THE OSCHOLARS

___________

Vol. IV No. 4-9

issue no 35-41:

April - September 2007

And I? May I Say Nothing

Click for the main pages of this issue of THE OSCHOLARS

To the Table of Contents of this page

To hub page | To THE OSCHOLARS home page

In the last issue we published a response by Talia Schaffer to Grace Brockington’s review of her Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle ; and, by kind permission, the abstract of a paper on The Picture of Dorian Gray by Ellen Scheible, given at the 2007 American Conference for Irish Studies.

This month, we publish

(i) a short informal essay by Dr Lucia Krämer on the German versions of The Importance of being Earnest.

(ii) Draft for a paper by Dr Kate Macdonald that was given at Varieties of Voice, the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE) annual conference, Leuven, 13th-16th December 2006 on ‘Orality and voice in John Betjeman’s “The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel”: from the 1890s to the 1920s, and back again’.

(iii) Six abstracts of papers dealing Irish women certainly known to, and possibly by, Oscar Wilde, given at the Conference ‘Irish Feminist Thought’. National University of Ireland, Galway, 13th-14th April 2007. This was convened by Dr Maureen O’Connor, Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) Post-Doctoral Fellow, and Associate Editor of THE OSCHOLARS for Ireland.

I. Dr Lucia Krämer: The German versions of The Importance of being Earnest

Y

ou were interested in finding out why Bunbury has established itself as the most prevalent German title for The Importance of Being Earnest, which is especially surprising in view of the fact that German has the name ‘Ernst’, which is the perfect equivalent of English ‘Ernest’ (as opposed to, for example, the name ‘Aimé’, which has been used in French translations of Wilde’s play). I’m not sure I can give any final answers, but here are a few thoughts on the subject. May I add that I’d be extremely grateful for any kind of comment on this.

I’ve consulted quite a number of German translations of Earnest, and what I’ve found out is this: the very first translation of Earnest had the title Bunbury. We cannot be absolutely sure who the translator was, but Rainer Kohlmayer convincingly argues for Felix Paul Greve, whose name is given as that of the translator of Earnest in the first German edition of Wilde’s complete works (publ. 1906-1908). In this edition the play is called Bunbury, and this was also the title of the play when it was first performed in Germany. Before the actual first performance in 1902, the play had however been announced as “Der unerläßliche Ernst”, a title that pays tribute to the pun in Wilde’s own title. Although Greve eventually opted for Bunbury, there are several German translators who have chosen the other approach, for example H. Freiherr von Teschenberg with his translation Ernst sein! (1903), F. Blei and Carl Zeiß with their translation Ernst! (1905/6) and E. Sander in Vor allem Ernst! (1934/35). More recently, Hermann Motschach has created a translation entitled Ernst sein ist alles (1993).

Motschach’s text is typical of most German translations of Earnest in that it has a double title, combining an expression that puns on ‘Ernst’/‘ernst’ with the term ‘Bunbury’. In Motschach’s case the full title is Ernst sein ist alles – Bunbury. More frequently, however, the order of the two elements is the other way round. Examples are Bunbury (Ernst sein ist alles), a translation and adaptation by Albert Steeb (1980), Bunbury, oder Ernst muß man sein by Paul Baudisch (1970), Bunbury, oder Das Vergnügen, Ernst zu sein by Helmar Harald Fischer (1992), Bunbury, oder Es ist wichtig, Ernst zu sein by Peter Torberg (1998), Bunbury, oder Wie wichtig es ist, ernst zu sein by Christine Hoeppener (1998) and Rainer Kohlmayer’s Bunbury, oder Ernst sein ist wichtig (1981). This strategy has a long tradition. A German edition of Wilde’s works in five volumes from 1922, for example, includes the Greve translation, which is here entitled Bunbury, oder Die Bedeutung des Ernstseins. In a two-volume edition of the works from 1930 the same version of the text has the title Bunbury, oder Die Bedeutung ernst zu sein.

This strategy of double titles still continues today, both in printed translations and in stage performances. The unique word Bunbury usually serves as a kind of brand name for the printed or performed text. In contrast to the many different expressions punning on ‘Ernst’/‘ernst’ that German translators have used, ‘Bunbury’ has, after all, the advantage of being a stable and instantly recognizable term. This is probably the main reason why in most printed editions this term forms the main title, and why in cheap editions like the very popular Reclam editions Bunbury has always been chosen either as the main title (as in the current edition) or even as the only title (as in the 1961 edition) for Wilde’s play. This is also the reason why Elfriede Jelinek’s translation Ernst ist das Leben (Bunbury), whose printed version can be marketed on the prestige of the translator, has usually been entitled Bunbury – Ernst ist das Leben for performances in theatres.

Another advantage concerning the term ‘Bunbury’ is that it does not draw attention to the process of translation itself in the way that the puns on ‘Ernst’/‘ernst’ do. All the German translations of Wilde’s play that I have come across retain the English names of the characters. Gwendolen may be turned into Gwendolin or Gwendoline, but Algernon is always Algernon, Cecily is always Cecily and Jack is always Jack, except when he is Ernst (he is never Ernest). Kohlmayer has pointed out that the early reception of Wilde’s play in Germany focussed rather strongly on the quintessentially English nature of the play and the characters, and retaining the original names supports such an approach. In contrast, introducing the German name ‘Ernst’ into such an English context could have a jarring effect. This is probably also the reason why the names ‘Hans’ and ‘Johann’, which are the perfect German equivalents of ‘Jack’ and ‘John’, have never been used in German translations of The Importance of Being Earnest. So despite the fact that all German translators have put the German name ‘Ernst’ among the other exclusively English names in the play, most of them have avoided disrupting the illusion of its fictional world by drawing attention to the German name ‘Ernst’ in their titles. Moreover Kohlmayer points out that the early performances of Earnest in Germany showed little awareness of the philosophical dimension and social criticism of the play. Earnest was played as a lightweight farce that was only intended as frothy entertainment. Again, the pun on ‘Ernst’/‘ernst’ does not lend itself so well to such an approach as the absurd word ‘Bunbury’.

I suppose that in the course of the reception process of Earnest in Germany many of the decisions and strategies of the first translators became a kind of norm from which later translators could only deviate at their peril. So The Importance of Being Earnest is nowadays predominantly referred to as Bunbury, and a Jack on a German stage may find out at the end of the play that, naturally, he has the quite unnatural name of ‘Ernst John’.

II. Kate Macdonald: Orality and voice in John Betjeman’s “The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel”: from the 1890s to the 1920s, and back again’.

M

y interest in this poem began because Buchan was in it. This seemed strange, anachronistic, and I really couldn’t see why Buchan and Betjeman and Oscar Wilde should be connected. My feeling is that the poem is not about Wilde at all, but about Betjeman’s impression of the past heard through the voices of the present, which representing voices of the past. The poem can be read as a convoluted expression of anti-heartiness set in confined spaces, but, in the end, it may be nothing more than a misunderstanding.

Introduction

Let’s start with the poem.

The poem describes how it might have been when Wilde was arrested in 1895. There are three voices: the voice of the narrator (which has been recorded by Betjeman as dry and mild, without emotion); the voice of Wilde, which is petulant, alternating between a focus on the immediate and the specific, and on broader underlying principles: and the Mockney voice of the policeman as an enforcer of moral standards. The poem also describes a crux in cultural and literary history: the fall of Wilde, and the parallel defeat of aestheticism by the hearties. The poem also, incidentally, acknowledges the arrival on the literary stage of the 1890s of a writer who was to become an epitome of heartiness, but who here was appearing in print (not for the first time) in a flagship journal of aesthetic values: John Buchan.

I regard this poem as more than a reconstruction of historical record, or as only a clever undergraduate hommage to the myth of Wilde, because of when and by whom it was written. John Betjeman wrote this poem in the late 1920s, while an undergraduate at Oxford, when he was part of a surge of revitalising enthusiasm for the aesthetic values of the 1890s. His voice takes us back to the 1890s with its affectionate admiration, but it is when and how he uses Buchan as an expression of heartiness that the times become unstuck, and we do not know from which period we are being addressed: the 1890s, or the 1920s.

What I would like to attempt here is an untangling of the poem from its usual position as an appendix to Wildean myth, to consider it as Betjeman may have meant it, and also from the perspective of the time in which it was written.

The poem is unified within a familiar and traditional structural rhythm, tightly held, but with a wide range of stress patterns within the structure. Variety is also introduced by the different rhymes for lines two and four of each stanza, and in the range of syllables per line, from eight to eleven, depending on the requirement of the speaking voice, and the tone.

Despite the free movement of conventional speech patterns in these lines, I think there is a strong suggestion here, at a very basic level, of confinement, something in motion held within rigid rules. A reflection of this idea can be seen in the lace curtains and the ‘bees’-winged eyes’, in lines three and four of the first stanza, which suggest a fluttering motion which is yet held in place.

The first and last stanzas are the only ones to share a b-rhyme; ‘skies/eyes’ and ‘eyed/outside’, tying the first and last stanzas of the poem together neatly. The rhyme scheme reuses only one line as a refrain: ‘For this is the Cadogan Hotel’, in stanzas five and eight. This echoes the opinions of the poet and the policeman that socially awkward activities are taking place in the heart of respectability, and that standards must be maintained, of good service in the hotel, and of not disturbing the residential peace by resisting arrest.

Alliteration also contributes to the poem’s subliminal suggestions of being tied together. Each verse, except one, uses alliteration in a subdued way, ensuring a smooth sound on recitation with words and lines linked. The exception is the second stanza, which is quite hard to say out loud. Here consonants clash deliberately, drawing our attention to the poet’s disjointed feelings on seeing the new red-brick buildings of Pont Street, which do not have, for example, the cream-coloured, aesthetically-pleasing classical proportions of the previous century, and are as unromantic and unaesthetic as gaslight and an unmade bed. The surroundings as well as the poet are not comfortable in this Victorian hotel room, but they are depicted with loving accuracy. Betjeman was to become an expert on the architecture of the period. The palms and the Nottingham lace are standard furnishings for the time; hock and seltzer was a standard Victorian aperitif which Wilde made famous. He was also well-known for his astrakhan coats, and undoubtedly owned at least one morocco portmanteau: these are all details with impeccable antecedents.

Pronunciation is important in this poem. We are invited to use the upper-class pronunciation of ‘Cadogan’ as ‘ka-duggan’, not ‘ka-dgan’ or ‘kDOEgn’ (which are Edinburgh pronunciations, for example), because the stress in line four of stanza five is presented in italics, and thus dictates the stress pattern of the rest of the line.

Betjeman’s exaggerated diphthongs from the voice of the pantomime policeman plead to be spoken aloud. This really is a performance piece. The reader-aloud is forced to slow down, to enunciate, to work at those complicated conjunctions of aspirated and tongue-sticking consonants. Reading dialogue aloud demands empathy, and a degree of acting. Do we pronounce ‘cretins’ in French or in English? How to convey the affection and panic in Wilde’s voice as he arranges his affairs?

Betjeman intended this poem to be recited to an approving audience, who would appreciate its dignity and pathos: there is no mockery, and no martyrdom. Wilde is shown as petulant and demanding, but also steady in his adherence to the importance of details. On hearing this poem read aloud, the audience is given a sense of impending social doom, the steady metre of the stanzas bringing the inevitable arrival of the police closer and closer.

The epigram at the heart of the poem is impeccably Wildean: ‘Approval of what is approved of is as false as a well-kept vow.’ I do find this hard to interpret because it is aggravatingly sybilline in its ambiguity. I think the first part can be translated as ‘following the crowd is not conducive to integrity’, but I am stumped by the idea of a ‘well-kept vow’ being ‘false’: there is a contradiction there which mocks the idea of a vow being ‘well-kept’, thus traducing conventional, and also Victorian, ideas of truth and honour. It could also be that Wilde (through Betjeman’s direction) or Betjeman (through Wilde’s voice) had issues with the concept of keeping a ‘vow’ per se. My final conclusion is that if the epigram merely states that a lack of integrity can be compared to fidelity, then fidelity itself must be tainted.

John Buchan is placed as the subject of this remark, but I find it hard to see his inclusion here as anything other than deliberate anachronism, since in 1895 Buchan was nobody. Later, of course, in Betjeman’s own time, he embodied heartiness, but to untangle who is saying what at which time at this point in the poem is getting ahead of ourselves.

The poem’s history

The poem describes Wilde’s arrest that ended his social career, and put him into prison. It symbolises the triumph of Establishment, conservative, Victorian values over the antithetical values of aestheticism, which Wilde had hoped would supersede traditional mores. Betjeman uses the poem as the narrative of an event to suggest that hearty views, anti-aesthetic views, have prevailed. But the narrative voice is ambiguous. There are shades of feeling which suggest sympathy and disapproval for both sides, and the presence of Buchan signals an overt anti-aesthetic/pro-hearty statement (for the 1920s) which is supported by Betjeman giving Wilde a demanding and petulant voice. Who does Betjeman approve of here? What is his voice saying?

Betjeman had had a thing about Wilde for years. While at school he read Wilde because Wilde was disapproved of by teachers and parents alike, and he began a correspondence with Lord Alfred Douglas. Betjeman’s father found out about the correspondence, told Betjeman exactly what ‘a bugger’ was and did, and put all further letters from Douglas into the safe, unopened.

But Betjeman was not interested, except perhaps in a symbolic way, in being ‘Bosie’s boy’ the way Douglas had been for Wilde. He maintained the friendship with Douglas until the latter’s death in 1945, and admired his poetry, some might say to excess. While a student at Oxford Betjeman wrote an essay contesting that the poetry of Lord Alfred Douglas was better than that of Shakespeare, and his tutor, C S Lewis, also classifiable as a hearty, was not amused (Hillier 1988, 135). It is probable that Betjeman did not think any such thing, that he was hoping for an entertaining exercise in critical debate, but Lewis did not ‘get’ Betjeman’s undergraduate humour. They were not a good combination.

It is entirely probable that Nancy Mitford was satirising Betjeman in her novel Christmas Pudding (1932), by drawing him as an obsessive on Victoriana, but Douglas was impressed by Betjeman’s ‘surprisingly authoritative strength behind the larky whimsical mask’ (Wilson, 47). Betjeman was attracted to the rebelliousness of what ‘Bosie’ stood for (one wonders if he had read Wilde’s De Profundis, which is not flattering to Douglas’ character), and he latched onto Douglas as a last representative of a past aesthetic period which Betjeman and his friends were passionately interested in remaking in their own image. Betjeman did the same for other poets of the period, notably Theodore Wratislaw, who is the subject of Betjeman’s poem ‘On Seeing an Old Poet in the Café Royal’, published in 1940. This poem is a lament for ageing poets of an older age, and for the older age itself, seen without sentiment from the age of modernism.

Betjeman offered the Oscar Wilde poem to Geoffrey Grigson for publication in New Verse in 1933, but it was refused (Hillier 1988, 358). In June that year it appeared in the revived magazine Oxford and Cambridge, and was illustrated by R S Sherriffs.

The poem was published again in Betjeman’s third collection, Continual Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse (1937), but despite its popularity, it was not looked on with favour by poetry critics. ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde’ was only included in John Sparrow’s edition of Betjeman’s Collected Poems in 1947, for example, under ‘Juvenilia’.

Betjeman was looking backwards when he wrote this poem, to thirty years before. In 1961, a little over thirty years later, the critic Derek Stanford wrote:

One of the surprises of Mr Betjeman’s poems is the feeling they convey of just how quickly a past becomes “the past” – “period” era, so to speak. Time today moves quicker than ever before, separating us from the years behind with a ruthless severance. Before the Great War, the phrase “period dress” would probably have implied “historical costume” – the garments, that is, of, say, a century ago. Today, in one lifetime, we see our decades reflected back to us from a great distance. (Stanford 85)

In writing this poem Betjeman was looking back to when his parents were young, the same age as he was. As we have seen, Betjeman regarded Wilde differently to the way his father did. His use of voice in this poem confuses time and draws together the opposing points of view to echo the poem’s subliminal impression of connectedness and confinement. We no longer know which voice is from which time, and we are trapped, bottling to and fro between periods like a bee between a curtain and a window-pane.

Let’s go back to the poem.

So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book:
and Buchan has got in it now:

First, I want to consider time, and then tone.

Time

The poem is set in April 1895. It can’t be set at any other period in time because the arrest of Wilde was a historical fact, and Betjeman is, not, I think, being metaphorical here. Volume 5 of the Yellow Book came out in April 1985, so presumably we must look for Buchan in that issue. He’s not there. To most readers it would be rather surprising to learn that Buchan ever appeared in the Yellow Book at all, but he did: three times, which was a pretty high occurrence rate. Did Betjeman glance at the wrong issue in the Bodleian or in a private collection, and make a simple error with the date? Buchan appears in volumes 8, 9 and 12, in January and April 1896 and January 1897. His last Yellow Book story, ‘At the Article of Death’, nearly was the article of death for the Yellow Book, since the magazine folded with the next issue, volume 13.

If Betjeman did make an error with the date, it would be uncharacteristic of a man who took such care over small details in his work. However, there exists the possibility that if Buchan was present in the poem to be snooted at by Wilde, then Betjeman may also have felt that such a figure of derision might not be worth the trouble of verifying exactly when he had stormed the aesthetic portals of the Yellow Book.

I think that there was no error, that Betjeman pulled Buchan’s first appearance back in time by a year, to heighten the tragedy of Wilde’s fall by a more immediate opposition of values. Wilde’s downfall symbolised the downfall of aestheticism, which in turn brought down the Yellow Book itself. Wilde’s association with the Yellow Book, although he never appeared in its pages as a contributor, was blamed for its drop in sales. After volume 5, and Wilde’s arrest, a group of six Yellow Book authors demanded that Wilde be dropped from the Yellow Book’s advertising for the sake of their own reputations, and its publisher, John Lane, agreed under protest (J Lewis May, 80). A year later Buchan appeared, and although his contributions were not hearty at all, under the terms in which his later thrillers and gripping yarns could be called hearty, they represented a breath of cold but fresh air.

Tone

Hitherto, the Yellow Book had largely contained intense little vignettes exploring personal fidelity, which Kipling, for instance, was to satirise much later in his short story ‘My Son’s Wife’ (1917). Buchan’s Yellow Book stories concerned death, loneliness, misery and a faint hope of Christian redemption, all set in cold and wet environments of poverty, particularly the Border landscapes of southern Scotland. These were a far cry from financially comfortable country-house settings, or the self-absorbed talk of art and artists. While it is unlikely that Buchan’s stories were published as an effort to change the Yellow Book’s image and to give it a ‘healthier’ outlook, it is undeniable that his work represented a change of direction for the magazine. At the time the Yellow Book was one of many literary magazines publishing short fiction, and since Buchan was already working for John Lane and had been published by him in 1895, it seemed an obvious choice of a journal to submit his stories to. Other authors, for instance Conrad, considered the Yellow Book as one among many, not as the principal shop window for short story writers (Mix, 273). Buchan himself said of the Yellow Book, many years later, that he ‘had always thought it a very odd medium for work of mine to appear in’ (Mix, 197). The recollections of Lord Tweedsmuir, as Buchan became, from a position of diplomatic power must be interpreted as having a different set of priorities than those of a 21 year-old impoverished student. Nonetheless, Buchan may well have had reservations about appearing in the Yellow Book (as well as having had his appearance in the Betjeman poem brought to his attention).

It is not on record whether Betjeman detested Buchan or not, but I think it unlikely that he was a fan in critical terms. It is more likely, given Betjeman’s interest in the Victorian period and with pederastic poets, and by his association with privileged subversives like Nancy Mitford, that anyone as Establishment as Buchan was in the late 1920s would have been fair game for an extended tease. In the poem, what Wilde objects to in ‘has got in it now’ is disapproval of what Buchan stands for, not of his inoffensive person. It could not have been possible for Wilde to have objected to Buchan in 1895 because in that year Buchan was nobody, even if he was about to have his first novel published by John Lane. Betjeman manipulated time to get Buchan where he wanted him, to make him the fall guy.

In the end, I think we have to come back to the poem itself. The name ‘Buchan’ is a perfectly placed trochee. The stress lies in the right place for that line, and it is legitimate to ask whether Betjeman was really, ultimately, only looking for the perfect rhyme scheme to complete his line. To have a two-syllable Yellow Book author in there was probably his goal: to have the name of an author so amusingly anti-everything that the Yellow Book had stood for would have seemed a perfect concatenation of circumstance. The structure of the poem is so neatly underpinned by its rhythm that a missing foot in a line would make a hiccup in a chain of syllables otherwise perfectly placed for effect.

For me, the joke is that Betjeman may never have bothered looking at the stories that Buchan published in the Yellow Book. He may have assumed that here was a 1920s idol of the hearties revealed as having an aesthetic past. If he actually had read these early dark and unsettling stories by Buchan, he would not, I think, have placed Buchan in opposition to everything that Wilde stood for.

v Kate Macdonald teaches at the University of Ghent / Gent / Gand, in Belgium. She is currently working on a John Buchan Companion, ‘essentially a mini-encyclopaedia of his fiction’.

III. Six abstracts of papers given at the Conference ‘Irish Feminist Thought’
National University of Ireland, Galway, 13th-14th April 2007.

1. “Power to think - power to achieve. Sex is only an accident, but the world has made man the independent creature - and I desired independence”: Broken masquerades, subversion and muted protestations in the fiction of Katherine Cecil Thurston.

Alan Bergin

The daughter of the once Lord Mayor of Cork, Paul Madden, Katherine Thurston wrote at the dawn of the twentieth century, a time when it could be surmised that women’s literary achievements remained very much on the periphery. Coming on the heels of the New Woman fiction of the late 1800’s, Thurston’s fiction bore little of the brashness that marked ‘the fiction of sex’. She instead, followed in the footsteps of Sarah Grand and George Egerton, in proposing that the female consciousness amounted to more than symbolic vulnerability, in need of preservation. Thurston’s fiction everywhere, celebrated identity re-formation, empowerment and sexual and aesthetic liberation. This paper will attempt to address Thurston’s own re-imagining of the female consciousness in Irish writing, a re-imagining which was less concerned with subscribing to preconceived roles in any nationalist agenda, or upholding the enforced societal mores. What would emerge with Thurston and a number of her contemporaries at the time was a brand of fiction that sought to transcend limitations and which would ultimately herald the emergence of an early Irish modernist discourse. A branch of thought that has long since been lost under the achievements of the male counterparts, this paper will attempt to address this submergence of a female voice in a style of writing that not only added to the richness & variety that characterizes the Irish literary tradition, but which served to stimulate the feminist imagination.

2. A Rebel Without Applause: Hannah Lynch and Irish ‘New Woman’ Fiction

Faith Binckes and Kathryn Laing

She was Secretary of the Ladies Land League and a close friend of Anna Parnell, Paris correspondent to the London Academy, recipient of two awards from the Royal Literary Fund, author of one of the earliest critical studies of George Meredith, of ten novels and collections of short fiction between 1886 and 1900, numerous articles in major periodicals, books on travel, and translations of French and Spanish literature. With such a pedigree, we might expect Hannah Lynch to be included in John Wilson Foster’s list of ‘interesting, prolific or popular’ Irish women writers working at the turn of the twentieth century, a list that mentions several names we now recognise, such as Rosa Mulholland, Katherine Cecil Thurston and Sarah Grand. But who was Hannah Lynch and in what ways might a study of her now all-but-forgotten work add important and complex nuance to the developing category of Irish ‘New Woman’ literature? The aim of this paper is to begin to address both questions.

First, following the now well-established practice of recovery and retrieval, we will give a brief introduction to her life, career (still fragmentary in detail, there is a great deal more detective work to be done) and death, in Paris, aged forty-three.

We will then turn our attention to the body of writing Lynch produced during the 1890s, in particular her feminist novel An Odd Experiment (1897) and the stories collected in her volume Dr. Vermont’s Fantasy (1896). We will examine Lynch’s ‘New Woman’ credentials— credentials supported and troubled by her own sustained exploration of issues of categorisation, in which reference to constructions of sexual and national identity play a prominent role. Her largely ironic representations of the manner in which prevailing inscriptions of femininity—whether literary, historical, sexual, or even revolutionary—inevitably departicularise women, connects with similar observations on the construction of Irish identity, both at home and abroad. However, despite these explorations, her work generally refuses to posit any neat or parallel solutions. Both her fiction and non-fiction demonstrate that established patterns are hard to elude— and that agency and self-determination not only open for spaces for possibility, empowerment, and encounter, but can also generate potentially irresolvable social and psychological conflict.

We will argue that these conflicts—as well as pressing practical concerns of marketability, publication and reception—are also visible in the way Lynch stages her narratives. During this decade her texts both toy with and undermine essentialist stereotypes, shift between genres and narrative voices, deploy satire and sentiment, and leave their endings strangely open. This openness contributes to the problem of identifying Lynch one way or the other – as an Irish New Woman writer or as a critic of some of the associations with this genre of writing in Ireland. Either way, a consideration of her responses in the form of criticism and fiction will offer broader insights into the development and permutations of Irish feminist thought during this period.

3. ‘Dear Woman of the Three Cows’: Alice Stopford Green and the origins of The African Society

Angus Mitchell

The chiselled letters on the plain granite headstone marking the burial place of the historian, Alice Stopford Green, in Dublin’s Dean’s Grange cemetery are almost invisible. The few words defining her life have been erased by the salt winds off the Irish sea. Her treatment at the hands of history has received a similar fate. Ireland’s first woman senator, who was described in 1911 as ‘the most important Irish writer of her day’, has been reduced to little more than a footnote. Her academic significance is most often linked to the reputation of her husband, John Richard Green, and the various revisions she undertook on his best-selling narrative A short history of England. In the libraries and studies of Oxford she learned her trade as a researcher and author of history and formed lasting friendships with several eminent historians. After her husband’s death, as the widow Mrs J.R. Green, she developed a specific style and trajectory of her own, becoming an active agent of history and author of a number of controversial works on medieval and early modern Ireland. Her insight into the process of historical production bestowed on her a keen sense of the correlation between power and the past and the value of developing a private sphere for influencing the present. An interest in social, cultural and economic history opened her mind to the possibilities of diversity, dissimilarities in human experience, and the need to comprehend cultural exchange. Her home became a gathering point and intersection for some of the most powerful literary and political luminaries of her day and until her death in 1929 she built and maintained bridges between diverse groups of figures, seeking to transcend political, religious and cultural divisions and encourage new dynamics of interaction.

If Green involved herself in many different activities her intellectual drive was conditioned by four principal concerns. Her campaigning for women followed a particular path through the period when the suffragette movement was most active. Her historiography wrote women back into the narrative. She became a prominent campaigner for women’s education and pursued a specific strategy for the intellectual and academic advancement of women. After 1900 her gender politics bonded with her involvement in Irish nationalist affairs and her alliance with the Irish language movement and Gaelic League scholars. Both of these interests overlapped with her engagement with Africa and colonial matters and occupied her with the fate of the British Empire. Most interpretations of Green have tended to overlook the interconnections and interrelations of her work, and treat her various interests as disconnected and different rather than attached and integrated. This paper will briefly consider one correlation between her thought and action: the link between her distinct view on gender politics and how this was realised in her work as founder of the Africa Society, or the Royal African Society, as it is styled today – the oldest organization in the western world dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Africa.

4. ‘Sexless Creatures’: Trans Discourses in Irish New Woman Fiction

Tina O’Toole

While New Woman literature and activism has tended to be read against the backdrop of 1890s London, many of the key writers associated with were Irish-based, or had Irish backgrounds.  By concentrating on such writers, in particular, on the work of Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Katherine Cecil Thurston, and L.T. Meade, my work seeks to recontextualise their work and reclaim it for the history of Irish feminist thought.  In this paper, I will address trans/vestite/gender narratives within the work of these writers, focusing in particular on Katherine Cecil Thurston's Max (1909) and making use of Braidotti’s figure of the ‘nomadic subject’ in my reading.

5. ‘Irish Versions of the New Woman Type’

Julie Anne Stevens

In the hands of Somerville and Ross the New Woman becomes a role that displays the artifice of its origins. Although the Anglo-Irish suffragists admired the fiction of Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand, their treatment of the Woman Question (like their handling of the Irish Question) was often overtaken by what they saw as the overriding concern—the money question. Somerville and Ross exploited the Irish countryside as a site to explore female potential, but at the same time their comic material did not hesitate to parody the more earnest aspects of the New Woman type in their fiction and Edith Somerville’s illustrations. Ultimately, they send up idealised configurations of the type to show a harsh reality at work, one that limits woman’s artistic output and controls her actions—the lack of money. They also place the New Woman discourse within the larger discussion of land improvement in Ireland, relying upon traditional images of a feminised landscape to examine the concept of the New Woman in the Irish countryside.

This paper will concentrate on Somerville and Ross’s representation of the New Woman in their 1898 novel The Silver Fox alongside other versions of the New Woman type by George Moore and Bram Stoker to assess the feminists’ work.

6. ‘Eva Gore-Booth and the Development of Irish Feminist Thought in Theology.’

Sonja Tiernan

Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926) poet, playwright, philosopher, and an influential political activist in England, contributed a vital element to the Celtic cultural revival. Gore-Booth dedicated the final years of her life to the study of theology; she published articles, poetry and essays on biblical interpretations and mysticism. Her theological and theosophical work culminated in her largest and final publication before her death, A Psychological and Poetic Approach to the Study of Christ in the Fourth Gospel. Through this pioneering text Gore-Booth established a distinct Irish feminist theological voice. Mary Condren concurs that Gore-Booth, ‘appears to have been a lone voice in the early modern systematic development of an Irish feminist theology.’ In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, a section devoted to ‘Irish Women’s Writing: Theology and Ethics,’ Gore-Booth is the only author whose writings precede 1967.

In this paper, I identify Gore-Booth’s innovative Study of Christ, as a powerful feminist approach to the Bible and religious doctrine, which can now be read as a precursor to current Irish feminist theological thought; the next major Irish theological text was not written until 1967 by Sister Vincent Hannon. Contemporary American feminists published a feminist reading of the Bible, The Women’s Bible in 1895. Gore-Booth’s text was more radical than the American, egalitarian theology and included a specifically Irish approach. Gore-Booth was inspired to write this text by the current political climate of the day, she began research for her book shortly after the Easter Rising, it was published during the Irish Civil War. Gore-Booth, as an advocator for the rights of women and Irish independence became a member of the Theosophical Society. Theosophy subverted the usual modes of power dynamics, positioning women and the Irish, as spiritually superior. Joy Dixon notes that theosophical writings of the early twentieth century, sited ‘India and the “Celtic Fringe,” along with women, (as) the repository of a spirituality that English men had forfeited in exchange for material progress.’

Gore-Booth employed these theosophical teachings in her analysis of the Bible; an approach which may have been too radical for theologians in the early twentieth century, yet, through this work she can now be given her due position in the genealogies of Irish feminist thought.

Click for the main pages of this issue of THE OSCHOLARS

To hub page |To THE OSCHOLARS home page