“‘Pigs!’: Gothic Racial Stereotype and Repressed Fear in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher...

Fiction and Drama 23.2June 2014©National Cheng Kung University & Airiti Press Inc.

“Pigs!”: Gothic Racial Stereotype and Repressed Fear in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy

Yen-Chi WuPhD Student

English LiteratureNational Taiwan Normal University

ABSTRACTPatrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy features a pig-like young murderer who

turns out to be a butcher boy and slaughters his Anglicized neighbor like a hog. Underlining the prominent “pig” image, this essay demonstrates that pig is a Gothicized racial stereotype of the Irish people. In the long colonial era, the British had borrowed much from the Gothic trope in order to characterize Irish people as insurgent pigs. The idea of the “swinish multitude,” through Gothic rendering, was conversely transformed into a symbol of transgression for the Irish political agitators. After the nation’s independence, Irish nationalists further endeavored to imbue pride in Irish primitivism, taking it as a national emblem against the modern and British cultural influences. The Butcher Boy is set at the turn of the 1960s, when conservative nationalism gave way to a modernizing project. Under the values of modernization, Irish primitivism is again dismissed as derogatory. Against this backdrop, the protagonist Francie’s struggle with the pig image signifies Irish people’s unceasing negotiation of their racial stereotypes and their cultural primitivism. From this perspective, the racial stereotypes of the Irish people, which were a remnant of the colonial era, represent a “repressed fear” that recurs to the nation as it launches its modernizing project. This essay, treating the Gothicized racial stereotype as a repressed fear in The Butcher Boy, examines Irish people’s continued struggle with their cultural primitivism in the face of the modernizing world.

Received: March 12, 2013; accepted: April 30, 2014.DOI: 10.6271/fd.2014.23.2.01

Fiction and Drama 23.2June 2014

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KEYWORDSPatrick McCabe; The Butcher Boy; the Gothic; racial stereotype; repressed fear; pig

小說與戲劇 23.2 二○一四年六月 ©國立成功大學暨華藝數位股份有限公司

「豬！」：派屈克‧馬克白《屠夫男孩》中的志異種族刻板印象和壓抑恐懼

吳彥祺國立臺灣師範大學英語學系博士生

摘要

派屈克 • 馬克白的《屠夫男孩》講述一位愛爾蘭男孩的謀殺故事：被形

容成豬的主人翁化身為屠夫男孩將親英的鄰居太太像豬一樣的殺害。突顯小

說中「豬」的意象，本文試圖證明豬是愛爾蘭民族志異化的種族刻板印象。

在英國殖民期間，殖民者常藉由志異想像將愛爾蘭民族刻畫為反叛而暴力的

豬。然而，志異化的「豬眾」概念反而讓愛爾蘭反叛人士視為踰越的象徵。

獨立後的愛爾蘭國族主義份子更進一步擁抱愛爾蘭文化的鄉野性，企圖將愛

爾蘭文化的原始性做為對抗英國文化現代性的國族表徵。《屠夫男孩》背景

設於 1960 年代之際，正是愛爾蘭從保守國族主義過渡到現代化的轉型期。在

現代化的觀點下，愛爾蘭的文化原始性再度被認為是負面的形象。在此歷史

背景下，主人翁方濟與豬的意象角力的過程可視為愛爾蘭民族與其種族刻板

印象與文化原始性持續協商的狀況。由此看來，這些在殖民時期遺留下來的

種族刻板印象，成為愛爾蘭人民在現代化過程中必須面對的「壓抑的恐懼」。

本篇論文，將《屠夫男孩》中的志異種族刻板印象視為壓抑的恐懼，探討在

現代化的進逼下，愛爾蘭民族如何持續與其文化的原始性角力協商。

關鍵詞：�派屈克 • 馬克白、《屠夫男孩》、志異、種族刻板印象、壓抑恐

懼、豬


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“Pigs!”: Gothic Racial Stereotype and Repressed Fear in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy1

Muck Inis, or “hog island” in Gaelic, is one of Ireland’s old epithets. The pig has since become one of the most enduring national emblems for Ireland. In the colonial era, Britain had taken advantage of this animal image of Ireland and delighted in imposing swinish features on the Irish people. In this regard, the pig image had carried the colonizer’s disgust and contempt for their colonial subjects, who lived in degraded conditions like a hog that lives in its own filth and feeds on kitchen waste. “Paddy the pig” had thus become a potential racial slur for the Irish. The Irish people as pigs, however, are more than a herd of squalid animals to be frowned upon; for the British, they are also irrational and insurgent creatures to be feared. The incessant Irish rebellions against Britain had seen Irish revolutionaries appear in the political comics as swinish monsters. The pig image, therefore, embodies British people’s complex feelings for the Irish: disgust, contempt and fear.2 With the ability to induce fear that the pig image is imbued with the transgressive potential to transform the colonial subject into a violent insurgent. Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, rendering the pig as a Gothic monster, probes the complexity of Ireland’s pig image:3 the pig is both victim and victimizer. In

1 This article is revised from part of my degree work. I wish to express my gratitude to my thesis advisor, Professor Yu-chen Lin. I am also much indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that helped me to shape this article into a more presentable form.

2 The author is not unaware that such statement may fall into a binary perspective. This Britain-versus-Ireland dichotomy might be problematic in that it ignores the heterogeneity within the British society: British people of different classes, ethnic origins and political orientations may hold different opinions toward the Irish. In The Butcher Boy, however, Patrick McCabe depicts the tension between the Brady and Nugent families in such dichotomous terms. McCabe’s use of this racial stereotype follows the trajectory of the binary opposition within the Irish society. The scholars I consulted, such as Shaun Richards, confirm that there are binary oppositions at work in contemporary Irish culture, which are remnants of the colonial era. I consider McCabe’s depiction of the binary racial stereotype between the Irish and British to reflect the opposing values existing in Irish society. For the purpose of this essay, instead of an encompassing discussion on British people’s different perceptions of Irish people, I will follow McCabe’s use of the dichotomous racial stereotype and examine how he caters to it in his social critique in the novel.

3 It may worth a footnote to mention that in the play, “Frank Pig Says Hello,” based on The Butcher Boy, Patrick McCabe foregrounds the pig image. In the play, Frank acts like a narrator who tells the

Wu“Pigs!”: Gothic Racial Stereotype and Repressed Fear

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the novel, Mrs. Nugent hurls the insult at the Brady family: “Pigs!—sure the whole town knows that!” (4). Invoking the pig imagery to bash her disadvantaged neighbor, Mrs. Nugent has unwittingly planted the seed for her own gruesome death, as the piggish boy turns out to be a butcher boy.

The Booker Prize-shortlisted novel tells the story of Francie Brady, a mentally disturbed Irish boy who slaughters his Anglicized neighbor, Mrs. Nugent, like a pig. The sensational plotline and the depiction of the young murderer as a pig-like monster are considered to be evident Gothic influence. The Gothic, as a cultural sensibility, has lent rich language and imagination to racial discourse. Pig, as a derogatory symbol for the underprivileged colonial and racial other, enters into this Gothicized racial discourse, which further complicates the animal image. As a Gothicized animal image, the pig becomes a threatening creature to the British middle-class mindset. In this regard, evoking this “pig” image, the Anglicized Mrs. Nugent reveals her internalization of the colonizer’s biased view of her own race; at the same time, she also replicates the British’s fear of the combative and bellicose wild Irish. With delicate irony, in naming the Brady family as pigs, Mrs. Nugent creates a swinish monster out of Francie, who terrorizes her throughout the novel. In the end, she is even gutted open like a pig herself, with her blood used to write “PIGS” on the wall (209). Mrs. Nugent’s internalized fear has thus come true, as the swinish boy next door becomes her ultimate nightmare.

Francie’s negotiation with the pig image, on the other hand, is more complicated. He first tries to reverse the derogatory meaning by investing pride in that image; however, as his family falls apart and his old world crumples, Francie fails to resist the pig label. In the end, Francie reveals in his hallucinations that his innermost fear is being a pig. In this way he has also internalized Mrs. Nugent’s fear of the pig image. If Mrs. Nugent, in adopting the biased view of her compatriots, represents the Anglicized and modernizing values that are often associated with Britain; Francie, in his struggle with the pig image, embodies Irish

story, while “Piglet” functions as Frank’s double on stage and does what he says. Therefore, in the stage adaptation, Frank and Piglet are one; Frank is not only called a pig, he is the pig.


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nationalist endeavors to overturn the pejorative racial image. If Mrs. Nugent were able to replicate the British colonizer’s fear of the belligerent Irish, Francie, as well as the Irish nationalists, would share the fear that the derogatory stereotypes are true, and the native Irish really are pigs. This essay, treating the Gothicized racial stereotype as a repressed fear, examines Irish people’s continued struggle with their cultural primitivism in the face of the modernizing world.

The Gothic, as a mode of sensibility, has offered a rich language intended to denounce the racial others in the colonial imagination. In the long colonial era, Ireland was imagined by the British as a primitive/Gothic island, its people the Gothic race. H. L. Malchow, in Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain, argues that “Gothic fiction and racial discourse were […] closely intertwined” (5). The British Empire, in its imperial expansion, tended to imagine its colonial subjects as less evolved races on the evolutionary ladder thereby to justify their colonial dominance. Malchow writes, this colonial “[r]acism requires a ‘demonization’ […] of difference,” and the literary Gothic “offered a language that could be appropriated, consciously or not, by racists in a powerful and obsessively reiterated evocation of terror, disgust, and alienation” (3). Such an interweaving of Gothic language and racial imagination is evident in the British view on the Irish people. The “wild Irish,” as the British see it, indicates the Celtic aptitude for insurgence, inebriation and insanity. These imagined stereotypes imply that the Irish race is constitutionally unfit for governing itself, and therefore, the British colonial dominance on the island is justifiable.

Luke Gibbons, in Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization, and Irish Culture, examines the relation between racial discourse and Gothic imagination in the case of the Irish. Gibbons points out that, before the discovery of the “new world” of America, Ireland was situated on the border between the known world and the unknown world, between European civilization and the savage world. With this peripheral locality, the island of Ireland was imagined as a primitive, Gothic island. Even after the American continents were mapped across the Atlantic, the Gothic image of the Irish island persisted and extended to the people living on it.


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Superstitious, insurgent and primitive, the Irish race was imagined as the Gothic people. This interconnection between the racial and Gothic discourses was evident in the colonial stereotypes designed by the British for the Irish. The primitive and Gothic features of the Irish people thus marked them as an inferior race, therefore subject to colonial dominance. Nevertheless, Irish nationalist movements, such as the Gaelic revival and Irish Ireland, had endeavored to invert these Gothic characteristics of their compatriots. Revering Ireland’s ancient Gaelic culture, Irish nationalism sought to imbue Irish primitivism with national pride. However, these Gothic features of the Irish race, despite the nationalist endeavor to reverse them, still maintained an undermining strength toward their ideal Ireland, for these stereotypes were not entirely unfounded; many of them indicated an ugly truth that the Irish Republic simply hated to face. The Brady family in The Butcher Boy, also known as the pig family in the town, embodies many of the racial stereotypes. Benny Brady’s alcoholism and Annie Brady’s madness, moreover, are also attributable to much social malaise, such as unemployment and poverty. The Brady kid, Francie, at first tries to wear the pig name with pride, but ultimately, it is his inability to do so that pushes him over the edge of sanity. In this light, The Butcher Boy reveals the nationalist struggle with the Gothic features of the Irish race. To understand this point, it is essential to look at the stereotypical portrayal of the Brady and Nugent families, who represent the deprived native Irish and the Anglicized middle class, respectively.

The central tension in the novel lies in the conflict between the Brady family and the Nugent family. The two families are portrayed in direct opposition: the Bradys are poor, violent and mentally troubled; the Nugents are wealthy, stylish and Anglicized. In this sense, the two families implicitly represent a long existing dichotomy between the wild Irish and the civilized English. Such stereotypes are a remnant from the colonial era when English civilization dominated the island, and the native Irish culture was dismissed as primitive and barbaric. Moreover, in the early 1960s, when the novel is set, the Nugents, with their English associations, are the desired new face of Ireland. In 1959, Séan Lemass succeeded Éamon de Valera


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as Irish Taoiseach. Ireland, under de Valera’s leadership, had espoused conservative nationalism and protectionist economic policies, which only led the country to an economic precipice, making Ireland suffer from poverty for decades. Lemass’s succession marked a significant change in the island. Upon his inauguration, Lemass immediately launched liberal economic projects that “seek to adapt [Ireland] to the prevailing capitalist values of the developed world” (Brown 164). In this regard, Lemass wished to transform the Irish Republic into a developed nation through economic expansion. In other words, Lemass’s liberal economic policies signified Ireland’s plunge into the capitalist world and its embrace of bourgeois values. With a better economy, Lemass believed Irish people could “achieve the country’s most profound aspirations—genuine political independence and unity between north and south” (Brown 189). In this light, Lemass succeeded in arousing patriotism in the people; he managed to summon Irish people to a mission of economic revival. Considering this national ethos at the time, the Nugents with their material affluence and economic adaptability are undoubtedly the desired model for the Ireland in the making. As their family name tellingly implies, they are the “new gents” of the new Ireland. Nevertheless, if these impeccably middle-class Nugents (new gents) are the ideal family celebrated as the image for the new Ireland, the dysfunctional Bradys are the dark side of the same face that haunts the Republic. The Bradys are depicted with stereotypical and derogatory racial characteristics: alcoholism, mental instability and unruly behavior. As Donna Potts suggests, the Bradys “are the wild Irish, characterized by the immoderacy of appetite and emotion, which had been the most enduring argument the British had to support their claim that Irish were constitutionally unfit to govern themselves” (85). In this regard, the existence of the Bradys must be an inconvenient truth to the modernizing project Ireland was launching in the early 1960s because the Bradys confirm the British prejudices against the Irish. In this respect, they signify the return of repressed fear.

The return of repressed fear is a prominent Gothic device. The fear is not necessarily personal; sometimes it is national. At the turn of the 1960s, as the


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Irish Republic sought to transform itself into a modern and developed nation, the primitive Gothic features of the Irish race could not be incorporated into the new national image. Aaron Kelly argues that the retroactive narration in The Butcher Boy “offers itself as a kind of national return of the repressed” (133). Kelly suggests that, “just as Freud saw childhood as the causal site of both traumas and later repressions, so McCabe’s novel sets about divesting the 1950s of its supposed innocence” (133). For Kelly, the retroactive narrative voice of the middle-aged Francie brings back the repressed fear of the 1950s when the new Ireland was in its infancy. Writing in the early 1990s when Ireland enjoyed the “Celtic Tiger” economic boom, McCabe looked back at the turn of the 1960s when Lemass’s modernizing projects signaled the onset of Ireland’s modern transformation. The primitive images that had once been celebrated in the previous nationalist era were no more cherished in the modernizing national ethos. Ireland’s modernization incorporates both capitalist and bourgeois values, under which primitivism has to be repressed. Ireland’s pig image as well has to be rejected under the prevailing modern values; as Eric D. Smith observes: “the pig […] becomes the social signifier for everything the newly sanitized civil body of the bourgeoisie fears, despises, and wishes to exclude (or repress) from its totalizing narrative” (136). From this perspective, Mrs. Nugent’s insult describing the Brady family as pigs is only fitting; for the pig not only represents the colonial other, it also represents the repressed fear of the bourgeois society that Ireland has become.

The pig, as Ireland’s national emblem, however, has not always been so derogatory. As Potts points out, Ireland had been known as the “Pig Island” (86); this epithet started as a neutral nickname, referring mostly to the large pig population on the island due to Ireland’s peasant economy. The pig then became a symbol for Ireland; for instance, one of the traditional distinctions between Britain and Ireland was “John Bull and Paddy the Pig” (Potts 87). Irish people’s close association with pigs, however, became a source of derision and mockery for the British. As Declan Kiberd observes, “[t]hat poverty which causes humans to cohabit with pigs and cows and hens may be tragic in cause but it is comic


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in effect” (Inventing Ireland 504). This comical effect of the human-animal

cohabitation was readily captured and adapted on stage for public entertainment.

An evident example is the Englishman’s creation of the “Stage Irishman.” In the

eighteenth century the comical Stage Irishman “frequently appeared with a pig in

close attendance” (Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World 21), as if the pig were

his best friend. Moreover, Irish people’s close association with pigs allowed the

English gents to impose swinish characteristics on Irishmen, such as “slovenliness,

fondness for wallowing in filth, and inability to control their appetites” (Potts 90).

These derogatory characteristics hence allowed the British to justify their colonial

dominance of the Irish and in turn, the Empire’s supremacy.

In the Victorian era, the pig image for Irish people became even more demonic,

for the “pigs” in Ireland were threatening to revolt against the British colonists. In

1800, the Acts of Union caused great disturbance in Ireland: some politicians filed

for repeal through the parliament, other political agitators, notably the Fenians,

resorted to armed forces and violent uprisings. The latter, for the English, was a

horrific problem that threatened their social stability. Under these circumstances,

Ireland’s pig image underwent a transformation. Instead of being a laughable

companion to the Stage Irishman, the pig had become the wild Irishman himself.

L. Perry Curtis Jr. in Apes and Angels traces the different faces of the Irishman

in English cartoons, such as the gentleman’s magazine Punch.4 Curtis indicates

that in such English cartoon caricatures, United Irishmen are usually endowed

with “snouts instead of noses”; Irish radical or revolutionary agitators are often

assigned with “porcine features” (30-31).5 Curtis suggests that this is due to the

“popular notion of the ‘swinish’ mob or multitude” (30). The notion of the “swinish

4 In Apes and Angels, Curtis focuses mainly on the Irish representation as apes and gorillas in English cartoons; the discussion on Ireland’s pig imagery takes relatively little space. Nevertheless, Curtis also concedes that “[i]n the world of English comic art, the hardy pig outlived both Paddy and the gorilla as the representative of the Irish people” (57).

5 In addition to the porcine features that render Irish revolutionaries as “swinish mobs,” Irish dissenters are also depicted as “an ape-like Caliban,” “Fenian Dragon,” “The Irish Devil-Fish,” and “Irish Frankenstein” (Curtis 32, 38, 44, 51). In this respect, the fanciful Englishmen not only tended to see the Irish political agitators as beasts, but also as downright Gothic monsters.


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multitude” was made popular by Edmund Burke, who used the term to deride the French revolutionaries in his work Reflections on the Revolution in France (173), a book that had been described by Burke’s contemporaries as “a manifesto of counter-revolution” (qtd. in O’Brien 51). Burke’s assault on the revolutionaries had caused a stir and backfired. As Smith indicates, in response to Burke’s infamous remark, “the French revolutionaries of the eighteenth century embraced the pig as a symbol of transgression” (142). In a similar vein, Don Herzog observes that “[a] stream of pamphlets mocking Burke had title ironically adopting the label: Hog’s Wash, Pig’s Meat, Politics for the People: A Salmagundy for Swine, Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke from the Swinish Multitude, and so on” (360). In this regard, the “swinish multitude” though demeaning at first, can be easily embraced with a rhetoric twist.

Ireland’s association with pigs may have allowed the British people to laugh at them and denounce them as Gothic monsters, but with rhetoric twist, the pig image can also be embraced as a symbol of transgression. In addition, since the pig plays a significant role in the meatpacking industry, this edible animal, for the Irish man, may serve to denote Ireland’s colonized and “eaten” position in the Anglo-Irish relationship. The swinish and Gothic features of the Irish race, therefore, can be inverted to underline the cruelty of the “eater.” As Gibbons argues, “[t]hough sharing—indeed partly constituting—the demonology of race, the Gothic as a literary and cultural form could be turned, through acts of semiotic and narrative appropriation, against itself, thereby becoming a weapon of the weak” (15). The pig image for the Irish people has undergone such semiotic turn and become a narrative weapon to assault British imperialism. Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” for instance, implicitly alludes to Ireland’s epitome as the “Pig Island.” In his satire, Swift gives voice to an unnervingly pragmatic economist, who proposes to have the infants of the Irish poor cooked and served as trendy delicacy on the English gents’ dining table. In so doing, Swift’s economist maintains, the babies slayed cannot only lessen the financial burden for their parents but also “contribute to the feeding […] of many thousands” (493). Swift’s satirical piece has often been seen


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as revealing the “imperial state’s symbolic cannibalism” (Backus 136), signifying that the Anglo-Irish relationship is an eater-eaten one. In a passage where the economist discusses the various ways of cooking the babies, he/she says: “I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs” [italics original] (495). In this respect, Swift implicitly alludes to Ireland’s pig image. In this allusion, Ireland as the Pig Island is consumed by England’s cannibalistic imperialism. Therefore, the pig image, for Irish writers, can be used to denote Ireland’s victimization in the imperial economy. Nevertheless, we cannot overlook one of the most famous invocations of the pig image by James Joyce. In his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce has his fictional alter-ego Stephen Dedalus remark: “Ireland is the old sow that eats her own farrow” (203). In contrast to Swift’s satire that underlines Ireland’s victimhood and “eaten” position, Joyce suggests that Ireland is herself the “eater” that feeds on her own offspring.

Joyce’s bitter critique of his motherland further complicates the binary “eater-eaten” position carried in the pig image. With rhetoric finesse, Irish nationalists may be able to overturn the derogative meaning of the pig and take it to assault the British. This, however, is simply playing victim, putting the blame on the colonizer and thereby ignoring the ugly truth before their eyes. Ireland at Joyce’s time was extremely repressive, or as Stephen Dedalus articulates in A Portrait: Ireland is a place where the “nets” of “nationality, language, [and] religion” hold back the souls of men from flight (203). The image of nets underlines the confining and repressive condition in Ireland resulting from the Church and the nationalist ethos. Hence the statement that Ireland is “the old sow that eats her own farrow” suggests that Ireland is just as responsible as Britain for the suffering of the Irish people. The old sow that is Ireland is also the victimizer of her own children. Given this, the pig image of Ireland may need further examination. Thus far, I have demonstrated that the British had used the pig image to dismiss the Irish as less than human and to characterize them as Gothic monsters; the Irish, in turn, had tried to embrace the image and turn it against the British oppressor. Nevertheless the derogatory


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stereotypes imposed on the Irish through the pig image suggesting that they were alcoholics, insane and violent, are not pure English fantasy. These stereotypes do tend to be true, and this is the ugly truth that the Irish people cannot face.

In the late 1960s, the first official statistic on schizophrenia came out and revealed a higher rate of mental patients in Ireland than other European countries. In the following decades, this report was treated in the Irish media “as an embarrassing national scandal, a stain on the national and cultural identity” because it seemed to “confirm ancient folk beliefs and stereotypes of mad Ireland” (Scheper-Hughes 34). Nancy Scheper-Hughes, in her socio-anthropological study on mental illness in rural Ireland, points out that schizophrenia is “uncommonly common” on the island, especially in its western region, which the nation had at the time prided as its most Irish area (136). In fact, so unnervingly common schizophrenia is in Ireland that Scheper-Hughes aptly names her book Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, a title that puts schizophrenics alongside with saints and scholars, as an allusion to Ireland’s old epithet as the “Isle of Saints and Scholars.” This evident Irish vulnerability to schizophrenia, however, should not be considered thoroughly as a biogenetic problem. Scheper-Hughes maintains that the high rate of schizophrenia in Ireland is “a manifestation of dis-ease between an individual and his milieu” (298); in other words, sociological factors are more accountable for this national epidemic. Ireland, in the colonial era, had consistently suffered from serious population hemorrhage; with the strike of the Great Hunger in the 1840s, the Irish exodus took away the young and the able, leaving behind the devastated people in an extremely trying land (Scheper-Hughes 27). Poverty, along with “sexual repression and religious guilt,” seemed to push the remaining Irish men and women over the edge to the world of derangement. In addition to the high rate of insanity on the island, Ireland is also notorious for her people’s indulgence in alcohol. According to Scheper-Hughes, alcoholism is but a “‘safer’ form of pathology” (160) because it can be easily disguised as an acceptable expression of masculinity. Moreover, mental illness and alcoholism sometimes climax “in fits of rage or violence directed against neighbors or self” (Scheper-Hughes 124). In this


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respect, mental illness, alcoholism and violence are interrelated social problems. These unflattering stereotypes, therefore, are not simply an English fantasy unjustly imposed on the Irish; they are symptoms resulting from the unaccommodating and stressful living circumstances in the Irish nation. In this light, the wild Bradys are the lively embodiment of this social dis-ease. Their existence is an embarrassment, a scandal and a stigma, as if the Irish people had responded to the statistics revealing Ireland’s high rates of mental illness.

Ireland’s pig image may serve differing purposes: it can be easily used by the British as racial slur; it can also be reversed as a weapon against the British. Yet as Joyce’s invocation in A Portrait reminds us, the pig image also uncovers the social dis-ease Irish people may feel with their land. In The Butcher Boy, Francie’s struggle with the pig label corresponds to the dual effect of the animal image; but ultimately, it is the social un-ease that pushes him over the edge of sanity and leads him to become the monstrous butcher boy. In the novel, Mrs. Nugent starts the pig name-calling at the Brady door because she wants to keep her son Philip from Francie; as she warns Annie Brady: “if he [Francie]’s seen near our Philip again there’ll be trouble” (4). In thus doing, Mrs. Nugent reenacts the Victorian Englishmen’s fear for the wild Irish. She is afraid that Francie the piggish boy would be a bad influence on her well-bred and cultured Philip. In the novel, McCabe astutely associates the Nugent family with the British cultural values, and thus, the Anglicized Nugents likely inherit the Gothic imagination from the British people. It is mentioned that the Nugent parents moved to London for a while, where their son Philip went to “a private school” (2) before they now moved back to their native town in Ireland. When Francie breaks into the Nugent house, he sees the picture of Mr. Nugent and remarks:

You could see by him that he had a high-up job. He was staring off into the distance thinking about all the high-up things he was going to do and all the people he was going to meet. I don’t know if he was English but he spoke like it. He said good afternoon when everybody else said hardy weather or she looks like rain. (55)


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In this regard, Mr. Nugent and his family are distinguished from “everybody else” by their English accent and their special interest in “high-up things.” The Nugents, therefore, are not only the “new gents” that embody the modernizing project in Ireland; they replicate the British cultural values that render them a little aloof and pretentious, which might associate them more with mid-Victorian English people. In this regard, Mrs. Nugent’s evocation of the pig image is suggestive of the Victorian caricature of the Irish swinish monster.

Invoking the pig image, Mrs. Nugent sees the Brady family as swinish Gothic monsters that might have a bad influence on good citizens. Her wish to keep a distance from the Bradys epitomizes the national fear of the derogative stereotypes of the Irish race. In the nationalist era, Irish primitivism may have been imbued with national vigor; in the modernizing rhetoric of the Lemass era, however, Irish primitivism can no longer be incorporated. In the novel, Francie first responds to the pig image with confident finesse. After Mrs. Nugent’s name-calling, Francie internalizes the pig image, but at first, Francie tries to turn this pig label into “a strength, an identity, a badge of pride” (Potts 86). Like the nationalist endeavor to imbue vigor in Irish primitivism, Francie reverses the derogative pig image into a positive identity marker. The next time he encounters Mrs. Nugent walking down the street with Philip, Francie terrorizes the Nugent mother and son, asking them to pay the “Pig Toll Tax” to get past the road (12).

Turning himself into “Francie Pig the Toll Tax Man,” Francie explains to the baffled Mrs. Nugent, “that was the rules of pig land” (12). By enacting the tax man, Francie assumes an authoritative figure, reversing the power relation between him and the Nugents. Such an act catches Mrs. Nugent by surprise; stunned and with “a tear in her eye” (13), Mrs. Nugent escapes the scene in a hurry. Significantly, in this episode, Francie not only tries to reverse the derogatory meaning of pig, he also teasingly re-names Mrs. Nugent as “Mrs. Nooge.” Francie says, “I don’t know why I called her Mrs Nooge, it just came into my head. I thought it was a good thing to call her but she didn’t” (12). Mrs. Nugent is quite offended by this name despite the fact that Francie claims his intention to be innocent. At first glance, “Nooge”


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seems a truncated version of “Nugent.” But given the fact that Mrs. Nugent is offended by the term, it may be inferred that she has associated it with a derogatory meaning. If “Nugent” signifies “new gent,” the newly emerging social gentry, “Nooge” might be read as a truncated rendition of “nouveau riche,” the demeaning term for an opportunistic social-climber. It is likely that Mrs. Nugent has sensed the implication of the latter, and it gets on her nerves. From this perspective, Francie has (un)wittingly reversed the power relation between himself and the Nugents on a rhetorical level. He refuses to play along with the accepted norm; instead, he creates his own language to denounce the orthodox reading of “new gents.” Indeed, in this episode, Francie seemingly succeeds in turning the pig label into strength. Nevertheless, despite Francie’s success in enacting the Pig Toll Tax Man, the power relation between him and Mrs. Nugent is reversed on a symbolic level only. The Bradys remain the underdogs in the town because they are still poor and underprivileged. When the Bradys’ familial circumstances deteriorate, Francie is no longer able to own up to the pig name, not even by using a game.

After Annie Brady drowns herself, Francie starts his slow descent into insanity; his behavior becomes wilder and more swinish. In an incident, Francie calls on the Nugents to ask Philip to play soccer with him. Mrs. Nugent answers the door and asks Francie to leave. On this demand, Francie gets “down on all fours” and does a pig imitation, as he tells in his own words: “I stuck out my face and scrunched up my nose and made my eyes as small as I could then I gave a big grunt” (58). Then, when Francie snorts and nudges his way into the house, Philip joins his mother trying to shoulder the swinish boy out of the door. In this turmoil, Francie reenacts the swinish monster in the Victorian Englishmen’s caricatures, and the Nugents replicate the Victorian Englishmen’s fear of this unruly creature. Just like Burke’s infamous remark of the “swinish multitude” during the French Revolution, Mrs. Nugent’s invocation of the pig image has backfired. Francie has not only internalized the pig label, he has found strength in it.

In another pig-related episode, Francie tries to reject the pig label altogether when he starts the pig school in the Nugent house. Some days after Francie’s


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swinish intrusion, he returns to the Nugent house when the family is out. Breaking into the house, Francie has a little party by himself, helping himself to some food and watching TV in the Nugents’ polished living room. In a wild fantasy, Francie starts “the pig school” (65). Playing the role as the headmaster, Francie teaches Philip and Mrs. Nugent how to behave like nice pigs. And what do pigs do best? “they do poo!” (66). Hence under Francie’s instruction and encouragement, Philip tries his best to be a good pig and defecates “on the carpet of the bedroom” (66). However, it turns out that it is Francie all alone, and it is he, not Philip, who shits on the floor. In this incident, Francie does something different from being the Pig Toll Tax Man or a swinish monster; by starting the imaginary pig school at the Nugent house, he tries to put the pig label back onto the Nugents.

More tellingly, in his wild imagination, Francie reveals his desire to switch places with the Nugent child. In the episode where he breaks into the Nugent house, Francie thinks it would be “a good laugh” to put on Philip’s school uniform, “the one [Philip] wore at private school in England” (63). Donning Philip’s clothes, Francie “went round the house like Philip” (63), imitating Philip’s accent and studious manner. Although Francie only views it as “a good laugh,” he has unconsciously revealed his desire to be Philip, to be a Nugent child. Starting the pig school, Francie then tries to put Philip and his mother in his old position as pig. And this is Francie’s secret wish: he wants to be a “new gent” who enjoys the middle-class affluent life; he does not want to be a pig and live in deprived conditions anymore. Therefore, although the pig image may contain the potential strength to reverse the unflattering stereotypes on a rhetorical level, it is still burdened with many derogatory connotations that Francie cannot bear. Being a pig is in fact Francie’s deepest fear that he tries to repress. If Mrs. Nugent has replicated the British man’s fear for the Irish “pig,” she has also put this fear in Francie when she verbally assaults him. In fact, the pig image as the Irish people’s repressed fear works in two ways: the Anglicized people fear living with the pigs, and the Irish people fear that they are the pigs.

In the novel, after Benny Brady dies of alcoholism, Francie is taken to an


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asylum where he has a series of wild hallucinations, which is a prominent Gothic device to reveal repressed fear. In one of his most horrific fantasies, the Bradys are a family of pigs and are the laughingstock of the town. At the beginning of the hallucination, a nosy neighbor, Mrs. Connolly, offers “a fat red polished apple” to Francie, on the condition that he “picks it up like a pig” (161). When Francie goes on all fours and tries to grip the apple on the ground with his teeth, Mrs. Connolly and her gossipy minions cheer and clap their hands in excitement. Then Francie realizes that Ma and Da Pig are there too, and they are deeply ashamed, with their faces “roast red” (162). Mrs. Connolly and the onlookers wait excitedly, anticipating to “see a row!” (162). Then Ma and Da Pig turn to Francie: “Why did you take the apple you stupid little pig?” (163); and the whole town watches the Brady’s family row for entertainment. In this respect, the pig image, for Francie, is associated with deep family shame. By being a pig, he has shamed his parents and disdained the Brady family name. Thus, in the end of this hallucination, Leddy, the owner of a local abattoir, appears with a sword and cuts Francie in two halves: “One half could see the other but they were both just dangling there on the meat rack” (164). Butchered like a pig on the meat rack, Francie resembles the sacrificial child in Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” He is the pig, the eaten, and the scapegoat of the town. More importantly, this horrific hallucination confirms that Mrs. Nugent’s vicious name-calling indicating that they are a family of pigs, and the whole town knows this (4). This is in fact Francie’s innermost fear, that the Bradys are pigs and are the underdogs in the town. In spite of Francie’s effort to reverse the derogatory pig label, he cannot change the fact that the Brady family is at dis-ease with the modernizing Irish society. Under the prevailing modern and middle-class values, the pig image is not only the racial and colonial other, it also represents the class other that needs to be repressed.

The Gothicized racial image is like a double-edged sword. It can be used as a racial slur to bash the Gothicized Irish race; it can also be embraced with pride by the Gothicized who can thence return the blow. Nevertheless, McCabe depicts an Ireland where the sword does not come from the outside, but from within.


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The modernizing project of the new Ireland in the 1960s relentlessly rejected the Gothicized stereotypes. Even though Irish nationalism had endeavored to reverse the derogatory images, it only succeeded at the rhetorical level. Both Irish nationalism and the modernizing project have conveniently ignored the fact that the Gothic features of the Irish race are indications of social malaise in their homeland. The Brady family in the novel is the embodiment of such social problems, and they are victims lying under that double-edged sword. The pig image would remain destructive if the Irish people continued to reject the pig image or to embrace it with blind vigor. Joyce’s comparison of Ireland to the sow that eats her own piglets uncovers the inconvenient truth that Irish people’s sufferings are for the most part, self-inflicted. The pig image for Ireland should not be considered solely as a Gothicized imagination by the British people; this stereotype indicates that Irish people are inflicted with very trying living circumstances of their own making. It is these trying circumstances in rural Ireland that account for the tragedy that befalls the Brady family. In this outlook, McCabe approaches this murder story with tenderness and sympathy, as Francie is not only a murderer, he is also a victim in a very trying land. He is both terrorized and the terrorizer, both pig and butcher.


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“‘Pigs!’: Gothic Racial Stereotype and Repressed Fear in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher...

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