Terror and Irish Modernism: The Gothic Tradition from Burke to Beckett (review)

Jim Hansen's Terror and Irish Modernism: The Gothic Tradition from Burke to Beckett displays boldness and breadth. It confidently ranges over the Irish Gothic tradition from the eighteenth century to the fiction of Samuel Beckett; engages the history of Ireland's relationship to Great Britain from the 1800-1801 Acts of Union to the establishment of the Irish Free State; and then focuses primarily on Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Beckett, three very different writers who are perhaps the most written about of Irish modernists.

Hansen has an interesting and compelling thesis about the complex relationships of the Irish Gothic tradition, Irish history since 1800, gender, politics, and modernism:

I want to propose a dramatically new interpretation of Irish modernism: we must read the novels of Wilde, Joyce, and Beckett in relation to the fraught political dynamic of the Irish Gothic tradition. Each of these writers yokes together the unlikely combination of masculinity and domesticity, and each portrays this combination as not only isolating and dehumanizing but also as the social and structural cause for terror and violence. . . . [I]n my reading gender disorientation, along with the political terror that follows from it, becomes something like the foundational condition of modern Irish political and cultural identity.

(6)

He then adds, "[T]he central claim of this book is that the generic boundaries of Irish Gothic fiction, and subsequently the entire genealogy of the canonical Irish modernist novel, should be redrawn around the central trope of the Gothic marriage" (17-18). Beginning the project, he lays the groundwork for his thesis in Edmund Burke's writings on the French Revolution, early Gothic novels, and the history of Ireland under British dominance. ¹

While doing so, Hansen offers more than a few intriguing and resonant insights: "modern Irish literature . . . reflects a Gothic double bind in which a gender identity—either a fearsome masculinity or a vulnerable femininity—is always already its own dark double. . . . I will read the literature produced during the Irish colonial period as cultural products that respond to and were triggered by a [sic] interrelated series of these gendered double-binds" (11-12); "a revision of the female Gothic that represents the entire population of Ireland—male and female—as vulnerable, feminine, and other was . . . one of the most popular forms of nineteenth-century Irish fiction" (20); "[t]he wrong-marriage crisis of the Union era evolved into the home rule crisis of the fin de siècle" (90), and so on. The problem, however, is that, despite his claim to the contrary, Hansen makes little effort to "read the literature." He rarely quotes from literary texts and mostly writes at a remove from them. Consequently, his large assertions often come to seem hyperbolic, reductive, unprovable or, at least, unproven.

Hansen's assertions about individual writers and works are usually engaging, and perhaps even true: Charles Robert Maturin's Gothic novels represent "the unresolved antinomies that constituted Anglo-Irish autonomy following the Acts of Union" (47). "Wilde's work always seems, at once, all too radical and not quite radical enough" (65—Hansen likes this point so much that he repeats it twice: on pages 70 and 84). Ulysses is "the premier mock-Gothic novel since Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey" (25). "Beckett's terse, caustic prose extends and ultimately annuls the Irish Gothic tradition. . . . [It] disavows the distinctions between terrorist and terrorized that characterized the Irish Gothic tradition" (25-26). But, again, such insights serve mainly as teasers because Hansen offers little close textual analysis that might make them convincing.

Hansen, in fact, seems less interested in the literature he is ostensibly discussing than in theorizing somewhat reductively about it. As he says, he reads for allegory: "the writers of the Irish Gothic tradition whom we have studied have represented and allegorized what I have referred to as the logic of the justified victim" (70); "both Wilde...