Hybrid Voices: Cultural Subversion in Modern Irish Women's Writing

Hybrid Voices: Cultural Subversion in Modern Irish Women’s Writing

Presenter: Geraldine Rossiter

Paper for the ACIS Irish Spirits Irish Souls Conference at the University of Rhode Island,

November 1, 2013

When I first arrived in America as a young teenager, the concept of hybridity in Irish culture was

as alien to me as soda fountains and poodle skirts. After all, in the Ireland where I grew up, we

looked like each other, we spoke like each other (although I could easily identify a Cork accent,

a Derry accent, or a Dublin accent), we all had the same religion, and we were all pretty much

related to each other. In fact, familial relations were somewhat akin to the six degrees of Kevin

Bacon, with just about any person you met, you could establish some type of family connection

within less than six links! America, on the other hand, was an exciting and heady rush of

diversity and mind boggling variety. Immigrants from all regions of the world, with their

multiplicity of languages, races, creeds and social customs had converged on this huge nation,

and had somehow managed to coalesce into a highly functioning democracy, that (on the

surface at least) respected the individual, while upholding a national ideology that unified its

society. America was the great melting pot, whereas Ireland was a small, insular nation, self-

contained and untouched by foreign influences. This, of course, was my cultural legacy, a

legacy that was handed down to my generation and the generation of my parents, by the

venerable leaders of the Celtic Renaissance, who so desperately wanted and needed to create

an Irish culture distinct and separate from that of an imperial oppressor. The irony, however, is

that the concept of a pure Irish culture, untainted by foreign and subversive influences, is and

was as damaging to the soul of the nation, as the lack of an evolutionary capability is to the

survival of a species.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Celtic Revival sought to re-define Ireland, not as a modern

nation, but as a devolved version of itself, based on an ancient ideology. As Edward Said noted

in his essay on Yeats in Culture and Imperialism, this desire of the national poet to recapture an

Irish past distinct and uncontaminated by imperial culture, can be viewed as an example of “the

Geraldine Rossiter Hybrid Voices: Cultural Subversion in Modern Irish Women’s Writing

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nativist phenomenon which flourished as a result of the colonial encounter.” As colonialism

constantly reinforced the subservience of the colonial state, nativism sought to deconstruct this

relationship by creating a past or national culture that was based on an almost metaphysical

imagining. The issue with this escapist rationale is that the abandonment of the “historical

world for the metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam or Catholicism is to

abandon history for essentializations that have the power to turn human beings against each

other…” In essence this language refuted what should have been the true goal of liberation, a

universalism that included all of the people within the nation rather than an ideology that

reinforced the repressive structures of the imperial society. This nativist attitude was all the

more damaging when considered in light of David Lloyd’s arguments in Ireland After History,

that most nationalistic movements take place in conjunction with other emancipatory

movements. Fin de siècle Ireland was no exception. The process of Irish independence he notes

rose out of a “broad ideological spectrum of political and social movements.” (28). Pre-

independent Ireland was a virtual melting pot of subversive, revolutionary and modernizing

movements, all aimed at the destabilization of imperial culture. Not only were these

movements publicly embraced, but they were incorporated into the national assertion of anti-

imperial discourse. By the time of, or perhaps as a consequence of, the Easter Rising however,

the nationalist movement emerged as the predominant and prioritized national objective. From

the declaration of independence onward, all other social movements were required to become

subservient to the primary national cause. The resultant ideology was a conglomeration of

nativist traditions and imperial values, which repudiated the importance of the overwhelming

number of social injustices requiring attention such as urban poverty, wage discrimination,

unsafe working conditions, and gender equality. Despite a fixation on a cultural monogamy, the

emergent state could not repress completely those counter-nationalist movements that

challenged the state ideology. Instead these movements co-existed within the national

discourse in the form of popular culture which continued, according to Lloyd, its “hybrid and

partially self-transforming, partially subordinated existence in the shadow of the state” (33).

Through the literature of women like Lawless and Gregory the hybridization of Irish culture

continued, albeit at a significantly moderated pace. These women insisted upon the inclusion of


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non-represented minorities in the national debate about the future of Ireland, and presented a

vision of an alternate, and more inclusive national culture. It was the promulgation of this vision

that motivated them to explore their ideas and convictions through their written works, and

expose the intolerance of patriarchal and heterosexist norms of government and social order.

The two female protagonists that we will meet in this discussion are Grania, a native of the

Arran Islands who struggles to balance her need for independence with her need for love, and

Gormleith, the High Queen of Ireland, married to Brian Boru and maligned by male history as a

traitor. As each heroine struggles through her own individual journey, she is continually foiled

by the men in whom she places her trust, love or loyalty. Her female perspective refuses to

accept the vast distance between the rules of behavior for men versus women. The

importunate tension between the two modes of behavior is the root of the tragedy or betrayal

that unfolds in each of these stories.

Throughout her writings Lawless insisted upon the complexity of the Irish cultural composition.

For her, Ireland was not simply a land filled with Catholic peasants, inheritors of a dreamy, if

misrepresented, heroic past, but a land of integrated cultures as waves of settlers and invaders

“were absorbed into the country: as other and earlier settlers had been absorbed before them;

marrying its daughters, adopting its ways, and becoming themselves in time Irishmen” (272). In

essence, the past which had been obliterated by the famine, was not a reason to eschew the

present; it could not be used as an excuse to resurrect an even more distant past and hold it up

as the national objective. For Lawless her time, the period where Home Rule was hotly debated

in England and Ireland, marked “a departure so new that no illustration drawn from the last

century, or from any other historical period, is of much avail in enabling us to picture it to

ourselves” (416). Ireland in the midst of all this upheaval, had a chance at a new beginning, a

chance to redefine itself, an opportunity to throw off the old antagonisms of landlord and

peasant, of colonial native and imperial oppressor, Catholic and Protestant, male and female.

While she respected and acknowledged the importance of the efforts of Yeats and the Celtic

Renaissance to pay tribute to Ireland’s long forgotten heroes, she preferred to look forward, to

open herself to the possibility of the “untravelled future” (416).


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She chooses the Aran Islands as the geographic location of the novel purposefully to make her

point. Inishmaan both insulates her characters from the current Irish landscape while providing

a realistic view of a society in transition. It is, as Heidi Hansson describes in Emily Lawless 1845-

1913: Writing the Interspace, a “microcosm of Ireland, where Inishmaan represents the threat

of a new, culturally hegemonic nation-state and Grania herself becomes a mirror of the

increasingly displaced members of the Ascendancy” (81).

Certainly there is a good argument to support this hypothesis. Grania, while technically a

native of the island, is regarded as an outsider or foreigner by the native population because

her mother was from the mainland. Her blood line is not pure enough to merit inclusion in this

closed and insular society. Her intense relationship with the land, which seems to understand

and accept her to a much greater degree than its inhabitants, is reflective of Lawless’ own

emotional attachment to Ireland. The personal sense of rejection and loneliness that Grania

feels throughout the novel can be interpreted as being representative of the sense of social

isolation that the Anglo-Protestant class experienced during the de-colonization process. Never

accepted by the Irish Catholic population and regarded as backwater colonial relations by

British society, the Ascendency class held an increasingly tenuous position in Ireland. They

were, however, not the only class or culture clamoring for a place in the new nation. The Ulster

Unionists, also protested their right to participate in national discourse. For Lawless it was a

foregone conclusion that the myriad of cultures that became, through interbreeding, residence

and personal investment, fully incorporated into the Irish national character, should all have a

place in the new vision of Ireland.

However, she fully recognized the difficulty of achieving this vision, and it is the resistance of a

monolithic culture to new voices, that provides the dramatic tension in the novel. Grania’s

family is the wealthiest on Inishmaan. After the death of her father, Grania becomes caretaker

to her sister Honor who is dying of consumption and bears the responsibility for managing the

house, farm and family income. The most eligible girl on the island, she is affianced to

Murdough Blake, on whom she has had a crush since she was a little girl. Throughout the novel

Honor is portrayed as the stereotypical saintly, self-sacrificing woman that is so ardently


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admired in nationalist literature. While Honor’s faith is never questioned and her spirituality is

undoubtedly genuine, Lawless is not content to simply create a character to contrast the wild

and ungovernable Grania. Honor has ingeniously chosen the religious path to avoid what is

portrayed in the novel as the greatest evil that can befall a woman, the arranged and loveless

marriage.

In order to care for Honor, Grania has delayed the impending marriage, but as the novel

progresses we realize that Grania has serious doubts about her ability to be happy with her

careless, self-centered and lazy fiancée. Thanks to her unique position of financial

independence, Grania has the ability to choose or reject potential suitors, an opportunity that is

not afforded other young women on the island. Throughout the novel she and Honor have

several discussions about marriage and men. In one particularly horrifying story, Honor

recounts a childhood memory of how fourteen year old Mary O’Reilly was forced into a

marriage with a nasty looking man named Michael Donnellan. Mary’s father had settled the

bride price with Michael over a few drinks at the local tavern and the in the ensuing four days

the poor child is physically dragged from her home as she attempts to forestall the inevitable

marriage.

In fact Honor admits that the event was so traumatic for her as a child that it turned her

against marriage. Grania, still young enough to believe in romance and love, then asks Honor if

she ever cared for a man and the response is negatively vehement. “What would ail me to

care? the elder sister asked in tones of genuine astonishment. ‘Auch! men is terrible trouble,

Grania, first and last. What with the drink and the fighting…a woman’s life is no better than an

old garron’s down by the seashore once she’s got one of them over her driving her the way he

chooses” (218).

In her essay “Lesbian Ethics,” Sarah Lucia Hoagland maintains that “heterosexualism is a

particular economic, political, and emotional relationship between men and women: men must

dominate and women must subordinate themselves to men in any number of ways. As a result

men presume access to women while women remain riveted on men and are unable to sustain

a community of women” (197). Essentially heterosexualism is a means of male domination that


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prevents the successful partnering or bonding of women. By creating a social order in which

women are dependent upon and submissive to men, a patriarchal society ensures that no

threat to its domination can arise through an alternate system of female rebellion. V. Spike

Peterson further explores this concept in the context of nationalism. Heterosexism, she

maintains in “Sexing Political Identities: Nationalism as Heterosexism,” is a process of

normalization “undertaken primarily through controlling women’s bodies, policing sexual

activities and instituting the heteropatriarchal family/household as the basic socio-economic

unit” (40). As a male possession, women are denied agency, excluded from the public domain

and prevented from forming relationships that could demand an alternate ideology.

Heterosexism she argues, “insists that women bond not with each other, but with men” (52).

This insistence on the male centered family as the primary socio-economic unit prevents

the formation of natural networks and relationships that women have always relied upon to

resist the key elements of gender based oppression, the eight characteristics of which are,

according to Kathleen Gough in “The Origin of the Family”: "men's ability to deny women

sexuality or to force it upon them; to command or exploit their labor to control their produce;

to control or rob them of their children; to confine them physically and prevent their

movement; to use them as objects in male transactions; to cramp their creativeness; or to

withhold from them large areas of the society's knowledge and cultural attainments" (768).

In Grania, we find substantial evidence of each of these characteristics from the

“selling” of little Mary O’Reilly and her mother’s desperate attempt to save her, to Murdough’s

expectation that Grania’s money should be unquestionably at his disposal, to the very

significant fact that Grania whose only language is Gaelic, is completely isolated from access to

societal knowledge outside of Inishmaan. By inserting these subtle references to female power

in the form of the relationship of the sisters, Lawless is basically advocating Rich’s position that

their “existence comprises…the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or

indirect attack on male right of access to women” (649). The sisters have successfully navigated

a way of living that has resisted the imposition of marriage, engaged in a deeply satisfying and

loving relationship, and provided practical and emotional support to each other. There is


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essentially no need for men, who are universally portrayed in the novel as weak, selfish and the

instruments of female ruin.

Augusta Gregory however, affords her central character no such luxury of female

camaraderie. Rather she places Gormleith alone and at the center of the public sphere

asserting her right to a shared voice in both government and religion. The opening scene of the

play begins with Malachi, her ex-husband and High King, denigrating Gormleith and

complaining of her inability to submissively accept her role within his household. Her brother

Maelmora immediately defends her, accusing Malachi of constantly “crossing and criticizing

her, and tormenting her to attend to the needle and to the business of the house” (72). He

anticipates that Brian will make better use of her talents, a prediction which unfortunately for

both of them fails to come to fruition. From the beginning of the play therefore we see

Gormleith as a woman who refuses to submit to roles laid out for her by a patriarchal society.

As Noelle Bowles notes in her essay “Nationalism and Feminism in Lady Gregory’s Kincora,

Dervorgilla and Grania” this queen acts as “feminist response to the assumption that women’s

proper sphere was private, not public” (119). Rejecting both the assertions of Malachi and his

servant Brennain that she should be satisfied with the reflected glory of her husband’s wealth

and power, Gormleith seeks to assert her own claim to power.

Gregory subtly validates this claim by imbuing Gormleith with the right to confer

sovereignty and in so doing endows her with the ancient rite of the Goddess. When Malachi is

forced to cede the High Kingship to Brian he asserts that Gormleith is the cause of his good

fortune. By rejecting Malachi and marrying Brian, Gormleith has essentially stripped him of his

royal title and right to rule the land. In this way Gormleith mirrors the role of the Celtic Goddess

who in the ancient rites of kingship mated with king in order to ensure the fertility and

prosperity of the land and people. His final question frames his belief that she still continues to

hold power when he warns Brian that his position is tenuous and that Gormleith could revoke

her support at any time. His question is almost prophetic as Gormleith does eventually reject,

Brian and in so doing causes his downfall. Brian’s complete subjugation to the Christian faith,

his unwillingness to act as a king should (at least in her eyes), and most importantly his

rejection of her in preference to the message of the beggar woman, motivate her to once again


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switch allegiance and select a more appropriate king for her people. As Elin Ap Hywel notes in

her essay “Elise and the Great Queens of Ireland,” Gormleith has been “situated at the

intersection of male power…Woman is specifically portrayed as possessing the power either to

sanction or destroy hopes for Irish autonomy in the face of foreign invasion” (33). In this

depiction of the queen, Gregory presents a sympathetic heroine who refuses to accept her

husband’s rejection of her Celtic way of life or his submission to the values of Christian faith.

The investigation of faith is an interesting component of this play. In her book The

Serpent and the Goddess, Mary Condren traces the systematic subjugation of women by the

Christian church in Ireland, beginning with its early battles to gain superiority of the old religion

and the complete eradication of the power of the Goddess in Celtic politics. These early

Christian priests were “diametrically opposed to what the old religion represented…Women,

according to the fully fledged theology of the church, were by nature incapable of mediating

with the divine and should not be so arrogant as to assume these functions. Thus a steady

regression took place [that eventually] ….denied that [women] possessed any sacred powers in

the first place” (81). The power of the wise woman and goddess therefore became relegated to

realm of sexuality and nature. Eventually, the church by making “sexuality in almost all its

forms intimately related to sin, controlled sexuality and thereby the minds of all the faithful”

(88). Gormleith is standing on the cusp of this battle for the souls of the threatened Gaels. If

the church succeeds in its attempt to gain control, then her personal freedom, her ability to

choose a husband, to own land, to govern in her own right as queen will be irrevocably

eradicated. She will be forever relegated to the position of dutiful and submissive wife.

Gormleith at the beginning of the 12th century may still have had a chance to resurrect

the ancient religion, but Gregory at the beginning of the 20th century could only challenge the

status quo. The exchange between the queen and the beggar is poignant in that they are the

only two female characters in the play and between them represent both aspects of

womanhood in Ireland: the rebellious nationalist and the submissive, repressed idealized

woman.

The beggar, who accepts and embraces her religious capital as her only source of wealth

and power, now becomes a significant statement against the material oppression of the


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subjugated woman. By embracing Brian’s religion, she essentially condemns herself to a life

without property or personal rights. She relegates herself to a life of reliance and dependence

upon others, a life where the only food or shelter she obtains is given at the mercy of another;

even her personal safety is completely reliant upon the rule of Brian. Her life is symbolic of the

modern Christian, imperial, patriarchal society which had stripped women of the ability to

participate in public life and relegated them to little more than the chattel of their fathers,

husbands and brothers. Unwilling to accept this role for women, Gregory provides an

alternative with Gormleith. According to Ap Hywel she (and Synge) both projected a different

type of woman in their plays, one that was not bound by the constraints of the conservative

mainstream nationalism. “Not only did many of the plots of their plays revolve around the

exploration of barriers to the heroine’s free expression of her sexual choice, but those heroines,

far from being transfixed in their context by the hatpin of conventional roles, were free to roam

the stage of the heroic past in as capricious a fashion as they would” (30). Gormleith is the

personification of this type of female character, she has asserted her right to public life and

vehemently rejected the private domestic duties of a wife and mother. Although Gormleith is

evicted from male society, Ireland suffers a devastating loss at Clontarf, therefore cementing

her as the source of national power. The moral the message is apparent: a hegemonic society

that refuses to embrace the opinions and views of all its inhabitants will face a future of

uncertainty and disruption.

This uncertainty is not just the product of the power struggle between men and women

but of the various cultural and religious strands of Irish society at the turn of the century. This

play has not been set in the ancient Celtic past but at a time when Ireland was in a state of

upheaval and under threat of foreign invasion. The choice of Brian is purposeful as he was the

only Irish king ever to unify the entire nation, including the rebellious north, and successfully

repel a foreign invader. He had accomplished the ultimate nationalist dream; a free,

independent and united Ireland. Through the selection of this key historic figure and the

rebellion of his wife against both Church and state, Gregory adhered to a typical construct of

Protestant Celtic Revival Writing. According to Declan Kiberd in his monograph Inventing

Ireland, these Protestant revivalist authors “wished for a fusion of two traditions, not just Gaelic


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with Anglo-Irish, but Catholic with Protestant as well. Their dream was of a wonderful new

hybrid” (424). They specifically used religious terminology to subvert the conservative

nationalist message of a hegemonic society and purposefully resurrected the ancient past in

order to promote a national pride that went beyond religious boundaries. “It was hugely

ironical,” Kiberd notes “that while Protestants like Hyde, Gregory and Yeats went about

collecting legends of healing wells and peasant miracles, the Catholic clergy was resolutely

attempting to extirpate these beliefs” (425). The Ireland that Brian and Gormleith created was a

unified entity, one where the provincial kings were allowed to retain their individual kingdoms

and rule them as they see fit, while paying only nominal tribute to the high king. Their code of

conduct is not the Christian value of unswerving obedience to a monarch or overlord, nor are

they required to accept his rule should it prove to be oppressive or against their best interests.

Rather these 12th century Celts answer to no one but themselves; they have a culture that

empowers the individual. This was a strong message to send to an increasingly conservative

Catholic middle class and the clergy that supported them. For Lady Gregory freedom needed to

be won for all individuals, the women and men, the Catholics and Protestants, the northerners

and southerners.

In this very pagan play, Gregory articulates her vision for an Ireland that has risen

beyond the constructs of a colonial and patriarchal society. For her “this tossed and tormented

country has to be put in order, and to be kept in order, and travel whatever road God laid out

for it, without arguing and backbiting and the quarrelling of cranky bigoted men” (95). As she

herself struggled for independence in a male dominated society, bound by the restrictions of

Victorian Anglicanism and its message of female duty, she began to recognize the beauty of

personal liberty and freedom. Hers was a voice of reason that attempted to advocate neither a

cultural, religious nor gender based hegemony but a society that could rise above its colonial

and religious bias and create a political system in which all citizens were treated with equality.


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Hybrid Voices: Cultural Subversion in Modern Irish Women's Writing

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