Seminar:
Irish Studies,
535
Meeting
Date: May 7,
2004
Chair:
Mary McGlynn
Speaker:
Prof. Clare
Carroll
Chair of Comparative Literature
and Director of Irish Studies, Queens
College, CUNY.
Title of Talk: "Irish 'Others' as Brothers and
Mothers in the Age of
Elizabeth."
Rapporteur: Cóilín Parsons
Attendees:
Ann M. McNulty
(Fordham University);
Patrick McNierney (Columbia University); Abby Bender (Princeton
University);
Brian Leahy Doyle (Lehman College, CUNY); Joseph Lennon (Manhattan
College);
Maria McGarrity (Long Island University); Gertrude Hamilton (Marymount
College
of Fordham University); Kathleen Connell (Marymount College of Fordham
University); Rita Loughlin (American Irish Teachers Association); Peter
M.
Leahy (CUNY Graduate Center); SŽamus Blake (WFUV, Fordham University);
Susanne
Forman (Pearson Publishing); Thomas Ihde (Lehman College, CUNY); Diane
Menagh
(Fairfield University); Martin J. Burke (Lehman College & CUNY
Graduate
Center); Robert St-Cyr.
A copy
of the
paper that Prof. Carroll gave has been deposited with University
Seminars. The following is a synopsis. Prof. Carroll also showed slides.
Prof. Carroll devised her title
to emphasise how close the Irish were
to the Elizabethan English, and also how troubling that closeness could
be. There were at least five
reasons why the English portrayed their Irish mothers and brothers as
others:
first, they were rebellious; second, they remained Catholic; third,
they had a
separate language, and distinct legal, poetic, and political customs;
fourth,
the English feared the Irish, especially Irish women, as seductive and
corrupting; fifth, the Irish were European and could form alliances
with other
Europeans, so they had to be portrayed as neither European nor modern.
The
Elizabethan conquest of Ireland was pursued by means of the policy of
surrender
and regrant, as well as by cultural Anglicisation and outright military
conquest. The story of how Lord
Deputy Sir Henry Sidney routed the persistent rebel Rory Og O'More of
the
midlands is recounted in John DerrickeÕs The Image of Ireland.
Prof. Carroll displayed a number of slides of woodcuts from
DerrickeÕs
text, and argued that they make military resistance, Catholicism, and
evil
synonymous with each other. They
also draw a contradictory connection between English civility and
state-sanctioned violence. The
Irish are constantly depicted as "the enemie," and only once in the
text is
there an indication that there were some Irish fighting in and working
for
SidneyÕs army, despite the fact that there would have been many. This depiction of the Irish as
primitive and outside civility stretches back to the twelfth-century Topographia
Hiberniae of
Gerald of
Wales, but in DerrickeÕs text the barbarism is no longer just
primitive, but
also evil.
This
same judgment of the Irish dominates Edmund Spenser's A View of the
Present
State of Ireland,
written
in the midst of Hugh OÕNeillÕs rebellion against English
rule. SpenserÕs plan for the
reformation of
Ireland places military conquest as the first order of the day. This is justified in the first section
of A View,
in which
Irish customs are depicted as wild, licentious, pagan, feminised, and
non-European. Irish vices are in
direct opposition to the array of virtues embodied in the hero knights
and
titles of each of the books of The Faerie Queene. Spenser
takes Gerald of WalesÕ descriptions of the Irish and allies them
with the
emerging discourse of race, depicting the Old English and the Gaelic
Irish as a
unified racial other.
Prof.
Carroll ended her talk with two stories that complicate somewhat the
notion of
the Irish as EnglandÕs Others.
When the QueenÕs godson, Sir John Harington, was on
campaign with Essex
in 1599, he wrote a letter that recounts a tale about Rory Og
OÕMoreÕs magical
escape. This story is exactly
identical to an anecdote he tells in the commentary to his translation
of the
Italian romance epic Orlando Furioso.
Harington wrote the letter after the English forces had been
defeated
against all oddsÑhe uses the trope of the Irish being magically
possessed to
explain an inexplicable defeat.
For Harington the ideological and the fictional, the legendary
and the
historical are all translatable in terms of each other.
Just
two months later, Harington paid a visit to the rebel Hugh
OÕNeill during a
brief cease-fire period. OÕNeill
greeted him warmly, and asked after his cousin, Sir Henry Harington,
who had
been defeated at Arklow by OÕNeill earlier in the year. Harington writes of OÕNeill in elegiac
terms, and gives his sons gifts of his ÒAriosto.Ó HaringtonÕs Orlando Furioso had very real influence in the
Irish translation of
continental culture, and even on the study of Irish by English speakers. An anonymous late seventeenth-century,
Irish-language prose romance, Orlando agus Melora shows this influenceÑthe
1696 manuscript
includes pen and ink drawings that closely imitate the engravings to
the 1591
edition of HaringtonÕs translation.
In the 1696 manuscript, the text is followed by a Latin-Irish
glossary,
guide to the pronunciation of Irish, and a grammar, all suggesting that
it was
produced for English-speaking students of the Irish language.
These
final two stories indicate that the English could encounter the Irish
as civil,
and that the Irish could encounter the English as a source of
inspiration for
their own cultural survival.
Q. Was Gerald of Wales of Welsh
blood? Did he speak Welsh?
Did he identify with Wales or was he
self-hating?
A. He was from Wales, just as most
of those in
the initial waves of settlement, the Cambro-Normans.
He didnÕt identify with Welsh culture, and he wrote in
Latin, but he did write an ecclesiastical history of Wales. Spenser took the notion of the barbarity
of the Irish from Gerald, but he added the idea that the Irish were
non-European. Gerald believed that
the Irish could be improved, but Spenser and Derricke thought that they
were
ineducable, that they were barbaric not by custom, but by nature. Willy Maley has written that the Irish
were seen as a mixture of many different races, and indeed there are
elements
of the Lebor Gab‡laÑone of the many Irish texts that speak of
the Irish as
Scythians, etc.Ñin Spenser. For
Spenser, however, the Irish are African not because they are ancient,
but
because they are barbaric.
Q. It is interesting that at this
time African
does not seem to mean black.
A. No, it doesnÕt. Coleridge, writing long after slavery had been
begun, says
he could not imagine that Othello could have been black, but this was
not a
problem for ShakespeareÑhis was quite a different time. Race at this time is not considered in
terms of skin colour, but in terms of lineage.
Q. You have spoken of the mantle
being a
traditional Irish coat. DoesnÕt
Caliban
wear a mantle?
A. I donÕt think so. I am not sure.
It would be a very interesting staging.
Q. In reports of the 1648-1651
rebellion in
Munster there was talk of profit and loss of profit.
Is this a new concern at that time?
A. Yes.
William Petty travels around the country calculating how much
land is
worth, and the value of peasantsÕ labour.
His interests are very much scientific and economic. He believes that, if only the Irish
could be modernised they would produce profit. This
was more of a concern in the seventeenth centuryÑthe
Elizabethan conquest had been a huge financial sinkhole.
Q. Before the New English arrived
was there a
sense of there having been a hybrid culture? In
Spenser is there a sense that the Irish will absorb,
culturally, any new settlers?
A. Ken Nicholls has written
brilliantly about
the process of hibernicisation, or gaelicisation. New
English settlers were jockeying for power and position
in Ireland, and someone like an Ormond or a Desmond would have been a
huge
threat to them, so part of the animosity against the
ÒdegenerateÓ Old English
was a result of this. The Old
English were very Catholic and very hibernicised, yet into the
seventeenth
century many of them still insisted that they were English.
Q. This claim to be English and not
Irish was
seen in the seminaries on the continent also.
A. Yes, there are very interesting
stories of
the fights between Gaelic and Old English carrying over to the colleges
in the
continent.
Q. Your talk brings to mind
Marianne MooreÕs brilliant
poem, ÒSpenserÕs Ireland.Ó
A. Andrew HadfieldÕs work on
Spenser insists
that he can be seen as an Irish writer.
His landscapes in The Faerie Queene are Irish.
He lived in Ireland for a very long time, and as a result he is
in an
in-between position, a peculiar position.
Q. I am interested in your comment
on Irish
wailing. When I heard keening it
was nothing like what is being described.
A. Of course this description is
based on
stereotyping; there is a proliferation of types that have little or
nothing to
do with empirical observation. It
is interesting to see writers very occasionally breaking through that
to a real
encounter.
Q. I know that to compare
manuscript and print
traditions is not fair, but are there similar changes in the
Irish-language
offerings at this time?
Q. There are poets who are
bilingual, who have
a foot in both traditions. Indeed,
by the late seventeenth century many are looking to the return of the
Stuarts
as the proper rulers. By that time
Irish writers are more closely embedded in the English-speaking world.
A. There is also macaronic poetry
in the
English language, and many Irish poets describe the changing landscape
and
English military set-up, but it is not quite the same type of shift.
Q. Roderick OÕ
FlahertyÕs poetry is an
interesting case of engagement with the issues of Anglicisation.
A. Yes, his Ogygia uses the word
ÒBritishÓ to include the
Irish. Of course, this was because
James II was about to ascend the throne, and OÕFlaherty was
looking for
favours, including the regrant of land that had been lost.