Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest
Steven's Analysis
The Importance of Gender in Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar
Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest follows
two young men in Victorian England who live out double lives, in order to gain
social mobility through love and marriage. The love interests of the two
gentlemen are also seeking marriage, but they specifically wish to marry
someone with the name Earnest, hence the two men’s double lives. The play
functions as a satire on Victorian society’s morals and values, by exaggerating
the absurdity of the characters and plot. Wilde’s comedic play situates his
characters inside and outside gender norms of the Victorian era; specifically,
Wilde uses reversed gender roles, notions of the dandy, and notions of the
dowdy woman to present a critique of Victorian values.
Gender
roles depicted in the play provide a means of examining the Victorian era. In
the play, Wilde uses gender roles to emphasize power, while also bringing
attention to the family, class, and general absurdity of Victorian society. It
is a common trope that men have more influence compared to women. Men are the
bread-earners, while women are confined to a life of domesticity. Women are
usually valued based on appearance, chastity, and childbearing capabilities.
Men, on the other hand are seen as intelligent and strong with the ultimate
agency and sense of power. Further, Victorian upper-class men, or the
leisure-class, often boast their leisure-ness and idleness; however, they do
often work hard, usually attending to their estates. Society women were
expected to be idle and frivolous, similar to the dandy that will be discussed
in detail later. As Alan Sinfield argues, “the uselessness of the leisure-class
female made her an ornament for the male upon whom she depended” (42). Sinfield
goes on to argue that marriage was a distinct responsibility of the Victorian
upper-class women. Since marriage could no longer be arranged, everything had
to be manipulated, in order to ensure optimal social mobility and appearance.
It was also a common assumption that women only engaged in gossip and small
talk. Wilde flips this assumed notion by replacing gossip with thoughtful and
witty conversation amongst the female characters. This paper seeks to examine
Wilde’s use of gender roles and what they reveal about the Victorian society.
In the examples and paragraphs below, I will discuss how Wilde critiques the
relationships between men and women by reinforcing and reversing gender roles.
Specifically, I will argue that Wilde uses his female characters to contradict
the dowdy woman, while he uses his male characters to reinforce the dandy
gentleman.
Lady
Bracknell provides an adequate critique of gender through gender role reversal.
Generally, Lady Bracknell is a symbol of Victorian earnestness and the
unhappiness it brings as a result. I
argue that she represents Wilde’s negative opinion of Victorian upper-class morals
and power. Lady Bracknell’s opinions and mannerisms portray a calculated
speaking pattern. She is able to keep up with witty banter amongst other
characters, showing her deviance of a woman’s simple gossip talk. Her
appearance on stage is commanding and controlling, especially in regards to
Gwendolen. Lady Bracknell has complete control over her daughter, Gwendolen.
She tell her daughter explicitly, “Pardon me, you are not engaged to anyone.
When you do become engaged to someone, I or your father, should his health
permit him, will inform you of the fact” (12). She sees marriage as an alliance
for property and social status, rather than an institution of love. In this
aspect, Lady Bracknell complies with the Victorian importance of marriage.
However, it can be argued that her power over Gwendolen’s marriage prospects,
positions herself against gendered norms, in the sense that she puts herself
outside of the domestic home and provides a suitor for her family. She adopts
the father figure role in Gwendolen’s life. Lalonde argues that Lady Bracknell
“policies the boundaries of sexual contact between the bourgeois and the
aristocracy in the control that she exercises over proposed marriages”
(663). She clearly puts her opinion
before her husband’s. The mention of his health, in this example, seems
backhanded and meant to show his inferiority. Lastly, her active role and
adoption of the father figure in Gwendolen’s life contradicts the notion that
Victorian upper-class women are leisurely and idle.
Further, Wilde’s
women present a deconstruction of the family unity and marriage. As stated
above, Lady Bracknell embodies the role of the father and the “patriarchal
unit” and her treatment of Lord Bracknell makes him dispensable. Lord Bracknell
is disconnected from the events of the play, as well as the characters in it. With
the patriarch confined to his room, the father is replaceable, allowing the
matriarch to be free to “regulate the social occasion and pair off with a
conversation partner of her choosing” (Lalonde 668). In this aspect, Lady
Bracknell is dismantling the family unit, while also bringing attention to
marriage. Further, Cecily shows a deconstruction of the marriage process.
Algernon proposed to Cecily. Her immediate response is, “we have been engaged
for the last three months,” and proceeds to inform him about the fake love
affair she has had with him, while he was completely unaware (32). In this
example, Cecily has control over her life, marriage, and sexuality. It would be
normal for a man to take advantage of a woman, but Cecily has enacted the
manipulation. Cecily and Lady Bracknell represent women who have, at some point
or another, embodied masculine and patriarchal roles throughout the play.
Together, they reveal a critique of the Victorian woman, by defying the
ascribed notion that Victorian woman must be idle and frivolous, through their
relationship with men and their treatment of the marriage institution.
Wilde uses
the characteristics of the dandy gentleman to bring attention to the Victorian
man. A dandy is a man devoted to their style and neatness. In other words, a
dandy is an effeminate man. According to Sinfield, dandy and effeminacy
signaled class over sexuality. The Victorian middle-class boasted their manly
purity, purpose, and responsibility. The upper class commonly referred to as
the leisure-class, embodied characteristics of idleness, immorality, and
effeminacy. Algernon embodies these traits when he says, “It is awfully hard
work doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work when there is no definite
object of any kind” (17). Also, in the opening of the play, Jack and Algernon
are sitting and waiting for their women to arrive. Their passiveness and
understanding that leisure is hard work situates them within the Victorian value
arena. Their want to climb the social ladder and their means of doing it
reinforce the idea that being a dandy presents you as upper class.
Throughout
the play, there is a lack of masculine, manly man figures. Lord Bracknell is
dispensable. He eats upstairs and is entirely domesticated. Gwendolen, his
daughter, states, “Certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties,
he becomes painfully effeminate” (35). She goes on to say that the “home seems
to be the proper sphere for the man” (35). While not only defying social norms
of women, Gwendolen brings attention to the gendered roles of her father and
men in Victorian England. Her father is a homebody and has become effeminate by
not being active with family responsibility. The passive attitudes and
behaviors of Jack, Algernon, and Lord Bracknell present the difference between
the women and men of Wilde’s play. The women take a more active role, while the
men sit idle, waiting for the events to happen. This further emphasizes the
idea that a dandy represents the Victorian upper class, providing a critique on
Victorian society.
Throughout
the play, Wilde presents a critique of Victorian society; however, he fails to
provide an outcome or means of change. Wilde’s women embody a threat that women
might exercise power beyond the innocence and purity that was allowed in
middle-class Victorian ideals. Wilde’s men, on the other hand, embrace
Victorian life, reinforcing the already established gender norms. Wilde uses
the female characters to construct a parallel to the effeminate and manly
dichotomy displayed by men. Further, the feminine women stand together with the
male dandy against “middle-class earnestness” (Sinfield 44). As Foster argues,
Wilde creates as an “as if” world in which the “real” values “are inverted,
reason and unreason interchanged, and the probable defined by improbability”
(19-20). Through an exaggeration of characters and plot, Wilde presents a
gender critique of the play, as well as a gender critique of Victorian society,
morals, and values, making The Importance
of Being Earnest, and important form of feminist and historical literature.
Works Cited
Foster, Richard. "Wilde as Parodist: A Second Look at The
Importance of Being
Earnest." College English 18.1 (1956): 18-23. JSTOR
[JSTOR]. Web. 4 May 2015.
Lalonde, Jeremy. "A "Revolutionary Outrage": The
Importance of Being Earnest as
Social Criticism." Modern Drama 48.4 (2005): 659-76.
Print.
Sinfield, Alan. ""Effeminacy" and
"Femininity" Sexual Politics in Wilde's Comedies."
Modern Drama 37.1 (1994): 34-52. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. New York:
Dover Publications, 1990.
Print.
Maria
Irish Angst: Its Evolution Through the
Lens of Art
Paralysis.
Indecision. Grief. Shame. Identity issues. In a word, angst. The Irish are
known for it. But why? And how has the country’s literature, theater and visual
art tracked this angst? Has it evolved? Is it different now than it was 100
years ago?
These are the
questions I will explore in this study paper. I will review historical issues, from
the injustices of Swift’s era, to the potato famine, and the relatively more
recent “troubles,” since they significantly inform Irish art. Then I will
examine and compare the attitudes and lifestyles depicted in James Joyce’s Dubliners, written in 1914, with those in Emma Donoghue’s Landing, published in 2007, and discuss
attempts to silence the voices of Irish writers through the years. I also will
look at the work of Irish playwrights – from Oscar Wilde’s farcical The Importance of Being Earnest, first
performed in 1895, to Death of a Comedian,
by Owen McCafferty, which recently opened at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
Finally, I will explore the work of several Irish visual artists, as
interpreted by Irish writers, featured in Lines
of Vision: Irish Writers on Art, currently on view at the National Gallery
of Ireland to mark its 150th anniversary. Specifically, I will study
the techniques used and emotions evoked by James Arthur O’Connor’s The Poachers, painted 1835; William
Mulready’s The Sonnet (1839); Mary
Swanzy’s Propellers (1942); Gerard
Dillon’s The Little Green Fields (c.
1946-50); and Jack B. Yeats’s Grief (1951).
I will compare and contrast those works with the more contemporary Magdalene created by Alice Maher in 1998,
and Patrick Graham and Carmel Benson’s collaborative piece, After Giovanni di Paolo, created in the
same year.
Spoiler alert:
Irish angst has evolved. It’s still
there, but it’s different. There has been progress. Painful progress. But through
the pain and the angst, we receive the quintessential Irish gift – empathy and
keen insight into the human condition.
History
Repression is a
recurring theme in the tumultuous history of Ireland, and is the broth in which
the angst has simmered for more than a thousand years. During the era of
Jonathan Swift, born in Dublin in 1667, Ireland had been controlled by England
for nearly 500 years. Scotland was granted union with England in 1707, the same
year Ireland was denied it. Ireland suffered under English trade restrictions –
Swift vehemently rebelled against this in his 1720 essay, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture. He felt
English injustice paralyzed the people; their passivity enraged him. According
to David Cody on victorianweb.org:
He (Swift) lived
in an Ireland which was a colony, politically, militarily, and economically
dependent upon England. It was manifestly in England’s interest to keep things
as they were: a weak Ireland could not threaten England, and the measures which
kept it weak were profitable for the English. As a result Ireland was a
desperately poor country, overpopulated, full, as Swift said, of beggars,
wracked periodically by famine, heavily taxed, and with no say at all in its
own affairs.
In his famous A Modest Proposal, published in 1729,
Swift parodied his own actual proposals, which the Irish Parliament time and
again ignored. He scathingly suggests the Irish eat their own young, as Cody
says, “to shame England and to shock Ireland out of its lethargic state.” It
did not work.
Fast forward a little
more than 100 years to the mid 1800s. Ireland’s eight million inhabitants were
among the Western World’s poorest. Only about 25 percent of the agricultural
nation was literate. Life expectancy was short (40 years for men); infant
mortality was high. Nature added a stunning blow to the already troubled island
nation: Beginning in 1845 and lasting for six years, the potato famine killed
over a million people in Ireland; it caused another million to flee the
country. The famine walls – long stone walls which “appear to divide nothing
from nothing,” as dochara.com states – are a haunting reminder of this
devastating period in Irish history. Though it is true that starving Irishmen
were paid by church groups or landlords during the famine to build them, they
did serve a purpose – clearing the land of stones so it could be farmed.
Then came the
Troubles. As Patrick Radden Keefe writes in his New Yorker article, “Where the Bodies are Buried,” tensions had persisted in Northern Ireland
since 1920, when the Irish War of Independence led to the partition of the
island, creating an independent republic of twenty-six counties in the south
and continued British rule over six northern counties. Catholics in the north
were discriminated against, and when the Troubles started in 1969, the tensions
turned violent. In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the
Troubles. But much damage was done – 3,600 people died and thousands more were
injured. People lived in fear; many saw loved ones taken from their homes and
“disappeared.” The land with little sunshine now had another kind of darkness
cast over it. Keefe says, “one by-product of the Troubles was a culture of
silence.” He could have easily called it a culture of angst.
Though the dank
broth in which this angst has simmered is bitter, it did yield by-products besides
silence and angst, and they are, miraculously, sweet – intense, powerful works
of art that soulfully mirror the human condition.
Literature
“After the
literatures of Greek and Latin, literature in Irish is the oldest literature in
Europe, dating from the 4th or 5th century CE” (“Irish
Literature”). Not surprisingly, Ireland has a dual tradition in Irish writing –
Celtic literature, written in Gaelic and the languages derived from it
(Scottish Gaelic and Manx, Welsh, Breton and Cornish) – and English, the
language of Ireland’s colonizers. Hybridity also is evident in content, with
Ireland being simultaneously colonial and national since the 17th
century.
Through the
years, this angst-ridden identity crisis is front and center in Irish
literature. Paralysis and hopelessness, eloquently illustrated in James Joyce’s
Dubliners, are themes echoed in the
current generation of Irish writers, like Emma Donoghue. “Eveline,” from Dubliners, tells the achingly poignant
story of a 19-year-old Irish girl, wavering between escaping her dismal,
fearful life for the great unknown, and staying put. Her existence is
miserable, yet familiar; she has fallen in love with Frank, who wants her “to
go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in
Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her” (21). Eveline has no future in Dublin, where “she
sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence” (21). Should she go?
“She tried to weigh each side of the question. In her home anyway she had
shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her”
(21). She worked hard both at home and
at her job, in the Stores. “What would they say of her in the Stores when they
found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps…”
(21). She gave all her salary to her father, and had difficulty wrangling any
of it away from him.
She had hard work to keep the house
together and to see that the two
Young children who had been left to
her charge went to school
regularly and got their meals
regularly. It was hard work – a hard life –
but now that she was about to leave
it she did not find it a wholly
undesirable life (21).
The evening
Eveline was to meet Frank at the station to catch the boat to South America, she
hesitated. “Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window,
leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty
cretonne” (22). She traveled in her memory back to the last night of her
mother’s life. “As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its
spell on the very quick of her being – that life of commonplace sacrifices
closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mother’s voice
saying constantly with foolish insistence: ‘Deveraun Seraun! Deveraun Seraun!’”
(22-23).
This phrase
means, in Irish Gaelic, “At the end of pleasure, there is pain” (Bierman,
Norman, Malenfant). The shame and guilt of the Irish psyche reared its head.
Then, for a moment, readers believe Eveline conquers the angst monster: “She
stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would
save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live.
Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness” (23).
Or did she? When
it is time to board the ship, Eveline, with the Irish angst of ages filling her
very being, just cannot put one foot in front of the other. “All the seas of
the world tumbled about her heart. He (Frank) was drawing her into them: he
would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing” (23).
Frank urged her
on, but “her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of
anguish!” (23). The story ends with these lines: “She set her white face to
him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or
farewell or recognition” (23).
Eveline was
trapped, like a helpless animal; her chance at happiness aborted, her efforts
at escape thwarted, by her own mind, which paralyzed her body.
A similar choice
was faced by Sile O’Shaughnessy in Emma Donoghue’s Landing. Sile is an attractive, hip, 39-year-old flight attendant
from Dublin, who also happens to be a lesbian. On one eventful flight, she
meets the love of her life, 25-year-old museum historian Jude Turner – who
lives in the fictional, rural town of Ireland, Ontario. Half-Indian, Sile is
the ultimate city chick; Jude, a Quaker, rides a motorbike and is rather butch.
Sile has a long-time partner; Jude has slept with men. They fall hard for each
other, despite all their differences and all the complications, and begin a
long-distance relationship. After a year, they have had enough: One of them
must move. Sile decides it should be her – or does she? Should she, can she,
leave Ireland, the land she loves?
During her
decision-making process, “jet-setter Barbie,” as Jude’s guy friend and former
lover, Rizla, calls Sile, makes an epiphanous discovery: Sile’s mother, who
died 37 years before, did not succumb to diabetes – she killed herself. Leading
up to this revelation, Donoghue explores – and Sile confronts – the painful
realities of pulling up roots – and, nearly 100 years after Dubliners was published, an Irish
protagonist is paralyzed. Even in today’s modern world, she is not encouraged
to grab hold of a new opportunity. Case in point, this exchange with her
friend, Marcus:
“…you’re Irish through and through.”
“Whatever that means!”
“It’s your setting, your frame.
You’re a Dub,” Marcus told her, warming
to his theme. “This dirty old town
is your, what’s the German word, your
heimat.”
She didn’t answer. “What the hell are you going to do with yourself
at some little Canadian crossroads?”
(420)
Another
friend, Declan, who just returned to Dublin after six years in Stockholm, tells
Sile, “the sad thing isn’t the going….the sad thing…is when you come back for a
visit and you find yourself bitching about everything. Maybe not the first
visit or the second, but sooner or later you find Dublin isn’t home anymore.
But nor is the other place. And then you’re sunk” (452).
If
Sile moved to Canada, would she feel as she imagined her Indian émigré mother
felt? Says Sile:
She
must have felt bits of her starting to crumble off as soon as she landed.
She
settled in Da’s family house, with all her neighbours goggling over the
Hedges;
she turned Catholic, stopped speaking Malayalam, got a little less
Indian
every year. She must have felt she was withering
– (462).
The
difference between Sile and Eveline? Sile was able to overcome her angst demon,
and make the move. Sile was self aware, exploring and facing her demons, unlike
her Irish sister of a century ago.
I
tried rock-climbing once. It was all great gas till I couldn’t find a foothold
and
my whole body froze up. They called out instructions, they bawled at me,
but
I was ice. In the end they had to winch me down the cliff like a sheep (411).
Sile was torn; it was not easy. But the
numbness of her paralysis wore off. She made the move, to a new life, and a new
chance at happiness. Joyce would be proud Sile – and of Emma Donoghue. In
replying to a potential publisher, he said, “I seriously believe that you will
retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people
from having a good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass” (qtd.
in McBride: 52). The reflection that Donoghue offers us of Sile is an Irish
woman who has made great strides since the days of Eveline – she is strong and
independent, living a lifestyle she chooses and following her heart.
And consider the
difference 100 years has made in the Irish psyche: Joyce spent nine years
attempting to get Dubliners published.
He began writing the fifteen short stories that comprise the book in 1907, and
it was not until he submitted it eighteen times to fifteen different publishers
that it was printed – in London – after having been printed and then rejected
on the grounds that it was probably libelous by the Dublin publishing house of
Maunsel & Co. (Dubliners, v). In writing to his brother, Stanislaus, in 1905,
Joyce said, “I know the name and tradition of my country too well to be
surprised at receiving three scrawled lines in return for five years of
constant service to my art…” (qtd. in McBride: 52).
What a
difference one hundred years makes: Irish writer Anne Enright was this year
named Ireland’s Fiction Laureate, the first ever post of its kind – what would
Joyce think? Ireland now embraces its own – if only Oscar Wilde, whose
alternative lifestyle caused him shame and scandal, could know that Donoghue, a
lesbian, is an internationally best-selling author whose book, Room, was a Man Booker Prize finalist. Through
the years, many Irish artists have been scorned by their countrymen – James
Stephens, author of Valley of the
Squinting Windows (1918), a novel about the negative power of town gossip,
was exiled from his hometown in County Westmeath (McLean 8). The book was
burned. More recently, in 1960, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls was banned by the Irish Censorship Board and
burned in churches for suggesting the two main characters, both girls, had sex
lives. O’Brien went on to win the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, the Irish
PEN Lifetime Achievement Award and honorary membership in the American Academy
of Arts and Letters (“`Country Girl’”).
Theatre
“For
a relatively small island at the western fringe of Europe, Ireland has made a
disproportionally large contribution to the history of theater in the Western
world.” So begins a web page on Dublin theatre (“Irish Theatre”). From Oscar
Wilde and George Bernard Shaw to Samuel Beckett, Ireland boasts a rich
tradition in drama. The Abbey, which opened in 1904, is the National Theatre of
Ireland and the first publicly funded theatre in the English-speaking world.
Near
Oscar Wilde’s lifelike statue in Dublin are some of his famous quotes. Among
them: “Most people are other people.”
Instead of its actual subtitle, “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” this quote
about the complex issue of identity would be an apt descriptor for Wilde’s farcical
play, The Importance of Being Earnest. His last completed play, it is “the fullest
embodiment of Wilde’s lifelong assault upon commonplace life and commonplace
values” (Popkin, 10). Unlike Joyce, Wilde was not making “seriously considered
social criticism,” according to Popkin. Instead, “it stemmed from an
individualism supported by a philosophy of art for art’s sake” (11). In the
play, through implication, he advocates for style – of life, behavior and
speech. “By showing the height of wit and manners, he criticizes their absence”
(11). Wilde prefers art over life. According to Popkin, his “playful approach
leads him to a defense of falsehood that can help to explain the great amount
of highly imaginative lying in The
Importance of Being Earnest” (14).
He
celebrates ‘the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb
Irresponsibility,
his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind’ and roguishly
assails
the United States, ‘that country having adopted for its national hero
a
man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie’ (14).
Wilde’s
play is funny, silly – and nearly impossible to briefly synopsize. In Wilde’s
words “It is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its
philosophy. That we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and
all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” (18). Wilde
is saying, forget angst – be who you are. Or who you are not.
In
Belfast writer Owen McCafferty’s Death of
a Comedian, which premiered in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in March 2015, the
protagonist is eerily dealing with a similar identity crisis – but much less
lightheartedly. Steve Johnston is a stand-up comedian who is on his way to the
top. His career is taking off – but he is pressured to compromise himself and
his art. Should he? His dream is the limelight; but, at what cost? How far should
he go to get what he wants? And is being
at the top what he really wants? When
we first meet Steve, he introduces himself to the audience, saying “I’m Steve
Johnston.” As the play progresses, he begins saying to the larger,
filled-to-the-brim auditoriums of people, “I’ve been Steve Johnston.” Steve might be selling out concerts; at the
same time, he’s selling out in another way –
and making a Faustian bargain for the big time. As Grania McFadden
writes in the Belfast Telegraph, “We
watch Steve’s act evolve from adult-only humour to family-friendly
entertainment. The final, wince-inducing act reveals just how low he goes to
reach the giddy heights of fame. Despite the humour, McCafferty’s play is a
tragedy. When the comedian tells his audience ‘I’ve been Steve Johnson’ it’s
not a laughing matter, it’s a statement of fact.” Wilde would be saddened by
Steve Johnson, but eminently heartened by McCafferty’s sobering message – be
true to yourself. He would no doubt stand in ovation.
Visual Art
When
the National Gallery of Ireland opened on 30 January 1864,
among
the guests gathered for the official ceremony was the newly
knighted
Sir William Wilde. While it might be considered fanciful to
imagine
that his nine-year-old son, Oscar, watched the grand occasion from
the
windows of their family home on Merrion Square, what cannot be
doubted
is that, from that day forward, the National Gallery has come to
figure
prominently in Irish literary life (McLean
8).
Angst
– and history – drip from the canvases of Irish art from the 1800s through the
early 1950s. Consider James Arthur O’Connor’s The Poachers (1835). The oil-on-canvas painting, at once dark and ethereal,
is considered one of the finest of the artist’s moonlit landscapes. Poaching in
the nineteenth century was severely punished; O’Connor’s tense rendering of the
three poachers dramatically highlights them, putting their crime in the
spotlight. Will they be caught? The viewer can feel the heavy emotion, frozen
in time.
Study
William Mulready’s The Sonnet (c.
1839). Though lighter in hue than The
Poachers, the graphite-and-chalk-on-paper piece similarly captures a
dramatic moment, or as painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti said “a sonnet,
or a ‘moment’s monument’” (65). The colors are drab, earthy, common, and depict
common, everyday folk. In the work, a young woman is reading the lines her
suitor has written for her. Gerard Donovan writes of the piece:
No
fulcrum can remove him from his moment of inertia – only she can
do
that. The viewer too is left stranded between the twelfth line and the
couplet.
This remarkable drawing is a physical representation of the sonnet
form
– the captured moment between reading and reaction, friendship and
love,
innocence and experience (66).
The moment captured transcends the
drabness of the tones, and of the couple’s everyday, work-a-day life.
Propellers, painted by Mary Swanzy in
1942, speaks to us of war – and secret longings. The oil on canvas, as
described by Colum McCann:
It
was yet another war. In yet another place.
The men had gone from the
country.
The women piled into the factory. They had the whole human
machinery
at their disposal. The apparatus of kill. Every nut and bolt
that
held savagery together. The women labored. They had iron. They had
chains.
They had oil. They had pistons. They had rotors. They had wrenches.
They
had hammers. They had wheels. But late at night, when the
machinery
of war was done, and the propellers were sent off to
their
men, the women remained behind in the factory, creating
the
thing that might one day fly: a secret longing for colour (129).
Intense, sad – with just the slightest
bit of hope.
Somewhat
like Gerard Dillon’s The Little Green
Fields (c. 1946-50). Though not dark, the painting evokes entrapment. Quintessentially
Irish, with the rambling stone walls and the only-in-Ireland scenes, the oil on
canvas invites us to look for a way out, as Julie O’Callaghan writes:
there
is only one gateway through these little green fields.
I
have searched everywhere
and
found this tiny wooden
barrier
on hinges.
It
leads to the mysterious
green
field
of
granite monuments
I
carved my name.
In
perhaps the most angst-ridden painting yet discussed, Jack B. Yeats’s Grief (1951), is angry, dark and
agonizing. The oil on canvas seems a cathartic response to Ireland’s turmoil.
Dermot Bolger writes:
Someday
each one of us will stand amid this:
Indigo
blue shards of grief, a blistering deluge
Of
mustard flecks of rain that seal us within
A
bewildered state which we desperately need –
Yet
so desperately fail – to make any sense of.
Though
two works created in 1998 differ vastly from this older art, we encounter shadows
of similar themes. The angst is not as raw; it’s lighter, not as dark. Alice
Maher’s etching on paper, Magdalene, is
boldly, yet delicately provocative. Eoin McNamee explains that, “in medieval
legend, Mary Magdalene did penance for sensual pleasure for thirty years, naked
and destitute in a cave with only her miraculously grown hair to cover her
nakedness” (142). Each strand of hair in this etching is remarkable – you can
almost reach out and touch the wavy, surreal-yet-real locks. And maybe even
smell a faint whiff of shampoo, or Moroccan hair oil. But again, we experience shame
– this time Mary Magdalene’s. At the same time, the art is defiant; uncut.
Carmel
Benson’s and Patrick Graham’s After
Giovanni di Paolo is edgy, abstract and brave. Giovanni di Paolo was an
Italian painter who lived in the 1400s. He illustrated manuscripts, including
those of Dante, and his works depicted many religious scenes. Of Benson and Graham’s
drypoint on paper, Vona Groarke writes, in an accompanying piece called
“Crucifixion”:
One
is the angle of history and art
One
is the straight edge of grief.
One
is the crux of here and now.
One
is gold with darkness in it.
One
is darkness with no gold (91).
Past and present – dark and light. A new take on an
ancient theme. Like Magdalene, this
piece has echoes of pain, but it is somehow lighter. As Peter Selz, curator of
the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, says, Graham’s art is “filled with anguish and mystery — and deeply steeped in
the Irish artistic and historical experience” (“Patrick Graham’s works steeped
in Irish tradition”).
These newer works from the late 1990s are
reminiscent of a verse written by a ninth-century Irish monk, who labored
lovingly on the Book of Kells:
I
and Panguar Ban my cat
‘Tis
a like task we are at:
Hunting
mice is his delight,
Hunting
words I sit all night.
Better
far than praise of men
‘Tis
to sit with book and pen;
Pangur
bears me no ill will
He
too plies his simple skill
Oftentimes
a mouse will stray
In
the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes
my keen thought set
Takes
a meaning in its net.
‘Gainst
the wall he sets his eye
Full
and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst
the wall of knowledge I
All
my little wisdom try.
Practice
every day has made
Pangur
perfect in his trade;
I
get wisdom day and night;
Turning
darkness into light (Trinity College Library Dublin)
Ireland’s
writers, playwrights and artists have amazingly turned darkness into light.
They have, thankfully, shared their angst with the world. In the end, what they
truly share is their humanity. The world is the recipient of this imaginative,
diverse, inventive gift. The poet Seamus Haney harvested peat on his family’s
farm as a young boy. He described the bogs of Ireland as “a landscape that
remembered everything that had happened in and to it” (qtd. in Keefe: 48). It seems the same is true of Irish
art – it remembers. And we are all the better for it.
Works Cited
Bierman, Elizabeth, Alex Norman, and
Lauren Malenfant. “Eveline.” Eveline
Hyperfiction. Web.
n.d.
27 Apr. 2015.
Bowman, Cathy. “Patrick Graham’s works
steeped in Irish tradition.” The Examiner.
12
Feb. 2012. Web.
28 Apr. 2015.
Cody, David. The Victorian Web. Ed. George P. Landow. n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2015.
“`Country Girl’ Edna O’Brien on a
Lifetime of Lit, Loneliness and Love.” NPR.
25 Apr. 2013.
Web. 26 Apr. 2015.
Death
of a Comedian. By
Owen McCafferty. Dir. Brian Doherty. Perf. Steve Marmion.
Abbey
Theatre, Dublin. 14 Mar. 2015. Performance.
Donoghue, Emma. Landing. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007. Print.
“Dublin Theatre.” Dublin.Info/Theatre. n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2015.
“Irish Literature.” Brittanica. Web. n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2015.
“Irish Potato Famine.” The History Place. n.d. Web. 19 Apr.
2015.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Stanley Appelbaum and Shane Weller. New York: Dover,
1991.
Print.
Keefe, Patrick Radden. “Where the Bodies
are Buried.” The New Yorker. 16 Mar.
2015, 42-61.
Print.
McBride, Eimear. “The heart of the
city.” New Statesman. 30 May-5 June
2014. 52-55. Web.
11
Mar. 2015.
McFadden, Grania. “Death of a Comedian: Story of a Stand-Up Guy Who Sells Soul.”
Belfast Telegraph. 12 Feb. 2015. Web. 25
Apr. 2015.
McLean, Janet. Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art. London: Thames & Hudson:
2014. Print.
“Stone Walls.” Dochara. n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2015.
Swift, Jonathan. “A Modest Proposal.”
Ed. Jack Lynch. Andromeda. Rutgers U.
n.d.Web. 29
Apr. 2015.
“The Troubles.” BBC.UK. n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2015.
Trinity College Library Dublin. The Book of Kells. Dublin: Trinity
College, n.d. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. Ed. Henry Popkin. New York: Avon,
1965.
Print.
ShariRoots and Routes: The
Translocal and Transnational in Emma Donoghue’s Landing.
Coming
back from a recent trip to Ireland, having reread James Joyce’s Dubliners and having read Landing, by Emma Donoghue, I began to
think of the Irish history of emigration, the character of Eveline in Joyce’
short story of the same name, within his collection Dubliners, and how current notions of translocal and transnational
identities are framed in Landing. Having had great grandparents who emigrated
from Ireland to the US, having been in a long-distance relationship for years,
and then having moved for love as occurs in Landing,
the novel resonated with me. As I
thought of these female characters and reflected on Ireland, I thought about
women who leave their homelands and why?
How has this changed historically?
This in turn lead me to think more critically of the novel as so much more
than a long-distance romance as critics have labeled it. The two main characters in Landing, Jude and Sile, 21st century women, have
choices, as I did. Does that make it
easier to be mobile subjects in a global world?
How does our roots or our backgrounds effect the routes we ultimately take
and how does that in turn effect our subject positions or own individual
identities?
Irish
emigration is well known, from the potato famine that spanned years beginning
in 1845, to recent day, and whether for reasons that are political, economic or
a lifestyle choice, mass emigration has been occurring throughout Irish history. With the 2008 economic crash in Europe, and
even as late as 2011, emigration rose by approximately 17 percent with Irish
nationals representing 53 percent of those leaving, with a 43 percent increase
in female migration. Britain, Australia,
Canada, and New Zealand are the countries most choose to relocate to. (Gray 20) National Irish perspective still maintains a container
mentality of home, a nation-state within specific borders as motherland, and
where a sense of belonging to one place remains. Emigration is seen as a “tragedy”(Gray 21). The Irish Times in 2011 began a conversation
in print and on the web to document the views and experiences of Irish
emigration. Doing so they found the
tragic feeling is not the same for those who emigrated, stating that there is “A
self-pitying streak in Irish discourse about emigration, which is often not
present among Irish emigrants themselves who are getting on with things while
we lament their absence” (Irish Times 2011). In
recent times this absence is often negotiated with the use of technology and
social media. Sedentary ways of life can
become mobile and those that move can maintain a sense of belonging or presence
with those at “home.” Fast and timely
means of international travel along with social media has changed the way in
which social reproduction can continue to occur at a distance. However, as is
noted in the Irish Times documentary
and as we find with Jude and Sile in
Landing, distance cannot always be digitally mediated, transportation
cannot be quick enough in times of desire, need or crisis when longing for another
or when someone is ill or dying. Even so translocal and transnational mobility
is better negotiated now then historically and with a more transnational world view
the notions of what constitutes home, citizenry, and national identity is
challenged.
For Eveline in Dubliners, a women in Ireland in the early 1900s, duty was to
family and home. Negotiating a way to
meet her own individual needs was a hope, a dream:
In her new home, in a distant unknown
country, it would not be like that. Then
she would be married—she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect
then. She would not be treated as her
mother had been” (Joyce 38).
As the
story opens, we see Eveline at a window watching the evening fade into the dark
of night, her head leaning against the window, an odor of dust lingers, she
looks out, tired. She must care for her
widowed father. She provides the wages
and maintains the home. When she meets a
man who tells her of distant lands, and woes her, she dreams of leaving.
However, duty calls. She remembers the
promise to her mother to take care of the home upon her death, even though when
she thinks of her mother’s life as a “pitiful vision… a life of commonplace
sacrifices closing in final craziness” (Donoghue 41). As she contemplates leaving, Eveline nostalgically
looks at her surroundings and “did not find it a wholly undesirable life” (Joyce 38). However,
she wants more. The only escape for her is with a man, one who promises her
another world, but nothing concrete. As
he is drawing her in to leave, she grips the iron railing, knowing he would
drown her too (Joyce 42).
She has hopes and desires, but no agency. She is described as a white face, passive,
helpless animal (Joyce 43).
Her sorrow is hoping for more than a women during her time, at her class
level and where she lived could hope for.
Her narrative was written for her by the family and community in which
she lived.
The women in Landing have more choice and with that their identities are less
fixed. They hold multiple subject
positions and negotiate to meet their needs as they continue to change. They have agency. However, the choice to leave one’s home, the
place in which one emotionally resides at any given time, is not always
easy. Our identities are molded, like
Eveline’s, by the narrative poetics of the communities in which we reside. As we encounter new situations there is an
ongoing negotiation of our sense of self, relationally to the past and
situationally to the present. This
negotiation between past and present, this disruption of identity, is responded
to differently based on an individual’s reference points. We are always becoming,
but with that becoming our prior experiences and memories create these
reference points influencing the choices we make in various situations and the
ease or difficultly in which they are encountered. Our
roots, geopolitically, geolocationally and geosocially influence or routes. However, for both Jude and Sile their
identities are not wholly constructed by their roots. In the global world in which we reside, the
global is continually interacting with the local and the local with the
global. Jude and Sile maintain multiple
subject positions and continue to grow and change, they dance the tango, and
continually negotiate external and internal borders relationally between the
two of them and with family and friends, and situationally as they learn one another
and face things together. They tango and negotiate the steps back and forth to
meet their own unique needs and find a way to move in the same direction in the
dance. Prior to publication the title
of the novel was Time-Zone Tango.
Both titles are fitting. In order to
land, and land together, they must negotiate distance, that of time and space
geographically and that which is emotional.
It is a tango, a back and forth of emotions as one negotiates a sense of
what constitutes home, belonging, what it means to live elsewhere from where
one has developed emotional ties.
Landing is a transnational
novel, a cosmopolitan and urban novel and a novel examining notions of place
and “home” and how relocation and movement affects one’s identity. The New York Times book review summarizes the
novel as a long distance desire with various distances: “generational,
cultural, even spiritual.” It is more
than distance, it is about the liminal space were distance does not exist but
interexchange provides for a closure of distance, and allows the chance for
hybridity to begin, and were a new “intertwined home” can be created. It is a narrative of encounter, about roots vs.
routes. It is also a love story, but one
that also questions the permanency of relationships.
As
the novel begins, Jude and Sile meet in a “non place” on an airline
transcending the borders of time and space.
They meet in a liminal space in the in between with no distinct borders
or time zone. It is the same type of space they must create in order to build a
life together. The novel is a light,
whimsical, and humorous love story and at the same time provides depth in to
issues of identity, what constitutes home and belonging, with Sile the transnational
and cosmopolitan woman and Jude the rural local woman who holds history of
place and ancestry important. While Sile
holds family important too, the two do so in vary different ways. Sile is a woman on the move. Her social structures and her experiences are
of mobility. Her mother was from India
her father a native of Ireland. She
travels not only as a flight attendant but visits friends outside of
Ireland. She is accustomed to new
places. She maintains connections by airplane, using urban transportation, and with
her phone or “gizmo,” which she cannot be without. Her friends, too, are
comfortable moving and traveling. She is
a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan woman, upper middle-class and not afraid to
travel and spend money on what she likes.
She is a cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, transnational character. Jude on the other hand is not. The first flight she had ever taken was the
flight she meet Sile on, anxious to get to an ill mother, and ironically having
to experience the death of the man sitting next to her. She has an old rotary dial phone, no cell. Jude, has no need to fly, no cell phone, no email. She felt no need. “Surely it was her business
if she preferred to stay on the ground” (Donoghue 4)? Jude recalls friends that traveled
and knew her preference is not to. However, she realizes that in today’s world
there is a romanticized notion of travel and mobility. If one does not travel, one is seen as leading
a static life. What is seen as
preferably, desirable, is movement and travel. But this is a choice, and one
Jude chooses not to partake in, and as she states to Sile, a kite still needs an
anchor (Donoghue 65). Jude’s
hometown of Ireland, Canada has only one cross-road. While everyone knows everyone in the small
community in her rural hometown, Jude is still attempting to come to term with
her own roots. Her mother dies at the
beginning of the novel and we met Jude as she thinks nostalgically of her
mother and the home in which they lived.
Jude’s loss of
her mother disrupts her sense of place and her sense of direction “she couldn’t
remember how to be “solid” or “grounded” or any of those words: Loss had tipped her whole life on its side” (Donoghue 47). Her
mother was the only family Jude had. She
was not close to her father since the divorce when she was young. She cannot
understand why someone would want to leave the place in which one was
born. In talking to her father on the
phone we learn,
“She knew he couldn’t
care less about roots, his or anyone else’s.
How else could he have grown up as a third-generation of Ireland,
Ontario, spent almost sixty years there, then flitted off to Florida” (Donoghue 52)
She cannot understand. Roots are
important to her. She works at a small
historical museum maintaining the history of Ireland, Ontario, a place
documenting the lives of the locals, their families, and a shared communal
history. And, as she writes in an email to Sile, Jude states begin a nomad and
constant movement is a “bad habit or punishment” (Donoghue 57). She quotes Rechabites, a
Jeremiah bible passage, 35:7, “Stay mobile, so as to not to be vulnerable…”(Donoghue 57). However,
Jude and Sile come to learn one is vulnerable none the less. Jude’s entire live, prior to meeting Sile,
was about maintaining a sense of stability based on a located past. Working at the local historical museum
for little pay she relishes reading the dairies of others, those who lived in
her community in the past, but she learns, as her borders expand, that she
needs to live in her own present life, one that is historically beginning to
change as theirs did. Jude’s identity is
informed by an historical connection with history and the past, but is changing
through transnational encounters. She
must take to heart the road sign her and Sile read during one of their times
together, “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be” (Donoghue 27).
As Susan Stanford Friedman states in
Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of
Encounter, there is a “dialogic pull of roots and routes in relation to
narratives of identity… and that the conventional emphasis on home or
“dwelling” has largely been suppressed” (Friedman
191). The foundation of our
identities and/or points of reference come from our past. This identity is
often a continuous stable sense of place or location. However, as we traverse through life the
routes we take, the situations we encounter of travel and change, disrupt the
notion of continuous stability. We are
always becoming, whether we realize it or not, and our identity as Freidman states
“depends centrally upon narrative, whether it is an effect of rootedness or
rootedness” (Friedman 193). Their
attraction to one another and sexual preference are the two things the two
woman have in common. They must
negotiate not only the spatial distance, but the different lifestyles they life
based on varied roots and/or reference points as they map the route of a
relationship. Their stories have formed
them, and the story they attempt to create together will as well. As the novel progresses
we traverse this journey with them. Jude’s
narrative is one of the local, rural family life and community with little
external influence. She cannot
understand the need to move away from what she finds a stable center. However, the stability is a false sense of
security and peace. As Sile and Jude enter in a relationship the negotiations begin as
their differences become apparent. Sile must adjust to a snowstorm, something
she has not had to encounter or even dress for.
Jude’s breakfast food choices are not café choices, but instant coffee,
oatmeal. Both must adjust to such things
as one another’s clothing choices, food choices of one another’s, ways in which
to spend free time, and even language or styles of conversing. Jude does not
know what Sile was referring to with her clothing that “angora shrug—a word
Jude had never learned till today, and couldn’t imagine using in conversation” (Donoghue123). When
Sile learns that Jude was married to a high school boyfriend and was not
officially divorced, during the fight that ensues Sile states “Who are you
people” (Donoghue 137)?
They even see themselves as different and must learn to negotiate these
differences.
The
“formation of cultural identity depends upon a dialogic of sameness and
difference (Friedman 193). Sile’s
understanding of class and race is conditioned by her multi-racial background,
residing in a more culturally diverse urban setting. Her and her friends reflect on this when Sile
states she is no longer “the only brown face” and how she no longer looks
foreign in Dublin. Sile informs Jude small town life “gives
her the creeps” (Donoghue 61). She envisions it lacking even cinemas,
as being too homogenic -- cities turn
her on, she compares herself to a kite and sees “life as a moveable feast” (Donoghue 62).
But, Sile is not an emigrant; she travels. It is only when she actually contemplates and
begins the process of emigrating that she realizes the extent of the change an émigré
faces. Jude contrasts this view of the urban being the ideal. She relates the
one cross-road community as one with no difficulties in commuting, and that
diversity exists even in the micro, we have “fundamentalists and flower
arrangers, a gay-run guesthouse… when you live in people’s pockets you learn
how out there some of them are” (Donoghue 64). Sile's choice of movement is not tied to
a sense of duty to family or a patriarchal script as we saw in Eveline and the
notion of family loyalty Jude feels for what is left of family for her, a home,
and a place. Sile represents the transnational women of the technology savvy
generation who does not see movement as severing connections. Her father wishes her well. Her friends do,
but there is an underlying doubt and concern with the extent of
connection. Sile contemplates her father
getting older, his health deteriorating and not being present to help. As she contemplates the move her anxiety
raises. Jude feels the tension more so in the
beginning of the novel. Mapping out a
new route with Sile is more difficulty to start, since she started from a place
in which her life felt disrupted. We
learn of the psychological unsettlement when her parents divorced, when her mother
dies, and when she meets Sile. She is disoriented and fears a loss of position or
direction. Sile feels this, too, as she
begins the plans to emigrate. This is common as lives change. Our identities, however, are always changing
but more noticeable with large movements. The disruptions, the disorientation
is felt more strongly. As the second chapter’s
epigraph states, the word travel is derived from travail, to go on a journey,
to work, tire, suffer (Donoghue 7). It is not easy for either
character. “Later on, Jude Turner would look back on December thirty-first as
the last morning her life had been firm, graspable, all in one piece” (Landing 1).
Right from the start her life is disrupted. Sile’s is as well as she comes to learn more of
her historical ancestry and realizes how emigration is disorienting. Their
subject positions shift as the difficulty is placed more on Sile, the one who
was at one time more comfortable with movement.
Sile realizes a connection with her past that she had not felt before,
and begins to understand what a true emigrant experience may mean. Whether situations are seen as negative or
positive, like moving for love, the disruption of our narratives is unsettling
and must be negotiated. In planning to
move Sile thinks of those who do not leave for love or by choice, but under duress. Emigration she always thought “sounded noble and tragic, immigration
grubby and grasping” (Donoghue 299). Navigating through emigration
polices and paperwork, she reads stories of others and realizes “crossing
borders, for so many people in the world, was a perilous business: guns behind,
hunger ahead, possessions and relatives scattered” (Donoghue 299).
Too, she things again of her mother and others. “There seemed no limit
to what people would endure in order to enter the country of their (perhaps
arbitrary) choice” (Donoghue 298).
Sile
has more choices, but that does not make emigrating necessarily easy. Even with choice Jude, like Eveline, is
restricted by a sense of home and duty to family and historical ties. While self-restricting in her sense of what
constitutes home, it is not any easier for her either. Jude’s choices are more restricted
then Sile’s, particularly based on economic status. Jude cannot afford to jump on a flight at a
whim. She cannot travel as she pleases and
has difficulty even affording the long-distance calls. Jude gives up smoking to pay for the phone
bills (Donoghue 129). Moving is not as financially
possible for her. Jude, like
Eveline, has more limited choice based on economic status. While social
restrictions are less an issue for Jude then Eveline, the cultural pull of
roots are strong for both and economic independence limited. Discourse on traversing borders and the permeability
of borders needs to take into consideration and recognize that race, gender and
class structure affect the way in which we live and affect experiences we may
be able to undertake.
Many
theories and critiques of identity formation and agency have come to light,
particularly concerning women from the late 80’s on. The idea of mobile subjectivities stems from
the work of K.E. Ferguson (Calas 2).
Proponents of the concept find it useful because it is imprecise, allowing
intersections of multiple identity categories encompassing the uniqueness of
individuals (Calas 3). Identities shift and are temporal and spatial
with various locals offering different possibilities. With that the subjects
encounter different “resources for de-articulating and re-articulating
themselves” (Fergurson 163). With each encounter Jude and Sile
change. The concept of multiple subject
positions in relation to movement is similar to the concepts Susan Friedman
proposes in Mappings; identities are formed
relationally and situationally. The various
subject positions we hold at any given time are either in the foreground or
background based on the situations we face.
None are negated, they simply shift as called for. The frames of reference for both Jude and
Sile vary. Their subject positions are multiple
and at times contradictory. That is okay.
As Jude and Sile traverse spaces together each increases their own
agency and empowerment, but with new possibilities and movement one must
negotiate through the tensions that arise as diasporic individuals, diasporic
in the broadest sense of the term. As we
see with Sile and Jude, negotiation is the tango that occurs when one
contemplates a diasporic move or simply moves her own internal boundaries or
borders created from the past. There is
a disruption, an unsettlement not just of place, but what was once a way of living.
Like
Eveline, both Jude and Sile reflect on their lives when contemplating a move,
unsure, questioning, and nostalgically remembering their roots. They rummage through the things they have
collected over the years in their homes.
However, their lives from their first encounter and attraction to one
another shifted everything. “As Sile states, worlds touch, tremble, spin into a different orbit” (Donoghue 150). The doubts become more profound as Sile, the
one to actually move, begins learning more of her own history. She wants to know of her lineage, as Jude as
always done. Sile compares her mother’s
and father’s meeting and romance to her and Jude’s. Her Da recollects memories
of her mother as a competent, sure, woman serving five courses meals on a
plane. However, Sile ultimately learns
that upon landing in a new world with her father her mother struggled to assimilate
as she was expected to do, and that her death may have stemmed from depression and
ultimately led to suicide (Donoghue 150).
Within the liminal
space created as Jude and Sile’s lives become intertwined, Jude begins to
question, too, how they can merge their lives.
At the end of the novel it becomes clearer for both. For Jude it is after seeing a women and her
young son in a café. She witness the
openness between them and while doing so sees an essay that had slipped from a
folder. The essay was entitled “Bad Little Sisters: A Case Study of Cross-Border Censorship in
Women’s Studies.” Jude immediately heads
home disturbed by her thoughts, wondering why she could not have met someone
like this woman, close to home, but instead met Sile, someone so far away. She
knows she longs for something more than her work, and the past that she holds
on to. The sign she sees as she travels
home is “Think Local, Buy Local,” but my now it is too late. Jude’s life is already intertwined with Sile’s. Jude, also, begins to see her community
differently. She realizes that the past
she is holding on to, is actually continually changing. Having organized the annual 1867 historical
fair she looks at those around her. She
sees how they are engrossed in current day activities as opposed to any
historical recreation of the past. And,
she, too, cannot stop thinking about the present, about Sile and what
constitutes home. Jude realizes that without Sile she does not feel a sense of
home, but rather a vacancy, an absence, a loss. Jude thinks about all those she
has studied and how the “Pragmatic settlers would have despised her for clinging
to home. They carried their nostalgia
like their framed photos and heirlooms, but they never let it get in their
way….A place was nothing on its own; it hit her now; it was only people who
carved it into meaning” (Donoghue 318). Sile discovers this as
well. Sile begins to feel the travelling
life she has led in aeronautical terms, how she is “losing situational awareness” (Donoghue 245). As she contemplates completing the necessary steps to reside in Canada
with Jude, she is handed a flyer while walking down Grafton street asking “Are
you an immigrant or asylum-seeker”(Donoghue 247). She was “amused that she’d been targeted, but
more so in noticing the word adjustment was spelled wrong. She begins to question how you spell
adjustment when you are so far from what you know, when you will lose your
situational awareness. That is diaspora
in all variations of the word.
Recollecting encounters on familiar
Dublin streets, going through her drawers and closets, reliving the life she has
lived in Dublin, she takes it all in to put it in the past, all in her attempt
to move away from it, to be able to move forward with Jude. Sile becomes nostalgic toward her past for a
brief moment. She realizes it is a part of her that matters. This causes her to
rethink the notion of emigrating. She
even does a pros and cons list. Too, the
political enters into the equation as she researches how she can move to
Canada, realizing governments define who can move and for what reasons, as
common-law partners, or conjugal partners.
The terms are defined by governmental bodies based on such criteria as
length of time that lives must be combined and defined by economic standards (Donoghue 278). However,
Sile knows that she is unlike Jude, who she described as someone who is “not a
shrub that needs transplanting” (Donoghue 280).
Sile knows that in order for the two of them to be together, she must be
the one transplanted for love, and her reference points help her negotiate
this, her past travails/movement, and her use of technology to stay connected. She can take her recollections with her. She can still maintain connections at a
distance. It is her friend Declan who
has moved away that reminds her that “sooner or later you find Dublin isn’t
home anymore. But nor is the other
place. And then you’re sunk” (Donoghue 304). Home she learns, as Jude does,
is not a place, but a space you must create that holds emotional meaning in
relation to others you care about. She
must create this new place of emotional connection with Jude. Gray’s studies of Irish migrant and
non-migrant women in mid-1990’s describes struggles women faced negotiating and
becoming valued mobile individuals with positions of “daughter, sister, and
national citizen” (Gray 25).
Jude and Sile both struggle with their changing identities as they find
a way to negotiate distance and difference.
In Gray’s studies “many of the accounts indicated that the rules of
making lives and maintaining connections were unclear and produced a minefield
of emotions...difficult to negotiate” (Gray 25). Both Jude and Sile attempt to.
One
has to question this sense of continuity, stability that we attribute to having
roots or being bound to a sense of place.
It is a false notion, and one that Jude comes to realize. We are always changing relationally and
situationally. Sile realizes this
too. She knows that even living in the
same city, building a life does not necessarily mean stability, that even love is
not permanent. This continues to present
itself throughout the novel with family and friends. The novel begins on New Year’s Eve,
symbolic of new times. This is a story of new meetings, new movement. All
subsequent chapters are about travel and its negotiation, the what, when,
where, how, and why, as the fourth chapter is entitled. Ultimately the novel ends with “Place
Makers,” Jude and Sile making a new
place from that liminal space they had to negotiate, crossing borders, creating
home not out of location, but one based on fulfilled emotional needs, a
definition I argue is a true definition of home. However, as mentioned earlier,
the novel not only raises questions of what constitutes home, but raises
questions about love’s permanency. We
see this thread throughout the novel. Sile asks her father how long it took for
her mother to adjust, not how hard or difficult it may have been. For him it was not seen as a matter of
choice. He states that Kerla, her
mother’s hometown, was on the brink of a civil war. There was no question about getting over the
“blahs.” He tells Sile ”Life is a bridge: cross over it, but build no house on
it” (Donoghue 290). He knows love does not mean permanency nor does moving for love. Her friend Jael tells her one person is not
enough, as she confesses to having an affair, when all others thought her
marriage perfect. Sile even tells Jude
she will owe her (for the move). Sile
learns that Marcus’ relationship ended, after having moved to the countryside
outside of Dublin for love. Sile then states “I suppose people and places are
similar that way, that you can’t tell how long you’ll end up staying” (Donoghue 307). Marcus’ response is “Love’s a country, theirs
is no such thing as a permanent visa” (Donoghue 307). Sile
learns from her older sister that her mother, Amma, “was one of the walking
dead” (Donoghue 309). Sile reflects how her mother must have felt “as if bits of her
starting to crumble off as soon as she landed.”… She must have felt she was
withering” (Donoghue 310).
“She wanted to wail aloud for Sunita
Pillay, glamorous Air India stew, who’d swapped everything she’d known for a
rain-green Dublin suburb: followed her
man, gone into exile, surrendered her country and family and friends in the
best tradition of womanhood. Who’d done
it all for love, and discovered that love wasn’t enough to live on after all…
Sile thought of the cave with only one opening, the island with only one
harbor…” (Donoghue 311).
This is a cry for herself as well. She knows nothing is guaranteed or permanent,
but she also knows that she has the capability to moves again if need be. Tropes of shrubs and trees being planted or
withering, tropes of people landing are weaved throughout the novel. Stories and myths are shared, which also do
not fare well of love or moves being permanent.
Jude tells Sile the story of the girl taken by the Fulmer , “The moral
is, never fall for a foreigner and let them carry you off to their godforsaken
country” (Donoghue 300). Sile tells Jude the story of
the Selkie, the half seal, half woman.
She is the split self. She falls
in love and moves on to land. Her
husband hides her possessions, and she begins to assimilate to his way of life
on the land. However, after finding her
old possessions her husband hid, she has an overwhelming desire to go
back. She disappears back to the sea
with her children (Donoghue 220). Jude and Sile’s tale is an
historical tale, a narrative told throughout time.
Postcolonial
theorist Appadura’s notion of translocating is one in which “communities in a
place become extended through the geographical mobility of their inhabitants” (Calas 5). Sile and Jude extend their
sense of place, negotiate the distance and differences in their growing encounters
in the liminal space between locations of place and the heart. They choose to settle in Toronto in an
attempt to meet each others needs. As Conradson and McKay state selfhood is
always a hybridic achievement through the relational and translocal subject positions
allowing for “multiply-located senses of self… for those who inhabit
transnational social fields” (Conradson and McKay 168). Local and global associations are made. Often
the local is associated with less affluent places fixed in time and space, and
the global as affluent, mobile, modern and effecting social change, with the
global always reinventing (Calas 6). We see these same associations within Landing.
However, this notion is disrupted.
Jude does not have a desire to be mobile, but is willing to negotiate
her space for desire/love. Sile and Jude
negotiate a space that will work for both and settle in Toronto, Canada. We need to rethink, as Sile and Jude do in the
novel, what is the desirable space for us at any given time. While sedentary ways of life and a sense of identity
based on place has in the past and continues in most places and for most people
to be intricately tied to home, community and nation (our mother lands), mobility
undermines this “container model of society (Calas 5). If one
moves how does one negotiate these social norms? Sile and Jude do so
translocally and transnationally. To
understand “mobile subjectivities, their agency, and production processes…requires
mobile conceptualizations” (Calas 6). With Friedman’s notions of encounters and
subject positions differing relationally and situationally, we can enter the
liminal spaces of encounter and negotiate roots and routes to come to acquire mobile
conceptualizations. The novel Landing provides an example of mobile
subject positions that provide movement through choice and freedom to act. Jude and Sile demonstrate personal forms of
agency through the interpersonal connections and exchanges they have. They
found as Ferguson states resources through and with one another to
“de-articulate and re-articulate” themselves “in shifting temporal and spatial
possibilities offered by specific locales” (Ferguson 163). Our roots and routes both inform our identity
and keep it fluid, never fixed in time and space. We live in a “world where mobility may be ever
more the ontological status of everyday experiences and social structuring” (Calas 5). We are always crossing the
internal borders of our past and present always in the liminal space, always
becoming. We continually negotiate roots and routes. Nationalism may be a
recognized community; but it is the community we build for ourselves, like Sile
and Jude are building that constitutes home.
For
Friedman cultural identity depends on a dialogue of sameness and difference,
and for hybrid subject positions to come about exposure is needed. Jude and Sile enter the liminal space, between
borders, external and internal. Theirs is
a narrative of encounter, each encounter guides their own liminal space, the in
between, to create new narratives for each, and a narrative together. Various relationships are presented in the novel. The story of Jude and Sile is
inconclusive. Theirs, as with all
relationships, will be an ongoing negotiation and a blending of difference. This is true with all subject positions we
hold, whether by location or within a relationship. We reside in a world with others. The word world in Sanskrit is: “That which
moves. That which changes” (Donoghue 200). In the novel Sile states how she would rather do away with borders (Donoghue 228-229). If we think
of time zones, and nations and nationality tied to that, we erect borders. We also do internally based on our roots and
routes. While borders help us categories the plethora of information about
location, space, and time, they are also shifting contact zones. Not only do external borders shift, but the
internal borders we create. We are continually in the liminal space negotiating
our past and present. Sile tells Jude “Respect des fonds…meaning you should
respect something’s provenance—where it’s from” (Donoghue 124).
They do so, respecting where each other’s roots are, and in their route
together they will create roots in a new place that respects that of one
another. Moving to Toronto is not Jude’s
country or Sile’ city to allow life in an urban setting, but for them the
liminal space, with no history, a place to create a new life together, to
create their own history as they continue to change together.
Works Cited
Calas, Marta
B; Ou, Han; and Smircich, Linda. “Woman”
on the move: mobile subjectivities after intersectionality.” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An
International Journal 32.8 2013, pp.
708-731
Casey, Moira
E. “If Love’s a Country”: Transnationalism and the Celtic Tiger in Emma
Donoghue’s Landing. New
Hibernia Review 15.2 2011 64-79
Conradson, D.
and Mckay, D. “Translocal subjectivities:
mobility, connection, emotion,” Mobilities. 2.2 2007, 167-174
Donoghue,
Emma. Landing Orlando: Harcourt Press 2007
Ferguson K.E. The
Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory.” Berkeley, CA.
University of California Press.
Friedman, Susan. Stanford
Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of
Encounter. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1998
Gray,
Breda. ‘Generation Emigration’: the
politics of (trans)national social reproduction in twenty-first century
Ireland. Irish Studies Review
21.1, 2013, 20-36
Joyce, James. Dubliners
London: Penguin Books 2000, 1914
Irish History—overview and pulling together the texts
Irish history is bloody—a series of invasions and internal conflict, with the result that it is scarred by many of the problems of a colonial nation. There are not the color and racial struggles of other typical colonial nations; Ireland’s problems stem rather from a struggle for independence, religion, class—and poverty. The forming of a sense of national identity separate from an overshadowing power is crucial to Irish history.
A Brief History of Ireland
by John Holwell
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An estimated 70 million people world-wide can claim Irish heritage. This article attempts to provide some insight into Ireland's long and complex history.
The island or Ireland, some 89,000 sq. km (32,000 sq. mi.) is comprised of the Republic of Ireland (Eire) which occupies almost 85% of the total land-mass, and Northern Ireland which is part of the United Kingdom. Within the traditional four ecclesiastical provinces of Ulster (north-east), Leinster (south-eastern Ireland including the ancient kingdom of Meath), Munster (south-west), and Connaught (or Connacht, north-west) there are 32 counties, 26 of which are within the Republic. The partition of the island dates from 1920-22, before which the whole island was under British rule.
The first settlement of Ireland took place sometime around 6000 BC by hunters and fishers along the island's eastern coast. The Gaels, a Celtic-speaking people from western Europe, found their way to the island sometime between about 600 and 150 BC and subdued the previous inhabitants.
About the time of Christ the island was organised into five kingdoms, the traditional "Five Fifths of Ireland". By AD 400 seven independent kingdoms had evolved. The kings of these kingdoms often allied their armies to raid neighbouring Roman Britain and the Continent. On one of these raids a lad of 16 was captured, returned to Ireland and sold into slavery. During his enslavement the boy turned to religion and some six years later at the age of 22 escaped. The young man studied theology in the Roman church and in 432 returned to Ireland, and began a lifelong quest of converting the Irish to Christianity. This was none other than Ireland's patron, Saint Patrick.
In the 9th and 10th centuries, Ireland came under fierce attacks from the Vikings. Monasteries suffered great atrocities at the hands of these aggressors. In 853 the Danes invaded the island and were followed by Danish settlers who gradually assimilated with the local population and adopted Christianity. When the four ecclesiastical provinces (Ulster - north-east, Leinster - south-eastern Ireland including the ancient kingdom of Meath, Munster -southwest, and Connaught, or Connacht - north-west) were created in 1152, both Gaelic and Danish elements helped form a united Church. This reform, and others advocated by the Irish church were frowned on by some, including Pope Adrian IV, an Englishman. In 1155 he conferred on Henry II of England the lordship of Ireland with hopes of curing some of Ireland's perceived ecclesiastical ills. In 1168 the English invaded the island and soon thereafter began invoking reforms, many dealing with the granting of land, and many of which violated the traditional political and social structure.
From the latter twelfth century to about 1400, many Norman's from England moved to Ireland and settled the eastern areas, particularly around Dublin. Some assimilated but strife persisted between the native Irish and the colonists. In 1367 a law was enacted to keep the two populations separate.
In 1495 Henry VII extended English law over the entirety of Ireland, and assumed supremacy over the existing Irish parliament. When Henry VIII became king, he tried to separate the Irish Church from the Papacy much as he had done in England. Instead he intensified Irish resolve toward the English. By the time that Queen Elizabeth ascended to the English thrown, Roman Catholicism became linked with Irish sentiment and the Irish refused to accept English imposed ecclesiastical change. Mounting English domination was also being met with greater Irish resistance. In the 1560s the English suppressed a revolt in Ulster and Queen Elizabeth took the opportunity to expropriate all lands and settle the province with Englishmen. By 1660 they had become well seated and English law prevailed throughout the land.
During the reign of James I (ruled 1603-1625), Catholic schools were closed and children were taught in Protestant institutions. Soon the old distinctions of Irish, Anglo-Irish, and English became realigned to Catholic and Protestant, although the island remained overwhelmingly Catholic. It was about this period that the emigration trend began.
When Cromwell took firm control of England, he also invoked strict rule over Ireland and confiscated all Catholic holdings. Following his death, however, the Irish renewed their claims on their historic lands. After some successes, in 1690 they defeated the English at Londonderry and signed a treaty with London that granted them a number of rights, only to see it rejected by the Protestant dominated Irish parliament.
The rift between adherents of the two religions broadened. In 1727, Catholics were excluded from all public office and denied the right to vote. Although some measured attempts at reconciliation were made nearing the end of the century, for the most part relations between the two factions remained poor.
In 1798, a revolt in Ireland set in motion a series of events that led the Irish to relinquish their own parliament. On 1 Jan 1801, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came into existence. Not surprisingly, the union in Ireland was highly unpopular and relations continued to deteriorate between the Catholic and Protestant populations. In the 1830s, a movement began to repeal the union. It found little favour in Protestant Ulster, though, where growing prosperity kept many committed to the legislative union with Britain. Catholic areas of Ireland fared less well and when the potato crops of the 1840s failed, a devastating famine resulted. Between 1841 and 1851, Ireland's population fell from 8.2 million to 6.6 million through starvation, disease, and emigration, particularly to the United States.
Following the famine, Catholic Ireland slowly increased in prosperity but there became a growing awareness of the greater affluence enjoyed by the industrialised Ulster and British people. Demand for national self-government came to the fore. The Catholics gradually gained parliamentary power and "home rule", a separate Irish parliament within the Union, gained popularity. Using their leverage in the British parliament, a home rule bill was enacted in 1914, but not put in effect until the end of World War I.
In the twentieth century, Ireland's situation has remained unsettled. In 1920, the "Government of Ireland Act" set up separate parliaments for both the north and south, although only the former ever functioned. In 1921 a treaty between southern Ireland and Britain established the Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion within the British Commonwealth of Nations. This allowed the Northern Ireland Parliament to take the six northern counties out of the dominion. A subsequent civil war broke out between pro-treaty and anti-treaty factions but ultimately the treaty stood.
In 1937 southern Ireland drafted and adopted a new constitution creating the new state of Eire. A republic in all but name, it remained formally within the British Commonwealth. It lasted only eleven years until 1948 when the ties with the Commonwealth were severed completely and the Republic of Ireland was born. In the north, the Protestants and Catholics continued their unsettled relationship with one another. In 1972, the Republic of Ireland joined the European Economic Community (EEC) along with the United Kingdom and Denmark. That same year, the Northern Irish State was dissolved and the six counties were put under direct rule from London.
This article originally appeared in the September 1997 issue of the Journal of Online Genealogy.
http://genealogypro.com/articles/Irish-history.html
The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves
The Slaves That Time Forgot
They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.
Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.
We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade.
But, are we talking about African slavery? King James II and Charles I also led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.
The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.
Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.
From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.
During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.
Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.
As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.
African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.
In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.
England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.
There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.
But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.
Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories.
But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?
Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?
Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened.
None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.
Anthony McIntyre made one thing clear: The project had to remain absolutely secret. If Boston College wanted him to interview former members of the Irish Republican Army, he needed that guarantee. They would be talking about dangerous things—bombings, shootings, and murder.
It was June of 2000, just two years after a controversial peace accord ended three decades of conflict in Northern Ireland. Mr. McIntyre, an independent historian, was having dinner at Deanes Restaurant, in the center of this small, working-class city, with an Irish journalist and a librarian from Boston College.
The journalist, Ed Moloney, was a friend who had recommended Mr. McIntyre for the project. But the librarian, Robert K. O’Neill, was a stranger. And Mr. McIntyre needed to know what sorts of promises he and Boston College were willing to make. The IRA was an unforgiving organization. Although the fighting was over, informers—or “touts,” as the IRA called them—were not looked upon kindly. You just didn’t go around talking about what you had done in those dark years.
Yet the idea was undeniably appealing. To record the stories of the men and women who had put their lives on the line for the cause of independence, some of whom had committed horrific acts of violence in the process, that was something no one else had done. The three men at the table understood the insights that could be gained, Mr. McIntyre perhaps most of all. He was a former IRA man, and had spent nearly 17 years in prison for killing a loyalist paramilitary soldier. That’s why Mr. Moloney wanted him for this job: His fellow fighters would trust him.
“No matter how skilled or experienced the academic researcher or journalist,” Mr. Moloney wrote in a proposal two months before the meeting, “ex-paramilitaries know far more about the subject and are familiar with the lifestyles of ex-colleagues in a way others cannot even approach.” [Read on in the link ....]
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