The Manliness of Parnell

Irish political and cultural historians have long pondered the reasons behind the tenacious hold that Charles Stewart Parnell exerted on the imagination of his compatriots. But while they have succeeded in amassing voluminous and fairly consistent evidence as to the sources and dimensions of his public appeal, they have failed, by and large, to satisfy themselves with a comprehensive explanation of what Labouchere called "the Irish fetishism of Parnell."¹ In trying to qualify the achievement of a figure similarly revered and martyred, mystified and then deified within his own oppressed community, Spike Lee's film Malcolm X celebrates the eponymous hero for giving Afro-Americans their "manhood," and I believe an analogous claim can be made for the impression Parnell left upon both the Anglo and the Gaelo-Irish communities of his time, not to mention the English themselves. Every aspect of Parnell's political life, from his widespread popularity to the internecine nationalist conflict occasioned by his demise, can be better assessed if one considers the importance of his gender performance, broadly conceived: (1) the way in which his personal style of address coordinated with his political agenda to project an air of manliness which had a special currency, to be examined directly, under the regime of domestic colonialism; (2) the way in which the air of manliness he projected became the locus of collective transference and identification, allowing Parnell to defy colonial emasculation in the name of the Irish people.

This is one of those occasions, I would submit, when a cultural studies methodology can legitimately supplement the discourse of history, by taking up inadequately explicated events or phenomena on conceptual lines not ordinarily applied to them. Thus, at the conclusion of his massive biography of Parnell, F.S.L. Lyons, the dean of modern Irish history, rather grandly proclaims that Parnell "gave back to the Irish people their self-respect,"² but he does not have an optic available to clarify the meaning of his own intuition and so he reverts, here and elsewhere, to a vaguely moralizing disappointment with the politically immature and self-mystifying disciples who so venerated Parnell in the first place.³ An analytic lever like gender performance, however, can help to contextualize the rather amorphous notion of colonial respect, to illuminate the ideological constraints placed upon its achievement, and to concatenate the elements of Parnell's career that engaged or challenged those constraints.

Having invoked cultural studies, however, I want to dissociate my use of the term performance from the claims of volitional agency that it often carries, along with its relatives performative/performativity, in much of that discourse. Indeed, as the ensuing discussion shows, the ideal of manliness itself was less a substantive or performative than a structural category, a mode of organizing the basic elements of character, private and public, individual and collective. As a result, the manliness embodied individually by Parnell for the ethos at large could not finally reside in the enactment of specific forms of policy or self-presentation, but only in the logic of their arrangement. The manliness of Charles Stewart Parnell in particular was articulated across several dimensions of his political profile and practice (personal, rhetorical, tactical, strategic), and it was on the basis of this concerted development—the way each register answered the others at a figurative remove—that its idealized aura radiated from Parnell to the people-nation, from exemplary Irishman to Irish Man.

Mapping Manliness

To trace the architecture of manliness in Victorian Britain, distinguishing its contours from those of the currently dominant psychoanalytic and feminist inflected conceptions of masculinity, it is easiest to start with two cruxes that have preoccupied the critics and genealogists of manliness and might be said to involve the vertical and horizontal axes of its historical definition. First, what is the relation of manliness to its ground in masculine gender identity? Is the former merely an honorific variant on the latter or do the two categories differ in some significant respects? Second, what...