“The Hard Hunger”: Famine, Sexuality, and Form in Eugene McCabe’s Tales from the Poorhouse

By the end of the nineteenth century Ireland had, in many respects, assumed the aspect of a quintessential Gothic landscape “with all its nationalist and all its Gothic graves, with all its mouldering estates and emerging farms, its Land Acts, and its history of confiscations.”¹ The contested nature of the Irish geographical and cultural landscapes meant that these topographies were haunted by the disinherited revenants of colonial misappropriation. Any Romantic sanitization of Ireland’s rugged terrain for the purposes of tourism belied the fractious memorial inheritances of the country’s disenfranchised population. Indeed, the Gothic had emerged, at least in part, to serve as a form of exfoliant of past injustice; as Leslie Fiedler observes, the Gothic “had been invented to deal with the past and with history from a typically Protestant and enlightened point of view.”² Fiedler’s point resonates with both late nineteenth- and late twentieth-century narrations of Irish history.

The Gothic in Ireland reveals that the past is not easily confined to the composed rhetoric and streamlined contours of historical writing. The Irish landscape, punctuated with the fragments of edifices, bespeaks a culture of discontinuous and unsettled histories. Political writings and speeches before and during the nineteenth century frequently figure Ireland as a haunted country. For example, William O’Brien’s speech before the Cork Young Ireland Society in 1885 is saturated in Gothic rhetoric. O’Brien invokes the dead generations, and asserts defiantly that

When the framers of the penal laws denied us books, and drew their thick black veil over Irish history, they forgot that the ruins they had themselves made were the most eloquent schoolmasters, the most stupendous memorials of a history and a race that were destined not to die. They might give our flesh to the sword, and our fields to the spoiler, but before they could blot out the traces of their crimes, or deface the title-deeds of our heritage, they would have to uproot to their last scrap of sculptured filigree the majestic shrines in which the old race worshipped; they would have had to demolish to their last stone the castles which lay like wounded giants through the land to mark where the fight had raged fiercest.³

More recently, Stephen Regan has offered crucial insights into the ongoing tension that exists between the political conditions of a country and the modes of creative art that are chosen to represent those conditions. Regan’s argument assumes that Ireland’s colonial history and postcolonial condition have been formative influences on the literary forms that have represented Irish society. In discussing the recalcitrance of Ireland to naturalist representation, he suggests that “we might want to see the Gothic in Ireland as part of amore general reluctance or inability to adopt a stable realist mode of fiction.”⁴

With its ability to ventilate and to represent the traumatic, the unconscious, and the Other, the Gothic has proven to be the most elastic of literary genres (if, indeed, it is possible to bracket the Gothic as a “genre” at all).⁵ Such elasticity, as Regan implies, lends itself to the narration of extreme violence, abject poverty, or insuperable hurt—all of which are occasions of deep trauma, trauma that already stands in excess of the contours of realist narration. Equally, given Ireland’s colonial history, such trauma is not confined to the native colonized population. As the history of the Gothic evidences, the Anglo-Irish population likewise underwent significant crises of conscience, and were victims of brutal anticolonial violences and dispossessions. These aggregated cross-cultural experiences, then, nourish the hauntings, paranoias, guilts, trauma, desires, and hatreds of the Irish Gothic.⁶ As Regan concludes, “Given the tortured, violent course of Irish history, and given the disinclination of Irish writing to follow conventional realist models, this penchant for the Gothic shouldn’t come as a surprise.”⁷

David Punter expresses this point more explicitly in his consideration of the relationship between the Gothic, colonialism, and national narrative in both Irish and Scottish contexts:

What happens in the...