-
6 Irish Women Poets
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
c h a p t e r s i x Irish Women Poets 1212 Irish Literature and the Romantic Context Much of what I observed in chapter 5 about the circumstances surrounding the lives, works, and reputations of Scottish women poets is relevant also to their Irish contemporaries. But there are important differences, too, that stem not only from geographical and cultural otherness but also from deeply rooted and passionately held convictions about religion and national identity. Ireland is, after all, an island and not a contiguous landmass, and in the later eighteenth century it was an island of almost exclusively Catholic citizens who were governed by an almost exclusively Protestant power structure. These deep divisions were invoked, on one side of the divide, to justify cultural opposition among the Catholic Irish (especially among the peasantry and working classes, and most tragically in the abortive Rising of 1798) to the hegemony of the colonizing English. On the other side, they were invoked to help justify the unconscionable exploitation of the Irish land and people (and their brutal suppression in 1798) by the wealthy Protestant English colonizers who regarded the native Irish in the essentially subhuman terms that are evident in the ubiquitous English stereotypes of the rustic Paddy.1 Although the Jacobite conflict in the middle of the eighteenth century bore dramatic consequences for Scotland and for Scottish nationalism, the end result was for the most part a movement toward cultural and economic assimilation with the mainstream “British” society, a movement that promised cultural, social, and economic profit for both parties. The same could not be said of the relationship between England and Ireland, however, the Act of Union of 1800 notwithstanding.2 The brutal exploitation of the native Irish increased exponentially in the wake of the act, which the ruling English took as license for what was widely perceived—then and now—as state-sanctioned plunder . The Rising of 1798 complicated matters infinitely, for it was a rebellion not about succession but rather about survival. That the rival factions were goaded not Irish Women Poets 245 just by competing national identities but also by complex economic circumstances and by violent religious prejudices only made matters worse. And while Scotland prospered, on the whole, in the wake of its own inclusion after the Act of Union of 1707, Ireland’s situation worsened steadily, culminating in the terrible effects of depopulation wrought in the 1840s by the Great Hunger and by the wholesale emigration of native Irish. It is against the backdrop of these very different political, economic, literary, and cultural differences that we need to assess Irish poetry of the period. Until recently, mainstream literary scholarship has customarily lumped together Irish and Scottish (and Welsh) literatures under the undiscriminating banner of “British” literature and then, most often, ignored those works—and their distinctive national components—or dismissed them as “minor” or “regional” variants of the more or less standardized “British” literature defined by the works of canonical English writers. But such hierarchical nomenclature largely fails to take account of the historical and cultural record. Stuart Curran pointed out some time ago, for example, that Romanticism in culture and the arts developed in Europe and North America along national lines, and that this development reflected among the various countries “the distinct exigencies of national culture” (Poetic Form, 209). More recently, Claire Connolly has made the point that even as Irish Romantic literature of the period participated in the broader thematic and stylistic developments of European Romanticism, it both reflected on and relished its singular differences from the amalgamated mainstream “British” literary culture: “Ireland emerged from this period with a renovated reputation as a naturally distinct national culture; this in turn fostered and supported new theories of nationality and nourished the cultural nationalism of the 1830s and 1840s” (408). Just as Scott popularized among contemporary readers a literary and cultural Scottishness whose elements he carefully manipulated in poetry and prose alike, so did Thomas Moore manipulate the readerly consciousness in his long-running Irish Melodies, creating for his readers a sentimentalized but nevertheless sympathetic and engaging portrait of a national culture that was for the most part alien to Moore’s predominantly English readers. More important, Sydney Owenson (who would become Lady Morgan) played a crucial role in creating an idealized view of a “romantic” Ireland, first in The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and then in her Lay of an Irish Harp (1807) and Patriotic Sketches of Ireland (also 1807). These three...