Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

(Grace) #1

This kind of representation of Celticism is also apparent in racist
colonial discourse as in Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State
of Ireland (1596), where he regards the Irish as ‘other’.^9 In this way,
argues Deane, Irish nationalism accepted the vocabulary of colonial
discourse, differing only in the positive answer it gave in response to
negative colonial representation. Rather than break from the
essentialist view of what constitutes Irish identity, the Yeatsian
Revival repeated the structures upon which colonialist racism was
based with the effect of creating further stereotypes regarding
‘Irishness.’ An example of this is found in Yeats’s play On Baile’s
Strand (1904) which is set in a scene of ‘misty light as of a sea mist’
in a Celtic past where heroes such as the fierce ‘Cuchulain, King of
Muirthemne’ stomp the stage. This is a romantic and invented idea of
Ireland as the mysterious Emerald Isle where feudal warriors fight
between themselves.^10 As Protestant Ascendency writers attempted to
forge a national consciousness in the face of colonialism, there was a
fine line to be trodden between colonial and nationalist representation.
As Colin Graham notices in his essay ‘Ireland and the
Persistence of Authenticity’ (1999): ‘Authenticity’s origins in the
colonial processes as well as in its radiation from the colonial context
need to be comprehended [...]’.^11 Moreover:


Authenticity and claims to authenticity underlie the conceptual and cultural
denial of dominance. The nationís very reason for being, its logic of existence,
is its claim to an undeniable authenticity as a pure expression of the ërealí, the
obvious, the natural. In the Irish context, claims for authenticity move from the
ërevolutionaryí (in all its aspects) to the dominant, following the path of the
nation.^12

9 Seamus Deane, ëThe Celtic Revival, 1780ñ1880í, A Short History of Irish
Literature (Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1986, 1994), p.84; Edmund
Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed., W.L.Renwick (London:
Eric Partridge, 1934), pp.6ñ3.
10 William Butler Yeats, On Baileís Strand, Modern Irish Drama, ed., John P.
Harrington (London: Norton, 1991), p.12. Cf. Declan Kiberd, Inventing
Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
11 Colin Graham, ëIreland and the Persistence of Authenticityí, Ireland and
Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity, eds., Colin Graham and
Richard Kirkland (London: Macmillan, 1999), p.9.
12 Ibid., p.8.

Free download pdf