The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 by Joseph Valente (review)

In the past decade or so, a wealth of smart scholarship focused on Irish Revivalism has appeared, fruitfully highlighting the rich complexity and inherent contradictions characterizing this instance of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cultural nationalism. With his study The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922, Joseph Valente usefully focuses that conversation on manliness, a category long defined by scholars as either essentially ontological or ethical, but one Valente sees instead as “fundamentally ideological” (2). This recalibration is an important one. It allows him to trace the “double bind of Irish manhood,” which traps its subjects in a “discordia concours” in which manliness “paradoxically represented both the consummation of the masculine condition, its perfection if you will, and a sublation of the masculine condition into a loftier form” (2). In his introduction, Valente contextualizes this harmonious discord, revealing how it was constructed in part by English Victorian intellectuals including Carlyle, Arnold, Tennyson, and Kingsley, men who simultaneously and successfully represented the Irish as enslaved by their passions. To advance a variety of nationalist agendas the Irish deployed both the animalistic and the self-regulatory aspects of the seemingly contradictory colonial ethos of manhood. The Irish manipulation of this “insoluble double bind” (10) of manliness provides the engine driving Valente’s trenchant analysis. Prior to independence, he asks, how did the Irish internalize and reappropriate this imperial ethos of manhood (and its powerful social currency) for their own political and cultural ends?

Appropriately, Valente opens his study with two chapters examining the nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, who (thanks in part to Joyce) has long served as the vexed “poster boy” for Irish manliness during the Victorian era. In his study of Parnell, Valente provocatively suggests that we release the term “performance” from volition and read Parnell’s place in culture as part of a structural category—one that enabled him to participate effectively in the “double bind” of animal passion and self-control until the exposure of his affair with Katharine (Kitty) O’Shea reduced him to an effeminate and ineffectual dandy in the eyes of the world. This latter point is supplemented by a range of previously unpublished political cartoons that persuasively demonstrate the corrosive effects of the Parnell debate on representations of Irish masculinity.

Parnell’s traumatic fall not only reveals the limits of the Irish invocation of the myth of manliness, but also paves the way for a powerful reading of the work of Lady Gregory. Her play The Deliverer (1911), as Valente notes, has traditionally been read as an allegory of Parnell’s fall. He sees in this play the “emancipatory justification” (87) of a dignity defined by the ability to bear loss and suffer defeat, which Gregory offered as one means of taming the unruly and threatening aspects of Fenianism. His astute readings of Gregory’s writing, a critical attention much merited and long overdue, segue into a third chapter attending to Revivalist dramas that deploy the Sovereignty myth. In these dramas, the “Sovereign Hag” seduces a young man and is transformed into a young woman, a logic made famous by Yeats and Gregory’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902). Gregory is not the only sorely overlooked dramatist to whom Valente awards attention: he also offers in this chapter nuanced readings of plays by Patrick Pearse, Lennox Robinson, and James Stephens, as well as shedding new light on classics like Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen (1903), which he reads as a spoof of the Sovereignty myth dominating the stage of this period.

Tales of the Irish hero Cuchulain were, like the Sovereignty myth, employed by Revivalists to promote native masculinity in the midst of imperialism. Valente demonstrates how the legend of Cuchulain provided Revivalists with an indigenous myth of Irish manliness, but one that once again manifested itself in a double bind. In chapter 4, he invokes another paradigmatic Irish male—Patrick Pearse, the poet-martyr of the...