Memory Ireland: Volume 2: Diaspora and Memory Practices

7. Private Memories, Public Display: Jewelry, Souvenirs, and Tattoos as Icons of Irishness

88 7 Private Memories, Public Display Jewelry, Souvenirs, and Tattoos as Icons of Irishness M AG GI E W I L L I A M S In 1850, Waterhouse & Co., Jewelers of Dame Street, Dublin, acquired a fabulous golden brooch that had recently washed up on a Drogheda beach, like a message in a bottle from the ancient Irish past (Whitfield 1976, 106). Made of gilt silver, the brooch’s surfaces were decorated with gold granulation , filigree interlace designs, champlevé enamel bosses, and imported gemstones . Only 8.7 centimeters in diameter, its fine decoration was suited to the contemporary taste for elaborate pattern. The beautiful and mysterious object was dated to the early medieval period and nicknamed the “Tara Brooch” to evoke a connection with the Iron Age hill fort of the same name, a site traditionally associated with the coronation of Ireland’s high kings. Within a year, the Tara Brooch had been exhibited in both Dublin and London, and it was possible to purchase a replica of the eighth-century original. The fine materials and exquisite craftsmanship of the facsimiles appealed to consumers accustomed to the popular style of the Arts and Crafts movement; Queen Victoria herself purchased two of the reproductions at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851, sparking enormous public interest in copies of ancient Irish objects as personal possessions. For more than a century and a half, that interest has not waned; indeed, since then, similar replicas have been mass-produced and sold, serving as mementos, souvenirs, and icons of Irish cultural identities. Copying and commodifying ancient imagery reinforces popular conceptions of Irish ethnic and cultural identity, and the ways in which contemporary reproductions Private Memories, Public Display 89 cross public and private boundaries generates new discourses surrounding the definition of Irishness in the modern world. Examples include simulacra of the originals as well as modern collages of ancient designs, deriving from both modern Ireland and the Irish-American diaspora. Ultimately, these objects’ significance depends upon individual and collective memories of an imagined and romanticized Irish “Celtic” past, as the objects’ original meanings are subsumed into an entirely different interpretive context, and they come to signify Irishness above all else. Although such contemporary objects have specific and venerable historical referents, they are nonetheless firmly entrenched in the realm of modern popular culture, which, for some scholars, delegitimizes them as objects of study. The powerful impact that such copies of ancient imagery have had on modern audiences, however, prevents us from dismissing them as “mere reproductions.” Important here is the analysis of mass production and reproducibility in the work of such scholars as John Fiske and Walter Benjamin. According to Fiske, “In a consumer society, all commodities have cultural as well as functional values. . . . The original commodity (be it a television program or a pair of jeans) is, in the cultural economy, a text, a discursive structure of potential meanings and pleasures” (1989, 27). Benjamin describes a similar phenomenon, whereby reproduced imagery can be reactivated in fresh interpretive contexts: “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. . . . And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation , it reactivates the object reproduced” (1968, 221). Both Fiske and Benjamin suggest that commodified reproductions are viable cultural texts that can be interpreted in new ways. In what follows, I present several examples of such modern icons of Irishness: costume jewelry, tattoos, and personal knickknacks, three categories of object that depend upon a physical connection to their owners and that repeatedly cross the boundaries between the public and the private, the individual and the collective . Whether worn on the body, carried in a pocket, or kept on a desk or a bedroom shelf, each item generates a profound sense of nostalgia by providing physical and visual links with Irish history and material culture. Viewers, owners, and wearers can repeatedly admire, caress, and exhibit the imagery in order to remind themselves and others of their Irish pedigrees. 90 Memory and the Irish Diaspora Significantly, such replicas began to be made and sold in the mid–nineteenth century, just after the devastating potato blights of the 1840s, when a burgeoning nationalist movement was emerging and Ireland was prepared to assert a positive ethnic identity. At around the same time that Waterhouse & Co. were manufacturing reproductions of the Tara Brooch, the object itself and other antiquities were being formally...