In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 by Joseph Valente
  • Seán Kennedy (bio)
The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922, by Joseph Valente; pp. x + 289. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011, $50.00.

Joseph Valente’s study of the myth of manliness in Irish culture “aims to supply the first contextually precise account of the male gender anxieties and ambivalences haunting the culture of Irish nationalism in the period between the Act of Union and the founding of the Irish Free State” (3). Beginning with Charles Parnell and ending with W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, Valente seeks to articulate what he sees as the “double-bind of Irish manhood”: the fact that Irish conceptions of manliness were based on the English tradition of muscular Christianity, or “strong passions strongly checked” (3). Victorian constructions of manliness entailed the successful sublimation of the powerful passions of masculinity in an exhibition of manly poise, Valente suggests, but the logic of this position played out differently when applied to the Irish national movement. Here, aggressive political action was deemed a loss of control and further evidence of Irish animality, while restrained political action, or poise, all too easily played into a colonial status quo which deprived the Irish of political independence and, thereby, their manliness. By the same token, mere passivity threatened to align the Irish with a passionless, feminized Other, jeopardising claims to manliness once more, and so the double-bind entailed finding ways to both assert and control Irish manhood in the quest for political independence. In sum, the Irish were “caught in a dynamic of identification and rivalry with the English over the terms of ethnic (self-)definition, which were vital in turn to the struggle for national self-determination” (19).

This is an exhilarating thesis, and one of the most important contributions to Irish Victorian studies in recent years. It promises to change not only our account of the Irish nationalist struggle between 1880 and 1922, but can also frame discussions of neo-imperial struggle to the present day where, as Valente suggests in his preface, the construct remains very much alive, “underpinning the neo-imperialist marriage of ruthless aggression and the sanctities of duty, honour and sacrifice.” The fall of Parnell was one of the defining moments in the history of Victorian Ireland, and Valente begins with an account of the manliness of Parnell who, he suggests, became such an important figure in Irish politics precisely because he remained elusive: his inscrutable character rarely betrayed evidence of passionate excess, which made him legible and creditable in English political circles, yet he was able to marshal that inscrutability to politically dangerous ends. Parnell’s poise and efficacy unsettled his English counterparts precisely because it seemed so English, while in Ireland his “characteristic posture of autonomy and dignity came to occupy the very center of his mythos because it could be held up as a model for the Irish people” (33). Parnell, Valente suggests, came to embody the Irish claim for “collective manhood” (42), and his extraordinary success lay in his ability to conduct “a politically normative assault on the political norms of British rule in Ireland” (43). By the [End Page 173] same token, the fall of Parnell is attributed to “a shockingly venal breach of the celebrated discipline that he had himself imposed” (54). Parnell is the subject of two chapters in this book—there is a second on “Parnell’s Afterlives”—and I cannot see how any future work on Parnell can usefully proceed without taking account of them.

Valente then turns to the tradition of the Irish sovereignty drama, and specifically to Isabella Augusta (Lady Gregory) and W. B. Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) and Pádraic Pearse’s The Singer (1942). For Valente, “the pervasive colonial import” of the manly ideal acted to “transform a myth of succession into a dramatic spectacle of self-sacrifice” (94–95), and it was the writers of the Irish Literary Revival, Valente argues, that transmuted “the already lost cause into a kind of ethnospiritual legacy” (102). The problem, of course, is that the rhetoric of sacrifice...

pdf

Share