The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (review)

The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order, by Margot Gayle Backus; pp. ix + 291. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999, $17.95, £14.36.

The Gothic Family Romance is an ambitious and wide-ranging reading of Irish literature, densely informed by queer theory, feminism, and Marxism. According to Margot Gayle Backus, much of Anglo-Irish writing is the product of a colonial order that privileged male over female, parent over child, state order over individual desire. The rise of capitalism in England and its importation to a neo-feudal Ireland created what Backus terms the "capitalist family cell" that imposed mandatory heterosexuality on generations of Anglo-Irish, and then, through the perpetuation of a colonialist hegemony after independence in 1921, on the Republic and Northern Ireland as well.

Backus aims to create a sustained explanatory paradigm for her reading of Irish culture from early Celtic society to the two contemporary nations on the island. Her reliance on highly ideological theorizations of history, some far more convincing than others, occasionally creates real problems. Embracing the ahistorical and certainly controversial methodology of Mary Condren's allegorical readings of Irish mythology in The Serpent and the Goddess (1989), for example, she posits a dubious pre-Christian and pre-feudal Celtic golden age of non-hierarchical community that offered alternatives to the fallen world of heterosexual marriage and patriarchal domination. Thus the unifying tropes of The Gothic Family Romance--the figure of the living dead, the Anglo-Irish devil's compact, the vampire--reflect the baleful effects of a symbolic contract brought to Ireland through conquest, as free laborers were transformed by colonialism into victims of a consuming capitalist economy. In her exploration of the intersection of Marxism and the Gothic, Backus equates English colonialism with the destruction of an idyllic communal economy and establishes the focus for her later unpacking of literary texts. Capital is the "transhistorical vampiric force" (32); commercial and exploitative relationships between the newly proletarianized peasantry become "the devil's compact" that shatters traditional society and creates a population of "the living dead" (33).

Drawing on David Lloyd and Terry Eagleton who differentiate "suppressed" and "marginalized" subgenres from privileged institutional discourses in Ireland, The Gothic Family Romance formulates a specifically Anglo-Irish Gothic tradition. Backus argues that, in Ireland, this strand expresses political perceptions that have been purged from the official record and must express themselves in marginal forms. Applying the term "Gothic" loosely, she considers a range of Irish texts, including not only the predictable--Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" (1872), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)--but also works less frequently envisioned in that tradition--Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (1729), Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September (1929), and William Butler Yeats's "Purgatory" (1939). Although a chapter on Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48) is awkwardly inserted in order to account for the transformation of an older system of alliance into a Foucauldian "family cell," Backus's analysis of twentieth- century Anglo-Irish fiction by women, such as Bowen, Molly Keane, Jennifer Johnson, and Iris Murdoch (retrieved here as an Irish writer), dominates the latter half of the volume.

The Gothic Family Romance argues that in Anglo-Irish society children existed to serve an insecure colonial order dedicated to suppressing its violent origins. Backus foregrounds "recurring narrative conventions testify[ing] to the continuing cost that is being exacted from children born within a settler colonial order that prioritized loyalty to an abstract national identity above local cooperation and identification" (19). Her compelling introductory chapter, in which she provides an allegorized close reading of Burning Your Own, a 1988 novel by Northern Ireland's Glenn Patterson, shows what she can do best. Arguing that the Unionist community...