Cambridge university press allegories of union in irish and english writing 1790

aaaaaa This page intentionally left blank AL LEGOR IE S O F U NI ON I N I RI S H A ND EN GLI S H W R ITI NG,   –   In this book, Mary Jean Corbett explores fictional and non- fictional representations of Ireland’s relationship with England throughout the nineteenth century. Through postcolonial and feminist theory, she considers how cross-cultural contact is negoti- ated using tropes of marriage and family, and demonstrates how familial rhetoric sometimes works to sustain, sometimes to contest, the structures of colonial inequality. Analyzing novels by Edgeworth, Owenson, Gaskell, Kingsley, and Trollope as well as writings by Burke, Carlyle, Engels, Arnold, and Mill, Corbett argues that the colonizing imperative for ‘‘reforming’’ the Irish in an age of imperial expansion constitutes a largely unrecognized but crucial element in the rhetorical project of English nation-forma- tion. By situating her readings within the varying historical and ideological contexts that shape them, she revises the critical ortho- doxies surrounding colonial discourse that currently prevail in Irish and English studies, and offers a fresh perspective on important aspects of Victorian culture.

            is Associate Professor of English and Affiliate of Women’s Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her publications include Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjec- tivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies (). Her work has also appeared in Criticism, Eighteenth-Century Life, ELH, Studies in the Novel, and Women’s Studies. aaaaaa A L L E G O R I E S O F U NI O N IN IRISH AND ENGLI SH WRITI NG,     –   Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold M A R Y J E A N C OR B E TT           The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.org © Mary Jean Corbett 2004 First published in printed format 2000 ISBN 0-511-03346-X eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-66132-3 hardback My family on both sides belonged to the toiling and dying types who made it over to America.

And once in America, people divided once again: you could say they became the poor and the rich. The losers and winners. The artists and scientists. If they were countries, they’d be Ireland and England.

Carolyn See, Dreaming: Good Luck and Hard Times in America Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labours! Maria Edgeworth, Preface to Castle Rackrent MMMM Contents Acknowledgments page ix Introduction   Public affections and familial politics: Burke, Edgeworth, and Ireland in the s   Allegories of prescription: engendering Union in Owenson and Edgeworth   Troubling others: representing the immigrant Irish in urban England around mid-century   Plotting colonial authority: Trollope’s Ireland, –   England’s opportunity, England’s character: Arnold, Mill, and the Union in the s  Afterword  Notes  Bibliography  Index  vii aaaaa Acknowledgments A book that has taken this long to write has run up exorbitant debts in its author’s name. First and foremost, I owe my mother, Joan; my brothers, Dennis, Bill, and Tom; my sisters, Susan and Judy; and the bright lights of the next generation – Lauren, Brendan, Conor, Mara, Liam, and Brigit – for putting up with it, and with me. Always and everywhere, Regenia Gagnier and Rob Polhemus remain what I hope to become; much love and thanks to both for their extravagant kindness and unstinting support. Shay Brawn, Alex Chasin, Ira Livingston, and Kelly Mays are still among the best friends I’ve ever made, and I feel beyond fortunate to have all of them in my life, more than ten years on.

And there will be no end to owing Brad King, Maggy Lindgren, Lucy Jackson Norvell, Nedra Reynolds, Kate Rousmaniere, and Ann Wier- wille for their care, friendship, and encouragement. I need to repay with interest those colleagues in English at Miami University who have contributed to the process and the product in either highly concrete or virtually intangible ways, often in both: Steven Bauer, Kim Dillon, Eric Goodman, Susan Jarratt, Katie Johnson, Frank Jordan, Laura Mandell, Kate McCullough, Lori Merish, Kerry Powell, and Vicki Smith, with special thanks to Tim Melley for providing a timely reading and to Barry Chabot for giving us all a local habitation. I’m obliged as well to the innumerable graduate and undergraduate students I’ve known and admired in the past ten years, who have given me way more than they realize, and to all manner of other folks with whom I’ve talked and to whom I’ve listened, especially Deborah Morse and Anca Vlasopolos, along with many other members of the Interdisci- plinary Nineteenth Century Studies Association. Two other colleagues have also enriched my work in particularly important ways, which they would fully recognize only in reading the pages of this book: my deepest gratitude for their intellectual companionship to Fran Dolan and to Susan Morgan.

ix x Acknowledgments For the gifts of time and institutional support, I thank the Committee on Faculty Research, the Department of English, and the College of Arts and Sciences at Miami University. I’m also obliged to Ray Ryan of Cambridge University Press, and to the two anonymous readers of the manuscript, who have improved it by their knowledge and rigor. An earlier version of the argument on Owenson in Chapter Two appeared as ‘‘Allegories of Prescription: Engendering Union in The Wild Irish Girl,’’ Eighteenth-Century Life  (). And some of the material on Burke and Edgeworth that appears in Chapters One and Two is revised from two other essays already in print: ‘‘Public Affections and Familial Politics: Burke, Edgeworth, and the ‘Common Naturalization’ of Great Britain,’’ ELH  (); and ‘‘Another Tale to Tell: Postcolonial Theory and the Case of Castle Rackrent,’’ Criticism  ().

Introduction In Seamus Heaney’s allegorical lyric, ‘‘Act of Union’’ (), the coup- ling of England and Ireland issues in the conception of ‘‘an obstinate fifth column,’’ ‘‘the heaving province’’ of Ulster.¹ Identifying the mascu- line position with English imperial power, the poem links the colonized Irish land with the feminine, carrying a fetal body that will never be born into separateness; even as it marks the geopolitical site ‘‘where our past has grown’’ (), Ulster is itself a product of the past that has survived into the present, cleaving to the mother from whom it cannot be divided. With a heart that throbs like ‘‘a wardrum / Mustering force’’ (–) and ‘‘ignorant little fists’’ () that ‘‘Beat at your borders’’ (), this angry child of Union punishes its mother from within and threatens its father, too, ‘‘across the water’’ (). The ‘‘legacy’’ () of force and violence, the poem suggests, is more of the same: the crossing of two cultures under conditions of imperial masculine dominance and colon- ized feminine subordination produce only a bitter fruit, with Union’s offspring – both a part of and apart from its parents – signifying Union’s enduring brutality. Now, more than thirty years after the renewal of ‘‘the troubles,’’ it may be difficult to read the ‘‘legacy’’ of the Act of Union in any other way.

The terms that Heaney’s poem deploys, however, should make feminist readers suspicious – not of the fact of conquest the poem describes, but of the sexualized and gendered binary it superimposes on the colonial relation, and of its attendant use of rape as a metaphor of imperial exploitation. When I teach Heart of Darkness, I must often remind students that to equate the Euroconquest of Africa with hetero- sexual rape is to engage rhetorically in a version of the act they liberally claim to condemn. Similarly, Heaney’s poem aims to demystify, to reveal that the heart of an immense darkness is beating still, not just in London, but in Dublin, Derry, and Belfast as well. Yet we might better understand the gendered rhetoric of the poem as itself a product of   Allegories of Union in Irish and English writing English discursive violence, another legacy of the rhetoric of empire as it has been institutionalized in ways of speaking and writing, learning and teaching.

Does Heaney’s extended use of this gendered imperial metaphor suggest that he is thoroughly ‘‘possessed by. the atavistic myth he deplores,’’ as Elizabeth Butler Cullingford implies?² Returning to the poem, I find that my interpretation of it depends on how I locate the speaker of the piece, and how I locate myself as a reader of it. The Latin Americanist Doris Sommer has made the point, in another colonial context, that ‘‘differences in evaluating nationalism’’ – or in evaluating the textual history of nation-formation – ‘‘may have less to do with which position is right or wrong than with the positionality one occu- pies.’’³ In this instance, because the ‘‘I’’ of ‘‘Act of Union’’ speaks for and as England (‘‘the tall kingdom over your shoulder’’ []), a female reader may well see herself positioned by the poem as the passive, all-too- female Irish body, raped and pregnant. And as a feminist reader embodied and culturally situated as a woman, this position, of course, is one I am inclined to refuse and resist in reading or writing the colonial relation, in that it reproduces that which it seeks to critique.

Nations and territories are not women to a feminist reader, however loudly a mascu- linist speaker might proclaim them to be. My positionality would lead me to envision the scene quite differently. Yet I also notice, on rereading, that the lyric voice marks Heaney’s speaker as English, and thus as ‘‘imperially / Male’’ (–), which complicates things, given the poet’s own divergent cultural locations. Recognizing the poetic speaker as male without adequately accounting for his Englishness, I have erred both in mistaking the ‘‘I’’ for the poet and in assigning the lyric voice to a generic man, any man, rather than to a specifically English man.

Once recognized as identifiably gendered and ethnic, the ‘‘I’’ of the poem may be seen to occupy a discursive position within a system of representation historically produced largely by English men. Enda Duffy suggests in a reading of another Heaney poem that ‘‘what is seen is always now seen partly through the op- pressor’s voice and that vision is spoken always, partly in the oppressor’s language and forms’’:⁴ today this discursive position is also potentially available to any one of us to appropriate, perhaps, or ironically to reverse, even if the different locations we occupy will differently nuance our uses of it. Thus my first reading of the poem in terms of a simple gender binary is challenged not simply by Heaney’s biographical status as an Irish man, but by his speaker’s cross-cutting identifications with both positions, (feminine) colonized and (masculine) colonizer. No bi- Introduction  nary can adequately articulate the complexity of the poetic and political situation: a point those in or from the North may know especially well.

Perhaps the poet has succeeded in leading me to misread because he has learned so well the trick of throwing his voice; or maybe it is because the gendered rhetorics of the imperial indeed inhabit us all in various ways, and have at times deafened us to colonial accents. Heaney’s uncanny ability to mimic the ‘‘imperially / Male’’ colonizer suggests that even as the poem grounds itself in a hierarchical opposition between English man and Irish woman, it also invites us to question the fixity of the positions it represents and to historicize the relations it maps.