Editing Out Factionalism: The Political Consequences for Ireland’s Shan Van Vocht

Editing out Factionalism: The Political and Literary Consequences in Ireland's "Shan VanVocht"Author(s): Karen SteeleSource: Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 113-132Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Research Society for VictorianPeriodicalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20083865 .Accessed: 26/01/2015 14:09

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Editing Out Factionalism: The Political and Literary Consequences in Ireland's

Shan Van Vocht

KAREN STEELE

During the last decades of the 19th century in Ireland, the press played a

pivotal role in the evolution and dissemination of revolutionary national ism. After the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1890 and the subsequent

discord in his Irish Parliamentary Party, poets, dramatists, essayists, and

journalists began an intense effort to wrest cultural - and it was hoped, political

- control from Britain. The national monthly literary magazine the Shan Van Vocht (the Poor Old Woman), which was published in Bel fast from 1896-1899, was the first of the advanced-nationalist press dur

ing this Irish literary revival. A number of critics have scrutinized the Shan Van Vocht for its singularity and its influence on subsequent nation alist papers.1 It was, for example, the first paper to popularize the political ideals of Sinn Fein (economic and cultural self-reliance); the first to print the socialist arguments of then-unknown James Connolly, who would later become one of the leaders of the Easter 1916 Uprising; one of the

only papers in Ireland edited by women (Alice Milligan and Anna

Johnston); and perhaps the only paper to seek sectarian and social unity among nationalists in all 32 counties of Ireland.

As numerous commentators have observed, the paper's name, the Shan

Van Vocht, signaled the paper's political and cultural identity, drawing on the long tradition of imagining Ireland as a woman, a colonized hag who

promises to be transformed into a "girl with the walk of a queen" when Ireland is finally free. Yet, this gendered imperative had significant femi nist implications that many earlier critics have missed. This essay argues that if we scrutinize the editorial and literary content of the paper

- in

particular, the political arguments and thematic figures of unification - we can see that the paper advocated politically subversive if socially con ventional roles for women in 1890s Ireland. We shall see that Milligan's literary features, notably, her romances-across-the-divide, revealed the



114 Victorian Periodicals Review 35:i Summer 2002

editors' long-standing political and gendered desires for their readers. As we follow the quiet political work of pampered Ascendancy girls, who don symbolic slippers and teach Fenians how to fight, we also learn how

Milligan revises the romance, a traditionally gendered literary form, to

complement the explicit unifying arguments of the monthly editorials. The paper's focus on unifying nationalists across region, class, sex, and

religion - and its implicit emphasis on the seemliness of such a peace

making project for women - proved to be untenable: the paper folded

after three years, in large part because no faction or party provided enough financial support to sustain it. Nonetheless, the Shan Van Vocht's

significant political project, as well as subsequent failure, helps account for the rhetorical strategies later used by female journalists engaged in the nationalist, feminist, and socialist movements of early twentieth-century Ireland.

The Irish press at the turn of the century was remarkably diverse, con

tentious, and lively, especially for such a thinly-populated colonized state. There were over 170 nationalist newspapers in print at this time, indicating the distinctive organizations and growing anti-colonial ac tivism of these years. Historians consider the Shan Van Vocht the in

augurator of what is now called the advanced-nationalist press: that is, nationalist newspapers dedicated to a cultural and economic revival in

Ireland, rather than the failed Irish Party at Westminster in England. Vir

ginia Crossman has suggested that the influence of the Shan Van Vocht was "profound but indirect" (138). Yet, while the paper contained what Crossman has called "typical [...] late nineteenth-century cultural nation alism" (129), the Shan Van Vocht used such generically innocuous forms as Celtic Twilight verse and nationalist romance to mask a much more

revolutionary content. And, although the editorials and romances ar

dently supported nationalist activities, from the intellectually-activist Gaelic League to the militantly-threatening Gaelic Athletic Association, the Shan Van Vocht was never censored or suppressed by Dublin Castle, a rarity for prominent nationalist newspapers during this time. So too, we

will find that the socially conventional narrative subjects of many of the Shan Van Vocht romances -

Ascendancy girls - used the very qualities of

their bourgeois femininity to resist imperialism in Ireland. The two-pence literary journal had an impressive roster of contribu

tors, such as W.B. Yeats, James Connolly, AE, Lionel Johnson, William

Rooney, Seumus MacManus, and Douglas Hyde. The majority of its

writers, however, were women: Maud Gonne, Barry Delaney, Alice

Furlong, Nora Hopper, Angela Loughrey, Regina Armstrong, Mairg head Keon, among others. Alice Milligan and Anna Johnston, who

adopted the pen names Iris Olkryn and Ethna Carbery respectively, wrote most of the copy themselves: approximately 16 pages of short sto



KAREN STEELE HS

ries, poems, biographical sketches, and editorials each month. Seumus

MacManus, who married Anna Johnston in 1901, claims that they were

responsible for every aspect of the operation: they "wrote almost all of the magazine [...]. They read the proofs. They kept the books. They sent the bills. They wrote the letters. With their own hands they folded and addressed every copy that was to go out, and licked every stamp" (qtd. in Curtis 169).

Shan Van Vocht readers were primarily middle-class nationalist men and women from Belfast, Dublin, New York, London. The number of subscribers was modest, but the readers included some of the most prom inent nationalists of the era. Maud Gonne, who proclaimed that she was "full of almost envious admiration" for Milligan and Johnston's "daring little paper," avidly read the monthly and regularly promoted her own

Paris-based L'Irelande Libre in the Shan Van Vocht*s advertising pages (Servant 176). Belfast Fenian Bulmer Hobson also recalled, according to

Leon ? Broin , that even as a teenager he was "saving up his pennies to subscribe to the Shan Van Vocht" (141). Because Milligan and Johnston no longer enjoyed the patronage of the Henry Joy McCracken literary society, which initially sponsored their work as editors of the Northern

Patriot, they depended on such dedicated readers, as well as modest

advertising, to keep the journal financially viable.2 The ads especially appealed to emergent Irish-Ireland consumers, as well as bourgeois visi tors to Belfast and Dublin. Rectangular banners urged readers to invest in Sinn Fein accessories - Gaelic League '98 handkerchiefs and Wightman &

Company's Irish jewelry, which was touted as "real souvenirs of our Native Land" - as well to cultivate their nationalist libraries by purchas

ing books such as The Story of Wolfe Tone's Life and Irish Verses by Tho mas Mayne. Whereas the Irish Worker, in 1911, advertised thrifty or union-allied venders, such as Larkin's Little Shop for Good Value, the Shan Van Vocht featured notices inviting readers to stay at the Imperial &

Windsor Hotels (whose large hall was "suitable for Balls, Receptions, Dinners or Supper Parties") or the Prince of Wales Hotel and First-Rate Restaurant. If the paper implicitly appealed to middle-class Irish national ists, it nonetheless circulated internationally, sometimes reaching a broader audience. Nationalist expatriates, such as John MacBride in

Johannesburg, Thomas Concannon in Mexico, and Patrick McManus in India reported, in the May 1897 edition, their delight in finding copies of "The Shan" so far afield. Some readers, such as John Lavery, editor of

Coalfield's Gazette in Middleburgh, South African Republic, and Patrick

O'Byrne, editor of the Gaelic Journal in New York, also provided free advertisement for the Shan Van Vocht in their home papers and urged

Milligan and Johnston to "push circulation in the United States in a more business-like fashion" (93).



ii6 Victorian Periodicals Review 35:2 Summer 2002

Alice Milligan was, in her day, recognized as a haunting lyricist, an innovative dramatist, and an influential nationalist figure. Thomas Mac

Donagh called her "the most Irish of living Irish poets, and therefore the best" (287). Her dramatic legend, The Last Feast of the Fianna, was the first example of Celtic Twilight drama, inspiring Yeats, Gregory, and

Martyn in their early efforts to found an Irish National Theatre (Hogan 842). And, late in her life, the Irish Press declared her pivotal to the Irish cause: "Nobody, at the turn of the century, saw with clearer eyes than

Alice Milligan that of the two sides of the Nationalist movement - the cultural and the political [...] she vigorously supported every phase of the revival - the language, the feis, the dramatic and literary renaissance" (qtd. in Harp, "No" 80). Milligan is also, as Richard Harp notes, a founder of

nationalist journalism, one of the most influential weapons in the anti colonial arsenal ("No other" 79). Yet, today, Milligan's writings, together

with the poetry and prose of her collaborator Anna Johnston, are, as

Harp has suggested, "not so much underrated now as [...] almost com

pletely forgotten" ("Shan" 44). One of the reasons Milligan's literary and

political efforts have been effaced is that much of her writing is only visi ble in the Irish press of the 1890s. Milligan rarely bothered to collect her

poetry, plays, and short stories into volume form, choosing instead to

spread her writing throughout the nationalist press of the day. While she and Anna Johnston founded two newspapers, the Northern Patriot and the Shan Van Vocht, in order for cultural nationalists, especially those liv

ing in the North, to have a literary-political forum, very few readers

today have access to these short-lived publications. Moreover, until

recently, the press has been much neglected in cultural criticism about Ireland.3 Ironically, the very ephemeral form that Milligan used to publi cize her writing

- and that is largely to blame for her marginal status

today - is now also responsible for renewed interest in Milligan's literary

and political writings. Because she edited and published much of her

prose and poetry in the Shan Van Vocht, a literary journal that has

recently attracted academic attention, Milligan's subversively feminist

writings are also garnering notice as well. Alice Milligan's multiple identities - as an upper-class, highly-edu

cated, Protestant, female nationalist from Belfast - are suggestive of why her literary and editorial objectives in the Shan Van Vocht centered on alliance and unification. Like many prominent cultural nationalists of the

day, from Augusta Gregory to W.B. Yeats, Milligan's claim as a national ist was initially suspect given her religious and class identity. Because she came of political age during the centenary of the 1798 United Irishman

Uprising - a rebellion that is popularly remembered for how it united

Ascendancy and Native Irish together for the common cause of Irish

independence -

Milligan would not have necessarily seen her upper-class,



KAREN STEELE HZ

Belfast background as incompatible with nationalism. In fact, Milligan took an active role in the planning of the commemoration of the 1798

Uprising, serving as Organising Secretary for the Centenary celebration in Ulster, and she lectured extensively about the Uprising on behalf of the

Gaelic League. Seventeen-ninety-eight was a recurrent topic in the Shan Van Vocht: each issue provided commentary on the upcoming centenary plans, as well as recalled significant '98 leaders and events.4 Even the title of the journal refers to the Uprising, through its allusion to the

eighteenth-century patriotic ballad of the same name. Significantly, the version of this patriotic song that appears in the journal's first number

judiciously avoids factional politics. Whereas an earlier version of the bal lad anticipated a French invasion to help destroy the Protestant Orange

Order, the ballad quoted in Milligan's journal, as Crossman notes, "omits

any reference to the Orange Order and is much vaguer in its reference to

foreign allies" (131). A large proportion of Milligan's literary efforts, from her play The Last

Feast of the Fianna to her most memorable lyric "When I was a Little Girl," evince a sustained investment in the thematic of alliance, consoli

dating past and present, unionist and nationalist, Protestant and Catholic, working-class and upper-class, cultural and revolutionary activism. Milli

gan's impulse toward alliance, however, is not so far removed from the ambivalent "insider-outsider" perspective of another upper-class Protes tant female writer, Maria Edgeworth. Whereas Edgeworth created unsta ble characters such as Thady Quirk, who faithfully serves and is cruelly subjugated by the Ascendancy Rackrents, Milligan devises speakers, such as the autobiographically-based "Little Girl," who embodies proper fem

ininity and impudent rebellion at the same time. The well-raised speaker of "Little Girl" obeys her nurse, who nightly cries out:

Come in! for it's growing late, And the grass will wet ye! Come in! or when it's dark

The Fenians will get ye

And, though she listens attentively by the fire to her nurse's Cromwellian

adages about God and the British Empire, by the poem's conclusion, we learn that her femininity and her youth, rather than her privilege and her class, determine her political sympathies:

But one little rebel there,

Watching all with laughter, Thought "When the Fenians come

I'll rise and go after."



ii8 Victorian Periodicals Review 35:2 Summer 2002

Wished she had been a boy And a good deal older Able to walk for miles With a gun on her shoulder;

Able to lift aloft That Green Flag o'er them

(Red-coats and blackpolice Flying before them);

And, as she dropped asleep, Was wondering whether

God, if they prayed to Him, Would give fine weather.

This early lyric, which was well known during her career as a journalist, indicates that Milligan's ideas about feminine behavior, while often overtly

conventional, nearly always contained a resistant, activist component. The beliefs and methods of the United Irishmen not only influenced

Milligan's lyrics but also strongly shaped the editorial content of the Shan Van Vocht. Milligan's editorials, in particular, advocated the seemliness of women promoting unity and overcoming factional party disputes. Given the international scrutiny of the New Woman, the split in the Irish Parlia

mentary Party over Parnell, the debacle surrounding the failed Ladies Land League and the local context of Milligan and Johnston's unsuccess ful efforts editing the Northern Patriot, it is less surprising that Shan Van

Vocht editorials promoted such conciliatory, unifying activism. The press of the 1890s could be, and often was, the venue for contested arguments about the Woman Question5; yet, it was also seen as a socially-appropri ate forum for women to express their political views. Many traditional

women wrote for the press, as Crossman notes, because the work could be performed within the domestic sphere. The fact that so many middle class ladies took on and ably performed these "womanly" tasks, however, indicates the early impact of first-wave feminism, notably in opening up secondary and university education to women (129). Additionally, the

women of the Ladies Land League, who, as John O'Leary famously remarked, "were suppressed because they were honester and more sincere than the men," surely imparted a quiet lesson to Milligan and Johnston (qtd. in Ward 43). In her study of women and Irish nationalism, Margaret

Ward argues that most male Irish revolutionaries, with the exception of

singular figures like the feminist-socialist James Connolly, disliked work

ing with women and only tolerated them during periods of extreme polit ical urgency:



KAREN STEELE II9

The high points of women's participation [in Irish nationalism] were also

moments of exceptional political crisis, when women were either drawn into the

movement because of the temporary (enforced) absence of men, or they were

encouraged to participate because a strong, united front was desperately needed, and because women, when the military struggle began, were also needed for

essential back-up services. At no stage were they accepted as equal members.

(Unmanageable 2)

Indeed, when, in 1888, Maud Gonne attempted to join prominent nation alist organizations such as the Contemporary Club, the Celtic Literary Society, and the National League, she was informed that women were excluded from membership. Although she was allowed to work as a "freelance on the fringe," fighting land evictions and giving speeches in Lancashire against the Conservative Party, Gonne had to found her own

organization, Ingh?nidhe na h?ireann (Daughters of Erin), in 1900 in order for female nationalists to have a platform from which to work.

Toiling in this socially-conservative context, in which even popular and successful female nationalists were gently suppressed, Milligan and

Johnston would have surely absorbed the message that feminine activism in Ireland would always be a highly scrutinized and often contested endeavor.

Quite likely, the most instructive lesson for Milligan and Johnston in the necessity of editing out factionalism was their short-lived venture as editors of the Northern Patriot, a literary journal they founded in Octo ber 1895, only to be dismissed after three issues. Although Milligan's biographer, Sheila Turner, speculates that Milligan and Johnston were

probably fired over a split on policy with the Henry Joy McCracken

Society, the January 1896 editorial of the Northern Patriot suggests that their contemporaries in the nationalist movement had little tolerance for

womanly writing if it were politically pointed about controversial topics, such as support for the Irish Republican Brotherhood or the amnesty campaign, two subjects that prominently appeared in the first three issues of the journal:

Our readers will observe that we have made a change. We were reluctantly com

pelled to take this step in order to keep our journal from becoming the weapon of

any particular party in Irish political life. Since the foundation of THE NORTH ERN PATRIOT our policy has been to keep aloof from modern politics, our object being to educate and elevate the minds of our youth; from that policy we have

never deviated. THE NORTHERN PATRIOT is a journal of the people; we shall never allow it to become an organ of faction, (emphasis original)

Historian Liz Curtis also agrees: "Milligan's militant Fenianism and sup




port for the amnesty cause led to her being outsted from the editorship of the Northern Patriot" (168).

Although the Shan Van Vocht overshadowed and outsold their old

journal, the Northern Patriot (which, despite a reduced price, folded in November 1897), Milligan and Johnston adopted an editorial voice that, at first glance, seemed much in keeping with the early non-factional dic tates of the McCracken society. Yet, as we will see, the tone betrays less a

"peace-at-all cost" mentality than a quiet indictment of the present state of nationalist affairs when women, too often, were pushed to the side lines, while the men ceaselessly bickered. Implicitly, Milligan and

Johnston promoted women's inclusion in nationalist politics as a remedy for these failures. In a June 1896 editorial, for example, Milligan and

Johnston called for women's involvement in present nationalist organiza tions not out of a sense of gender inequality but rather because women

were better suited for making alliances, since their projects would "not intrude on the sphere of the committees already formed in Dublin and

London." The editors wryly surmised that women were especially poised for providing such unifying example because, given women's inability to vote, "the women of Ireland [...] are not called upon to have any opinion whatever as to who has the right to speak for Ireland in the British parlia ment" (104). Listing a host of activities, from caring for graves to selling home industries and sponsoring Irish concerts, the editors pointed out that such projects would, significantly, induce "the women of Ireland [to]

unite," thereby setting an example for the fractious men, who created a

political climate where "political dissensions are rife." After having estab lished that women were exemplary strategists who worked effectively in collective political projects, Milligan and Johnston went on, in a July 1897 editorial, to remind readers that this feminine virtue was shared by the venerable United Irishmen, for in 1798, "Irishmen fought the strangers, not each other" (122). Still again later in February 1899, another editorial

was dedicated to making peace in the Gaelic League: "The appearance of the slightest dissension at a time like the present will be a great hindrance to the movement, and in the name of our common cause we appeal to

those who have influence with the Council to exert that influence in the interests of peace" (30).

If the editors took pains to advocate the traditional role of women as

peace-makers, they did so out of a sense of feminine superiority. The edi tors gleefully highlighted the successes of the Irishwomen's Centenary

Union, which contrasted with the on-going wrangling in the men's orga nizations; at the same time, they underscored the political potential of women, who were the numerical majority, to advance their inherently minority position of overcoming factionalism: "Is it not a fortunate thing that the better half (numerically, of course I mean) of the population of



KAREN STEELE 121

Ireland is not involved in these differences of the polling booths?" (qtd. in Innes 135). Although they emphasized gender difference, Milligan and

Johnston emphatically challenged the idea of woman as "the weaker sex."

They called upon women to be trained equally to men, to prepare for the

physical ardor of rebellion. One editorial, for example, supported the Gaelic Athletic Association's physical education program because it would prepare a national liberation army: "It is the bounden duty of

every man, of every body, who dares to dream of freedom, to make him self in every way that lies in his power a soldier fit for Ireland's service"

(44). The support of physical education in the context of the nationalist movement was also resolutely inclusive of girls and women, as Milligan made clear in a later column: "Physical education has been given, for the

last twenty years, a prominent place even in girls' schools. At the school in Londonderry where the Editor of The Shan Van Vocht spent many

years, the smallest pinafored mite in the girls' kindergarten was drilled like a little soldier, and the parallel bars, the vaulting horse, and the Indian clubs were given as prominent a place in the school curriculum as the French or German Grammar" (45).

Milligan and Johnston viewed sport, in particular, as an important venue for finer nationalist lessons in uniting Irishmen and women in a common goal: honor and dignity for the nation. A May 1896 editorial column emphasized the importance of orderly spectatorship and unified

competition: "Let us then thoroughly understand this first principle -

that every achievement in the athletic field is prompted by the ambition to have the country rather [than] the club or individual profiting the honour and glory" (89). A similar theme was present in a June 1896 editorial that advocated a new nationalist activity, National Decoration Day. This day, the editorialists admonished, must not "be controlled by any society, or set of societies, or any political party in Ireland. It is simply suggested as a beautiful ceremony which we would desire to see grow into a custom, and which all who love Ireland and honour her patriot dead should observe, each caring specially for the graves in their locality" (116).

If the editors promoted orderly unification on the sports field as well as in the committee room, they displayed an unusual willingness to serve as an open forum for debates on Ireland's social, political, and economic future. In particular, Milligan and Johnston proved to be far more respon sive to the challenge of socialism than many of their nationalist contem

poraries. On November 6, 1896, Milligan and Johnston began a new

feature, "Other People's Opinions," which dedicated valuable space to "articles which we may not necessarily be in agreement with, but which in all cases are worthy of our earnest consideration." The inaugural col

umn, James Connolly's "Can Irish Republicans be Politicians?", was

published within months of the establishment of the Irish Republican




Socialist Party, a time when membership was tiny due to strong trade union resistance. Connolly went on to contribute four articles to the Shan Van Vocht on socialism, labour, and the efficacy on a Republican Party in

Westminster. Critics such as Innes, Ward, and Ritschel maintain that Mil

ligan and Johnston were anxious to disassociate their journal from Con

nolly's socialist agenda.7 The prominent publication of subsequent columns by Connolly and the Irish Socialist Republican Party, conspicu ous printing of letters endorsing Connolly's columns, and two commen taries by Milligan on Connolly's arguments suggest, instead, that Milligan and Johnston downplayed rather than dismissed the economic analyses of

Connolly. Like many cultural nationalists sympathetic to socialism, they tended to ignore or relegate social questions to the background in favor of broader nationalist projects (Curtis 169).

A clear example of how Milligan and Johnston navigated the merging paths of socialism and nationalism can be seen in how the editors posi tioned themselves and other readers in light of each of Connolly's polem ics. In all of his writing for the Shan Van Vocht, Connolly emphasized two related claims: first, that a successful Irish revolution requires two kinds of defense, a legislative and a military force; second, that a Socialist

Republic must be the goal of every Irish patriot seeking independence for their country. In the issue following the publication of his first article,

Milligan and Johnston published a series of letters in response to Con

nolly's paper, all of which warmly praised and enthusiastically under scored elements of Connolly's argument.9 Connolly's platform was also bolstered by subsequent columns by Thomas O'Brien, also of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, and Thomas Concannon.10 Finally, Milligan twice appended a short paragraph to Connolly's columns, indicating pre cisely what she endorsed and critiqued in his columns. After Connolly's article on "Patriotism and Labour," for example, an editorial note dis closes: "Whilst in full sympathy with Mr. Connolly's views on the labour and social questions, we are absolutely opposed to the scheme he puts forward for the formation of an Irish Republican party in the British Par liament. Any conscientious Republican would stick at the oath of alle

giance" (139). Several months later, in October of 1897, Milligan publicly declined an invitation by the ISRP to lecture for them, offering instead to debate Connolly over whether Irish Republicans should be politicians. Complimenting Connolly and his party for doing "good work for Ireland in preaching the gospel of democracy and spreading national principles,"

Milligan nonetheless rebuked what she saw as the end result of a Republi can party in Westminster: "taking the broad road that leads to destruc tion, as such a party would inevitably be in alliance with the English labour party" (188).

Milligan and Johnston's eagerness not only to avoid but also to heal



KAREN STEELE I23

social divisions in the Irish nationalist movement must be read in light of the growing sectarian and class divisions that emerged in the wake of the

1798 commemorations. In Ulster, as Crossman has shown, the commem

oration activities accentuated sectarianism (132). Although Belfast, in par ticular, was a wealthy city at the turn of the century, the workforce divided cleanly along sectarian lines: Protestant cross-channel dock

workers, as Curtis notes, regularly earned two to two and a half times the

salary of Catholic deep-sea dock workers (197). The Trade Union move ment in Belfast, moreover, was firmly controlled by the craft unions, whose memberships were predominantly Protestant and Loyalist-identi fied (Curtis 197). If Belfast MP Joe Devlin, of the Irish nationalist party, sought to recruit working-class voters, the Tory party could clearly not

hope for political survival with a labor program. Milligan's anxiousness to subdue the socialist stance of Connolly, thus, should be understood in the context of her desires in appealing to a religiously diverse, if economically homogenous middle-class audience. As we will see, Milligan's literary efforts, in suggesting the political potential of Big House ladies while

remaining taciturn about girls in the tenement rows, reveals a similar mid dle-class habit in editing out class divisions in the nationalist movement.

If critics have highlighted the Shan Van Vocht as a model of journalistic nationalism and an early example of feminine editorship, they have also underscored the conventional gender roles promoted in the pages. Sheila Turner, for example, laments that Milligan was "much too busy to pause over gender issues" (79). Yet, the editors' silence about suffrage

- admit

tedly a pre-eminent cause for feminists in the 1890s - is shaky grounds for

dismissing the commitment to gender equality of these writers. After all, the icon of modern femininity, the New Woman, took many different forms, as well. In Ireland and across the Irish sea, New Women might be

wild or unwomanly, organizing or anarchist, fallen or pure, nationalist or orientalist, leisured or working, bicycling or bookish. So too, in the col umns of the Shan Van Vocht, feminine agency and activism is ubiquitous, albeit not uniformly expressed. In fact, the roles for political women in the Shan Van Vocht foreshadow what Louise Ryan has called "the dual roles of 'girl on bicycle' and 'sniper on the roof" adopted by Cumann na

mBan (the women's council of the Irish Volunteers) during the Easter 1916 Rising (259). Although the journal's editorials and features, poems

and romances rarely envision a girl with a gun, nearly every issue con tained examples of how ladies of the past and women of the day chose to do their bit for Ireland. Alongside recollections and histories about male patriots such as Robert Emmett and Wolfe Tone, there were features about female contemporaries, such Anne Devlin, Lady Fitzgerald, and Speranza. The Shan Van Vocht also reminded readers about the life of female activists from the North, such as the prophetic Betty Fryers, and



124 Victorian Periodicals Review 35:2 Summer 2002

retold heroic battles fought by the valiant Betsy Gray.11 The majority of these female features detail the lives and activism of Ascendancy or aristo cratic women who, through patriotic husbands, sweethearts or distant heroes, became committed to the cause. Yet, in each in these features, Mil

ligan and Johnston emphasized little about the revolutionary men in these women's lives; instead, they recounted how women -

despite their politi cal, social, and gendered upbringing

- risked more to dedicate themselves to Irish independence.

For example, in a short biographical essay about Speranza, also known as Lady Wilde, the Ascendancy patriot-poet and mother of Oscar Wilde, the author regrets that, given the confines of space, one cannot "do justice to the worth of Lady Wilde's poetry [...]. To-day the best we can do is to draw attention to her life, to the persistent and consistent course which she followed to the risks that she dared and to the matchless spirit which in a time of doubt, danger, and despair, she brought to the service of Ire land" ("Speranza"). Replacing her poetry with her life, however, is less a

problem of space than a recurrent of the gendered lessons in the paper. For, as readers of the Shan Van Vocht learn how Lady Wilde first grew interested in Irish culture, the author also hopes that the female audience

might recognize, as a young Speranza did, that "she had a country, that it had certain demands upon her, that it would be a crime to neglect the duties which Nature had placed upon her." As readers of the Shan Van Vocht, this audience also shared an important bond with Speranza, who subscribed to the premiere nationalist paper of her day, the Nation, and

who "studied its contents and learned something of the state of Ireland, and the causes responsible for its state." Implicitly, then, Speranza's life

represented a positive and possible model of feminine activism, one that

directly linked seemingly benign activities, such as reading nationalist

papers, with direct action, such as speaking out at Fenian trials.

Nonetheless, feminist critics have firm reasons for charging, as Innes and Crossman have, that Milligan and Johnston envisioned political

women as supportive and subsidiary rather than agitating and armed.12

Yet, if the Shan Van Vocht failed to promote gender equality in the overt fashion of later newspapers such as the Irish Citizen, there is nonetheless a consistent ideal of feminine behavior that was forthright, strong-willed, and politically committed. While women were often implored to show their nationalism in conventionally feminine ways, they were, nonethe

less, guided to use the tools of domestic resistance. Crossman has pointed out that the editors of the Shan Van Vocht aimed "to operate the maga zine as a 'literary factor in the National cause,'" inspiring and educating at the same time (128). The lessons of the romances, which envisioned

women's activism within the domestic borders, transformed the genre and the ideals of bourgeois femininity at the same time. Unlike the revo



KAREN STEELE 1^5

lutionaries Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz, who left behind the comforts and the trappings into which they had been born, Milligan's romantic protagonists demonstrated how one could as plausibly espouse revolution from the Big House as from the tenement rows.

The theme of alliance across the divides of religion, class, and ideology suffused many of the literary features in the Shan Van Vocht. Perhaps the

most memorable examples can be read in Milligan's political romances, a demotic form that shares the activist, interventionist impulses of late

eighteenth-century pamphlets, sermons and speeches.13 In particular, I am interested in what, for Milligan, becomes an evolving sub-genre: the romance-across-the-divide. As Joe Cleary has noted, these romances

across-the-divide are an "anxious and contradictory literary mode," espe

cially when set in partitioned places like contemporary Northern Ireland. Because the political borders cannot be addressed, they are both literally and figuratively erased: the romance between divided communities thus enables the writer to imagine a reconciliation between two conflicting communities that cannot be achieved in the political sphere. Although

Milligan set her narratives (and indeed lived the majority of her life) in Belfast before the establishment of partition in 1923, the longing for rec onciliation between warring constituencies (Unionists and Nationalists, northern Nationalists and southern Nationalists, Protestant Nationalist and Catholic Nationalists) is a driving force in every element of her polit ical and journalistic career. In nearly every romance Milligan pens, we

have a beautiful young protagonist whose political beliefs initiate the nar rative conflict between Ascendancy authority and native rebellion.

Although the plot of generational and ideological friction is tired and worn, Milligan animates the narrative by revealing the wily domestic

strategies employed by our pampered rebel girls: in nearly every narra

tive, our protagonist subversively deploys the unexpected political tools of bourgeois life (the accouterments of leisured femininity) to undermine the colonizers. Nowhere do we see young girls taking up arms; rather, we observe them donning symbolic slippers and strumming nationalist

harps. We learn, as a result, that every domestic gesture has the potential to contribute to the revolution.14

That Milligan chose to express her nationalism in narrative form is itself an indication of her impulse toward alliance. Deeply inculcated in the val ues and aesthetics of the Irish Literary Revival, Milligan understood that the reception and canonicization of Irish art was based on a text's ability to articulate national self-definition. Yet Irish fiction, and notably the Irish novel, has too often been ignored precisely because of the genre's ambivalence towards the idea of an Irish nation. Critical scrutiny of the Irish novel, in turn, has suffered from neglect because of the novel's close associations with the middle-class. Although the British novel has been




enriched by what scholars, since Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel, have seen as the interconnectedness of the social and aesthetic, the Irish novel has been obscured because, as W. J. McCormack notes, "until recently, it

was not uncommon to find literary critics declaring that, in whatever

period of Irish literary history they were concerned with (the 1920s, the Romantic, or the Victorian period), no middle-class existed!"15 This was less due to Irish scholars' Manichaean vision of the social classes than the

long, complicated history of British colonization in Ireland and, notably, the legacy of the Penal laws, which, when rescinded in 1829, finally afforded the emergence of a native middle class. Terry Eagleton has also

suggested two other causes for the critical oversight of Irish fiction: Irish writers' longstanding alienation from realism and the sensationalism of

Irish history, which always seemed to trump the most spectacular of tales.16

Milligan's romances make a strong case for re-examining the ideologi cal and formal ideals of the Irish Literary Revival, for her narrative sub

jects, her thematic figures, and her generic modifications of the romance

challenge commonplace attitudes about both the literary and political contributions of women in 1890s Ireland. In one of Milligan's most rep resentative stories, "The Little Green Slippers," which is set in Belfast in

December of 1798, we meet the beautiful, impetuous Jessica Huston, a Protestant Northerner, who (against the dictatorial orders of her country gentleman stepfather) initially refuses to attend the Christmas Garrison Ball in protest of the recent executions of the United Irishmen. After considerable threats and many ineffectual stomps of her pretty little feet, she ultimately decides to attend the ball but stirs a scandal by wearing "a

pair of dainty morocco slippers of the rebel green, audaciously rosetted with crape." The green silk and the black crape defiantly and, to the Gar rison crowd, unequivocally, represent Jessica's inappropriate mourning for the execution of Henry Joy McCracken, one of the United Irishman leaders. Moreover, as the green slippers were a gift from her beloved rebel on the run, Bernard Magennis, they represent to Jessica, and to us, her romantic desires, which are to reunite with her politically inappropri ate lover. Jessica's name and plight, of course, recall Shylock's rebellious

daughter, who runs away to marry the Christian Lorenzo, in Merchant

of Venice. By alluding to Shakespeare's Jessica, then, Milligan is clearly signaling not only the close correlation of religion, race, and class in

1890s Ireland, but also the significant transgression Jessica's union with

Magennis represents. Like the "national romances" that Doris Summer describes in Foundational Fictions, this story effectively melds erotic and

patriotic desires, for as luck would have it, Jessica and her lover are reunited in the end because of her political defiance. When she is ban ished from her stepfather's home for her "impudent rebel" act, she meets



KAREN STEELE 127

up again with Bernard, who (by chance) had made one last stop at her aunt's home before sailing away from Ireland. Jessica's "audacity in the

wearing o' the green," is rewarded with the romantic resolution of mar

riage on the run. Her reconciliation with Bernard, then, suggests the

political possibilities of reuniting Protestants and Catholics in facing down Britain, though, importantly, this reunion can only take place away from Ireland's shores.

In another tale, "The Harp That Once!," we witness the power of the anti-romance-within-the borders, a close variation of the earlier theme.

In this narrative, Milligan wryly revises the well-known nationalist emblem of the weeping woman with a harp into an aristocratic activist.

Here we meet Mabel, a beautiful heiress with "rebel blood in her veins."

Despite being an eminently marriageable grand-daughter of her Lady ship the Dowager, Mabel with her Fenian blood "had been warmed to flame in this year '98 by the stories she heard of the people's suffering."

Mabel, like several protagonists in Milligan's romances, learns her nationalist lessons young in life from her Fenian nurse, a familiar path for Protestant nationalists (Lady Gregory is but one example) who claimed their introduction to Irish nationalism was through enchanting stories and songs that their native nurse or governess taught them. In this anti romance set in Dublin 1798, we watch how Mabel plays the coquette in order to foil a British army captain, en route to seek and punish rebel

United Irishmen. Joining forces with her nurse Mrs. Kelly, whose son Denis was among those hiding in the Dublin outskirts, Mabel sets out to detain Captain Warren while her nurse alerts the rebels to flee to safety. Beautiful, unmarried heiresses rarely have trouble entertaining eligible bachelors, but Mabel has her work cut out for her in the disciplined Cap tain Warren. Nonetheless, he finds he cannot deny Mabel's offer to play the harp for him. Of course, "he had not reckoned on the time a harp takes in tuning." Nor had he realized, when a string, by chance, had

popped, that "the fixing of a string was a more tedious process than the tuning." He never, moreover, considered how long a simple parlor piece could take to finish, especially when the harpist insists on playing the refrain of an unfamiliar native ballad, "The Coolin," over and over again, in hopes, the narrator tells us, that "the enchanting melody would haunt

his ears till death." As the captain squirms uneasily in his chair, he real izes too late what Mabel understood from the start: "it was not a very

wise thing" to allow pretty young ladies to distract when raids are so close at hand. Though the captain won't admit it to himself, his men rec

ognize the "mockery in her smile" and the "mischief in her eyes." And, of course, as they go to raid the rebel homes, they discover that none are to be found.

Although many of Milligan's romances implicitly supported a male




armed uprising, one of her most celebrated short stories, "The Captain's Daughter," which was published over three issues from February to April

1896, suggested that feminine agency could also mean advocating sensi ble, not terrorist, activism. More realistic than romantic fiction, "The

Captain's Daughter" elaborates on one of Milligan's and Johnston's sternest editorials, where the writers denounced "senseless violence," such as bombing buildings "without aim or reason other than mere desire of vengeance" ("Guard"). The narrative lays bare and plainly mocks

many of the conventions of the chivalric romance, from the bumbling "knight" Captain Moonlight to the daring damsel who foils the ineffec tual men. Significantly, this narrative is set in 1888 -

during the height of the Land Wars - not 1798, and takes place in a rural area between Cork and Kerry rather than the urban landscape of Belfast or Dublin: these details prepare us immediately for a genre quite distant from the historical romances of later issues. While "The Captain's Daughter" introduces Shan Van Vocht readers to another beautiful, pampered daughter of the

Ascendancy-class, Millicent O'Brien, she will prove to be quite a different model of bourgeois, feminine activism, someone quite closer to the New Women in Milligan's and Johnston's audience. Through the example of her Gaelic-speaking nurse, Molly Breen, the young Millicent has learned to rebel from the "stern English disciplinarians" at her English boarding school by brandishing her rule-breaking tongue. Millicent utters English

when French was compulsory, German when French was required. In the corridors between lessons and at night in the dark, Millicent "smashed the rules into fragments" by speaking loudly and wildly of Irish myths and lore, Fenian history, and heroic tales.

The action begins when Millicent returns from England unexpectedly only to find her family estate about to be attacked by a band of "moon

light" rebels, who had hoped to obtain the captain's guns for some vague, future uprising. Although her heart is with the rebel's goal of Irish inde

pendence, her mind resists. What she observes is not merely poor plan ning and unproven exigency; the results of the raid could only produce

what Millicent (and Milligan) view as the most harmful result, class divi sion in the nationalist cause:

It wasn't anything in the way of a rising that was afoot in that winter season of

eighty-eight, with a parliamentary agitation in full swing [...]. This wasn't Rory of

the Hills and his brethren who stood below her on the frosty ground [...]. These were people whom she feared had no higher motive than a fierce one of vengeance

against some poor wretch of a land-grabber [...]. The capture of arms, the deadly use of them, in this case meant nothing for Ireland; nothing but more desperate hate between class and class. (21-22)



KAREN STEELE 129

Surprising the rebels, who had expected to find the home empty, Milli cent ends up outwitting and then shaming the men for being "moonlight ers." Refusing to give them her father's guns and swearing her silence in return, Millicent soon talks on about politics and parliamentary strategy, revealing along the way that she, too, was a Fenian sympathizer. When one of the Moonlighters, Jim Shaugheny, exclaims, "Divil a wan, Miss, but why didn't ye tell us ye were that way av thinking' at the first? [...]. Shure who wud have looked for the like in the captain's daughter?" Milli cent replies, "Ah, I see you don't know the Wexford song about the cap tain's daughter," and rewards the men with books rather than guns to

prepare more discerningly for war (54). Like the forgotten ballad, Milli cent prompts the men (and the Shan Van Vocht readers) to consider allies of the revolution in unexpected places. As Millicent challenges conven tional wisdom about class and political sympathy, she also confronts her audience with the nature of feminine agency as well. In her attempts to recast the revolutionary, if passive, Mother Ireland as the conventional, if

activist, coquette, then, Alice Milligan inevitably revised what it meant to be a nationalist in late-nineteenth century Ireland.

Yet, Milligan's message was quickly lost with the folding of the maga zine in April of 1899 and its subsequent resurrection, in Dublin, under the

newly-masculinized name of the United Irishman. Critics have argued that the Shan Van Vocht folded because of insufficient funds, a financial

insolvency caused, in part, by the editors' conscientious avoidance of

party or factional politics.17 Indeed, in the editorial of the final, April 1899, issue, Milligan plainly blamed the Shan Van Vocht's demise on "the

unfortunate sectional policy which is shattering the forces of Ireland at

present" (68). Arthur Griffith learned from such failure: his Dublin-based United Irishman, and its successor, Sinn Fein, depended heavily upon financial supporters who condoned its strong separatist approach to nationalist politics, one that diverged from the scrupulously non-sectar ian editorial voice of the Shan Van Vocht. Although the Shan Van Vocht, in its recurrent emphasis on the example of the United Irishmen of 1798,

hoped to fuse the nationalist movement into a mass revolutionary body, there was little public sentiment to support such a call. In the end, the

paper failed because of the generic impulses of the romances contained in its pages: romance-across-the-borders might delight but firm factionalism

was what kept a paper in business. While the stories and the very exist ence of the Shan Van Vocht testified to the agency and centrality of female activists in the nationalist campaigns of the 1890s, the editorial and fictional counsel towards the mollified route of silk-slippered ladies ensured the ultimate demise of the Shan Van Vocht.

Texas Christian University




NOTES

i See Virginia Glandon, Richard Harp "Shan," CL. Innes, Carl Racine, and

Virginia Crossman.

2 See Innes, 135; Crossman, Harp, 51; Glandon, 25.

3 One glimmering exception is CL. Innes' Woman and Nation.

4 For more extensive discussion of the influence of 1798 on the Shan Van Vocht, see Crossman.

5 See Michelle Elizabeth Tusan for an account of the role of the press in defining and reframing early debates about the New Woman.

6 See Servant 92-97, for Gonne's account of the exclusion, including her famous

remark to Timothy Harrington, President of the National League: "Surely Ireland needs all her children."

7 See Innes 135, Ward 45, and Ritschel 55. 8 See Connolly, "Can Irish," "Nationalism and Socialism," "Patriotism and

Labour," "Other People's."

9 See "Other People's Opinions" (December 1896): 234-5. 10 See Thomas J. O'Brien, "Other People's Opinions: How to Celebrate the

Centenary of '98" and Thomas Concannon, "The Irish in Mexico."

11 "In the North Country II: Betty Fryers" (April 1896): 61-65; "The Story of

Betsy Gray" (May 1896): 97-8. 12 See Crossman 130 and Innes 137.

13 See Kevin Whelan, "The United Irishmen, the Enlightenment and Popular Culture."

14 Milligan's pairing of romance and politics may have been gleaned from the

publication of Young Irelander Michael Doheny's The Felon's Track (1875), a

thrilling account of his escape after the 1848 rebellion, which was published

alongside romances such as The Turkish Slave and The White Queen and the Mohawk Chief. I am indebted to Terry Eagleton for this information.

15 "Language, Class and Genre" 1070.

16 See "Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel" in Heath cliff and the Great Hunger.

17 See Innes, Crossman, and Curtis.

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KAREN STEELE !3I

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Editing Out Factionalism: The Political Consequences for Ireland’s Shan Van Vocht

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