ALLEGORIES OF UNION
IN IRISH AND
ENGLISH WRITING,
–
Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold
MARY JEAN CORBETT
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.cambridge.org
First published in printed format
ISBN 0-521-66132-3 hardback
ISBN 0-511-03346-X eBook
Mary Jean Corbett 2004
2000
(Adobe Reader)
©
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
Acknowledgmentspageix
Introduction
Public affections and familial politics: Burke, Edgeworth,
andIrelandinthes
Allegories of prescription: engendering Union in
OwensonandEdgeworth
Troubling others: representing the immigrant Irish in
urbanEnglandaroundmid-century
Plottingcolonialauthority:Trollope’sIreland,–
England’s opportunity, England’s character: Arnold, Mill,
andtheUnioninthes
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
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 ().
x Acknowledgments
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
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-
Allegories of Union in Irish and English writing
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét