The Midnight Court / Cúirt an Mheán Oíche: A Critical Edition

Courting an Elusive Masterwork

70 Courting an Elusive Masterwork Reading Gender and Genre in Cúirt an Mheán Oíche/The Midnight Court S A R A H E . M C K I B B E N úirt an Mheán Oíche/The Midnight Court is a hard text to pin down. It courts our attention with its dazzling wordplay and propulsively rhymed couplets but confounds our attempts at settled interpretation. How are we to parse its multidirectional mockery, its slippery, contending mix of parody and protest?1 One might simply read and enjoy its musicality, exuberant wit, and sheer verbal superabundance , as the text ardently invites us to do. Or one might argue that definitive explication of parody’s indeterminacy and polyvalence is a mirage. If our judgments about the text are necessarily partial, though, our questions are no less pressing. We are left asking what to make of the text; how to situate it; who, what, when or indeed whether it critiques or compliments; and even what we are laughing at. 1. “Parody” may be broadly defined as an imitation of the style and stance of a literary text, author or tradition. See Falk and Teague (1993). Courting an Elusive Masterwork 71 What cannot be disputed is the text’s preoccupation with gender .2 Cúirt an Mheán Oíche centers on a heated debate in opposing monologues between a woman and a man, who speak for women and men respectively, regarding a key aspect of gender (sexual and marital relations, addressed in intimate detail), in front of a special court composed of women, with a female judge. In response, many critical readings have focused on the text’s alleged attitude toward women, often abstracting particular moments or aspects of the text to read as emancipatory and protofeminist or as conservative and androcentric. Rather than asking how a blatantly fanciful poem featuring a fairy court, a queen, and a twenty-foot-tall bailiff does or does not represent actual women, it seems more fruitful to consider how gendered discourse functions in the text as a whole. In so doing, we should bear in mind that the language of the court does not only represent things in the conventional sense, by referring to ideas, objects and events, like marriage, folk cures for singles, and women’s dress. Through its verbal, thematic, and formal echoes it simultaneously refers parodically to other genres and thus to other ideological constructs, which in turn are intimately tied up with constructs of gender, as will become clear once we turn to examining Cúirt an Mheán Oíche in closer detail. The poem begins with a framing prologue in which the speaker describes his custom of strolling in the lush countryside. The past habitual tense denotes his former habit, as he presently composes poetry instead of walking, while subtly conferring the authority of experience on his confident scene painting, as he joins his male poetic peers in authoritatively claiming the bucolic landscape he 2. “Gender” refers to the shifting and highly political sociocultural organization of sexual difference (itself understood as constructed and variable). Sarah E. McKibben 72 surveys. The past habitual tense of the first twenty-two lines also conveys the familiar and unexceptional, even canonical, quality of the pastoral mode in which he confidently writes (Kiberd 2000). However, the speaker shortly succumbs to the heat and his own rhythmic if potentially vapid verse to fall asleep alongside some trees, no longer in command but unconscious and vulnerable. That the text is framed as a dream following a ramble in nature aligns it with the most prominent of the formal poetic genres of the period: that of the aisling, or allegorical vision poem. In the formal, prophetic incarnation of the genre, a solitary, typically male poet falls asleep at home or outside by a river or wood. He is found by a beautiful but distraught spéirbhean or sky-woman, whom he describes in courtly fashion with a concatenation of highly conventionalized, praiseful adjectives. He asks the woman her name and identity. She reveals that she is Ireland, deserted by her rightful spouse, the exiled Stuart king (by 1780 a lost cause, though still a source of resonant imagery), and left to suffer from national injustices that she enumerates before giving a prophecy of the leader’s return to rescue her and return her lost sovereignty. At this point the poet usually...