“Looking Back” at Inis Meáin: Alternative Mothering in Synge’s The Aran Islands and Emily Lawless’s Grania

Fifteen years before John Millington Synge published his ethnography of the native inhabitants of Inis Meáin in The Aran Islands, Emily Lawless wrote a novel set on the same island. Grania: The Story of an Island (1891) tells the tale of a young woman navigating the emotional, social, and physical demands of late nineteenth-century island life off the West Coast of Ireland. The texts may have shared a geography, but Synge made no secret of his distaste for Lawless’s Grania. In a footnote to one of his notebooks composed during his time on Inis Meáin, Synge writes, “I read Grania before I came here and enjoyed it, but the real Aran spirit is not there. . . . To write a real novel of the island life one would require to pass several years among the people, but Miss Lawless does not appear to have lived here. Indeed it would be hardly possible perhaps for a lady [to stay] longer than a few days.”¹ W. B. Yeats shared Synge’s sentiment and offered the opinion that Lawless’s novel “was in imperfect sympathy with the Celtic nature.”²

Synge, Yeats, and Lawless all shared an Anglo-Irish Protestant background, but the criticism and outright dismissal of Grania by these two titans of the Celtic Revival illustrates what Gerardine Meaney terms “canonical gender discrimination.”³ Meaney suggests that, until recently, the neglect of Lawless’s literary career “is indicative that writing by Irish women ran a gauntlet of unpredictable political vicissitudes and critical ignorance.”⁴ Emer Nolan, however—in her work on postcolonial feminist critique in Ireland—challenges the notion that gender may have accounted for Lawless’s exclusion from the Revival, and in turn Irish, literary canon. Nolan contends, “Neither Synge nor Yeats dwells on questions of gender or sexuality.”⁵ Nolan is right that Yeats does not cite issues of gender or sexuality in his critique of Lawless; still, Synge’s use of the term “lady” in his response to the novel cannot go unnoticed. In his specific reference to Lawless’s gender, Synge suggests that a man from an Anglo-Irish background can withstand life in the harsh island conditions, but a “lady” with a similar upbringing and class cannot.

In reflecting on Grania, both Synge and Yeats comment on the absence of an intangible essence. They argue that Lawless leaves out the “spirit” and the “nature” of island life. What characterizes this island “spirit” that these male Revival leaders so desired? Synge’s descriptions of women in The Aran Islands help us to unearth what he saw as constituting the “Aran spirit.” Those moments in Synge’s work that prompt him to write “the maternal feeling is so powerful on the island that it gives a life of torment to the women” say much about Synge’s preoccupation with maternity on Inis Meáin. For him, maternity functioned as a marker of irreducible difference between himself and the island women. Synge’s dismissal of Grania and Lawless may pave the way for an antithetical reading of these two texts. Yet, his figuring of Inis Meáin as a maternal space invites us to revisit Grania through a similar maternal lens. Looking back at Grania through the lens of this approach to motherhood and mothering reveals Lawless’s emphasis on maternal nurturing as exhibited by Grania and her sister, Honor. Moreover, this approach demonstrates the writer’s attention to the importance of maternity to Inis Meáin women. Most important, reconsidering the maternal practices exhibited by Grania and Honor rehumanize the Aran Island women whom Synge would later raise to mystic symbols of an untouched Irish culture representative of the Revival project. A closer analysis of the maternal practices in Lawless’s work broadens the definition of maternity for her contemporary readers, expanding the boundaries of Irish motherhood and mothering both past and present.⁶ These texts—which may have, up to this point, been read as antithetical—can, in fact, provide a productive dialectic to think of nineteenth...