Authors: Declan Kiberd
Recent refinements in psychiatric theory may help to explain the
psychological process at work. Children with problems have traditionally been described as mother-dominated, but such problems may often be attributed to the
father's
refusal to assume full responsibility. It is argued that the father's role is central in the second year of a child's life: the toddler needs space in which to achieve the beginnings of independence, but the mother feels a natural sadness at the prospect of a less intimate bond. The father at this point must try to compensate for this loss by reclaiming his place as partner, as well as by fulfilling the duties of father. If he fails to do so, he makes it harder for the mother and child to take the necessary steps back from one another. Many fathers in societies may lack the self-confidence, or hope for the future, that such a deed demands; and by failing to intervene at the right moment they launch another generation into a further hopeless cycle.
On the other hand, those fathers who
can
demonstrate that they are not under the mother's control help to cure the child of absolute dependency. By asserting his due authority over his children, the father allows them to explore their own anger until they can control it at will and learn to stand up for themselves. Even more importantly, the father teaches the child that other people have needs too, and that everyone functions as a member of wider and wider groups.
41
When such fatherly authority is not asserted, the child may become a self-indulgent subversive with no respect for the configurations of the larger community... in other words, a rebel.
Modern Ireland appears
to
have produced many such, according
to
a clear-cut formula which illustrates the foregoing analysis: weak fathers make way for clutching mothers to raise rebel sons. If the father does learn to assert himself, on the other hand, the child can begin the task of achieving a vision of society as a whole and the even more exhilarating challenge of framing an alternative. Such reassertion of himself by the father is
not
a return to patriarchal values: it is no more than a proper manliness. Patriarchy is, rather, the tyranny wrought by weak men, the protective shell which guards and nurtures their weakness.
Ireland produced more than its fair share of conservative rebels, and very few revolutionaries imbued with a vision of an alternative society. After independence, a fear of the bleakness of freedom had so gripped the people that autocracy and censorship were the order of the day. Re-Oedipalization became manifest in all walks of life, brought on by sheer exhaustion: the energy consumed in expelling the British had
been so great that there was little left with which to reimagine Ireland. Virginia
Woolf convinced herself that she could detect signs of the same fatigue in
Ulysses,
which she explained as follows: "Where so much strength is spent in finding a new way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition".
42
Her remark applies more to the Ireland abandoned by Joyce than to the liberationist poetics of his wonderful book.
Against the polyvocal pluralism of
Ulysses,
the new state rapidly proved itself rigid and autocratic in character. In
The Fear of Freedom,
Erich Fromm showed how such a character worships the past, believing that what has been will eternally be: "To wish or work for something that has not
yet
been before is crime or madness. The miracle
of
creation – and creation is always a miracle – is outside his range of emotional experience".
43
Creative attention would mean giving one's attention not to the injured Samaritan, so much as to the full person whom this act of imaginative kindness will bring into being. What is true of individuals may also be true of nations, so that a real patriotism would base itself not on the broken bones and accumulated grudges of the national past, but on an utterly open future. Unhappily, this was not to be in Ireland, and for an entirely predictable reason. The Irish language and culture were in decline, with the result that those who suffered from a tenuous sense of selfhood tended to prostrate themselves before apparently charismatic leaden. Incapable of self-sufficiency, many people nursed feelings of hatred for the authority which had so humiliated them. The way out of this crisis was to idealize some ordinary mortal – Parnell, Collins, de Valera – as the super-epitome of the history that was overtaking them. This idealization harmlessly drained off the accumulated feelings of hatred, while the glamour surrounding the "uncrowned king" or "chief converted the humiliation into intelligent obedience.
44
The accompanying pathology might be described as "revivalist".
The paralysis that Fanon detected in certain newly-independent African states also gripped independent Ireland:
The leader pacifies the people . . . unable really to open the future . . . We see him endlessly reassessing the history of the struggle for liberation. The leader, because he refuses to break up the national bourgeoisie, asks the people to fall back into the past – and to become drunk on remembrance.
45
Such a leader has no comprehensive programme: he desires not so much to lead as to occupy the position of leader. So, in the Irish case,
Éamon de Valera, the "boy from Bruree" must be the subject of endless radio broadcasts to remind listeners of his rise from humble country cottage dweller to shaper of a nation. That the nation is
not
being shaped is what this self-mythologizing is designed to occlude: this type of hero, confronted with each crisis of statecraft, can do little more than repeat the tale of his own apotheosis. History, under such a dispensation, ceases to be progressive, becoming instead an endless repetition of familiar crises, with no hope of resolution. The fight becomes more important than the thing fought for, and "history" is deemed history only if it exactly repeats itself.
In
Life Against Death,
the psychoanalyst
Norman O. Brown points out that "under the condition of repression, the repetition-compulsion establishes a fixation to the past, which alienates the neurotic from the present and commits him to the unconscious quest for the past in the future. Thus neurosis exhibits the quest for novelty, but underlying it, at the level of the instincts, is the compulsion to repeat".
46
This is doubtless the son of revivalism which Conor Cruise O'Brien had in mind when he accused his countrymen of seeming determined to commemorate themselves to death. It is instructive, in that context, to contrast the behaviour of the Irish electorate in the 1930s and 1940s – which consistently re-elected ex-gunmen who talked repeatedly of past gunplay – with that of their counterparts in Britain, who unsentimentally disposed of
Winston Churchill after
World War Two lest his once-valued martial rhetoric come between them and a welfare state.
In Ireland, following a limited form of independence in 1922, the shutters came down on the liberationist project and the emigrant ships were filled not just with intellectuals but with thousands of young men and women. People began to emigrate not only from poverty or the hated law, but also because the life facing them was tedious and mediocre. The revivalists had won: the fathers with their heroes and ghosts from the past. The revolutionaries were snuffed out: the sons with their hopes of self-creation in the image of an uncertain future. Yet the revenge of the fathers was barren in almost every respect, since it represented a final surrender to received modes of thought. A renaissance, which should have extended personal freedoms, served only to confirm the pathology of dependency.
One final explanation for this failure may lie in the fact that the father/son dichotomy was, if anything, too sharp in the Ireland of the time. Late marriage among adults had led to huge gaps of age between parents and children; and the constant emigration of people in their thirties and forties often left towns and villages without an "intermediary generation" to help the old and young adjust to one another
In ordinary times, younger
generations must adjust to the way of their elders; in times of rapid change, elders were more open to the wisdom of youth. If there were no generations, there would be no way for new knowledge – that is, knowledge that comes from fresh experience – to be transmitted and to be assimilated by older age-groups; and, at the same time, if it were not for the existence of intermediary generations, cultural transmission could never be accomplished without conflict.
47
Antonio Gramsci added subtle modulations to this analysis, arguing that a generational conflict occurs when an older generation fails to educate the young to meet the tasks set by their time. Often the young wish to transfer their allegiance from the retrogressive class to a more progressive one, but this attempt may be blocked by the emerging élites. The "old" order loses its power to attract the young, but the "new" order is prevented from winning power. "An old generation with antiquated ideas may be followed by a young generation with infantile ideas, if the intermediary generation that should correct the old or educate the new is missing or quantitatively weak".
48
Yeats inclined to the opinion that Gaelic Ireland lost its natural leaders and traditions of leadership with the flight of the Wild Geese, and to that he attributed the infantile formations of public opinion among the nationalist clubs of young men and women. Gramsci – an unlikely bedfellow of the poet – would probably have agreed. He argued that this pattern is more likely and of graver consequence among the subordinate classes, because their intellectual élites lack a cultural tradition, and because the few individuals in these groups who are at the height of their historical epoch have a difficult time organizing an intellectual centre that can effectively counter the hegemony of the dominant social coalition.
49
Modern
Irish history bears out that analysis. The decades in which significant social and political progress was made tended to be the ones which saw a palpable drop in emigration by adults. During the 1870s and 1880s, with the United States in the grip of a prolonged recession, many potential emigrants opted to stay in Ireland and make a stand: the result was the successful land agitation. Again, during the uncertain years of World War One, the outflow of population was much reduced, and the frustrations of those caught at home helped to fan the flames of the Easter Rising.
50
The ritual killing or replacement of fathers by sons is the stuff of legend as well as of social progress: though it may have begun in the tragic mode, it is by now a tradition so extensive that there is a place within it for comedy, such as the masterpiece by Synge. The son must challenge the father to become a man. What daughters must do in order to become women is more problematic: killing the mother could hardly be enacted in any recognizably comic mode. Even the more radical thinkers of the modern age defined the revolt of women in terms of the attempt by wives and daughters to break free of the constricting images of the female devised by men, and devised as often by men of national resistance movements as by men of the occupying power.
A common claim by imperial administrators was that women, so often repressed by traditional native cultures, would fare better under the
Pax Britannica.
In an age when the women of Britain lacked the citizen's elementary right to vote, this argument seemed hollow indeed. Across the globe, those women who committed themselves to the programme for decolonization found in the very conditions of that struggle the lineaments of their own freedom. The constant risk of arrest and incarceration run by nationalist males made it imperative that their partners could earn a living or support a family. Their families took on the contours of resistance, becoming in effect "alternative models of human organization":
1
the one free zone in which people could be themselves, the one space in which the occupier could not enter; and many of the women in such families assumed equality with men as a natural right.
When
Parnell and the leaders of the Land League were arrested in 1882, the
Ladies' Land League, under his sister Anna, took over the campaign, as would the women of India in later decades after the arrest of
Nehru. Parnell was unnerved by the militancy of the
women and
feared that he might be mocked for "sheltering" behind them. His sister encouraged her followers to become self-sufficient, to develop their powers of organization and oratory; and she was soon being denounced as a "fanatic" and "harridan", by dismayed nationalists as well as by enemy imperialists. Her movement ignored her brother's command to drop its no-rent policy and was consequently dissolved: but many of her followers, having sensed their political power, went on to use it in challenging new ways. They felt that they had every right to disobey laws which they had no part in framing.
2
The odds against the crusaders for women's rights were formidable. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the number of women workers in industry had dropped substantially; their contribution to agriculture seemed less important as farmers switched from tillage to livestock; and daughters came to rely more and more on dowries offered by elderly fathers. Ireland became, in consequence, a society pervaded by male values. The historian
Joseph Lee has lamented that the Catholic Church's achievement of spiritual hegemony, through its control of the educational system and its regular religious crusades, should have coincided with the era of Victorian propriety. The passion and realism of the old Gaelic love poetry were replaced by a coy sentimentality. He finds it ironic "that at a moment when educational opportunities increased for Irish women, the educational system began to be more systematically used to indoctrinate them into adopting as self-images the prevailing male view of women". The very spread of literacy became, in these circumstances, "another instrument for stifling independent thought".
3
Literacy, of course, would always be a two-edged sword: and the extension of access to education was bound over time to produce a new, more independent type of woman. In 1904 Trinity College Dublin was opened to women: that same year, Francis Sheehy Skeffington resigned as registrar of the Royal University over the non-recognition of women graduates. By 1909 the National University of Ireland had placed women on an equal footing with men, following a wily and resourceful campaign by
Mary Hayden, who would become a professor of history in the institution.
4
To some extent, the colleges may have been shamed into making these concessions by the example of the Gaelic League, an organization which had always recruited women as well as men, being indeed the victim of priestly censure for its mingling of the sexes at classes and summer camps. Agnes O'Farrelly, one of the first women to take an external degree in Celtic Studies, gave lectures in League classes in the years before 1909, when it was still not possible for her to teach
at the National University: later she, too, was a professor there. Queen Victoria had lamented the "horrors" of the new feminists, and in this she was supported by the more conservative Catholic clergy. One parish priest in Kerry opined that "it was a sure sign of the break-up of the planet when women took to leaving their homes and talking in public".
5
The initial response of many Irish women to such strictures was to link the call for female and for national rights. "I had read all the books about the position of women", wrote the literary critic Mary Colum, "which corresponded in a way to that of the oppressed races".
6
Her friend, the suffragist
Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, agreed, but warned against the danger that a narrow nationalism might simply use women in a subordinate capacity. She cited
Mary Wollstonecraft in support of her case: "To fight men's battles for them and to neglect those of women has always been regarded as true womanly, though when men fight for their rights on the broad basis of humanity they are not accused of selfishness. The cause of an oppressed group is fully as great as that of an oppressed nation and deserves no taunt of narrowness".
7
Nevertheless, the suffragists learned useful lessons from their male counterparts, emulating the Parnellite policy of "marking" government candidates at election time. The women, in turn, devised many tactics which would be imitated by the men: the 1912 hunger-strike by four women, among them Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, would be repeated by male nationalists not only in Ireland, but also by Gandhi and his disciples, who found further sanction for it in Indian tradition.
8
It was supported by a wide range of Irish opinion from Tom Kettle to Patrick Pearse: though Mrs. Skeffington found that some of her choices of nineteenth-century novels for prison reading proved unwise: "One instinctively skips in books the descriptions of food; I never realized before how much both
Scott and Dickens
gloat,
and how abstemious are the
Brontës and Jane Austen".
9
No doubt, the story of Catherine Earnshaw had a certain grim appeal.
Countess Constance Markievicz emerged as perhaps the most forceful proponent of the link between national and female self-sufficiency. Against the glamour and egalitarianism of the revived national movement, she held that the imperialists could offer women only a genteel bondage:
The feminist cause in Ireland is best served by ignoring England and English politicians .. . The United Irish League (with the exception of one branch, we believe), the
Loyal Orange Association, the Liberal Home Rule
Association are exclusively masculine bodies. The Gaelic League and the Sinn Féin organization are the only ones in existence at present where women are on an equal footing with men. For that reason they are worthy of the support of every Irish suffragist.
10
Many nationalists were emboldened by this analysis to question the logic of Irish women seeking the franchise from an oppressive
foreign
power. Celtic scholars buttressed such arguments by outlining the superior rights enjoyed by women – in fact, upper-class women – under the ancient Brehon laws; but Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington insisted that the English were only partly to blame, a contention which she proved (to her own satisfaction, at any rate) by demonstrating that contemporary Irish women had fewer rights in law than their English counterparts.
11
She was, of course, in favour of a universal adult suffrage, not merely "votes for ladies". Just how convoluted these debates could become was evident in the strictures of D. P. Moran's
Leader
to the effect that Irish
suffragism was an abject example of West Britonism: "the movement in Ireland smacks rather of imitation of the English, and we do not regard it as a native and spontaneous growth".
12
This was raising Ireland-as-not-England to the power of a pathology.
Most radical women of the time believed in an Ireland not merely free but feminist, not merely feminist but free: "so therefore", wrote Constance Markievicz, "the first step on the road to freedom is to realize ourselves as Irishwomen – not as Irish or merely as women, but as Irishwomen doubly enslaved and with a double battle to fight".
13
Even the Skeffingtons, in the years of rising national militancy before the rebellion, came to accept this view: "There can be no free nation without free women; neither can there be free women in an enslaved nation".
14
Yet they were both constantly troubled by the instrumental view of women adopted by many of the Irish Volunteers (founded in 1914). This group's rhetoric stressed "manly" and "martial" qualities and its leaders seemed distressingly prone to patronize the female professors and suffragists of
Cumann na mBan (The Society of Women), its sister organization.
The writer and critic Mary Colum acidly noted that Volunteer references to women were made "as obliquely as possible, in order not to alienate any potential supporters".
15
Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington was appropriately underwhelmed. Nor was she particularly impressed by the theory that misogyny in Ireland was entirely due to the British presence: she knew Irishmen too well to fall for so naïve a diagnosis.
The Irish Citizen
voiced her doubts:
Cumann na mBan ... continues to work for the Irish volunteers in a purely subordinate capacity, without any voice in the control of the organization, without any official declaration from the Irish Volunteers that the "rights and liberties" for which they stand include the rights and liberties of
women.
16
By then, however, the suffragist movement had been fatally split over whether or not to support war efforts; and Cumann na mBan was seizing the hour. Mrs. Skeffington was soon making regular appearances on its platforms, encouraged by Thomas MacDonagh, who had debated the treatment of women with her husband and who proved more sympathetic than some of his comrades. Countess Markievicz served as president of Cumann na mBan for nearly seven years. Its annual convention reported over eight hundred branches active in the country.
17
Some had joined in response to James Connolly's warning that the vote would not heal all women's disabilities: it was indeed possible, he said, that most women might exercise it in favour of the forces of reaction (which, he added, they had a perfect right to do).
18
He urged suffragists to follow the example of the independent group Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Erin) and to commit themselves to programmes for the alleviation of childhood poverty, poor housing and the problems of working mothers. The journal of the Inghinidhe was
Bean na hÉireann
(Irish Woman) and it often contained columns by Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz. The latter's gardening feature became a
cause célèbre
for its rather strained conflation of violent nationalism with pouting feminine gentility:
A good nationalist should look upon slugs in a garden much in the same way as she looks upon the English in Ireland, and only regret that she cannot crush the Nation's enemies as she can the garden's, with one tread of her dainty foot.
19
When the rebellion came in 1916, over ninety women took part. The largest contingent, about sixty, came from Cumann na mBan, whose members took no direct part in the fighting, but performed assigned tasks as nurses, cooks and dispatch-carriers (probably the most dangerous activity in Easter, Week).
20
Not all were pleased with the way in which they were treated. At Boland's Mills, Commandant Éamon de Valera turned down their offer of help, saying that he did not wish to add to his problems by employing unproven women warriors: much later, he would rather indiscreetly confess to Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington
that this had been a bad move, since it meant that he had to release some of his best men for "womanly" chores such as cooking and catering.
21
The ambiguous position of
women in the emerging republic was summed up by Mrs. Skeffington's own predicament: she had been named as one of the five members of the provisional government which would come into being if the Rising were successful, but she had been named without her knowledge or consent.
22
Nonetheless, the Proclamation was, for her and for many others, an inspiringly
radical document: it addressed itself equally to women as well as to men, it guaranteed equal rights to all, and it announced the welfare state of which so many, all over Europe, had dreamed. It implicitly recognized that the risks which women were taking for the republic were the same as those being run by men.
The women of the Citizen Army adopted an even higher profile.
23
Countess Markievicz commanded a battalion of troops in St. Stephen's Green; Dr.
Kathleen Lynn acted as chief medical officer, and
Margaret Skinnider led a squad of men against a British machine-gun post, being severely wounded in the attack. She had already acted as a roof-top sniper and, to the dismay of male comrades concerned for her safety, tried to organize a bombing of the
Shelbourne Hotel. In all, fifteen women fought at St. Stephen's Green. After the hostilities had ceased, about eighty were arrested, among them
Helena Molony, the Abbey actress, trade unionist and suffragist. The countess was held at
Kilmainham Jail, where she underwent the bitter experience of having to listen daily for the gunshots which executed a succession of her male comrades. She, too, was sentenced to death, but the verdict was commuted, and she was transferred to
Holloway Prison in England, along with
Kathleen Clarke. The latter had been designated to take charge of the entire Irish Republican Brotherhood in the event of its Supreme Council being arrested:
24
clearly, the British took a somewhat less gallant view of the rebel women than did some of their Irish opponents.