E3W Literature | University of Texas

Susan Cannon Harris
Gender and Modern Irish Drama
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
320 pages
ISBN: 0253341175
Price: $41.95

Reviewed by Joe Moser

Gender and Modern Irish Drama is a book that moves seamlessly between academic disciplines, including fascinating forays into medical and cultural history, anthropology and demographics. Susan Cannon Harris has crafted an amazingly readable text that should please the initiated and the neophyte alike. Though the book focuses principally on Irish drama produced in the forty year period surrounding the Irish War of Independence (1899-1939), concurrent with the most prominent years of W.B. Yeats’s creative life, it has remarkable relevance in terms of contemporary debates about gender roles, post-colonialism, violent resistance and martyrdom. Additionally, Harris offers the rare contribution to ethnic and gender studies that is concerned equally with men and women in literature and culture, as she approaches the dramatic works of four politically embroiled male Irish figures, W.B. Yeats, John M. Synge, Padraig Pearse, and Sean O’Casey.

In her introduction, entitled “Bodies and Blood,” Harris begins, characteristically, with a striking historical anecdote that resonates throughout the pages that follow. She gives an account of the Armagh prison dirty protest of 1980, in which confined Republican women sought political status by refusing to dispose of their bodily wastes by conventional means. Instead, like their male counterparts in the IRA had done during their own dirty protests, they used their cell walls and floors as their only toilets. This type of protest met with little success with the British authorities, and the dirty protests eventually gave way to the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981. The latter protest was led by Bobby Sands, who gained increased popular sympathy for the Republican cause after he and nine other men died on hunger strike in the face of Margaret Thatcher’s intractable refusal to allow Irish Republicans political prisoner status. However, Harris points out that, while the Republican movement supported the male prisoners’ dirty protests, the women’s dirty protests were considered “unspeakable” by the same faction (1). The idea of menstrual blood as a component of protest proved an all too real reminder of women’s biological reality, one that the Republican movement has consistently sought to ignore throughout the twentieth century.

As Harris goes on to describe in her subsequent chapters, the dramatic formula for blood sacrifice in Ireland suppresses and represses the bodies and blood of women. Within this paradigm, Irish men are the martyrs and the only ones who bleed, though ideally offstage, while Irish women, idealized and tied to the land (“Mother Ireland”), receive their sacrifice and are responsible for guarding their homes and bodies against invasion from outsiders. For Harris, the fundamental example of such a drama is Yeats’ and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, and she gives a full treatment of the play’s revolutionary implications in terms of politics and gender in chapter one, “Body and Soul: Yeats, the Famine, and the Two Cathleens.”

Providing wonderfully exhaustive supporting evidence from Republican newspapers such as the Arthur Griffith-edited The United Irishman, Harris explains why nationalist audiences rejected Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen (1899) as much as they embraced his and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, written and performed three years later. The first play committed the unpalatable offense of portraying a landowning Irish woman selling her soul to the devil to save her starving tenants, and thus flew in the face of nationalist dogma that idealized the female body and spirit as inviolable temples. On the other hand, Yeats’s second Cathleen play, Cathleen ni Houlihan, has no threatening ideas about feminine agency and thus fared amazingly well among the nationalist crowd. This play features the supernatural, sexless Cathleen who comes to Killala during the 1798 Rising in the guise of a hag, speaks in allegories, and exhorts the young peasant Michael to choose glorious death for his country over an opportune marriage to a comely maiden with a considerable dowry. After Michael makes his choice and goes offstage to die for Ireland, the play closes with his younger brother’s recognition of Cathleen transformed – also offstage – into a beautiful young woman with “the walk of a queen.” As Harris writes,
The promise of fertility that this rejuvenated Cathleen holds out is not, of course, literal. She produces not actual children but the nation itself; and she does it by demanding blood, not sex. The message of Cathleen, then, is that violent rebellion – successful or otherwise – will solve on the ideal plane what cannot be resolved in the material one. (59)
Thus, though Michael’s fiancée and family lose considerable wealth and security as a result of his death, he has helped revive the ideal manhood and femininity that has been sapped by colonial invaders. From a nationalist standpoint, his unseen blood cleanses and fertilizes the desecrated earth.

It becomes increasingly clear throughout Harris’s book that this dramatic formula of blood sacrifice is repressive to men as well as women in the Irish context. In chapter two, “Under Siege: Blood, Borders, and the Body Politic,” she considers the effects of the Imperial English medical establish¬ment and prevailing eugenicist ideas on early-twentieth-century Irish culture, and specifically, how prevailing attitudes about medicine and the human body came to bear on the staging of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and the attendant riots. Harris asserts that male nationalists projected their fears of bodily, cultural and territorial vulnerability onto Irish women: it was the sacred duty of the “weaker” sex to safeguard their bodies and homes from foreign corruption and provide an ideal environment for rearing pure-hearted Republican men. Thus, as Harris details, in his most controversial plays, In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) and Playboy (1907), Synge’s portrayal of Irish women as material and sexual beings – and furthermore, as figures of domestic resistance – poses a profound threat to nationalist ideology. However, Harris also argues that the main impetus for the Playboy riots was not Synge’s shocking portrayal of feminine desire for a young man believed to have murdered his own father, but instead the graphic portrayal of the violability of the male body onstage. At Playboy’s premier, when Christy’s father, Old Mahon, makes his first entrance sporting a massive head wound, this spectacle more than anything else, according to Harris’s evidence, unsettled the audience and started the public outcry against Synge’s play.

In her reading of Playboy, Harris walks a fine line, as she acknowledges Synge’s own elitist, eugenicist, and primitivist thinking, quoting extensively from his pseudo-anthropological work, The Aran Islands, yet ultimately she reads Playboy as an affirmative play about the power of language to provide individuals – even those that eugenicists would write off as insane degenerates – with the power of self-definition. Harris provides a wonderfully complex assessment of Synge – the man and his work – one that neither romanticizes nor tarnishes the legacy of a great artist who died in his prime, as she likens the author to his most famous character:
Given that many of Synge’s later critics explain his “morbidity” in terms of his illness, it is hard not to read the ad hominem attacks made on Synge by his contemp¬oraries...as having some reference to his physical condition, which was deteriorating during the production of Playboy. In Christy – the quiet, slight, delicate, physically weak hero who constructs out of words alone the virility and health that biology has apparently denied him – Synge both accepts and resists eugenist conceptions of disease and the body. . . If biological purity remains an already lost cause, there is still the chance of redemption through reconstruction – not through the shedding of blood but through the telling of lies. Disease may have breached the borders and invaded the Irish body, but as long as Christy’s command of language makes him “master of all fights,” imperial science will not have the last word. (122)
I would only add that, although his reputation is founded on lies, specifically the idea that he killed his father, which proves immensely attractive to country girls, Christy succeeds in making part of that fiction a reality, as he successfully becomes his own master and makes his roguish father into his servant, all through the power of his rhetoric. The tragedy of this comic play is that Christy ultimately falls just short of winning the hand of his equal in speech and wit, the impetuous Pegeen Mike. Christy represents a pointed repudiation of the nationalist paradigm of blood sacrifice. He is finally unfettered by ideas of community, patriarchy and nation when he exits the stage bound for America with his father in tow. His rhetoric of self-definition will never be amenable to causes based on group identity, and this aspect of Synge’s play likely chafed nationalist audiences as well.

Further complicating her examination of the Irish formula of male martyrdom and female idealization, Harris views Padraig Pearse as a man who is both liberated and confined by his espousal of blood sacrifice as a political tool. Beginning chapter three, “Excess of Love: Padraig Pearse and the Erotics of Sacrifice,” with a concise account of the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916, Harris discusses Pearse’s role in the rebellion before proceeding to look closely at the plays and speeches he had written in the preceding years for the genesis and development of his views on the power of bloodshed and martyrdom. Compiling striking examples from Pearse’s critically neglected literary output, Harris builds the case for Pearse’s constrained homosexuality. Her psychosexual reading of Pearse’s writing takes Foucault’s work in The History of Sexuality a step further, as she applies his ideas about the medicalization and pathologization of homosexuality that originated in the Victorian era to Pearse’s life and cultural context as a closeted man in early-twentieth century Ireland. Harris contends that the leader of the Irish Volunteers finds a socially acceptable outlet for his homoerotic feelings in ascribing to and enhancing the Republican reverence for brotherly love and male martyrdom. However, just as this paradigm projects national vulnerability onto women and represses their material and bodily needs, it conceals the shedding of the “cleansing blood” and the bodily suffering of the actual Republican men killed by English forces in the Easter Rising. His own dramas, like the early ones of Yeats, emphasized the purity of blood sacrifice and concealed maimed bodies and death pangs from the view of audiences. Fittingly, it was the highly publicized – though not public – executions of Pearse and other leaders of the Rising that brought their cause the popular support it had previously lacked.

In chapter four, “The Body of Truth: Sensa¬tionalism and Sacrifice in Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy,” Harris charts the evolution of the socialist playwright’s political convictions, identifying his break with Pearse and the Irish Volunteers as a result of the Dublin transport workers’ strike of 1913, which Republicans such as Pearse failed to support. Through analyzing O’Casey’s letters to the James Connolly-edited Irish Worker in the years leading up to the Easter Rising, Harris reveals that the weary cynicism evinced in the Dublin Trilogy is likely a product of O’Casey’s own frustrated Republican idealism:
Before the strike, O’Casey’s letters show him to be a vocal and enthusiastic proponent of cultural nationalism, belonging both to an Irish pipe band and to the Gaelic League...and defending the power and beauty of Irish history, legend, and culture in language that would have been quite at home in the pages of the Irish Volunteer. (173)
Harris goes on to contend that O’Casey’s famous trio of plays, while debunking Republican idealism and the sanctity of blood sacrifice, affirms dangerous essentialisms about Irish men and women. Though the Dublin Trilogy – consisting of Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926) – sparked immense controversy for its unflattering portrayals of nationalist “heroes,” O’Casey’s male characters tend to conform to the drunken “stage Irishman” stereotype, while his heroines are invariably saintly matrons who survive poverty and bereavement despite the men in their lives. For Harris, both O’Casey and Synge are remarkably problematic for their claims to realism and authenticity in their dramas. Synge purported to know intimately the lives and speech of the agrarian Irish, just as O’Casey believed he was portraying the “truth” of urban Irish life in poverty. These assertions fueled the controversies surrounding the productions of both writers’ works at the Abbey Theatre, and they also leave both men open to critique for their respective limitations in giving “realistic” interpretations of gender relations.

In her final chapter, “Misbirth of a Nation: Yeats and the Irish Free State,” Harris examines the political involvement and dramatic output of W.B. Yeats in the 1930s, the twilight of his years. As the chapter title suggests, Yeats and many of his contemporaries felt deeply disillusioned by the defaulted promises of the new independent Irish government, which was in many ways more repressive than the old English colonial regime. Under Eamon DeValera, Ireland became a staunchly conservative country, implementing stringent laws enforcing censorship and sexual propriety, the former frustrating even for writers as revered as Yeats and the latter particularly oppressive to women. DeValera’s legacy continues to affect Irish policy today, as divorce was only legalized in 1997 and abortion remains a crime.

Susan Harris’s book succeeds, first and foremost, as a compelling and dynamic account of a defining, turbulent period in Irish cultural history. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Irish politics, gender studies, stage history, and colonialism in general. The book’s preface lists ten categorical headings in its Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data, and yet these fail adequately to encapsulate the breadth of Harris’s achievement. Her book not only grants readers a deeper understanding of four towering figures in Irish letters – as artists and as men – but at the same time it makes important distinctions in terms of politics, science and socioeconomics that help to elucidate prominent contemporary texts. For instance, her discussion of the public enmity of O’Casey and Pearse brings into focus the tensions between the socialist Irish Citizen Army and the more bourgeois Irish Volunteers, which provides critical background for Roddy Doyle’s recent fictional account of an orphan-cum-Republican in A Star Called Henry. By the same token, in discussing the paranoia stemming from early-twentieth-century scientific advances – like the microscope – that alerted the public to the presence of harmful microbes and increased fears of bodily vulnerability that informed the riots over Synge’s Playboy in 1907, viewers of Martin Scorsese’s latest biopic, The Aviator, can better grasp the potential origins of Howard Hughes’s (b. 1905) obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Harris also consistently pits her arguments against destructive essentialisms about the Irish – and by extension, other post-colonial societies – as she attributes Republican attitudes about gender roles and blood sacrifice as much to the effects of colonialism as to Catholic beliefs and iconography. She offers an even-handed treatment of Irish Republicanism, accounting for its extremism in terms of the colonial conflict while maintaining a sharp focus on the material and bodily costs exacted on both Irish women and men. The book closes with a statement of guarded optimism about the future of gender relations in Ireland in the aftermath of the Troubles: “If that poisoned wound ever does heal, it will be interesting to see how the successful completion of the peace process – whatever form that ultimately takes – changes the situation of Irish women” (272). Harris successfully identifies old wounds that continue to impact gender relations in postcolonial cultures.