Speaking the Unspeakable: Male Humiliation and Female National Allegory after Kinsale

This essay investigates the central role of gender in the Irish poetic response to the setbacks that followed Kinsale, the 1601 defeat that heralded the final Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. Understood as the shifting, highly political, social organization of sexual difference (Scott 42–49), gender not only concerns itself with women, but also comprehends reciprocal notions of masculinity—as within the predominantly male, androcentric literary elite that produced most Irish-language works in the early modern period.¹ Indeed, the need to redress the specifically masculine humiliation of colonial subordination spurred both individual poems and the larger ideological reconceptualization of nascent nationalism and its associated genre, the early modern political aisling, a “dream” or “vision” of the female personification of the nation.² This form is perhaps most familiar as an eighteenth-century poetic encounter between a wandering poet and a suffering, yet hopeful and prophetic spéirbhean (‘sky-woman’) representing Ireland (Welch 9; Ó Buachalla, Aisling, 529–30). The renovation of a medieval prophetic or amatory genre, which begins in the seventeenth century and blossoms by its end, continuing through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, has often been seen as foregone. Welch finds the aisling unproblematically rooted in earlier legitimating invocations of the sovereignty goddess (9), whereas Nic Eoin attributes this renovation to a masculine poetic tradition freshly animated by Counter-Reformation moralism (B’ait, 209; “Sovereignty,” 273). This article argues, however, that distinctive early Stuart challenges to representation, political strategy, and gender ideology, not just the so-called imperative of tradition, drove the poetic recalibration of this longstanding poetic trope.

As English dominance prevailed in the crucial transitional period after 1601 and especially after 1607, the female figure’s inflammatory grief and vulnerability metaphorically voiced Ireland’s inexpressible colonial trauma: the profound male dishonor of defeat, subjugation, and accommodation. Representations of the conquered country as a suffering, violated, and, later, errant wife, nurse, or mother expressed this dishonor yet deflected it onto a gender-normative figure who imaginatively summoned a correspondingly heroic manhood to her rescue. The poetic form thus sustained a sense of ideological resistance where actual rebellion proved untenable, as evidenced by the unsuccessful revolt of Sir Cahir O’Doherty in April 1608 (Edwards 279). These early seventeenth-century Irish representational shifts resonate with recent postcolonial analyses, in Leela Gandhi’s words, framing “the colonial encounter . . . as a struggle between competing masculinities” (98). Such developments also evoke Cynthia Enloe’s feminist insight that “nationalism typically has sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope” (44). For all its eroticized femininity, seventeenth-century political poetry fundamentally concerned itself with an Irish manhood that it sought to recuperate, unify, and mobilize anew.

With the end of the Nine Years War, Ireland came completely under colonial control, subject by conquest to forcible assimilation, martial law, and garrison government. The years after 1603 saw a steady erosion of the Irish position as all Catholics, regardless of prior allegiance, were disarmed and subjected to religious conformity laws, transplantation, transportation, and expropriation; concurrently a “civilizing” policy sought the transformation of “barbaric” Gaelic social, cultural, and linguistic structures to secure government control. Consequently, considerable numbers went into exile. Disparate Catholic communities coalesced under a Counter-Reformation banner while those at home increasingly unified in the face of shared grievance. With the exception of the dispossessed and unemployed (who withdrew to the woods to become outlaws), those Catholic elites remaining in Ireland, like all Catholics, overwhelmingly complied with colonial demands to forestall further losses or to recuperate past ones, even as they hoped for redress.³

Irish poets had thus to address patrons who had suffered defeat—a topic they had traditionally avoided for fear of giving insult (Knott, Bardic, 1: xlvi–xlviii)—as well as those who had fought with the English but nevertheless faced subjugation, dispossession, and assimilation. Poets now grappled with attacks on their own and their patrons’ legitimacy, as well as with threats to their own patronage and status that forced them to choose between accommodation and exile.⁴ As they addressed a Catholic community assailed by...