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Tears and Blood: Lady Wilde and
the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism |
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Marjorie Howes |
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This article
was first published in the Boston
College Journal, X 1:2 Spring 1997 pp. 203-23; was reprinted in Tadhg Foley & Sean Ryder
(edd.): Ideology and Ireland in the nineteenth century (Dublin: Four Courts, 1998)
pp.151-72; and is here republished by kind permission. |
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Introduction |
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The mid nineteenth-century movement known as
Young Ireland marked the emergence of an Irish nationalism that was more
ethnic and cultural than civic and constitutional. Although the movement
fizzled out in the abortive rising of 1848, its cultural and political
legacies were extensive. The poetry of Young Ireland was arguably the most
popular body of literature in |
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Young Ireland was associated with a group of
figures that included Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon, Charles Gavan Duffy,
William Smith O’Brien, James Clarence Mangan, Lady Wilde and several other
women poets. It originated in and emerged out of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal
Association. Deliverer of Catholic Emancipation and campaigner for repeal of
the |
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Wilde was born Jane Elgee in 1821, to a
conservative, middle-class, Protestant family in Wexford. She married William
Wilde in 1851, and became Lady Wilde when he was knighted in 1864. As a young
woman, she was part of the second generation of nationalist poets that rose
to prominence in the late 1840s, after Thomas Davis’s death in 1845. She published
poetry and prose in the Nation under the pen name Speranza, and was noted
among her contemporaries as one of Young Ireland’s most violent, emotional
and inflammatory writers.[4] She published Poems by Speranza in 1864, and wrote a number of other essays and
books during her life.[5] After the failure of the 1848
revolution, both she and William became disillusioned with Irish nationalism;
later she concentrated increasingly on other literary projects and on her
aspirations to run a literary salon. In the late nineteenth century, she was
generally acknowledged as an important, if eccentric, figure in the |
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Like many nineteenth-century women writers of
sentimental fiction or parlour poetry, Wilde was considerably more visible to
her contemporaries than she was to later cultural critics. Although her
contributions to the Nation were nearly as popular as those of Davis, its
most charismatic writer,[8] she has been largely neglected by
studies of Irish cultural nationalism as well. To the extent that she has
entered literary history, Wilde has done so primarily as a figure defined by
her gendered ‘excesses’ - emotional, political, and stylistic.[9] These excesses are usually
characterized as a surfeit of sentimentalizing emotion and an extravagant
interest in violence, bloodshed and death: a constant sense that the history
of |
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Tears |
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Wilde’s nationalist poems are awash with tears –
the tears of men, women and children; the tears of poets, patriots and
peasants; the tears of sufferers, spectators and gods. These tears structure
an important aspect of Young Ireland’s construction of its project as
subject constitution. David Lloyd’s Nationalism and Minor Literature offers a
ground-breaking and insightful examination of this project. While Lloyd’s
work focuses mainly on issues of identity and unity in the work of James
Clarence Mangan – unity as homogeneity between the individual and the nation,
identity as the consistency of the subject over time – another way to think
about subject constitution is as the production and organization of affect.
Of course, most nationalisms are primarily ‘about’ feeling; the question for
the critic is how particular nationalisms conceptualize and organize ‘feeling.’
In most accounts of nationalism, its engagement with the question of feeling
takes the form of an erotics.[12] This assumption tends to produce two
related narratives of the relationship between gender and nationalism, both
focusing on the nationalist practice of representing the nation as a woman.
In the first, the nation-as-woman is an eroticized lover, and her patriots
worship her with an ecstatic heterosexual devotion. In the second, the nation
is figured as an idealized mother whose purity secures her sons’ faithfulness
and mediates their potentially dangerous homosocial attachments to each
other.[13] The distinction between these
narratives is one of degree and emphasis rather than kind; both involve
suppressing homosexual desire between men and presenting heterosexual love as
the appropriate model of national affect. Such narratives do form an
important part of Young Ireland’s cultural production, but they do not exhaust
the functions of gender in nationalist writing, nor do they encompass all
the ways in which cultural nationalism engaged with the question of national
feeling. In addition, women writers often have an especially problematic
relationship to such iconography.[14] While these representational patterns
are not wholly absent from Wilde’s work, they do not structure it in a
significant way. Young Ireland also employed a different set of tropes for
conceptualizing and organizing national feeling, one that was arguably more
congenial to women writers. Through representations of tears, her poetry
illustrates this alternative conception of cultural nationalism as subject
constitution and that project’s relation to gender and class boundaries. |
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While O’Connell wanted to achieve his political
goals without shedding blood or tears, he was no less sentimental than Young
Ireland; his nationalism simply imagined a different relation between
nationality and feeling. O’Connell’s movement relied upon a combination of
feeling and reason.[15] His nationalism was largely a
modernizing, Enlightenment project; several critics have argued that
disciplined, mass, constitutional politics in the |
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For Young Ireland, speaking the voice of the
Irish was more complicated. Many critics have remarked on the doubleness that
characterizes discourses of the nation; these discourses assert that the
nation already exists, and at the same time they seek to create it.[21] This doubleness assumed a
particularly virulent form for Young Ireland. On one hand, an anti-colonial
nationalism has to work harder to illustrate the pre-existence of the nation
than a statist nationalism, and in the case of |
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Wilde’s representations of tears encapsulate this
ambiguity. In some instances, tears are the mark of a suffering and passive
populace who lack national consciousness or feeling (these two being
virtually equivalent for romantic nationalism). Such tears indicate the
masses’ inadequate response to their own conditions of oppression, conditions
that cry out for political action. One poem asks, ‘But can we only weep, when
above us lour / The death-bearing wings of the angels of power’.[23] Another criticizes the ‘abject tears,
and prayers submissive’ (p. 34) of the people who refuse to rise. In ‘Who
Will Show Us Any Good?’ tears literally blind the masses to their true
identity and interests: ‘Suffering Ireland! Martyr-Nation! / Blind with
tears thick as mountain mist; / Can none amidst all the new generation /
Change them to glory [?]’ (p. 59). Tears as the sign of colonial abjection
are often gendered feminine; the same poem describes a passive |
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Not all Irish woe was dastardly; Young Ireland’s
writers frequently invoked the tears of the suffering to describe the
brutalities of English rule and the horrors of the Great Famine of the 1840s.
Mary Eva Kelly’s ‘A Scene for |
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Wilde’s works attempt to navigate between the
nationalist Scylla of tears that indicate contemptible helplessness and the
imperial Charybdis of tears that indicate moving helplessness that
nevertheless remains helpless by transferring the imperative to nationalist
subject constitution and action to the spectator or reader. Such a transfer
is implicit in Young Ireland’s laments for Irish suffering and their
privileging of popular forms like the ballad. It also accords with Young
Ireland’s project, discernible in a number of its intellectual structures, to
transform the history of Irish suffering, national and individual, into a
source of and blueprint for a gloriously victorious future. But Wilde
theorized, more thoroughly than many of her contemporaries, the processes and
mechanisms through which tears undergo this transformation. In her works
tears constitute a spectacle of suffering capable of generating national
feeling and spurring nationalist action; they also signify that a viewer is
reacting properly to that spectacle. As this description suggests, such
representations of weeping are generically related to the late
eighteenth-century discourses of sensibility and their sentimental Victorian
descendants, though they do not coincide completely with either. Terms like
sensibility and sentimentality are notoriously hard to define; their
political implications are even more slippery. Sensibility could be organized
around individualistic, democratic, and liberal principles, or it could be
mobilized in the service of ‘natural’ social and political hierarchies.[28] The politics of sentimentality are
similarly uncertain and in contention.[29] The various formulations of these
discourses shared a conviction of the immediately political significance of
feeling, and a concomitant conception of feeling as the basis of the social
bond. Thus when Edmund Burke attacked the French Revolution, whose excesses
are widely supposed to have irrevocably tainted the vocabulary of sensibility
after the 1790s, he did it by claiming sensibility’s terms as his own without
acknowledging them, lamenting the elimination of natural sentiments and
affections as the basis for a hierarchical and harmonious social order.[30] |
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Burke, Wilde, and various Victorian
sentimentalists shared a double interest in feeling as a spectacle to be
observed, and as the response that a particular kind of spectacle should
produce in the ethically and politically enlightened observer. The tears of
the suffering object and the tears of the observing subject go together; the
former produces the latter. Wilde’s often millenarian vocabulary tended to
interchange an earthly observer with a heavenly one. One poem urges, ‘Let us
lift our streaming eyes / To God’s throne above the skies, / He will hear our
anguish cries’ (p. 17). In ‘The Voice of the Poor,’ the speaker claims: ‘If
the angels ever hearken, downward bending, / They are weeping, we are sure, /
At the litanies of human groans ascending / From the crushed hearts of the
poor’ (p. 14). Similarly, ‘Ruins’ predicts that the weeping of the poor will ‘Start
the angels on their thrones’ (p. 40). If God and the angels could be trusted
to respond with the appropriate sympathetic tears to the weeping of the
oppressed, members of the Protestant Ascendancy could not. ‘The Faithless
Shepherds’ (pp. 45-7) castigates the landed aristocracy for its cruel
indifference to the plight of the poor during the famine by asserting that
the Ascendancy (like many contemporary descriptions of Famine victims) are
the walking dead: ‘Dead! – Dead! Ye are dead while ye live / Ye’ve a name
that ye live - but are dead.’ This ethico-political (or national)
death-in-life manifests itself as an absence of feeling – ‘For the heart in
each bosom is cold / As the ice on a frozen sea’ – and a lack of sympathetic
tears: ‘With your cold eyes unwet by a tear, / For your Country laid low on
your bier.’ The absence of national feeling indicates the corruption of the
current regime and presages its violent demise, just as the presence of such
feeling in heaven suggests that the nationalist revolution is divinely
directed or sanctioned. |
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‘The Brothers,’ subtitled ‘A scene from ‘98’ (pp.
7-9), presents a spectacle, an execution, and revolves around its potential
ability to generate national feeling, measured in tears, and the nationalist
action such tears should also produce. Insofar as it is cast as an exemplary
or paradigmatic spectacle, the kind of scene supremely suited to produce the desired
sentiments, we might also think of the poem as Wilde’s equivalent to Burke’s
famous description of Marie Antoinette in Reflections on the Revolution in |
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Wilde’s poem thus explicitly rejects, in
conventionally gendered terms, the imperial sentimentality of a writer like |
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Yet none spring forth their bonds to
sever |
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Ah! methinks, had I been there, |
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I’d have dared a thousand deaths ere
ever |
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The sword should touch their hair. |
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It falls! – there is a shriek of
lamentation |
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From the weeping crowd around; |
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They’re stilled – the noblest hearts
within the nation – |
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The noblest heads lie bleeding on the
ground. |
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The crowd’s tears cannot prevent the spilling of
the heroes’ blood. The last stanza places the spectacle in the distant past
for the first time in the poem. At the same time, it figures the execution
scene as a kind of perpetual present, embodied in the heads that refuse to
decay and in the continued appeal of the spectacle to nationalist
sensibilities: |
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Years have passed since that fatal
scene of dying, |
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Yet, lifelike to this day, |
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In their coffins still those severed
heads are lying, |
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Kept by angels from decay. |
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Oh! they preach to us, those still and
pallid features |
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Those pale lips yet implore us, from
their graves, |
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To strive for our birthright as God’s
creatures, |
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Or die, if we can but live as slaves. |
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Having transferred the burden of reacting
properly to the scene from the weeping but passive crowd to the narrator, the
poem then transfers this burden to its readers. The poem itself, as well as
the events it features, exists as a permanent national spectacle, waiting
for the reader in whom it will inspire sentiments and actions like the
narrator’s. Wilde locates the power to constitute the subject of Irish
nationalism simultaneously in the timeless spectacle, which should produce it
automatically in anyone, and in the contingencies of the poem’s particular
readership. |
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Weeping is thus a figure for the doubleness of
the nation; it can signify either the ineradicable plenitude and force of the
spirit of the nation, or its devastating absence. As a way of structuring
Young Ireland’s anxieties about cultural nationalism as subject constitution
– defined as the production and organization of feeling – this ambiguity
generates a problematic that differs substantially from the problematics
produced by an erotics of nationalism. The erotics of nationalism raise the
threat of homosexual (as opposed to homosocial) bonds between men, the
possibility that the patriot will choose his wife over her sexual rival, the
nation, and the spectre of the woman-as-nation whose sexual betrayal or rape
is equivalent to colonial conquest. The tearful strand of nationalism
exemplified in Wilde work, however, grapples with the danger that the signs
of national feeling are ambiguous; their meanings contingent on who displays
them. Wilde’s work manages this ambiguity by constructing taxonomies of feeling
based on gender and class distinctions. Thus Young Ireland’s representations
of tears also occupy the intersection between their drive towards a
transcendent national unity and their need to maintain the divisions that
unity supposedly transcended. |
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Men and Women; Leaders and Peoples |
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Wilde’s work is structured by two hierarchies of
tears – the tears of men over the tears of women, and the tears of patriot
leaders over the tears of the masses. While O’Connell’s movement was largely
for and populated by men, he was well aware of the potential intersections
between feminine sentimentality and political reform. He was passionately
opposed to slavery, and once claimed that Thomas Moore’s Captain Rock was to
the struggle for Catholic emancipation what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to the
abolition of slavery.[31] Maurice R. O’Connell has argued that
the logic of Young Ireland’s romantic cultural nationalism, which emphasized
the uniqueness of peoples, militated against their sharing O’Connell’s
Enlightenment, universalist concern with American slavery and other instances
of oppression outside |
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Wilde’s acceptance of Young Ireland’s equation of
true nationalist subjectivity with masculinity meant that while weeping as a
sign of powerlessness or a lack of political consciousness is often feminized
in her work, tears as evidence of positive national feeling are associated
with masculinity: ‘Meekly bear, but nobly try / Like a man with soft tears
flowing’ (p. 26). Similarly, while the tears of the populace often reveal
their despair and pre-political stupor, the tears of patriot leaders embody
the riches they can offer the nation: |
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And woe to you, ye poor – |
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Want and scorn ye must endure; |
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Yet before ye many noble jewels shine |
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In the sand. |
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Ah! they are patriots’ tears - even
mine – |
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For Fatherland! (p 99) |
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This impulse towards hierarchy and
differentiation within the boundaries of the nation was the inevitable
companion to Young Ireland’s drive towards various kinds of unity –
political, aesthetic, and ethical. While the latter has received more
critical attention, the former is particularly crucial to Wilde’s work. Since
the nation was always in the process of being forged, the nationalization of
the masses was always incomplete. This was particularly true for Young
Ireland, given its relative lack of organic connections to the Irish masses.
O’Connell’s movement, in contrast, had been more genuinely popular, with the
emergent Catholic middle classes, particularly in cities and rural towns, as
its backbone of support.[34] Young Ireland never achieved the
popular following that O’Connell had; the enormous early success of the
Nation depended in part upon O’Connell’s Repeal Association, which
distributed it. In addition, though O’Connell continued to have a popular
following, the Famine destroyed his political machine.[35] |
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Accordingly, a number of scholars have read Young
Ireland’s project as an attempt to create in culture a unity that did not
exist in the political sphere.[36] Thus Young Ireland’s founding premise
of a unified spirit of the nation located in the Irish masses arose as the
chances of them achieving such unity and politicizing the masses were
actually receding. But this compensatory response created its own
contradictions; it is less often observed that nationalization had to be
incomplete, or it risked undoing some of cultural nationalism’s other
founding premises.[37] Their healthy respect for property
and general economic conservatism (with a few exceptions) set limits on Young
Ireland’s unifying, assimilative ideals, and led them to privilege the
leading role of the bourgeois intellectual. As Wilde wrote in an essay on an
anthology of Irish songs, ‘The utterances of a people, though always
vehement, are often incoherent; and it is then that men of education and
culture are needed to interpret and formulate the vague longings and
ambitions of the passionate hearts around them.’[38] For Young Ireland, the relationship
between leaders and peoples demanded both that the masses assimilate
themselves to the model of the leaders, and that this assimilation remain
perpetually deferred. |
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As a result, the figure of the nationalist leader
carries enormous weight for Young Ireland, embodying both an ideal of unity
and the continued significance and the superiority of the bourgeois
intellectual. Wilde’s work is obsessed with leaders - the current dearth of
effective national leaders, the qualities and techniques associated with leadership,
the nature of the relationship between leaders and peoples. Her poems refer
to leaders with epithets such as ‘poet-prophet’ (p. 53), ‘poet-priest’ (p.
25), ‘prophet-leader’ (p. 39), and ‘patriot leader’ (p. 28); her leaders are
heroic, Christ-like, or God-like. At the same time, her works constantly
return to the faults of the masses who have failed to assimilate themselves
to the model offered by such leaders. ‘Have Ye Counted the Cost?’ sneers, ‘Let
the masses pass on scorning, / Seek not courage in their mind; /
Self-devotion, patriot fervour, / Spring not from the craven kind’ (p. 34).
When she became frustrated with the national movement, she blamed the
populace, writing to Duffy, ‘I do not blame the leaders in the least. In |
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Along with other Young Irelanders, Wilde
subscribed to Carlyle’s dictum that the history of the world is a series of
biographies - the biographies of great men. She wrote biographical essays
about a number of figures, including Thomas Moore and Daniel O’Connell. David
Lloyd has explored Young Ireland’s preoccupation with biography and.
autobiography, arguing that for Irish cultural nationalism the hero’s
biography represents a repetition of the nation’s history, pre-figures its
destiny, and asserts the seamless continuity of the individual with the
nation.[40] Wilde’s essay on O’Connell
exemplifies this pattern. His life, she wrote, was ‘one long gladiatorial
wrestle against oppression and bigotry in which every step was a combat, but
every combat a victory. ... The life of O’Connell is, indeed, the history of
Ireland for nearly a century … He lived through all, incarnated all, and was
the avenger, the apostle, and the prophet of her people.’[41] This view of Irish history as a series
of gladiatorial triumphs was, to say the least, counter-intuitive, and may
seem particularly perverse in the wake of the Famine. In contrast, for O’Connell,
the history of |
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Wilde’s works foreground the question of the
leader’s success or failure in transforming the masses, invariably imagining
this transformation occurring when the leader breathes the spirit of the
nation into the populace through his passionate oratory. Thomas Davis’s
essays emphasized the skill of past Irish orators and encouraged present
would-be leaders to study the character of their audiences and the techniques
of oratory. Wilde described O’Connell’s powers as an orator using a language
of the mythical and the magical: ‘Never, perhaps, since sirens gave up
sitting and singing upon rocks, did such witch-music fall on the ear of
listener. The effect was magical – it acted like some potent spell; ... Men
were charmed, subdued, enchanted – forgot everything but him, and could not
choose but listen, love him, and swear to do or die for him’.[42] Although O’Connell was famous, in
Parliament and in |
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Although Young Ireland consciously promoted and
exploited print media, set up Repeal reading rooms, and lauded their literary
projects as part of the national struggle, their rhetoric, in contrast to O’Connell’s,
went to some lengths to conceal their dependence on print. Cultural
nationalism’s representations of the nation erased the mediated national
community created by print and visualized by O’Connell as each Irish citizen
reading a newspaper at home, and replaced it with the physical immediacy of
an orator addressing a crowd. Young Ireland’s definition of the leader as
orator cast him less as the people’s representative than as their hypnotist,
or, as Wilde put it, their siren. Although the people formed a natural and
inevitable national community, they needed the leader’s magical eloquence to
make them aware of their nationhood and give it political force. To imagine
the orator relying on logic, persuasion or choice in mobilizing the people
was tantamount to recognizing the nation as constructed and contingent, so
Young Ireland described its orators using a language of mystical
transformation, in which the masses simply ‘woke up’ from the nightmare of
their own ignorance and passivity. Wilde asks in one poem, ‘Then
trumpet-tongued, to a people sleeping / Who will speak with magic command[?]’
(p. 61). Another poem calls for a leader to ‘Pass the word that bands
together - / Word of mystic conjuration’ and predicts the result: ‘And, as
fire consumes the heather, / So the young hearts of the nation / Fierce will
blaze up, quick and scathing, I ‘gainst the stranger and the foe’ (p. 31).
The hearts of the masses respond automatically, irrationally and uncontrollably,
like a field set ablaze, their reaction unmediated by distance, time, or
thought. |
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As the repositories of the spirit of the nation
and the instruments of that spirit’s emergence in the people, poets and
leaders were interchangeable in Wilde’s work. ‘The Young Patriot Leader’
describes the hero’s eloquence as an overpowering natural (and ultimately
supernatural) force, capable of achieving the transformation of the heart
that sentimentalists like Stowe imagined in less violently martial terms: ‘As
a tempest in its force, as a torrent in its course, / So his words fiercely
sweep all before them, / And they smite like two-edged swords, those
undaunted thunder-words, / On all hearts, as tho’ angels did implore them’
(p. 29). Similarly, ‘A Remonstrance’ asserts: ‘Flashes from Poet’s words /
Electric light, strong, swift, and sudden, like / The clash of thunderclouds,
by which men read / God’s writing legibly on human hearts’ (p. 52). In Wilde’s
works, the words of patriot leaders and poets burn, smite, act as ‘thunder
crashes’ (p. 24) or ‘God’s thunder’ (p. 30); they are both physical objects
with concrete effects and fetishes, magical objects with absolute power to
transform listeners. The greater and more God-like the orator’s
transformative powers, however, the greater his distance from the masses with
whom he was eventually supposed to be merged. Young Ireland’s emphasis on the
unmediated character of the orator’s effect on the people formed the very
vehicle through which they inscribed his absolute separation from them.
Conversely, it was O’Connell’s faith in the mediation of print that made it
possible for him to imagine himself a member of the Irish nation, similar to other
members. |
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Most of Wilde’s works emphasize that the masses
have yet to be transformed by the spirit of the nation. The exhortatory
language of her work casts it as an attempt to generate that spirit among her
readers. The didactic impulses of Young Ireland’s project are well known.
But in Wilde’s case, representations of gender play a particularly important
role in organizing those impulses. The recalcitrance of the masses, and the
necessary, continued separation of the leader from them, is expressed in the
discrepancy between the women poet and the male patriot leader. ‘Who Will
Show Us Any Good?’ laments: ‘Alas! can I help? but a nameless singer – / Weak
the words of a woman to save; / We wait the advent of some light-bringer’ (p.
61). The female poet is the pale, inadequate shadow of the true inspirer of
the nation, the patriot leader. The doubleness of the nation, which exists
eternally yet remains to be created, is mapped onto a gender gap between
them. |
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The first poem in Poems by Speranza, ‘Dedication.
To |
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My Country, wounded to the heart, |
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Could I but flash along thy soul |
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Electric power to rive apart |
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The thunder-clouds that round thee
roll, |
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And, by my burning words uplift |
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Thy life from out Death’s icy drift, |
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Till the full splendours of our age |
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Shone round thee for thy heritage – |
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As Miriam’s, by the |
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Clashing proud cymbals, so my hand |
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Would strike thy harp, |
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Loved |
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The second stanza confesses: ‘I can but look in
God’s great face, / And pray Him for our fated race, / To come in Sinai
thunders down, / And, with His mystic radiance, crown / Some Prophet-Leader,
... ‘The poem turns on the speaker’s gender, which renders her an inferior
substitute for a true poet-leader: ‘The woman’s voice dies in the strife /
Of Liberty’s awakening life; / We wait the hero heart to lead, / The hero,
who can guide at need.’ The poem’s last stanza affirms the efforts made by
the ‘woman’s hand’ of the speaker, while insisting on their limited efficacy.
Even the reference to Miriam indicates that she will never achieve the status
of a true poet-prophet. Miriam was Moses’ sister, and her only prophecy was a
song of praise for Moses after he parted the |
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Like the other women writers of the Nation, in
general Wilde did not explicitly critique or resist the major structures of
Young Ireland’s cultural nationalism. Instead, I have been arguing that she
inhabited their contradictions in a particular way. Wilde emphasized a
sentimental rather than an erotic model of national feeling, but did not make
the claims to specifically feminine power that other sentimental literatures
did. She used Young Ireland’s gender conventions to mediate a bourgeois
nationalism’s necessary but problematic separation from the people, embodied
in the weak feminine tears of the masses and the worthy, masculine tears of
the true patriot. Similarly, rather than explicitly assert the worth of the
woman writer, Wilde employed the figures of the woman poet and the male
patriot to inscribe the doubleness of the nation and the ambiguous status and
potential the masses had for Young Ireland. But if Wilde found a despairing,
pre-national people problematic, she hardly found a mobilized, nationalist
people less so, as is illustrated in her representations of blood. |
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Blood |
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O’Connell struck (or, perhaps more accurately,
failed to strike) an uneasy balance between threatening revolutionary
violence and condemning it. Although the British political classes viewed him
as a figure who deliberately aroused the passions of the mob, O’Connell
feared and distrusted the masses who supported him, hated social unrest, and
condemned revolutions and agrarian secret societies.[48] His speeches and essays counseled
legal agitation, orderly mass demonstrations, and non-violence: ‘Let there be
no riot, no outrage, no violation of the law, and above all, no despair. We
are eight millions’.[49] He repeatedly insisted that ‘the best
possible political revolution is not worth one single drop of human blood’[50] Much of O’Connell’s pacifist politics
was based, however, on the implicit threat of a mass uprising. His speeches
sometimes employed martial language, especially when he wanted to whip up
popular feeling at the monster meetings of the early 1840s. The meetings
themselves, which scholars have compared to people’s festivals, religious
revivals, and theatrical spectacles, bristled with potential mass violence,
and encapsulated the tensions between violence and non-violence in the
movement. They were elaborately staged, with much pomp and pageantry, and
audiences responded passionately to O’Connell’s famed oratorical skills.
Crowds were often organized into ranks and marched in step, in a display of
quasi-military discipline that suggested their potential to become a real
army.[51] It was this combination of O’Connell’s
ability to mobilize the passions of the masses and his skill in controlling
them, in the manner of an inspired military leader, that many contemporary
observers found particularly threatening. |
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In some respects, Young Ireland’s warlike
rhetoric simply meant that they stated plainly what O’Connell had been
careful to suggest obliquely. However, the devastation of the Famine, |
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While Wilde’s representations of tears were
inflected by the dominant discourses of feeling, her representations of
blood were informed by the major impulses of contemporary religious
discourses, the importance of which, as |
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Like her interest in biography, Wilde’s
millenarianism was a way of writing the history of the nation and the
individual as both a record of oppression and a blueprint for victory. The
cataclysmic nature of the suffering involved becomes an index to the radical
nature of the transformation it heralds. Poems such as ‘Foreshadowings’ (pp.
17-19) graft the vocabularies and structures of millenarian thinking onto a
discourse of nationalist resistance. The poem begins, ‘Oremus! Oremus! [Let
us pray!] Look down on us, Father!’ and conflates the horsemen of the
apocalypse with imperial coercion and famine: ‘On rushes the war-steed, his
lurid eyes flashing / There is blood on the track where his long mane is
streaming, ...There’s a tramp like a knell – a cold shadow gloometh – /Woe! ‘tis
the black steed of Famine that cometh.’ ‘Signs of the Times’ (pp. 21-23)
claims, ‘By our prophets God is speaking, in Sinai’s awful thunders, / By
pestilence and famine, in fearful signs and wonders,’ and describes the rough
beast that slouches towards Ireland as a successor to the French revolution: ‘On
its brow a name is written – France read it once before, / And like a demon’s
compact, it was written in her gore – / A fearful name –thrones tremble as
the murmur passed along – / RETRIBUTION, proud oppressors, for your centuries
of wrong.’ The signs of a better world are literally ‘written’ - both
determined and predicted – in violence, blood and gore. The Irish might be
suffering horribly, but God – and the nationalists whose divine sanction was
indicated by the interchangeability of the earthly and heavenly avengers that
her poems constantly invoke – would judge the oppressors and avenge their
crimes. |
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Analyses of cultural nationalism often associate
its more violent-minded formulations with its nostalgic, mythologizing,
backward-looking impulses.[56] But Young Ireland’s nostalgia for
lost origins and pristine pre-colonial culture did not prevent them from
needing, and embracing, however ambivalently, a modernizing,
nineteenth-century narrative of progress. Hobsbawm points out that
millenarianism is the most ‘modern’ of ‘primitive’ social movements, and can
be fairly easily harnessed in the service of modern political revolutions.
Wilde’s bloody millenarianism coexists with her commitment to progress, most
often imagined as the ‘onward march of nations’ (p. 69) through history. ‘Who
Will Show Us Any Good?’ asserts, ‘ |
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Wilde imagined violence and bloodshed as both the
mark of oppression and a sign that the nationalist cause was advancing. But
while the tears that indicate the weakness of the masses become the
enlightened tears of the patriot or reader/spectator, her representations of
blood usually revolved entirely around the masses, organizing her conception
of the masses’ role, once mobilized, in nationalist politics. This
conception was the logical complement to Young Ireland’s impulses to limit
(as well as to achieve) the merging of leaders and peoples. Her version of O’Connell’s
disciplined army, that is, of the Irish people mobilized as an effective
political force, was a raging mob. She assumed that mass politics was by
nature violent and irrational, so when she imagined the successful
transformation of the masses, she emphasized the unthinking and bloodthirsty
propensities of the masses so transformed. Often, the mobilized populace
becomes part of the landscape itself, taking the form of some blindly
powerful and destructive force. ‘Signs of the Times’ lists the ‘signs apocalyptic’
(p. 21) of a coming upheaval, comparing disturbances among the people to
surging oceans and tempest-tossed forests: ‘When mighty passions, surging,
heave the depth of life’s great ocean – / When the people, sway, like forest
trees, to and fro in wild commotion’ (p. 21). ‘Forward’ threatens, ‘And the
heaving myriad surges, / To and fro in tumult swaying, / Threaten death to
all who vainly would oppose them in their might’ (p. 31), while ‘The Year of
Revolutions’ exhorts, ‘On, on in your masses dense, resolute, strong’ (p.
36). Wilde’s descriptions of violent nationalist mobs as blazing fields,
human oceans, wind-swept forest, thunder clouds and other powerful natural
phenomena fit them into millenarian narratives of upheaval. They also embody
Young Ireland’s anxious conceptualization of mass politics as irrational and
bloody. |
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Wilde’s conception of mass politics as crowd
violence made a transition from tears to blood an inviting figure for the
nationalization of the masses. ‘ |
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The poem gleefully addresses the guilty,
aristocratic victims of the crowd’s revenge, threatening and taunting them,
as in ‘Calculating statesmen, quail; / Proud aristocrat, grow pale; / Savage
sounds that deathly song’ or ‘What! coronnetted Prince of Peer, / Will not
the base-born slavelings fear?’ Throughout, the poem emphasizes the violent
savagery of the revolution it depicts. In contrast to O’Connell’s conception
of violence in politics, the crowd’s power lies not in threat or disciplined
action but in their blind, uncontrollable hunger for violence: ‘Blindly now
they wreak revenge – / How rudely do a mob avenge!’ The poem emphasizes
hunger as the source of the riot, repeating words like ‘famished’ and ‘bread.’
In Wilde’s apocalyptic reading of the Famine, the masses’ hunger for food –
which represents their colonial subjugation – and their hunger for violence
– which represents their mobilization as an effective political force –
become indistinguishable. The dismembered bodies of aristocrats become
strange fruit, to borrow a phrase from a later description of mob violence: ‘Ghastly
fruit their lances bear – / Noble heads with streaming hair.’ The speaker
imagines the carnage of the riot in terms of a savage ‘harvest’ of
aristocratic blood: ‘Royal blood of King and Queen / Streameth from the
guillotine; / Wildly on the people goeth, / Reaping what the noble soweth.’
Thus the lines ‘Hunger now, at last, is sated / In halls where once it wailed
and waited’ have multiple referents: food, blood, blood as food. While
national feeling among the male patriot leaders manifests itself as tears,
national feeling among the masses manifests itself as a blind bloodlust as
deep and instinctive as the hunger for which it is a metonym. |
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Current criticism often theorizes cultural
nationalism’s project of subject constitution as the formation of a centered
subject whose autonomy prefigures national autonomy, and whose national
feelings are embodied in unmistakable signs, such as love of country. Wilde’s
work illustrates that, at the same time, Young Ireland’s bourgeois
nationalism also produced different, more unsettling versions of national
subject constitution, particularly in relation to the Irish masses. In this
version, the signs of national feeling are ambiguous, their meanings
contingent and shifting. This subject’s bodily integrity is tenuous – defined
through shedding tears, spilling blood, even ingesting blood – and its autonomy
dissolves into the unreasoning mind of the crowd. These divergent conceptions
of subject constitution marked Young Ireland’s ambivalence about the Irish
masses; subject constitution as the achievement of individual integrity,
autonomy and stable signification was the province of the elite. The
necessary complement to Young Ireland’s drive towards unity, their dreams of
assimilation, and their faith in the people as the embodiments of the spirit
of the nation was their reliance on class and gender hierarchies, their will
to separate bourgeois leaders and intellectuals from the populace, and their
fear that the masses could not be constituted as national subjects, or that
they could only be constituted as threatening, ambiguous kinds of national
subjects. As a woman writer engaging with a deeply masculinist tradition,
Wilde had cause to be, particularly sensitive to the latter set of impulses
– those that emphasized disjunction, distrust and hierarchy. The major
tropes and patterns of Wilde’s work embody, rather than resist, many of Young
Ireland’s gender conventions. Through those conventions, however, Wilde
illustrated with particular clarity the disintegrative and divisive aspects
of the contradictory formulations that distinguished Young Ireland from Old. |
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·
Marjorie Howes is Co-director, Irish Studies Program
and Associate Professor of English at |
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