The myth of sovereignty: gender in the literature of Irish nationalism.

Publication: ELH

Publication Date: 22-MAR-94

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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press

Nineteenth-century imperialism relied for much of its ideological strength upon normative tropologies of gender disjunction, exclusion and stratification. In figuring the conquerors as the exponents of a principle coded and celebrated as masculine (encompassing an aggressive will to historical progress, technical mastery and rational transcendence, et cetera) and the conquered as the embodiment of a principle stereotyped and discounted as female (encompassing a passive repose in organic cyclicality, affective immanence and domestic concerns, et cetera), imperialist discourse has inscribed a vicious symbolic circle in which sexual and socio-economic dominance reflect and authorize one another. Colonial rule and expropriation were naturalized as the latest historical signifiers of an inherently gendered cosmos; gender hierarchy and male control were naturalized as the ultimate referents of the colonial mission.

As this dynamic has played itself out in the European incursions into Asia and North Africa, it has been lucidly critiqued under the rubric of Orientalism. Edward Said has famously demonstrated how Western anthropologists, ethnographers, explorers, poets and politicians of the nineteenth century constructed the Oriental as irrational, sensual, available, supine and enigmatic as opposed to the lucid, accurate, energetic and decisive Westerner.(1) But many of these same manichean disjunctions were taken to inform the relationship between imperial Britain and its nearest ward, Ireland. The nexus of the ideological modalities of Orientalism and Gaelophobia finds its personification in the prominent and formidable figure of Arthur "Bloody" Balfour, who was charged on the one hand with justifying British sovereignty in Egypt, which he did in terms of the superior knowledge and rationality of the Anglo-Saxon, and on the other with administering British sovereignty in Ireland, which he did via the brute force of the Coercion Bills. Perhaps nowhere does the link between knowledge and power stand more nakedly revealed.(2)

The sexual inflection of socio-economic dominance was unusually explicit in the case of Ireland. First of all, its hybrid status as a metropolitan colony left Ireland especially susceptible of familial metaphors. Long nicknamed the Sister Isle, Ireland was increasingly imaged in wifely terms as the century wore on, the implied connubial connection with England serving to naturalize that long-standing bone of contention, the Union. Noted historian Oliver MacDonagh writes,

The sexual image was in constant use in nineteenth and early twentieth century England to express the dominator's concept of the relationship between the two islands--with perhaps the Gates |Home Rule~ Acts dimly perceived as a sort of counterpart to the Married Woman's Property Acts and the British retention of the power of political decision subconsciously validated by similar psychological mixtures of assertion and insecurity. Even the Hibernophiles might explain themselves in terms of arch-femininity. Harold Bigbie, the Daily Chronicle journalist, introduced his Home Rule Tract of 1912 with Ireland a young and capable matron seated at her fireside, who raises her gray eyes to the visitor and says, with a whimsical and ingratiating play of laughter on her lips, "I wish to do my own housekeeping."(3)

This genderizing dynamic found further reinforcement in the contemporaneous popularity of crude ethno-anthropological discourses, which switched the symbolic focus from the Irish nation to the Irish race and thereby underwrote a burgeoning Anglo-Saxon supremacism. The supposedly virile efficiency of the Teutonic races was contrasted with what Matthew Arnold called the "nervous exaltation" and "feminine idiosyncracy" of the Celts, which made them, in his eyes, a naturally subordinate race.(4) Such discourses played on and played into the modern, markedly gendered schism of mind and body, thought and feeling, reason and fancy, in order to suggest that the Irish, like women in general, were constitutionally ill-equipped for the dispassionate pursuit of state and social policy and were for that reason properly dispossessed of any real historical agency. Thus, in 1843, for example, The Times was already arguing that the Irish were "a people of acute sensibilities and lively passions, more quick in feeling wrongs than rational in explaining or temperate in addressing them," and, as such, were ripe to be "fiendishly exploited" by demagogic leaders like Daniel O'Connell.(5) Lord Acton brought out the implicitly evolutionary dimension of this ethnic romance. Having troped human history as an assertive, rational operation upon an inert materiality, he adjudges the Celts to be a race "which is not one," the ethnic equivalent of an earth mother:

The Celts are not among the progressive . . . races but those which supply the materials rather than the impulse of history, and are either stationary or retrogressive . . . They are a negative element in the world . . . and waited for a foreign influence to set in action the rich treasure which in their own hands could be of no avail.(6)

The switch from nation to race in the discourse of British triumphalism served to naturalize the assumed inferiority of the people of Ireland, to make it seem biologically inscribed and therefore historically inevitable. This gambit, in turn, participated in a larger shift in the specific value of gender as the ideological currency of colonization, a shift occasioned by the development of liberal principles and institutions back home in the metropole. The discourse of modernity in Britain was staked on the contradictory coherence of economic and political liberalism, the former openly demanding imperialistic forays as a way of expanding markets, acquiring resources and accessing cheap labor, the latter implicitly deploring such conquests as a vitiation of the democratic ideal. The tension between these collateral strains was especially pronounced with respect to the Irish situation, owing to the geographical proximity involved and the resulting mobility of persons and information. As historian Richard Lebow writes,

The discrepancy between the values of British society and the means employed to preserve colonial domination over Ireland grew steadily more apparent . . . While Britain was becoming more democratic |through the successive Reform Acts~, British rule in Ireland continued to rely on force and coercion and became more undemocratic in relation to the emerging value structure of British society.(7)

Under these circumstances, the stereotyped feminization of the colonial other began to operate as a mode of imperialist self-justification--which is to say it operated under the pressure of a felt inconsistency.

The gender system acted as a uniquely serviceable frame of reference for discriminating the English from the Irish in a hierarchical manner in order to rationalize the British appropriation of Irish land and liberty, while at the same time acknowledging the profound cultural intimacy of the two peoples. Thus Lord Acton continues the passage cited above, "Subjection to a people of a higher capacity for government is itself no misfortune; and it is to most countries the condition of their political advancement."(8) He thereby suggests that the edifying effects of British subjugation somehow compensate the Celts for the "rich treasure" they offered up on the altar of historical development, much as the edifying tutelage of a Victorian husband was held to compensate a woman for the "treasure of her sex," which she offered up on the altar of matrimony. By the end of the century, the men of middle class Britain had in fact begun to categorize the Irish with their wives and daughters as cultural minors or wards, and in an age when the suffragette movement was arousing anxiety and antagonism in this sovereign populace, the assignment of feminine traits to a minority group effectively discredited their claims to self-determination.(9) The phrase Home Rule had acquired a highly charged double valence.(10) At the same time, those supposedly female qualities that rendered the Celt incapable of self-government--undependability, instability, "nervous exaltation"--remain linked with a masculinized predilection for violent action, so that periodic agrarian and IRB |Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood~ outrages were seen not as part of a rational if desperate revolutionary program but as auguries of the anarchy dwelling in the female soul of the Irish.

To state, as I have, that the gendered allegory of ethno-racial supremacism serves to naturalize both colonial subjugation and the continued subordination of women is to say that it is specifically invoked to override the avowed political ethos, democracy, in favor of political economy, which is after all the most comprehensive liberal theory of nature: nature as that which is split off from, adversarial to, and exploitable by man. In its modern function as a secular theodicy, the gendered rhetoric of ethno-colonial difference could not but grow more strident and invidious, because given their universal reference and narrowly coded range of application (the heterosexual metropolitan male bourgeois), democratic principles could only be legitimated through a certain dehumanization of those groups situated on the margins. The ironic corollary of the extension of political rights to all persons has been the selective extenuation of the status of personhood, the relegation of certain groups and social locations to the domain of...

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