ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS OFFERED TO THE CONFERENCE
Ireland, Modernism and the fin de siècle
University of Limerick. April 2010
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Table of Contents
Dr. Maeve Tynan
Affiliation: English, University of Limerick
The Gaelic Gothic: Degeneracy and Diffusion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dr. Bruce Stewart
Affiliation: University of Ulster
‘The Curve of An Emotion’: fin de siècle Metaphysics in Wilde, Yeats and Joyce.
Dr. Tina O’Toole
Affiliation: English, University of Limerick
Cross-Lines: Egerton, Moore, Joyce
Dr. Maureen O’Connor
Affiliation: Mary Immaculate College
Inhuman Voices Wake Us: Animals and the Mythical Method in Irish New Woman Writing
Conor Montague
Affiliation: NUI Galway
Bard’s Synge Song: Anatole le Braz and the Irish Revival
Dr. Ed Madden
Affiliation: University of South Carolina
Tabhair Dom do Lámh? Austin Clarke’s Washroom Encounter
Dr. Aoife Leahy
Affiliation: The Oscholars
Fin de Siècle Dialogue in George Moore’s ‘Mildred Lawson’
Dr. Yvonne Ivory
Affiliation: University of South Carolina
Beyond Salomé: Oscar Wilde’s Afterlife in Modernist German Opera
Prof. Heidi Hansson
Affiliation: Umea Uninversity
Emily Lawless and Fin de Siècle Literature as a Temporal Category
Clare Gill
Affiliation: School of English, Queen’s University Belfast
Taking out the Trash: Belfast’s Free Public Library and the fin de siècle Doctrine of Improvement.
Prof. Alex Davis
Affiliation: School of English, University College Cork
Learning to be Brutal: Synge, Linguistics, Decadence
Dr. Faith Binckes and Dr. Kathryn Laing
Affiliation(s): Oxford University; Mary Immaculate College Limerick
‘The inconsistencies and surprises of sympathy’: Hannah Lynch, Gender, Genre and Politics at the fin-de-siècle
Dr. Elke D'hoker
Affiliation: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Somerville & Ross and the modern Irish short story
Prof. Hedwig Schwall
Affiliation: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Towards a new definition of the ‘New Woman’? Rereading Yeats’s ideas of the individual on the basis of contemporary psychoanalysis.
ABSTRACTS
Dr. Faith Binckes and Dr. Kathryn Laing
‘The inconsistencies and surprises of sympathy’: Hannah Lynch, Gender, Genre and Politics at the fin-de-siècle
In her 2006 article on Mary F. Robinson and Vernon Lee, Emily Harrington drew attention to ways in which the two women explored the ‘ethical responsibilities of aesthetics’ during the fin-de-siècle, shaping a discourse that both drew upon, and significantly altered, the templates established by their male contemporaries. This paper will follow Harrington's lead by reasserting the connection between political commitment and artistic production during the period, and emphasising the importance of female literary networks. The focus of the paper is Hannah Lynch (born Dublin 1859, died Paris 1904), Robinson's close friend and fellow salonnière, in 1890s Paris. Lynch published a range of short stories and novels from the early 1880s onwards, many of which engaged with contemporary and popular debates surrounding the ‘New Woman’, in both Irish and European contexts.
Although her writing was markedly different from that of Robinson, the paper will explore the way in which depictions of ‘sympathy’– either as ‘compassion’, or as a less quantifiable act of emotional engagement– also played a central role in Lynch's writing of the period. Lynch typically portrayed such engagements as subversive of both radical and reactionary agendas. In this sense, they provided her not only with the opportunity to explore the uncertain territory upon which we encounter others, but to negotiate the polaritiesDriving the ambivalent category of the ‘New Woman’. However, equally important to this negotiation was Lynch's position as an émigré, Catholic, Irish writer, whose writing identity was in large part shaped by the requirements of her (mainly British) publishers and readers. This paper will also pay close attention to Lynch's portrayal of the ways in which sympathy– or the lack of it– can cross or reinforce the barriers of national or political affiliation.
Prof. Alex Davis
Learning to be Brutal: Synge, Linguistics, Decadence
Writing in 1911, Ezra Pound argued that the generation of Ernest Dowson had reached a poetic impasse: while Dowson ‘epitomized a decade’ and ‘holds a very interesting position, strategically, in the development of the art,’ his work is ‘the ‘Vale’ of a number of spent force[s].’ Yet, as Pound’s early collections vividly demonstrate, modernism’s valediction to Aestheticism was to be a long goodbye. A decade earlier, in his Etude Morbide, J. M. Synge can be seen confronting the literary cul-de-sac which Pound had to circumnavigate: the sense that the written literary tradition had, by the end of the nineteenth century, devolved: ‘stories in verse are [pointless] now, sincereDrama has the weight [of] earthly passion, description is vain, and lyrical poetry is but a substitute for the singing voice or violin. Literature is not alive. I will be silent.’ Synge’s extraordinary development at the turn of the century, from the stalling of both the Etude and the related Vita Vecchia to the achievement of Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen, may owe something to his contact with developments in linguistics on the continent, especially a course on phonetics he took with Paul Passy at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Synge’s exposure to Passy seems to have reinforced, as Declan Kiberd suggests, a developing ‘belief in the potential of dialect.’ While Synge’s rejection of ‘poetic diction’ in the very first sentence of the Preface to Poems and Translations would appear to align his later poems the dialect of his plays, it nevertheless remains the case that the idiom of Synge’s most achieved poetry, as in hisDrama, is as artificial as any other form of poetic diction, a fact Donald Davie long ago observed. Furthermore, the unvarnished immediacy, the linguistic brutality, Synge advocates in the place of poetic diction in the Preface to Poems and Translations is, as Davie notes, vivid testimony to Synge’s position in the modern movement. Though we often think of the visuality of a modernist text—that which Jerome J. M cGann memorably describes as the ‘visible language of modernism’—Mark Morrison has noted the importance of orality to the modern movement as a whole, that is, to both modernist and Georgian writers alike. A preoccupation with the purity of English diction (in the United States as well as Great Britain) stemmed from the anxiety that the English language was in a state of terminal decline. In this context, Synge’s extraordinary late ballads can be read as in the vanguard of the ‘outbreak in poetic realism’ in Anglophone poetry of the early years of the twentieth century; one which, as Chris Baldick comments, ‘seemed at the time to be a bold rejection of Victorian inhibition, and a promising reconnection of poetry with the vitality of popular speech.’ On the one hand, Synge’s ballads are very much in the vein of Pound’s contemporaneous ‘Villonauds’ (‘Villonaud for this Yule,’ ‘A Villonaud. Ballad of the Gibbet’) in A Lume Spento (1908), works which prefigure the more robust early modernist monologues, ‘Piere Vidal Old’ and ‘Ballad of the Goodly Frere’ in Exultations (1909). On the other, however, Synge’s late poems should be read alongside the nascent ‘poetic realism’ of the Georgians, including that of his friend and admirer, John Masefield, whose Salt-Water Ballads (1902) and Ballads (1903) signalled a significant breach with the poetry of the 1890s in their vigorous use of colloquialisms, dialect and wilful vulgarity. Synge’s poetry, from the abortive Vita Vecchia to the minor triumph of the final ballads, participates in the crucial transition from the poetics of the fin de siècle to that of the new century, illustrating in its small compass the rapid shift from the poetics of Decadence and Aestheticism to the restless innovations of the early modern movement.
Dr. Elke D'hoker
Somerville & Ross and the modern Irish short story
The three volumes of ‘R.M. stories’ which Somerville and Ross published between 1899 and 1915 have always had an ambivalent reception in Irish literary criticism. Quite apart from the controversy about the colonial stereotyping of their work, critics have often seemed uneasy in face of the huge popularity of these comic stories with generations of readers. Frank O’Connor famously voiced this uneasiness in the introduction to The Lonely Voice. Although he calls The Irish R.M. ‘one of the most lovable books I know’ he goes on to dismiss it as a work of art. He claims that the authors ‘forgot’ all about the French naturalism they deployed in The Real Charlotte and wrote these tales ‘just to enjoy themselves’. As a result, he claims, the stories are ‘yarns, pure and simple’, without intellectual depth or artistic integrity. In fact, they prove empty or ‘nothing when studied alone by the cold light of day’. He concludes: ‘Irish literature has gone Moore’s way, not Somerville and Ross’s’ (34-7).
While recent critics have come to view the artistic achievement of Somerville and Ross in far more positive terms, O'Connor's final verdict on the traditional rather than modern quality of their short fiction still lingers. While recognising that the R.M. stories present an advance on the tale tradition terms of artistic control, Heinz Kosok nevertheless concludes that they belong ‘soziologisch wie literarisch’ in the 19^th century (1982: 131). Heather Ingman too discusses the authors in her chapter on the nineteenth century tale rather than in her chapter on fin-de-siècle short fiction. And although Julie Anne Stevens traces elements of a modernist aesthetic in the stories (e.g. stereotyping, performativity and visual techniques), she notes that their ‘popular and anecdotal short stories were quite different from the so-called literary story that Frank O’Connor would later identify as ‘modern’ in The Lonely Voice’ (162).
While there is no doubt as to the difference between Moore’s stories in The Untilled Field and the R.M. stories of Somerville and Ross, I would like to test the accuracy of O’Connor’s dual claim, (a) that the authors ignored fin-de-siècle or (proto-)modernist developments in short fiction when writing their stories and (b) that their work is therefore of little consequence for the genre of the modern Irish short story. Since both the thematic and the overall aesthetic dimension of their work has received ample attention in Julie Anne Stevens' illuminating study, I will focus particularly on the formal and narrative structure of their short stories. I will examine such 'modern' features of their work as (a) its unity (both within individual stories and within their short story cycle as a whole), (b) its representation of 'ordinary' reality, and (c) its use of a potentially unreliable character-narrator. I will also compare their work on these points with that of contemporaries such as Kipling, Stevenson and Conrad who have been hailed as originators of the modern short story form. Finally I will consider the importance of the R.M. stories for the tradition of the Irish short story as a whole.
Clare Gill
Taking out the Trash: Belfast’s Free Public Library and the fin de siècle Doctrine of Improvement.
As a direct response to the rise and unequivocal predominance of the novel in the fin-de-siècle literary marketplace, alarmist, hyperbolic and often emotional articulations on the effects of ‘pernicious’ literature were regularly enunciated across a variety of platforms throughout the late-Victorian period. The potential contaminating effects of popular fiction were widely felt at this time, and alongside the increasingly voiced notion that reading required urgent policing, cynical critics of popular reading habits also began to underscore the necessity for the provision of practical guidance for the working classes in the selection of appropriately chosen reading materials.
Free public libraries, long since criticised for being the preserve of trashy novels, magazines and vagrants, came under great pressure throughout the period to be seen to be marshalling their readers towards more nourishing literary fare and away from the most recent Marie Corelli novel or the latest issue of Titbits. This paper will examine the response of one public library, Belfast’s Central Library, to these wider debates about popular fiction, education and self-improvement. Belfast’s Central Library was founded in 1888 under the direction of its first chief librarian, George Hall Elliott, a devoted Unitarian with a fervent belief in the educative and redemptive function of literature. This paper willDraw upon a diversity of archival materials including library records, annual reports, correspondence, pamphlets and unpublished ‘black lists’ of immoral books, in order to outline the various attempts made by the library to encourage self-improvement through judicious, systematic reading practices.
The material and symbolic construction of texts in the late nineteenth-century world of books was determined by an intricate network of publishers, printers, newspaper editors, influential reviewers and readers; this paper will go some way to illuminating the significant nature of the roles performed by libraries and librarians in the selection, circulation and policing of reading practices in one free public library at the fin de siècle.
Prof. Heidi Hansson
Emily Lawless and Fin de Siècle Literature as a Temporal Category
Emily Lawless’s 1901 work A Garden Diary was written at and describes the turn of the nineteenth century, but it is doubtful whether it can be categorized as fin de siècle writing. Rather than emerging modernism, the text seems to be infused with residuary Victorianism, in style, ideology and subject matter. Nevertheless, A Garden Diary brushes against themes and aesthetic attitudes that are characteristic of what is normally understood as fin de siècle writing: self scrutiny, heightened sensibility, a melancholic outlook, the sense of ending and the disappearance of an old world order. Insofar as modernism equals avant-garde writing, Lawless’s works certainly do not qualify, but A Garden Diary might function as a reminder that there is no straightforward move to something new, either in culture or thought, but a struggle between old and new approaches to art, life and politics. The text is an example of the cultural ‘noise’ present at the time, works that may reach a wide readership at the time but which afterwards fail to be incorporated into any of the categories established in literary history. In a sense, the text serves as a control group, against which works that are more neatly classified as fin de siècle literature may be defined.
Dr. Yvonne Ivory
Beyond Salomé: Oscar Wilde’s Afterlife in Modernist German Opera
In his influential and highly tendentious 1892 study Entartung (‘Degeneration’), the Austro-Hungarian cultural critic Max Nordau scorned Oscar Wilde as an egotistic aesthete who embodied all of the worst the principles of the fin de siècle—a period and mood that Nordau associated with ‘contempt for traditional views of custom and morality.’ Following the Wilde scandal of 1895—and despite professing some misgivings about ‘kicking a man while he’s down’—Nordau repeated his condemnation of Wilde in a new edition of Degeneration: Wilde could not be ignored as he represented the ‘most instructive example of the very mode of thought’ that Nordau’s study was trying to capture. Nordau’s was the very first German-language discussion of Wilde; the second was penned in 1894 by the giant of Austrian letters Hermann Bahr, who dismissed Wilde as an aesthete and a prophet of Decadence. These two readings of Wilde set the stage (if not the tone) for much of his German-language reception: Wilde was the epitome of aestheticism, individualism, and decadence; the fin de siècle incarnate. Salomé, the first Wilde work to be revived in Germany following Wilde’s death, fit comfortably with such an assessment of Wilde, and was read, for the most part, in its light. Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera based on Salomé fared similarly, cementing the bond between fin-de-siècle decadence and the modernist impulse in the realm of serious music.
In this paper, I will return to Max Nordau’s Entartung to flesh out his notion of the fin de siècle, focusing particularly on his definition of the trend as ‘a practical emancipation from traditional discipline.’ I will then turn to a number of less-well-known modernist German-language operatic projects inspired by Wilde (Alexander Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg and Eine florentiniche Tragödie, and Otto Julius Bierbaum’s Das Gespenst von Matschatsch) to explore the extent to which modernism in European opera owes a debt to the Irishman’s own ‘practical emancipation from traditional discipline.’
Dr. Aoife Leahy
Fin de Siècle Dialogue in George Moore’s ‘Mildred Lawson’
Many of Oscar Wilde’s critical essays are written in a dialogue form, such as ‘The Decay of Lying’(1889) and ‘The Critic as Artist’(1890). The format facilitates the concept that a writer’s best arguments are always with himself or herself. This kind of writing also challenges the notion of absolute conclusions or certainties.
This paper will examine some notable dialogues in George Moore’s ‘Mildred Lawson’ from the collection Celibates (1895), such as Mildred’s arguments with her brother and her suitors regarding a woman’s role in life. Mildred aspires to a life as an artist and tries to persuade herself as much as others that she is prepared to remain single in pursuit of her goal. Moore’s dialogue-heavy story often seems closer to a critical essay than to short fiction and can be interpreted as a textual experiment. The central characters discuss many topical issues in 1890s culture and art. I will pay particular attention to the sections of ‘Mildred Lawson’ that seem most like a dialogical critical essay.
Dr. Ed Madden
Tabhair Dom do Lámh? Austin Clarke’s Washroom Encounter
In Austin Clarke’s 1962 memoir Twice Round the Black Church, he recounts a schoolboy romance that ends with a homoerotic proposition in the school washroom. While critics of Clarke have focused on his anti-clerical eroticism, none have noted this homoerotic narrative, which resituates Joyce’s ‘An Encounter’ firmly in the school washroom as internal rather than external threat. Further, it anchors the homoeroticism that suffuses Clarke’s work by specifically connecting it to adolescence and the contexts of Irish language instruction and Irish nationalism. Clarke describes the proposition as an ‘awkward’ and ‘mysterious’ sentence—’tabhair dham spúnóg’ (give me a spoon)—like a ‘translation from our Irish phrase book.’ Clarke then describes his Irish language instruction as illicit, shameful, and queer—he recounts a series of teachers with prostheses, deformities, stutters, and a tendency to pinch schoolboys—’we all concluded,’ writes Clarke, ‘that there was something very queer about the Irish language.’ In my book Tiresian Poetics (2008), I argue that Clarke connects circumcision to linguistic power. If Clarke blamed masturbation—as I demonstrate—on phimosis, or a penis irritated by a tight foreskin, in his memoirs he links partial circumcision to both sexual pleasure and linguistic proficiency through a pun in French, ‘il faut couper le filet’ (cut the cord, loosen the tongue). If French is linked to circumcision and adult (hetero)sexual pleasure, then this narrative suggests that Irish is part of a network of male-male intimacies—sweets in the pocket, pinched bums, washroom sex—that is adolescent, homoerotic, and deformed. Sexual figures in Clarke are often figures of nation. Influenced by modernist anxieties about gender and nation, Clarke described Irish poetry in 1932 asDriven by fear of female sexuality, the aisling as subversive and repressed eroticism finding expression in nationalism. If repressed sexualities find expression through national discourse, this anecdote is rich. The washroom proposition is surely an echo of that emblematic Irish wedding song, ‘Tabhair Dom do Lamh’ (give me your hand), and thus a queering of heteronormativity in its most traditional (Irish) forms.
Conor Montague
Bard’s Synge Song: Anatole le Braz and the Irish Revival
In April 1897, J.M. Synge attended a lecture at the Sorbonne delivered by Anatole Le Braz. Born in Saint-Servais in 1859; the ‘Bard of Brittany’ was a Breton folklore collector and translator. The lecture made quite an impression, for the famously reticent Synge approached Le Braz afterwards and introduced himself. The two became friends and Synge read several of Le Braz’s books on Breton folklore, including La Légend de la Morte en Basse Bretagne (1893) and Au Pays des Pardons (1894), texts which were hugely influential to the composition of The Aran Islands and Synge’s subsequentDramatic cannon.
This paper will explore the cross-cultural exchanges between Anatole Le Braz, the Breton cultural revival and Irish writers such as J.M. Synge and Douglas Hyde at the fin de siècle. Le Braz visited the west of Ireland for three months in early 1905, around the time that The Well of the Saints was courting controversy in Dublin. He travelled in the company of Henri Lebeau, a Breton who became a close friend of Synge. Lebeau reviewed The Well of the Saints in the Revue de l’artDramatique on 15 April 1905, and is credited with exposing the play to a European audience. Finally, the paper will briefly examine the influence of the Gaelic League on the Breton Revival, comparing and contrasting the two movements as they struggled to assert cultural identities within the pervasive modernity of empire.
Dr. Maureen O’Connor
Inhuman Voices Wake Us: Animals and the Mythical Method in Irish New Woman Writing
In his 1923 essay, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, TS Eliot commended James Joyce’s use of myth, identified the Irish writer as ‘pursuing a method which others must pursue after him’. The ‘mythical method’, Eliot goes on to say, had been ‘already adumbrated’ by WB Yeats, ‘the first contemporary to be conscious’ of the need for this narrative mode. It is significant that two Irish writers share a tendency not only to ‘manipulate’, in Eliot’s words, but to assume a ‘continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’. Maud Ellmann’s analysis of Joyce’s deployment of mythical figures from Ulysses, observes that ‘Homer’s monsters are liminal figures, neither human nor inhuman, which undermine the boundary between these categories’. In Joyce, Ellmann argues, ‘this boundary is undermined by animals, whose constant incursions into hearth and mind compromise the integrity of homo sapiens’. Ellmann reveals the ant-imperialist implications of the animal in Joyce, asserting that England is the Circe which turns the Irish into swine. The history of the Irish as animalized in colonial discourse complicates the use of myth and animal imagery in Irish writing. ‘Human superiority is exposed as a delusion based the repression of the animal’, Ellmann contends, and the act of writing ‘animalizes its creator’. Figuration itself is implicated in and potentially undermined by the animal, what John Berger calls ‘the first metaphor’. Women share a history similar to Ireland’s of beastialization as justification for violent appropriation and oppression. This paper will argue that Irish New Woman writers, such as Somerville and Ross, George Egerton, and Emily Lawless, anticipate the ways in which later Irish writers call upon the animal to intervene in the epistemological and mimetic crises which mark Ireland’s relationship to modernity.
Dr. Tina O’Toole
Cross-Lines: Egerton, Moore, Joyce
Several scholars of the fin de siècle, including Lyn Pykett, have suggested links between the experiments of New Woman writers such as George Egerton, and the work of modernist writers such as Joyce and Lawrence in particular. In this paper, I will examine Egerton’s short fiction and consider the ‘cross-lines’ between her work and that of George Moore and James Joyce.
Beginning with a brief examination of the connections between Egerton’s transcultural experience and literary experiments, and those of her Scandinavian role models (particularly Knut Hamsun and Ola Hansson, whose texts she translated), the paper will address her deployment of their avant garde forms and narratives. With this in mind, examining the themes of subversion and sexual transgression which dominated her decadent narratives, I will consider her use of her Irishness, her ‘outsider’ status, as a subversive tool to disrupt the operations of gender and genre at the end of the nineteenth century. Set in this broader context, and addressing a wider European audience at the end of the nineteenth century, Egerton’s work refutes the prevailing view of Irish fiction as always at odds with either British or European literary practice. Re-placing Egerton’s work alongside that of Moore and Joyce and focusing on linkages and echoes in the work of these three Irish writers, I will argue that we arrive at a somewhat more nuanced and differentiated account of the Irish fin de siècle than has tended to be offered in mainstream literary history.
Dr. Len Platt
A Portrait of the Artist as a Public School Novel
This paper considers Joyce’s A Portrait as a highly transgressive and modernizing treatment of the bildungsroman and its variants. Narratives of these kinds, often linked by literary historians to the development of European romanticism, derived their particular force from the symbolic and highly politicized resonance they constructed around youth and adolescence in the age of nationalism — there was an Anglo-Irish dimension to the genre in the shape of such figures as Maria Edgeworth and Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald.
Most typically public school novels constructed young aristocratic or otherwise advantaged males in metaphorical relationship to cultural development, the latter usually being imagined in racial or national terms and frequently conceptualized in terms of potent antitheses — across conservatism and progressivism, for example, and, most typically, the promise of national growth and development pitched against the threat of decadence and degeneration. A Portrait is a critical and modernist engagement with these forms and traditions. Drawing emphatic attention to the most Anglicized product of bildungsroman culture — public school literature, where, in the standard nineteenth-century form, juvenile development gained new value as a metaphor for wider social progress and political reform. The connections that this literature made between nation building and adolescence, and its later deployment of the discourses of racial fitness and national efficiency, ensured that this nowadays humble literary culture was once centrally engaged and of considerable relevance for Joyce’s handling of both Irish cultural nationalism and modernist innovation in A Portrait.
Beth Rodgers
‘She talks Ireland’: Irishness, Authorship and the Wild Irish Girls of L.T. Meade
Born in Bandon, County Cork, in 1844, L.T. Meade holds the perhaps dubious honour of being one of the most prolific and most forgotten writers Ireland has ever produced. After leaving home in her twenties in order to pursue the pen in fin-de-siècle literary London, Meade found fame as the writer of over 280 books, most of which were aimed at girls. A significant number of these books featured Irish settings and characters, invariably in the form of a Wild Irish Girl disrupting the good order of an English boarding school with her brogue and untamed ways, as in titles such as Wild Kitty (1897), The Rebel of the School (1902) and Peggy from Kerry (1912). Meade’s formulaic books have, however, been much criticised for complying with questionable representations of gender, class and empire typical of many Victorian children’s writers, and her portrayals of Irish girls as ‘noble savages’ arguably stand as arch examples of this.
This paper, however, will offer a different reading of Meade and her Wild Irish Girls, who are not necessarily as one-dimensional as they might initially appear. Using a wide variety of periodical sources, such as interviews and reviews from contemporary girls’ magazines, I will explore the relationship between Meade’s Irishness, her self-construction as a women writer, and the popularity of her novels. I will argue that Meade was by no means as wide-eyed and naïve as her Wild Irish Girls but instead had a savvy grasp on the demands of the marketplace and the notion of public persona which tells us much about the marketability of certain images of Ireland at the fin de siècle and may even go some way to deciphering the rather elusive Meade herself.
Prof. Hedwig Schwall
Towards a new definition of the ‘New Woman’? Rereading Yeats’s ideas of the individual on the basis of contemporary psychoanalysis.
Yeats studies have been curiously defensive against the use of contemporary forms of (literary) theory. Text edition and biography have been major focuses of research, new studies in prosody have thrown a new light on much of his poetry. And as W.B.Yeats was a cultural nationalist, whose first aim was to ‘offer models’ to help form an identity for this new nation state it is no wonder that many scholars focus on the political-historical context in which his work came into being. E. Cullingford combines this approach with an interest in gender studies (2006). But whichever the method used, all scholars agree that Yeats was primarily a theatrical poet, and indeed his development of theories on man’s ‘internal scene’ and his ‘mask practice’ underscore the importance of the performative element in his work.
Because of Yeats’s focus on the mask, which is linked on the one hand to his ideas of man’s ‘psychic system’ and on the other to the necessity of a national theatre that should ‘organically’ grow out of the interactions between people’s psychic systems, my approach will be psychoanalytic, and I will more specifically discuss the phenomenon of hysteria, which was a focal point of interest in the 1890s. Not only were the many forms of histrionic behaviour part and parcel of the New Women’s scene (cf Charcot’s clinic in Paris, Sarah Bernhardt’s new body language being spread through European theatres and beyond), but Freud and Breuer’s research into hysteria (published in their Studien über Hysterie in 1895) founded the science of psychoanalysis, which terms developed greatly throughout the 20^th century. It is the results of this development, the refinement in the views on hysteria, as brought about by L. Israël ( 1984), I. Veith (1986), P. Verhaeghe (1987), Nestor Braunstein (1990), Borch-Jacobsen (1990) E. Showalter (1997) et al, which help us to elucidate the hysteric structures in Yeats’s representation of the political and artistic women of his time, thus reconfiguring some questions pertaining to the definition of ‘the New Woman’.
Dr. Bruce Stewart
‘The Curve of An Emotion’: fin de siècle Metaphysics in Wilde, Yeats and Joyce.
My proposed paper revolves around the fact that Joyce borrowed Wilde’s phrase ‘curve of an emotion’, which Wilde employed in An Ideal Husband as a defining quality of female intellect (i.e., the absence of rigorous thought). For Joyce, however, it served a very different purpose as a descriptive term for the conception of ‘soul’ which he defined in Aristotelian terms as a developmental entity (or entelechy) in the first ‘Portrait’ essay of 1904. The young Joyce borrowed much from Wilde and especially from The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose title-character is no less a precursor of Stephen Dedalus than Des Esseintes in Huysmans À Rebours is a precursor of Wilde’s eponymous character. (Huysman’s novel was of course the decadent ‘yellow book’ that influenced Dorian Gray.) In later remarks on Wilde he emphasised the ‘sense of sin’ as a ‘separation from God’ which Wilde shared with Catholicism, thus implicitly proposing a biographical reading of Dorian Gray in terms of the ‘double life’ that Wilde adumbrates in that novel and which was to assume a tragic relevance in the light of his nemesis at the hands of English law. Wilde’s influence on Joyce is little recognized today, chiefly because the supposed modernity of the latter renders it inconvenient, and Buck Mulligan’s allusions to ‘a new Hellenism’ or Stephen’s to the ‘cracked looking-glass’ of Irish art in the Telemachus chapter of Ulysses are considered happenstance rather than essential. Yet there is a great deal more to the Wilde-Joyce connection than a kind of superficial borrowing—grist to his literary mill. More obvious is his debt to Yeats whose manifestly fin de siècle story ‘The Tables of the Law’ both Joyce and Stephen Dedalus knew by heart; yet even still, the indebtedness is generally underplayed. More broadly still the total effect of fin de siècle thinking in the domain of metaphysics and aesthetics on Joyce has yet to be assessed and, to that extent, a vital link between the Irish nineteen-eighties and European modernism remains little understood. Put otherwise, modernist and post-structuralist criticism have collaborated to occlude the fin de siècle Irishman in James Joyce and with it the true magnitude of Ireland’s share in the spirit of the fin de siècle.
Dr. Maeve Tynan
The Gaelic Gothic: Degeneracy and Diffusion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
The modernist novel is characterised by its obsession with knowledge and its attendant anxiety about the loss of reliable epistemological coordinates. As such, the central, and often futile, quest of the novel’s protagonist represents an attempt to penetrate the heart of darkness and return to a world of certainty and stability. In racial terms the colonial Irish represent an obstacle to epistemological certainty in that they are both ‘white’ and ‘native’ simultaneously. The ‘white native’ can slip unseen into ‘civilised’ society, threatening corruption, contamination and the potential for replication. This paper proposes that Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray stage modernist concerns of epistemological instability and racial degeneracy. Though ostensibly evading the contentious ‘Irish Question’ in their novels, the title figures in each dramatises the concerns regarding the invisible Irish contagion. The Count, who arrives to London in a coffin ship, can walk its streets unseen ‘so that no man stops if he sees me, or pause in his speaking if he hears my words to say, “Ha, ha! A stranger!”’. In a similar fashion, Dorian Gray, the charmingly effeminate young man, can conceal his depravity in an attic. Wearing a mask of Victorian respectability, his sin is projected onto a portrait that is a replica of himself. In this sense, the progress of these figures reproduces that of their creators[1], who would likewise draw attention from their racial origins in an attempt to advance socially in the imperial metropolis. Furthermore, both Dorian and the Count then are implicated in processes of reproduction that are characterised as unnatural and aberrant, representing a threat to civilised society. Centring on issues of reproduction and diffusion, this paper argues that both novels present an ironic critique of fin-de-siècle concerns about the contamination of the Anglo-Saxon race and in particular the invisible threat of the ‘Irish disease’.
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[1] In his influential book Degeneration (1895), Max Nordau would actually suggest that the end of civilization was foretold in contemporary trends in the arts, including the emergence of Decadents such as Oscar Wilde.