Rival maternities: Maud Gonne, Queen Victoria, and the reign of the political mother.

Abstract: Alert to the ways Maud Gonne used journalism and public presentation as a means of shaping her feminist activism, "Rival Maternities: Maud Gonne, Queen Victoria, and the Reign of the Political Mother" argues that Gonne both petitioned for Irish mothers' involvement in nationalist politics and sustained her own elite class position by challenging Victoria's embodiment of maternal sovereignty. Through her literary and dramatic personifications of Cathleen ni Houlihan and Mother Ireland, Gonne crafted a model of nationalist motherhood that, when placed alongside the Queen's representations of imperial maternity, worked to promote Ireland's divestiture of English governance.

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In the opening pages of her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen (1938), Maud Gonne discloses that the queen to whom her title refers is none other than Cathleen ni Houlihan, the female personification of Ireland whom Gonne famously performed in the 1902 play by William Butler Yeats and Augusta Gregory. (1) Another queen, however, lurks in the title. By the time Gonne's autobiography was published, Victoria had been dead almost four decades, but Gonne's text--a work intended to shape her legacy within the Irish nationalist movement--nevertheless invokes her rivalry with Queen Victoria, sovereign of Ireland.

During the latter part of Victoria's reign, Gonne devoted her energies to denouncing British imperialism and promoting Irish nationalism by writing essays for nationalist newspapers and delivering speeches in Europe and America. (2) Gonne was celebrated by her contemporaries for her oratory, but she was even more renowned for her compelling personifications of Ireland. Gonne embraced her identifications with Ireland-as-woman, believing them to be politically advantageous. A striking woman with an impressive voice, she turned down nearly all of the theatrical roles she was offered out of fear that acting would monopolize her time and talents, but she eagerly adopted the role of Cathleen ni Houlihan: "I did it," Gonne explains, "because it was only on that condition that Willie Yeats would give us the right of producing his play, and I felt that play would have great importance for the National movement" (MacBride 177). The "us" Gonne refers to here is Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Erin), the first prominent Irish nationalist organization for women to arise after the disbandment in 1882 of the short-lived Ladies' Land League. Gonne's acceptance of the Cathleen role reveals not only her desire to situate Inghinidhe na hEireann in the center of nationalist cultural life, but also her willingness to serve as the embodiment of an aspiring autonomous Ireland.

Cathleen ni Houlihan was one of many popular nationalist representations of Ireland as a woman in the nineteenth century. While Yeats and Gregory's version of Cathleen adopted the convention from Celtic mythology of a crone who is transformed into a beautiful maiden when Irish men volunteer to fight for their nation's independence, other renderings of a feminized Ireland took the form of a wholesome maiden such as Erin or Dark Rosaleen, a suffering old woman such as the Shan Van Vocht (literally, poor old woman), or Mother Ireland. Dublin cartoonists depicted Erin in a variety of roles, from "frail and maidenly" to "strong and defiant" (Curtis, Images 15). The Shan Van Vocht was portrayed alternately as a lamenting hag or a bold, unruly virago--the latter drawing upon Celtic incarnations of the goddess of war (Clark 168-69). After the Great Famine, many Catholic Irish found renewed comfort in the figure of the Virgin Mary, and by the late nineteenth century, Mother Ireland and the Mother of God were often connected in literary and cultural representations (Innes 41). (3)

Political nationalists and devotees of the cult of the Virgin Mary alike idealized the figure of the mother. The prominent nationalist Patrick Pearse, for example, like many of his peers, relied heavily upon "myths of motherland" to promote "the mother church of Catholic revival; the motherland of national revival; and the mother tongue of Gaelic revival" (Kearney 118-19). Maternity itself earned state endorsement in the 1937 Irish Constitution's protection and support of women in their exclusive roles as unemployed wives and mothers. (4)

Understandably, the representation of Ireland as a mother has been criticized as overshadowing the genuine political accomplishments of Irish women, and it has become standard for recent scholars to regard the figure disapprovingly. (5) Those wary of Irish nationalism's glorification of maternity worry that politicizing motherhood traps women in the procreative function of providing the nation with healthy citizens. A concomitant code of "hyper-masculinity" for nationalist men, which insists on a "hyper-feminine" standard for women, has "in the Irish Catholic context meant an intensification of the already heavy emphasis on virginity and motherhood, and a denial of autonomous female desire," sexual or otherwise (Cullingford, "Thinking" 6). Scholarship devoted to Gonne's activism thus often aims to rescue her from the damage that her personification of Mother Ireland may have inflicted on her political legacy. (6)