, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 146 Transnationalism 12 Tribune on Sunday, The  178 Trollope, Anthony  47 Troubles, the  13, 171, 173, 175, 176, 178, 180, 182, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 201 Tsuruoka, Mayumi  117 Turnbull, Ronald  15, 17, 18 Ulster  9, 10, 120, 123, 133, 153, 154, 155, 165, 167, 173, 179, 181 Ulster Plantation (1609)  3, 18, 133 Ulster-Scots  154, 155, 165, 167 Ulster Scots Socialists  134 Union Canal  66 Unionist / Unionism  69, 78, 154, 203, 207 UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force)  171, 172, 178, 182 Vebelen, Thorsten  104 Theory of  the Leisure Class  104 Vettriano, Jack  207 Voice of  Labour, The  135 Voice of  Scotland, The  140 Walker, William  134 Wallace, William  19

237 Walpole, Horace  43, 44, 55 The Castle of  Otranto: A Gothic Story 43 Walsh, Patrick  165 Ward, Thomas  49 Errata of  the Protestant Bible  49 Waterford 134 Waters, John  216 Welsh, Irvine  3, 15, 137 ‘Rents’ (Mark Renton)  15 If  You Liked School, You’ll Love Work 137 Trainspotting 3 ‘West Britonism’  28 Wheatley, John  134, 135 Whyte, Christopher  145, 208 Wicklow  55, 103 Wilde, Oscar  10 Williams, Raymond  96 Woolf, Virginia  107 Workers’ Republic, The  136 Wray, Ramona  186 Yamamoto, Shūji  119 Eikoku-Airuranndo kindaigeki seizui (Essences of  British and Irish modern dramas) 119 Yeats, William Butler  3, 10, 21, 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 118, 119, 125, 143 At the Hawk’s Well  119 Cathleen ni Houilhan  119 On Baile’s Strand  10 Young, Douglas  145 Young, James D.  135, 136 YouTube 207

Reimagining Ireland Series Editor: Dr Eamon Maher, Institute of Technology, Tallaght

The concepts of Ireland and ‘Irishness’ are in constant flux in the wake of an ever-increasing reappraisal of the notion of cultural and national specificity in a world assailed from all angles by the forces of globalisation and uniformity. Reimagining Ireland interrogates Ireland’s past and present and suggests possibilities for the future by looking at Ireland’s literature, culture and history and subjecting them to the most up-to-date critical appraisals associated with sociology, literary theory, historiography, political science and theology. Some of the pertinent issues include, but are not confined to, Irish writing in English and Irish, Nationalism, Unionism, the Northern ‘Troubles’, the Peace Process, economic development in Ireland, the impact and decline of the Celtic Tiger, Irish spirituality, the rise and fall of organised religion, the visual arts, popular cultures, sport, Irish music and dance, emigration and the Irish diaspora, immigration and multiculturalism, marginalisation, globalisation, modernity/postmodernity and postcolonialism. The series publishes monographs, comparative studies, interdisciplinary projects, conference proceedings and edited books. Proposals should be sent either to Dr Eamon Maher at eamon.maher@ ittdublin.ie or to [email protected]. Vol. 1 Vol. 2 Vol. 3

Eugene O’Brien: ‘Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse’: Negotiating Texts and Contexts in Contemporary Irish Studies ISBN 978-3-03911-539-6. 219 pages. 2009. James P. Byrne, Padraig Kirwan and Michael O’Sullivan (eds): Affecting Irishness: Negotiating Cultural Identity Within and Beyond the Nation ISBN 978-3-03911-830-4. 334 pages. 2009. Irene Lucchitti: The Islandman: The Hidden Life of Tomás O’Crohan ISBN 978-3-03911-837-3. 232 pages. 2009.

Vol. 4

Paddy Lyons and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds): No Country for Old Men: Fresh Perspectives on Irish Literature ISBN 978-3-03911-841-0. 289 pages. 2009.

Vol. 5

Eamon Maher (ed.): Cultural Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland ISBN 978-3-03911-851-9. 256 pages. 2009.

Vol. 6

Lynn Brunet: ‘A Course of Severe and Arduous Trials’: Bacon, Beckett and Spurious Freemasonry in Early TwentiethCentury Ireland ISBN 978-3-03911-854-0. 218 pages. 2009.

Vol. 7

Claire Lynch: Irish Autobiography: Stories of Self in the Narrative of a Nation ISBN 978-3-03911-856-4. 234 pages. 2009.

Vol. 8

Victoria O’Brien: A History of Irish Ballet from 1927 to 1963 ISBN 978-3-03911-873-1. 208 pages. 2011.

Vol. 9

Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Elin Holmsten (eds): Liminal Borderlands in Irish Literature and Culture ISBN 978-3-03911-859-5. 208 pages. 2009.



Vol. 10 Claire Nally: Envisioning Ireland: W.B. Yeats’s Occult Nationalism ISBN 978-3-03911-882-3. 320 pages. 2010. Vol. 11 Raita Merivirta: The Gun and Irish Politics: Examining National History in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins ISBN 978-3-03911-888-5. 202 pages. 2009. Vol. 12 John Strachan and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds): Ireland: Revolution and Evolution ISBN 978-3-03911-881-6. 248 pages. 2010. Vol. 13 Barbara Hughes: Between Literature and History: The Diaries and Memoirs of Mary Leadbeater and Dorothea Herbert ISBN 978-3-03911-889-2. 255 pages. 2010. Vol. 14 Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe (eds): Irish Modernism: Origins, Contexts, Publics ISBN 978-3-03911-894-6. 256 pages. 2010.

Vol. 15 John Walsh: Contests and Contexts: The Irish Language and Ireland’s Socio-Economic Development ISBN 978-3-03911-914-1. 492 pages. 2011. Vol. 16 Zélie Asava: The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities in Irish Film and TV ISBN 978-3-0343-0839-7. Forthcoming. Vol. 17 Susan Cahill and Eóin Flannery (eds): This Side of Brightness: Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann ISBN 978-3-03911-935-6. 189 pages. 2012. Vol. 18 Brian Arkins: The Thought of W.B. Yeats ISBN 978-3-03911-939-4. 204 pages. 2010. Vol. 19 Maureen O’Connor: The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing ISBN 978-3-03911-959-2. 203 pages. 2010. Vol. 20 Rhona Trench: Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr ISBN 978-3-03911-964-6. 327 pages. 2010. Vol. 21 Jeannine Woods: Visions of Empire and Other Imaginings: Cinema, Ireland and India, 1910–1962 ISBN 978-3-03911-974-5. 230 pages. 2011. Vol. 22 Neil O’Boyle: New Vocabularies, Old Ideas: Culture, Irishness and the Advertising Industry ISBN 978-3-03911-978-3. 233 pages. 2011. Vol. 23 Dermot McCarthy: John McGahern and the Art of Memory ISBN 978-3-0343-0100-8. 344 pages. 2010. Vol. 24 Francesca Benatti, Sean Ryder and Justin Tonra (eds): Thomas Moore: Texts, Contexts, Hypertexts ISBN 978-3-0343-0900-4. Forthcoming. Vol. 25 Sarah O’Connor: No Man’s Land: Irish Women and the Cultural Present ISBN 978-3-0343-0111-4. 230 pages. 2011.

Vol. 26 Caroline Magennis: Sons of Ulster: Masculinities in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel ISBN 978-3-0343-0110-7. 192 pages. 2010. Vol. 27 Dawn Duncan: Irish Myth, Lore and Legend on Film ISBN 978-3-0343-0140-4. 181 pages. 2013. Vol. 28 Eamon Maher and Catherine Maignant (eds): Franco-Irish Connections in Space and Time: Peregrinations and Ruminations ISBN 978-3-0343-0870-0. 295 pages. 2012. Vol. 29 Holly Maples: Culture War: Conflict, Commemoration and the Contemporary Abbey Theatre ISBN 978-3-0343-0137-4. 294 pages. 2011. Vol. 30 Maureen O’Connor (ed.): Back to the Future of Irish Studies: Festschrift for Tadhg Foley ISBN 978-3-0343-0141-1. 359 pages. 2010. Vol. 31 Eva Urban: Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama ISBN 978-3-0343-0143-5. 303 pages. 2011. Vol. 32 Mairéad Conneely: Between Two Shores / Idir Dhá Chladach: Writing the Aran Islands, 1890–1980 ISBN 978-3-0343-0144-2. 299 pages. 2011. Vol. 33 Gerald Morgan and Gavin Hughes (eds): Southern Ireland and the Liberation of France: New Perspectives ISBN 978-3-0343-0190-9. 250 pages. 2011. Vol. 34 Anne MacCarthy: Definitions of Irishness in the ‘Library of Ireland’ Literary Anthologies ISBN 978-3-0343-0194-7. 271 pages. 2012. Vol. 35 Irene Lucchitti: Peig Sayers: In Her Own Write ISBN 978-3-0343-0253-1. Forthcoming. Vol. 36 Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (eds): Breaking the Mould: Literary Representations of Irish Catholicism ISBN 978-3-0343-0232-6. 249 pages. 2011.

Vol. 37 Mícheál Ó hAodha and John O’Callaghan (eds): Narratives of the Occluded Irish Diaspora: Subversive Voices ISBN 978-3-0343-0248-7. 227 pages. 2012. Vol. 38 Willy Maley and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds): Celtic Connections: Irish–Scottish Relations and the Politics of Culture ISBN 978-3-0343-0214-2. 247 pages. 2013. Vol. 39 Sabine Egger and John McDonagh (eds): Polish–Irish Encounters in the Old and New Europe ISBN 978-3-0343-0253-1. 322 pages. 2011. Vol. 40 Elke D’hoker, Raphaël Ingelbien and Hedwig Schwall (eds): Irish Women Writers: New Critical Perspectives ISBN 978-3-0343-0249-4. 318 pages. 2011. Vol. 41 Peter James Harris: From Stage to Page: Critical Reception of Irish Plays in the London Theatre, 1925–1996 ISBN 978-3-0343-0266-1. 311 pages. 2011. Vol. 42 Hedda Friberg-Harnesk, Gerald Porter and Joakim Wrethed (eds): Beyond Ireland: Encounters Across Cultures ISBN 978-3-0343-0270-8. 342 pages. 2011. Vol. 43 Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Carmen Zamorano Llena (eds): Urban and Rural Landscapes in Modern Ireland: Language, Literature and Culture ISBN 978-3-0343-0279-1. 238 pages. 2012. Vol. 44 Kathleen Costello-Sullivan: Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín ISBN 978-3-0343-0753-6. 247 pages. 2012. Vol. 45 Lesley Lelourec and Gráinne O’Keeffe-Vigneron (eds): Ireland and Victims: Confronting the Past, Forging the Future ISBN 978-3-0343-0792-5. 331 pages. 2012. Vol. 46 Gerald Dawe, Darryl Jones and Nora Pelizzari (eds): Beautiful Strangers: Ireland and the World of the 1950s. ISBN 978 -3- 0343-0801-4. Forthcoming. 2013.