Eugene McCabe and Irish Postcolonial Gothic (original) (raw)
The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction
2014
know far more about the subject of this book than I do and would have written a much better one on the subject than I have. Bernice Murphy occupies the office opposite my own and has not only had to suffer my constant attention-seeking for the last few years, graciously guiding me towards not only ever-more horrific viewing material and invaluable critical reading, but has also cheered me up when the going got tough. Darryl Jones, as usual, was a friend, colleague and wise guide and spent far more time talking to me about the book than either it or I deserved. Students in my classes on Literary Monsters had to endure my first public airing of many of the ideas that found their way in here and often patiently explained to me how misguided I am about such things Acknowledgements vii-so I thank them too. I am grateful to the anonymous readers who made very good suggestions which I tried to address as best I could. Some material from the Introduction and Chapter 1 first appeared in two articles published in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2006 and 2008) and is reprinted here with permission. To my wife, Mary Lawlor, and our daughter, Eilís, I owe the most gratitude. I offer them my love and dedicate the book to them both. The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction Gothic trope of the past violently erupting into the present connect this minor horror film to a much longer cultural tradition which figures Ireland as a zone of weirdness, the supernatural and the pathological. At the time of shooting, Coppola was working for the veteran horror maestro Roger Corman, who had just wrapped up The Young Racers (a charmingly terrible film about racing car drivers and the women who love them), which he filmed all around Europe, finishing up in Ireland, and Dementia 13 was basically made with the left-over budget from Corman's film, with some of its actors thrown in, supplemented by additional players brought in from the Abbey Theatre. The Irish setting was, then, purely happenstance, since, as Kim Newman points out, Coppola would have filmed in Texas had he been there at the time. 2 Coppola got the most out of the location, however, and while naming the dead daughter Kathleen was probably simply a matter of invoking something suitably 'Oirish' for an American audience, it (un)happily results in the personal history of the Halorans becoming (unintentionally) emblematic of a national history in which the Irish are haunted by the ghost of a different Kathleen (ni Houlihan) and young men are led into perpetuating murderous deeds on her behalf. Concerning a ritual commemoration of death, and released three years before the Irish state celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising with tremendous pomp and circumstance, the film implicates such commemorative events in a cycle of madness and murder and suggestively anticipates the blame that would later be heaped on the anniversary festivities for the renewed campaign of the Irish Republican Army in 1969. Moreover, the IRA's Border Campaign had just finished in 1962, and the image of young men conducting murderous assaults because of the memory of a ghostly and allegorical woman would have been fresh in the minds of an Irish audience at the very least. 3 Therefore, although Ireland was little more than incidental to its planning, the film resonates with what had by then become a very traditional version of Ireland as a site of queer goings on, and Coppola is merely utilising a recognisable trope in cinematic tradition which associates Ireland with either quaint Celtic charm or grand Gothic guignol (or sometimes both). For every Finian's Rainbow (1968-and also directed by Coppola, who must have been smitten by Irish blarney), with its jolly, cheerful leprechaun grotesquely over-played by Tommy Steele, there is a Leprechaun (1993; dir. Mark Jones) with a leering, gurning, homicidal version of the same mythical creature, played this time by Warwick Davis who seems to be enjoying himself a bit too much in the role. Ireland, and its (real and mythical) inhabitants, are convenient shorthand for the supernaturally bizarre and appealing in Walt Disney's The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction Leicester, dies, Matilda is kidnapped and taken to Jamaica, remaining there for eight years. Her sister, meanwhile, has her own foreign tribulations, travelling to Ireland in search of Essex, where she excites the unwanted sexual desires of the Earl of Tyrone, who imprisons her so that he has the time to seduce her. Ireland is a wild and dangerous space, and Ellinor has little good to say about it or its inhabitants, complaining that it 'offers to our view a kind of new world; divided into petty states, inveterately hating each other, it knows not the benefit of society. .. The advantages of commerce, the charms of literature, all the graces of civilization, which at once enrich the mind and form the manners, are almost unknown to this people'. 8 So shocked is Ellinor by the behaviour and dress of the native Irish that she speculates that they have about as much in common with her as the 'inhabitants of the Torrid Zone', making the parallel between Ireland and Jamaica as exotic and perilous spaces clear for the reader. 9 Ireland is to be interpreted here as if it has somehow been geographically displaced from its true location in the tropics; those visiting the island from the mother country can rightly view themselves as entering a state of nature and incivility, a 'new world' in need of taming, or one perhaps impossible to tame. Tyrone's sexual licence, his perverted, 'licentious' and excessive desire for Ellinor, is mirrored by his rebellious 'hopes of wholly expelling the English, and ascending the throne of Ireland', allowing sexual and political subversion to merge together in his body. Indeed, his lust may stem from his political greed, so that Irish rebellion is figured as the cause of Irish sexual dissolution. 10 Although Lee's novel is set during Elizabeth's Irish wars, her treatment of Ireland is heavily dependent on eighteenth-century prejudicial accounts of the seventeenth century, especially David Hume's History of England (1754-62), where the rebels of 1641 are described as naturally inclined towards violence and atrocity, a propensity 'farther stimulated by precept; and national prejudices empoisoned by those aversions, more deadly and incurable, which arose from an enraged superstition'. 11 Given that both sisters have spent their lives in another rather odd location, the recusant priest hole that is the recess, where they have been kept safe from the dangers of a stridently Protestant land, that Ellinor fails to see Ireland as an equivalent space in which the rejected and endangered find refuge is somewhat disappointing. Ireland is even stranger than the hollowed out cave in which the sisters have been raised simply because it is Ireland, whereas the cave is at least to be found in the homeland. This reversion to ethnic and geographical bigotry is also disappointing given that Lee herself had spent a lot of time in Ireland, living in Dublin, where her parents worked as actors, during much of the 1750s. Lee provides a rather more nuanced view of Ireland and the Irish in The Two film adaptation of Cecelia Ahern's P.S. I Love You (2006; dir. Richard LaGravenese), where the American tourist Holly Kennedy (played by two-times Oscar winner Hilary Swank!) finds herself both amazed and lost in the Wicklow mountains (which have been obviously CGI-ed for extra sublimity). Holly is looking for the 'national park' and is gobsmacked to discover that the wildness of the countryside is what the Irish think a park looks like. Luckily, Holly also encounters a gorgeous yet wise local man (an improbable Gerard Butler) who can direct her back to civilisation, and, of course, they end up married. The genders may have been reversed, but the marriage plot of the romantic novel The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction Moreover, as Christopher Morash has outlined, the Celtic fringes were not only considered repositories of all that which England wished to deny and banish (the irrational, the superstitious, the perverse, the Catholic, the cannibalistic), they also became a kind of collective zone of atemporality, a place of the primitive, the out-of-touch and the backward which the modern world had not yet affected. If the Gothic is often seen as the return of the repressed, the past that will not stay past, Ireland has usually been constructed as a place where the past had never in fact disappeared, a place where the past is in fact the always present. Morash points out that nineteenth-century philologists such as James Cowles Prichard, Franz Bopp and J. Kasper Zeuss all argued that in Celtic languages was preserved the remains of a European ur-language and that 'in a slide which was common in nineteenth-century ethnography and beyond, this was taken to indicate that the Celtic peoples of the present day were an instance of a cultural anachrony, a race out of time'. 39 In such Celtic regions as Ireland time and space took on different meanings and history itself was out of joint. According to Declan Kiberd, Ireland operated as 'England's unconscious', hence the surprising number of English Gothic narratives which use Ireland as a shorthand indicator of the depraved past rather than the technological future. 40 This version of Ireland as a Gothic madhouse had to be confronted by Irish writers, but rather than reject it, a great many of them, on first glance, appear to have embraced it, allowing the tropes and themes of the Gothic to infect practically everything they wrote. Any list of important Irish writers includes a rather extraordinary number of Gothic specialists and horror aficionados, and their apparent over-representation in the Irish ranks has rightly seemed to some critics to require an explanation. In fact, one of the great 'problems' in Irish literary history has been not only...
A New ‘Rhetoric of Darkness’: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, John Connolly and the Irish Gothic
Oceánide
The relationship between Ireland and the Gothic goes back to the early days of the genre, when the Sublime, as identified by the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, became central to the aesthetic concepts which would abound in the articulation of the Gothic as a literary form. The “dark, desolate and stormy grandeur” of the perception of Ireland which was held by the English reading public in the late eighteenth century was readily adaptable for the use of the island as a kind of pre-Enlightenment wilderness which, when combined with its linguistic, religious and cultural “otherness”, provided a fertile territory for the growth of a literature which favoured the supernatural, the uncanny and the numerous features which unite to make up the genre. As early as 1771, Elizabeth Griffin’s "The History of Lady Barton" contains elements of the Gothic, and the huge popularity of Waterford-born Regina Maria Roche’s "The Children of the Abbey"gave a definitive boost to the ge...
Through an exploration of Maturin's most famous work, Melmoth the Wanderer, his novel The Wild Irish Boy, and Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, this paper aims to explore each text as representative of the Nineteenth Century Irish Gothic response to contemporary events (the Act of Union, post-1798 rebellion). The paper also aims to show a link between these Nineteenth Century texts as expressions of contemporary issues and some two centuries later, a Twentieth Century novel and Twenty-First Century Irish Gothic tale as responses to the pressures of the diasporic subject and to Modern Ireland.
The Hysterical Body: deconstruction and confinement of the female body in the Irish Gothic
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