University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)
Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud Gonne and the "United Irishman"
Author(s): Karen Steele
Source: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 84-105
Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)
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Karen
Steele
Raising Her Voice for Justice:
Gonne
Maud
Feminist
and the United Irishman
critics have often claimed
that an Irish nationalist
identity is inher
has repeatedly described the
ently chauvinistic. Eavan Boland, for example,
challenges for a woman poet writing in a constraining
national
tradition
that
females as figures of the nation. Vainly looking for herself in the
Irish literary tradition of aislingi and ballads, Boland laments that nationalist
writings "simplified women almost out of existence" by relying on "static, pas
emblematizes
sive, ornamental figures'* that do no credit to women or poetry.1 An examina
tion of the nationalist press during the Celtic Revival and, especially, of Maud
Gonne?whose
frequent journalistic writings promoted gender equality as well
liberation, and were prominently published in the most renowned
Boland's as
nationalist newspaper of the day, the United Irishman?challenges
sertion. Such a context alters how we read Irish fin de si?cle literature, as well as
the supposedly competing movements
of feminism and nationalism.
as national
and literary critics have previously drawn upon the nationalist
press to trace the development of important cultural and political organizations
in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 Little at
Historians
tention has been paid to the extensive role that newspapers played in arousing
nationalist sentiment in Ireland, in educating public opinion, and in framing
the cultural and political debates of the day. The Irish press at the turn of the
century displayed a surprisingly diverse range of political thought. The pub
lishers of fin de si?cle Ireland produced some 172 nationalist papers, 73 Union
i.
Eavan Boland,
"A Kind of Scar: The Woman
Poet
in a National
to note my gratitude
and Creative Development
Grant, which
(Dublin: Attic Press, 1994), p. 91.1 wish
University Research
Ireland in the summer
brary in Dublin,
Tradition"
in A Dozen Lips
for the support of a Texas Christian
assisted my travel to the National Li
of 1997.
2.
Press (New
See, for example: Virginia Glandon, Arthur Griffith and the Advanced-Nationalist
York: Peter Lang, 1985); Liz Curtis, The Cause of Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications,
1994);
Revolutionaries
(London: Pluto, 1989); CL. Innes, Woman and Na
Margaret Ward, Unmanageable
of Georgia Press, 1993); Virginia
tion in Irish Literature and Society, 1880-1933 (Athens: University
and
the
of the 1798 Re
Shan Van Vochr. Women,
Commemoration
Crossman,"The
Republicanism,
bellion" Eighteenth Century
Oxford
Life, 22 (1998), 122-139; as well as R F. Foster, WB.
University
Press, 1997).
NEW HIBERNIA
REVIEW/IRIS
Yeats: A Life (Oxford:
?l REANN ACH NUA, 3:2 (SUMMER/SAMHRADH,
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
1999),
84-IO5
Raising Her Voice for lustice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
ist papers, 27 Labour papers, and 60 independent offerings.3 The press in Ire
land became an increasingly important and diverse source of political educa
tion for the Irish citizenry for a number of reasons, including rising literacy, the
British government's shift in its Irish policy from coercion to conciliation, and
the political vacuum following failure of the Irish Party's long fight for Home
Rule.4 In the pages of the Irish press, ideas germinated about what cultural and
political organizations should develop. Among the many nationalist papers of
the day, significant differences persisted between constitutional
nationalists,
who supported the Irish Party in the British Parliament, and advanced nation
alists, who promoted a cultural and economic revival in Ireland instead. Of
those advanced nationalist newspapers, Virginia Glandon notes that the United
Irishman, together with the Shan Van Vocht and the Irish Peasant, "reflected
some of the leading ideas and ideologies which formed the basis for advanced
nationalist
thought in Ireland" before the Irish Republican Brotherhood
several years later.5
revived
William
Rooney and Arthur Griffith established the United Irishman in 1899, in
the wake of the centenary of the rebellion of 1798.6Orchestrated byW.B. Yeats,
Alice Milligan, Anna Johnston, Maud Gonne, John O'Leary, and others, who
commissioned monuments,
and gave lectures to re
planned demonstrations,
movement
heroes
of
the
commemorative
the
member,
'98,
sought to legitimate
nationalism and unite its various factions through educating the public about
Ireland's rebel past7 Implicitly, it also fostered the emergent feminist movement
Virginia Glandon, p. i; see also "Index of Irish Newspapers,
ter, 1976), 84-121 for these numbers.
4. Glandon, p. 1.
3.
5.
Glandon,
1900-1922" ?ire-Ireland
11,4 (Win
p. 5.
in 1791, the United
at the time, and for generations
after
Irishmen were considered
"the vital germ of Irish radicalism." Led by Wolfe Tone and Edward Fitzgerald, the organi
zation united Catholics and Protestants
in a shared desire to liberate Ireland from British colonial
6.
Founded
wards,
rule. See Nancy Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994); United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism, and Rebellion, ed. David Dick
son (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993); Jim Smyth, Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in
Late Eighteenth Century Dublin (Dublin: Gill, 1992); Mary Helen Thuente, The Harp Re-Strung: The
United
Irishman
and Kevin Whelan,
and the Rise of Literary Nationalism
(Syracuse: Syracuse University
and the Construction
The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism
Press, 1996). Eighteenth-Century
tity (Cork: Cork University
issue on the topic titled Ireland, 1798-1998: From Revolution
P.MacCubbin,
22, (November 1998).
7.
Press, 1994);
of Irish Iden
Life also recently published a special
toRevisionism
and Beyond, ed. Robert
Gould,
John Kelly, and Deirdre Tooney, eds Letters ofW.B. Yeats, vol. 2. (Oxford:
Shan Van Vochr.
1997), pp. 695-707; Curtis, Cause, pp. 175-77; Virginia Crossman,*The
and
the
the
Commemoration
of
Rebellion,"
1798
Eighteenth Century Life,
Republicanism
Warwick
Clarendon,
Women,
22 (1998), 128-39.
85
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Raising Her Voice for lustice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
by promoting women's visibility in politics. Numerous nationalist women got
their first experience as public activists when they traveled the country on pub
lic speaking tours, advocating the United Irishmen's "ideal of an independent
Irish republic uniting all its people regardless of their religion." The new half
as well as John Mitchel's
1847
penny weekly was named after this movement,
Ireland
and
it
circulated
nationalists
among
throughout
revolutionary weekly
a year, it grew to an eight-page penny weekly, and had
in
Belfast,
Paris, New York, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia.9
London,
agents
the United Irishman
In keeping with the goals of the '98 commemorations,
and elsewhere.8 Within
supported the absolute independence of Ireland. Editorially, it did not advocate
armed revolution, but many of the republican writers published in its pages did.
The newspaper aimed, as R.M. Henry observes, "to build up a kind of national
might have their say, and to induce a gen
eral consensus of opinion in favor of the new policy [of re-establishing the con
stitution of 1782]."10The guiding principle of the paper was separatist nation
alism, advocating Irish self-reliance and patriotism.11 Even its advertisements
forum inwhich all 'real'Nationalists
revealed the newspaper's philosophy of economic autonomy: nearly every item
featured, from cigarettes to crucifixes, was "guaranteed Irish made," and many
advertisements enjoined readers to encourage Irish industry and pride with the
power of the purse. The government seized and confiscated twenty-three issues
during the first three years of publication, and on three occasions, the United
Irishman was publicly suppressed. In 1906, the United Irishman Publishing
the paper because of
Company, which engaged Griffith as editor, discontinued
a libel action. Within months Griffith established another newspaper named
after the newly-formed political and cultural organization Sinn F?in.
During the span of seven years from 1899 through 1906 the United Irishman
was one of the most significant nationalist newspapers in Ireland. F.S.L. Lyons
called it "as potent a force as theNation had been for contemporaries of Thomas
Davis."12 George A. Lyons recorded in 1923his impression of the paper's marked
influence on its readership: "The United Irishman alone amongst the Press of
8.
See Richard M. Kain, Dublin
in the Age of William
Butler Yeats and lames Joyce (Norman: Uni
Press, 1962), p. 49.
versity of Oklahoma
9. Glandon, p. 18.
10. R. M. Henry, The Evolution
1920), p. 63.
of Sinn Fein (New York: Huebsch,
11. The United Irishman also often combined
anti-Semitism
with Irish-Ireland
"Jew Press against Transvaal."
4 February
16October
1900, p. 4).Glandon observes
in terms of Irish nationalist
nationalism.
See
1899, p. 5 and "Gold of the Jew against the Irish Brigade."
that "Griffith rationalized
the anti-Semitic bias in his early
resentment
of another race, who, in his
against members
'came to Ireland penniless* and were able to secure loans through the Bank of Ireland for the
(43).
purchase of land and business property, while Irishmen were denied this opportunity"
newspapers
words,
12. F. S. L.
Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine
(1971; London:
Fontana
Press, 1985), p. 248.
86
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Raising Her
Gonne
Voice for Justice: Maud
and
the United
Irishman
Ireland stood out definitely for probity and dignity in public affairs, and pushed
forward the campaign which ultimately dislodged the political mountebanks
from their strongholds."13 Two series of articles written by Griffith, "The Res
urrection of Hungary" and "TheWorking Policy," were reissued as pamphlets;
the former was translated into several Indian languages and sold more than
3,000 copies. Gandhi would later state that he found Griffith's proposals valu
able when planning nonviolent resistance in India.14 Although the United Irish
man was surely not, as nationalist historian Francis Jones claims, one of the
most widely
of the most
Anna
read papers in the country,15 itsmodest audience comprised many
influential nationalists of the day. John O'Leary, James Connolly,
Johnston (Ethna Carbery), Alice Milligan, members of the Gaelic League
Brotherhood read and publicly supported the news
the
relied upon '98 clubs to push its sales, but it gained
paper
paper.16 Initially,
as
to
a list of notable contributors. W.B. Yeats, J.B.
attract
it
began
popularity
St.
Oliver
Yeats, J.M. Synge,
John Gogarty, Frank Fay, George Moore,
John
and the Irish Republican
Eglington, Edward Martyn, Eamon Ceannt, Michael Davitt, John O'Leary,
James Connolly, Seamus MacManus, Anna Johnston (Ethna Carbery), Alice
Milligan, Maud Gonne, Nora Hopper, Jennie Wyse-Power, May Curran, and
Mary E.L. Butler contributed poems, plays, and reviews; discussed and devel
oped the idea of an Irish theater; and debated nationalist politics.
While the newspaper's most important goal was arguing the cause of Irish
independence, its columns, editorials, and features revealed an ambitious array
of interests and concerns in literature, history, economics, art, and geography.
In addition to publishing original literature from many of the leading writers
of the day, it avidly supported the Gaelic League,
tion, and the Celtic Literary Society. Some cultural
ballad history and Irish bardic tales, ran for more
paper also republished as a serial Jean D'Arbois de
the Gaelic Athletic Associa
series, such as those on Irish
than twelve months.17 The
Jubainville's influential Irish
The
United
Irishman
Mythological Cycle.18
regularly reviewed books, including
those written by Lady Gregory (Gods and Fighting Men) and C.J. Hamilton (No
table Irishwomen).19 Starting in 1902, it contained a regular column on the Irish
of Griffith and His Times (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1923), p. 58.
in Sean ? L?ing, "Arthur Griffith and Sinn Fein" in Leaders and Men of the Easter Ris
1916, ed. F.X. Martin
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 68.
13- Some Recollections
14. Quoted
ing:Dublin
Francis
Jones, History of the Sinn Fein Movement
Kenedy and Sons, 1917), p. 179.
16. Glandon, p. 13.
15.
1905; January 1902-January
January 1904-February
18. December
1902.
1901-July
19. 18 June 1904, p. 6.
17.
and the Irish Rebellion
of 1916 (New York:
1903.
87
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Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
language. Griffith's popular series on Irish topography and placenames, "Ram
bles in Erin," also fostered interest in Gaelic culture.20
to the paper,21 the
contributed
James Connolly occasionally
Although
United Irishman was hardly progressive in its economic platform. Griffith's
focused on the foundation
and development of native in
as
laboratories, and crafts, well as the promotion of com
dustries, workshops,
merce, to achieve full-scale economic strength. This economic philosophy later
economic
objectives
to complain
Jim Larkin, whose militancy Griffith disapproved,
prompted
as
much about politics and economics as he does
about Griffith, "He knows
about the Irish worker, which is nothing."22 While the newspaper offered little
practical advice or theoretical analysis about the working class in Ireland, it re
peatedly urged alliances with the dispossessed in other countries of the British
Empire. There were regular features and special editorials on the Irish Trans
in support of the Boers' battle with Britain, and on the Indian
vaal Committee
famine.
One of the remarkable features of the United Irishman was the extent to which
women's writings and women's concerns were featured in its pages. Until histo
rianMargaret Ward published her impressive feminist study Unmanageable Rev
olutionaries in 1983, few contemporary scholars knew about the political work of
the Ladies Land League or the nationalist cultural projects of Inghindhe na
h?ireann ("Daughters of Ireland"). A precursor ofWard's feminist recovery pro
ject, however, was taking place in the columns of the United Irishman a century
the United Irishman was best known as a nationalist-separatist
weekly newspaper, it also served as a republican woman's studies primer. Build
ing on the "implicit feminism"23 of Alice Milligan's and Anna Johnston's literary
ago. Although
journal Shan Van Vocht (1896-99), the United Irishman nonetheless lacked the
oppositional political stance later taken by the feminist newspaper the Irish Cit
izen (1912-^0). Rather, the United Irishman celebrated women's culture in aman
ner resembling Ms. magazine inAmerica of the 1980s. The newspaper discussed
the literary, historical, and political contributions of nationalist women from the
past and present; provided reviews and commentaries about female artists; fea
tured poems and plays written by women; included numerous editorials, fea
20. April 1903-July 1905. See also George A. Lyons, p. 49.
21. Connolly published several poems in 1904, and he also contributed
national
theater
22. Quoted
23.
an essay on the merits
(24 October
in Glandon,
1903, p. 2).
p. 100-101.
Innes,p.i34.
88
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of a
Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
columns by female journalists; and alerted readers to the na
tionalist writings of women featured in other newspapers.24
The example of the United Irishman counters Boland's assertion that femi
nism and nationalism form an inherently "unhealthy intersection."25 The pages
tures, and weekly
of the paper demonstrate how each movement
drew strength from the other:
feminist, socialist, and nationalist women such as Maud Gonne, Constance
Markievicz, Nora Connolly, Barry Delaney, Kathleen Clarke, Alice Milligan, Ella
Younge, Ethna Carbery, Mary E.L. Butler, Delia Larkin, and Hanna Sheehy
Skeffington wrote frequently and were avidly discussed as equal, autonomous
participants in agitation for female suffrage, the rights of labor, as well as in the
struggle for Irish national liberation. Two recurring columns focused on female
labor: "Irishwomen's Work"
and "Irishwomen and the Home Industries."26
a
wrote
E.L.
Butler
Mary
four-part series on "Womanhood and Nationhood,"
which promoted the "Nationalisation of the Irish homelife."27 Despite its obvi
ous intent to attract previously apolitical women
to the cause of Ireland?
series
namely, "to enlist the aid of the home-maker as a nation-maker"?the
some of the limitations of early feminist discourse, as it primar
women's
contributions within the home. Nonetheless,
Butler's
ily imagines
women
rhetorical strategy in reminding
that because they "make the home at
... women are the chief nation-builders"
resembles the speeches of
mosphere
other early suffragists, who proclaimed that women's scrupulous housekeeping
demonstrates
predicted their proficiency in parliament.
Other articles in the United Irishman were more
forthright in advocating a
One weekly feature
female activism that was public and independent-minded.
women
the
of the Young
described
the
action
and
of
poetry
glowingly
political
a
more
Ireland movement,
details
and
century ago
literary excerpts
offering
than the three-volume Field Day Anthology of IrishWriting offered in 1991.28The
goals of the newspaper meant that art was submitted
populist, propagandists
in the pages of the United Irish
24- Some of the literary women who wrote for or were discussed
man are Alice MiUigan, Charlotte Grace O'Brien, Fiona MacLeod, Olive Schreiner, Augusta Holmes,
Eliza
Ethna Carbery, Katherine Tynan, Nora Harper, Kathleen O'Meara, Mrs. Patrick Campbell,
beth Robins,
Chraoibh?n
Helen
Sheridan,
Some political
Parnell, and Anne Devlin.
Ely, Anna
25. This famous
phrase,
Grace Rhys, Rose Kavanaugh,
and historical women
discussed
Sarah Bernhardt,
and Jane Barlow.
applied
to another
putatively
dangerous
confluence,
1903-31 October
1903.
Ella Young, ?lis Ni
of
include Margaret
is Conor
Cruise
O'Brien's.
26.
19November-16
December
1904 and 24 October
3 January 1903-24 January 1903.
28. See The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day Press, 1991),
fourth
vol. 2, "The Famine and Young Ireland," selections by Seamus Deane. The long-awaited
to redressing the exclusion of women writers of Ireland, will perhaps provide
volume, dedicated
better coverage.
27.
89
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Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
to political judgement, as D.E.S. Maxwell observes.29 The sustained interest in
topics about women, as well as the ubiquity of female writers in its pages,
women as
strongly suggests that the values of emerging feminism?promoting
equal, if sometimes separate, participants in political activism?were
to influence the broader nationalist movement.
beginning
Part of the unusual nature of the focus on women
in the pages of the United
movement
in Ireland had
Irishman was
that, while the emergent women's
achieved important advances in education and economic autonomy, most Irish
nationalist organizations of the time barred women from membership. Unlike
Britain, where the feminist movement was a visible political force and mobi
lized around a host of issues ranging from the campaign against the Contagious
suffrage crusades and theworking women's struggle for
decent working conditions, Ireland in 1899 had few organizations of women ex
Diseases Act tomilitant
pressly created in order to fight for the emancipation of the female sex as a
whole. Irish feminists initially shared many of the political concerns of their
British sisters in their push for theMarried Women's Property Acts and the So
cial Purity Crusade, but they began to diverge and develop differently in their
campaigns for employment, education, and the vote.30 Likewise, the Boer War
(1899?1902) and, especially, World War I encouraged British and Irish feminists
increasingly separated according to national allegiance.
The promotion of women in the pages of the United Irishman did not, how
ever, develop in a vacuum. Cliona Murphy points out that feminist activism in
to become
Ireland "was prefaced by almost forty years in which
early twentieth-century
two to three generations of Irish grew accustomed to the idea of women in pub
lic life."31As the suffrage movement was slowly gathering pace, a growing num
ber of women
gained admittance to higher education. By the early 1890s, both
Roman Catholic and Protestant middle-class women had access to, though not
equal standing in, higher education as a result of the 1878 Intermediate Educa
tion Act and the 1879 Royal University Act. Many middle-class women could
also claim greater economic autonomy as a result of the Married Women's
Property Acts of 1870,1874, and 1882. By the turn of the century, women could
sit on Poor Law Boards and Local Government
Councils, two important op
women
for
full
that
Irish
prepared
political participation.
portunities
Irish feminism's most devoted champions, the suffragists, finally organized
into a powerful collective
in 1908 when Hanna
29. The Field Day Anthology, 2:562.
30. See Mary Cullen, "How Radical was Irish Feminism
and Establishments,
ed. Patrick
31. Cliona Murphy,
tury (Philadelphia:
and Francis Sheehy Skeffington
between
i860 and 1920?" in Radicals, Rebels,
J.Corish
The Women's
(Belfast Appletree Press, 1985), pp. 185-201.
and Irish Society in the Early Twentieth
Suffrage Movement
Temple University
Press,
1989), p. 14.
90
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Cen
Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
and Margaret and James Cousins founded the IrishWomen's Franchise League.
Almost a decade earlier, however, Inghinidhe na h?ireann had begun its cul
tural nationalist activism in 1900.32 Initially established to give women a forum
activities, the group soon revealed an implicit feminist agenda as
well. Evening lectures and such entertainments as tableaux vivants often focused
on such powerful, self-reliant women of the past asMaeve, Brigid, Anne Devlin,
for nationalist
Grania Mhaol, and Sarah Curran. In circulation from 1908 through 1911, its
newspaper Bean na h?ireann (Woman of Ireland), made the organization's
growing belief in the inseparability of nationalism and feminism even more ex
plicit. Its pages often revealed an ongoing debate about prioritizing the demands
of these two related but different political causes, asserting the cause of Ireland
over the cause of suffrage: "A vote may be the hall-mark of
equality, but it is in
our daily lives?in matters of education, in commerce, on local administrative
boards, and in the labour market, that we need real liberty and equality."33 A
later, an editorial in the April, 1909, issue yoked feminism and na
tionalism when it demanded "freedom for our nation and the complete removal
of all disabilities to our sex."
few months
The growing acceptance of political women helped to create an environ
in which advanced nationalists were receptive to women's equality. The
editorship of Arthur Griffith may also have played a part. Although many bi
ment
ographers suggest that Griffith behaved with shyness and chivalry toward the
"fairer sex," he wrote frequently in the United Irishman, as well as in Bean na
h?ireann under the under the pseudonym "1er,"34about women as "intellectual
in morals, no
comrades and helpers in various concerns of public life ...
stronger and no weaker in the main than men, and worthy of frank, full confi
dence and trust, and of the highest and best education."35 Griffith's promotion
of female equality may have been influenced by one particular woman with
closely during the years of the United Irishman: Maud Gonne.
whom he worked
From 1899 to 1901, Griffith collaborated with William Rooney in writing and
editing the newspaper. During these years the newspaper provided little cover
age of women's
was left without
activities. When
Rooney died suddenly inMay, 1901, Griffith
in a political and intellectual venture he had always
viewed as collaborative.36 Maud Gonne appears to have in some ways filled the
a partner
32. See Ward, "Inghinidhe na h?ireann,
1900-1914"
33. Bean na h?ireann, February 1909, p. 1.
34. Glandon,
35. United
in Unmanageable
Revolutionaries,
pp. 40-87.
p. 135.
Irishman,
26 January 1901, p. 6.
Padraig Colum, Ourselves Alone! The Story of Arthur Griffith
State (New York: Crown Publishers,
1959), p. 50.
36.
and the Origins
of the Irish Free
91
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Raising Her Voice for lustice: Maud
Gonne
and the United
Irishman
gap. In the year before Rooney's death, Gonne had spent less time writing and
editing her monthly VIrelande Libre in Paris; instead, she was writing occasional
editorials for the United Irishman and other nationalist newspapers, as well as
serving as a liaison between Griffith and other important nationalists.37 Mar
garetWard and Antoinette Quinn both suggest that, during these years, Gonne
functioned less as awriter than as a financial supporter of the United Irishman,
ensuring that the newspaper publicized her activism and the
projects of Inghinidhe na h?ireann.38 Gonne paid Griffith an editorial subven
tion of twenty-five shillings a week and her fund-raising in the United States
her contributions
also helped keep the newspaper afloat during the early years of its publication.
It ismore likely that the newspaper's frequent coverage of Gonne reflects not
just her financial support but her persistent predilection to unite all of her many
projects. In her autobiography, Gonne neatly summarized her phi
losophy: "I never willingly discouraged either a Dynamiter or a constitutional
ist, a realist or a lyrical writer. My chief preoccupation was how their work could
nationalist
help forward the Irish Separatist movement."39 As a close friend of Griffith, and
one who brought him in contact with nationalists as diverse as Connolly and
Yeats, or Milligan and Butler, Gonne may have simply and naturally introduced
to an untapped resource vital to the Irish cause?women.
After Gonne founded Inghinidhe na h?ireann in the spring of 1900, the
United Irishman published rharkedly more articles about Irish history and cul
Griffith
ture that were implicitly feminist. In part, this was simply because the newspa
per devoted extensive space to reporting on gatherings of Inghinidhe na h?ire
ann, literary meetings,
language classes, and history lectures. After Gonne
tour in the spring of 1901, the United Irish
in Irish politics, history, and cul
1904,when Gonne became preoccupied with a new baby and a
returned from her final American
man featured even more articles about women
ture. Following
failing marriage, however, its pages contained fewer topics and features for its
female readers. In fact, one writer in 1905, perhaps reflecting her growing dis
satisfaction with the paper's waning interest in women's topics, lobbied the
readers of the United Irishman for a women's
nationalist paper that would be
too
not
and
and
solidly written ... [with] fash
fully national, brightly
"frankly
ion articles which I suppose would be its strong point ?
indispensable for the
37? See Colum,
pp. 50-1,74 and Glandon, p. 177.
See
38.
Margaret Ward, Maud Gonne: Ireland's Joan of Arc (London: Pandora, 1990), p. 60; and
Quinn, "Cathleen ni Houlihan Writes Back: Maud Gonne and Irish National Theater," in Gender
and Sexuality inModern Ireland, ed. Anthony Bradley
of Massachusetts
Press, 1997)? p. 57
University
39. Maud
Gerrards
Gonne, A Servant of theQueen,
Cross: Colin
Smythe,
and Maryann
ed. A. Norman
Gialanella
Valiulis.
(Amherst:
Jeffares and Anna MacBride White.
1994), p. 178.
92
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
(1938;
Raising Her
Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
capture of the female seoinini."40 Helena Molony, who edited Bean na h?ireann
own paper to
explained that Inghinidhe na h?ireann decided to produce their
ideas"
of
the United
"counteract" the "reactionary social and dual-kingdom
Irishman in its final years.41 By the time the United Irishman was resurrected as
Sinn F?in in 1906, Griffith's newspaper provided an even narrower scope. The
United Irishman's hallmark presentation of diverse ideas from feminism to so
cialism was diminishing.
Whether or not Gonne was a behind-the-scenes
collaborator with Griffith,
the United Irishman devoted an extraordinary amount of space to following her
nationalist activities and writings.42 The newspaper featured excerpts from Vlre
lande Libre, it closely covered Gonne's speeches in Ireland, England, and France;
it noted that Gonne presided at such political and cultural organizations as the
Celtic Literary Society, the Irish Transvaal Committee, and the Patriotic Chil
dren's Treat; it publicized meetings of Inghinidhe na h?ireann; and it often pub
It also ran more than thirty of
lished entire talks given at these meetings.
Gonne's signed editorials and letters.When she rested her voice and picked up
her pen, Gonne had an attentive nationalist
and editorials in the United Irishman.
audience
for her frequent
letters
One common charge against Gonne?notably
among Yeats critics?was
that she was a political fanatic. If one reads her earliest columns, one can see
how this reputation emerged. Her early impulses as a writer were to express
anti-English sentiment. Rallying against Irish enlistment in the English army,
Gonne detailed the experience of disabled Irish soldiers in the workhouse who
were denied government pensions, and declared, "Think of this, Irishmothers,
even when there is the hunger in your cabins and things look dark and hope
less for the land we love."43A subsequent letter to the editor pointed out the in
adequacy of such romanticized expectations when Irishmen's choices "so far
as they see, lies between the workhouse,
the jail, and the army_If
Ireland
cannot give them employment what are the poor devils to do?"44 Gonne's early
columns also blithely advocated armed rebellion, arguing that formany "the tu
such an uprising in
of war comes as a refuge from grief." Envisioning
mythic terms that echoed the imagery and optimism of '98 commemoration
speeches, Gonne conveniently ignored the human dimension of war: "Over Ire
mult
land the cloud-cloak
40.
of theMor Riga will wave once more ?om
"A Paper for Irishwomen,"
41. Quoted
United
42.
See Ward, Maud
43.
"Rewards of Serving England," United
28 October
1899, p. 3.
44.
8 April 1905, pp. 6-7.
(Dublin: Talbot Press, 1935), p. 121.
Irishman,
in R.M. Fox, Rebel Irishwomen
Gonne,
her war char
pp. 58,61-2.
Irishman,
21October
1899, p. 5.
93
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Gonne
Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
and
the United
Irishman
iot, and through the smoke, and the fire, and the darkness,
generation will come."45
life, light, and re
time, the facile rhetoric of her earliest columns waned as Gonne de
as
a thinker, stylist, and journalist. Her early career as a writer was
veloped
marked by fervid hatred of England and its symbolic leader, Queen Victoria.
to base her
Her later columns display a wry wit and an increasing willingness
Over
on reserved analysis and statistics. In some of her most fa
anti-imperialism
mous columns, such as "Famine Queen" and "Her Subjects," one can hear the
resonance of an electrifying, defiant speech. Emotionally controlled and po
litically calculating, Gonne spoke for many when she baldly derided Queen
as a woman
who, so Gonne implies, had been not only an unjust
but also an unwomanly queen.
Victoria
monarch
For Victoria,
of her eighty-one
in the decrepitude
to revisit
absence of half-a-century
are the victims
of the criminal
all she
must
the political
famine,
organised
is a woman,
Irish mothers
tremble
have
cursed
she hates
of her reign, the survivors
necessity must have been terribly
vile
as death
shelterless
who,
ing little ones,
the country
and whose
policy
and however
sometimes
to have decided
years,
and
selfish
when
approaches
under
and pitiless
the cloudy
her before
her
she thinks
Irish
an
after
inhabitants
of sixty years
strong;
soul may
of
of
for after
be,
she
the countless
their
sky, watching
starv
they died.46
"Famine Queen" was widely distributed,
section of the Dublin police force seized
members of the intelligence-gathering
all remaining copies from the United Irishman offices.47 In the next issue, Gonne
was equally defiant of the spirit, if not the letter, of English law,which prohib
Before
the edition
that contained
ited libeling the queen. This column also suggests the extent to which Gonne's
speech-making successes were due to her rhetorical skills rather than her stat
uesque beauty. Disingenuously
promising to refrain from embarrassing the
queen, Gonne quickly returned to the topic of British misrule by focusing on
"her subjects" rather than on the "Famine Queen":
Itwould appear that it is against the English law in Ireland to write about the
Famine
Queen,
the police
say so at any
rate?
Still
though
I do not pretend
to
understand that lawwhich grants policemen by hundreds to the landlord who
desires
to burn
down
the houses
of
the starving
peasants,
and which
puts
the
peasant in jail formonths for burning a little turf cut off the landlord's bog, my
reverence of it is sowell known to allmy friends that theywill not be surprised
that, hearing it is illegal to write about this Famine Queen, I today only wrote
about
4546.
her
subjects,
and humbly
hope
that
Imay
"Ireland and Her Foreign Relations," United Irishman,
"Famine Queen," United Irishman, 7 April 1900, p. 5.
not
again
22 December
have
the misfortune
1900, p. 4.
47. Curtis, p. 181.
94
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Gonne
Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
to offend
more
the richest woman
starving
whose
in the world,
creatures
of human
millions
and
the United
proud
than
Irishman
it is to reign
boast
any queen
in history
has
over
ever
done.48
Throughout her journalistic career, Gonne consistently wrote with a sense
of urgency and haste. Implicitly, the pace and exigency of her discourse is ex
plained in an editorial of 1901,where Gonne compares her journalistic vocation
to a nurse's calling:
It is not by the side of a dying mother thatwe can stay to turn polished phrases
or studied
periods.
One's
mind
whole
to save her. To save, to cure,
on how
is fixed
it isnecessary to know the extent of the ill, the cause of the ill, and the remedies
that have
already
promptly,
been
consistently,
tried;
these
facts
perseveringly,
it is necessary
established,
for the life we
to act, to act
the life of our nation,
love,
the life of our mother is flowing rapidly away.49
This passage exposes more than Gonne's sense of journalistic urgency. Her link
age of writing and nursing can also be read as a way that Gonne sought to le
gitimate her "unwomanly" work
Ireland's freedom.
on behalf of
in the public sphere, campaigning
Gonne increasingly drew upon economic
the propagandistic control Britain maintains
ined the human toll and financial burdens
statistics and offered examples of
over its colonies. She also exam
as India, Hong
the British Empire. In one col
to such colonies
Kong, and Ireland had shouldered in sustaining
umn on the Indian famine, Gonne deftly revealed the pompous, superficial de
bate in the House of Commons concerning the famine and concluded,
Alas, we in Irelandknow how vain the hope that the people of Great Britain will
ever awake
to a sense
of duty,
unless
their material
is the bugle-call
interest
The death by starvation of millions of Irish and of Indians have never moved
them.Why should it?50
Elsewhere, Gonne asserted that the death rate of Irish soldiers in the English
army during the Boer War nakedly exposed the English "policy for the exter
mination of the Irish people." Such apparent overstatements,
however, were
supported by statistics:
... of the enormous
send
against
21,000 were
48.
49.
50.
the Boer
Scotchmen,
army
of 229,500
farmers,
men
155,000 were
5,000 were Welshmen;
which
had
England
Englishmen,
been
16,000 were
the rest were
obliged
Irishmen,
Colonials.
"Her Subjects," United Irishman, 21 April 1900, p. 3.
"Ireland To-Day," United Irishman, 28 September
1901, pp. 2-3.
"India," United Irishman, 12May 1900, p. 5.
95
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In killed,
to
Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
wounded,
and deaths
missing
the Irishmen
and
from
and
Gonne
the United
the Englishmen
disease,
Irishman
lost 12.7 per cent...
cent.51
22.7 per
also suggested concrete ways by which her Irish readers
could reject British control over their daily lives. One column detailed the im
cultivating economic partnerships outside of
portance of Irish merchants
Gonne's
columns
her readers that if they wanted freedom, they
with Irish Americans,
and
direct communications
to
needed
foster frequent
many of whom relied upon the biased British press for their news about Ire
Britain.52 She also reminded
land.53 Gonne's writings often addressed the responsibilities and the inherent
limitations of the press in Ireland and elsewhere. While, as Gonne noted, "The
want of public libraries in most of the country towns and villages of Ireland,
advantages, such as are found in free countries,
the importance and responsibility of the Press of our country," the
mainstream newspapers of the day were hardly objective dispensers of the news,
in large part because their relationship to the marketplace strongly determined
and the want of educational
doubles
how issues were framed:
Press
The
is generally
the expression
of some
great money
or vested
interest;
in
serving that interest it is sincere, if usually lying, and when dealing with other
matters
not
it expresses
his
readers
ing of our
papers,
thinks
what
necessarily
anyone
thinks,
but what
the Editor
are thinking...
It is our duty to carefully watch
the advertis
and see that no such immoral
advertisements
[imperialist]
find theirway into them.54
Here Gonne offers an understanding of the mass media that anticipates the pro
paganda model later famously characterized by Edward Herman and Noam
Chomsky as "manufacturing consent."55
In "No Second Troy," Yeats memorably
"taught to ig
violent ways."56 As Gonne spoke out against the effects of
British imperialism, she sometimes explicitly alerted readers that "first the river
recalled that Gonne
norant men most
52.
and the English Army," United Irishman 20 October
1900, p. 5.
"In the Event of War," United Irishman, 22 December
1900, p. 7.
53.
"Ireland and Irish America,"
54.
"Irish Press" United
51.
"Irishmen
"vested
and
interest" were
Irishman,
22 lune 1901, p. 5.
and
Irishman, 7 February
1903, p. 6. Such locutions as "great Money"
common code for anti-Semitism,
to which Gonne was not immune. In 1890
1891 in France, Gonne
Boulanger
in support for General George
joined her lover Lucien Millevoye
a fiercely nationalist,
anti-German
politician with fascist and anti-Semitic
to the left as she aged, she never overcame her strong dis
Gonne's ideology moved
(1837-1891),
leanings. While
trust of Jews.
55.
United
See Edward Herman,
Mass Media
Noam
(New York: Pantheon
Chomsky,
Books,
Manufacturing
Consent:
The Political
Economy
1988).
56. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, ed. Richard
J. Finneran
(London: Macmillan,
1984), p. 91.
96
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of the
Raising Her
Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
of blood must
flow" before Ireland would be free.57 Yet, Gonne's invocations of
She was enacting what she believed was her pre
as
woman
the
role
in the prophecy of Brian Ruadh, in which "there
war were not mere bloodlust.
ordained
Would be a famine and that awoman
the revolt. After that, men would
killed but that the English would
dressed in green would come and preach
rise and there would be fighting and many
in the end be driven out."58 Even before her
performance as Cathleen ni Houlihan in the 1902 play, Gonne's lec
tures and essays returned repeatedly to her fascination with the symbolic power
of awoman leading her men to freedom. Gonne's belief in the old prophecy that
memorable
Ireland will be saved by awoman legitimated not only her militantism, but also
the activism of all Irishwomen doing their part for Ireland. Thus, hoping "to re
vive the memories
of Irish heroines," Gonne lectured and wrote about such
as Brigid and Emer not only because, as she claimed, "the Celts ... have
always reverenced the feminine equally with the masculine principle," but also
because she sought to enlist all women in the nationalist movement.59 Gonne
women
further encouraged female participation through promoting women's political
in the home. Like Mary E. L. Butler's serial, which accepted the mid
dle-class expectations of women as primary inculcators of children's spiritual
activism
and moral values, Gonne's columns encouraged Irish mothers to teach their
children nationalist politics: to "know as well as love Ireland ... her history, her
language and her literature" in order "to serve [Ireland] intelligently."60
Gonne's editorials, along with the columns and features of the United Irish
man, suggest the extent to which the press served in the campaign against im
perialism. A number of recent critics have made a convincing case for the liter
ary relevance of the press as well. Laurel Brake notes that, despite the efforts of
such Victorian
critics asMatthew Arnold who divided culture into high and low
writers were active contributors, editors, and
almost all Victorian
categories,
even proprietors
of the press.61 The list of contributors to the United Irishman,
shows that the same was true across the Irish Sea. Maria DiBattista further ob
serves that even such "high" literary writers as Joseph Conrad and Virginia
regarded such "low" cultural forms as the popular press as "an inalien
able part of modern life, hence unavoidable subject matter whose forms as well
Woolf
as content might be assimilated or reworked, playfully imitated or seriously crit
57-
"Ireland and Irish America
58.
Servant, pp. 252-3.
"Emer," United Irishman,
59.
vember
60.
"
United
1November
Irishman,
22 June 1901, p. 5.
1902, p. 3; "The Goddess
Brigid" United
Irishman,
3 No
in theNineteenth
Cen
1900, p. 3.
"Ireland and Her Children,"
United
Irishman,
61.
7 June 1902, p. 3.
Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature
tury (New York: New York University Press, 1994), p. xii.
97
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Raising Her
and
Gonne
Voice for Justice: Maud
the United
Irishman
icized, in their own art."62 Journalism in fin de si?cle Ireland, moreover, proved
a valuable forum for both literary and political women, as C. L. Innes has
shown. Women, excluded from the vote and from mainstream nationalist and
cultural organizations, could attract an audience for their poems and plays, as
well as have a voice in public debates about Ireland, if they wrote for the popu
lar press.63
The United Irishman frequently juxtaposed feminist history and nationalist
politics with popular poems and plays of the Celtic Revival, and so the news
paper provides a unique context for examining Eavan Boland's claim that "con
ventional reflexes and reflexive feminizations of the national experience" are
necessarily debilitating in the Irish literary tradition.64 A poem written in trib
as well as Gonne's play Dawn?both
of which first appeared in
the pages of the United Irishman?may
illuminate this debate. When Gonne
and Major John MacBride were in the United States in 1901, lecturing to secure
support for the Irish cause, the newspaper devoted at least one page each week
ute to Gonne,
tour. Upon Gonne's return, the newspaper printed an
titled
"Maud Gonne," which celebrates Gonne's work as one
anonymous poem
"Who raises up her voice against the wrongs / Of the fair land where first her
to their twelve-week
sires saw light."65
Notably, this poem
singled out for honor the specific attribute that Yeats's
later lyrics repeatedly rebuked?her
voice.66 In fact, the poem's opening mood
is argumentative, rebutting prevailing social expectations that women should
be weak and silent: "Say not that woman's voice is ever weak, / That 'tis not hers
to nerve the patriot's arm...." The poem shifts to a series of descriptions that
trace awell-publicized
aspect of Gonne's biography, how she "burst the bonds
of kindred and of home" to join the Irish cause:
She made
herself
a
aside
Pariah:?flung
The trammels forged by fashion and by caste
Reared up in luxury 'mid a heartless throng,
to look down
Taught
Who
eat bread
She soon
And
62. High and Low Moderns:
Diarmid
(New York: Oxford
63. CL
64.
gained
forsook
teachings
on
those who
in suffering
the teachings
of the class
groan
and
and
toil.
in woe,
of her youth
that nurtured
Literature
and Culture,
University
Press, 1996), pp. 4-5.
her.
1889-1939, ed. Maria
DiBattista
and Lucy Mc
Innes, p. 128.
Boland,
65. United
p. 91.
Irishman,
8 June 1901, p. 6.
66.
See, for example, Yeats's "Prayer for my Daughter," "Easter 1916," and On the Boiler (1938), where
the speaker repeatedly laments women who trade their "natural" pleasantness
for "unnatural" po
litical opinions.
98
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Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
the poet associates the
of
Gonne's
upper-class upbringing with the significantly
gendered subjugation
more urgent class and national oppression suffered by the "sons of misery." Yet,
Recounting
the "trammels" and "bonds" of servitude,
this passage reveals a striking departure from the routine descriptions of the na
tionalized feminine object in Celtic Twilight verse. Rather than celebrate
Gonne routinely described as her
Gonne's looks or her fine clothes?which
"passport" in difficult situations,67 the speaker of this poem sees little merit in
Gonne's finery or her natural beauty. This speaker is hardly the male patriot of
Irish ballads whose sexual longings are sublimated into desires for national
freedom.
The speaker celebrates not only Gonne's fight for human rights in Ireland,
but also her consistent struggle for the dispossessed in other colonial countries:
from "the stubborn heroes of Transvaal" to those suffering "death and famine
in the Hindoos' land."The poem, however, also records the implicit cultural lim
itations of women's activism in early twentieth-century
Ireland. Unable to en
vision military women, the speaker can only speculate about Gonne's heroism,
as her gender prevents her from participating in armed insurgency:
Were
Her
Have
she a man
shoulder
her hand would
a rifle and
bear
one more
Irish
soldier
a sword
wield
the Boers
in their
ranks.
Moreover, while the poem praises Gonne's eloquence, and even mimics the hall
the speaker undercuts
her use of repetition?
mark of her fiery speeches?
Gonne's and, implicitly all feminized, activities by asserting that speeches, trea
tises, and tears are futile if they do not lead to masculine military action:
All in vain
The patriots tongue pours forth its noble thoughts
In vain
the words
In vain
the tears
When
forced
There's
Save
Or
no
traced
by the patriot's
th' expatriate
to seek another
salvation
in the rifle's
home
for a suffering
sharp
in the home-thrust
pen;
shed
and deadly
of the hard
or die.
land
crack,
blue
steel.
Sharing Gonne's thesis that nationalists have little time for "polished phrases
or studied periods," the United Irishman's anonymous poet here privileges the
imperative of male military action over the contributions of female and femi
nized rhetoric. As the poem closes, we glimpse one important reason for the
speaker's ambivalence toward Gonne's voice: her outspoken work has generated
67.
Servant, p. 109.
99
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Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
and
Gonne
the United
Irishman
controversy. In response, the speaker offers not an apology but a curse: "Of those
who slander and who hate her now, / Shall be as loathsome as their bodies dust."
The poems shares the promise, but reverses the tactic, of Cathleen ni Houlihan,
who prophesied that Irish patriots
... shall be
remembered
for ever
They shall be alive for ever
They shall be speaking for ever
The
people
shall hear
them
for ever68
In its final rhetorical act, the poem in praise of Gonne
speech to heap abuse on the opposition, to inspire men
memorate moments of national importance.
returns to the power of
to act, and also to com
Several years earlier, in 1896, the literary magazine Shan Van Vocht featured
a similar poem in tribute toMaud Gonne. Written byM. Barry Delaney, the as
sociate editor of Gonne's VIrelande Libre; the poem similarly celebrates Gonne's
commitment by highlighting her powerful voice. The speaker in De
in fact, equates "the spell of her young voice alone" with the hero
poem,
laney's
ism of Joan of Arc andWolf Tone. Innes has aptly judged this poem as?like the
political
United Irishman hymn?a
banal example of Celtic TWilight verse.69 Both De
and
that
in
the
United Irishman do indeed serve as inelegant ad
laney's poem
for Gonne's activism and corroborate Yeats's declaration in "To
Ireland in the Coming Times" that "my rhymes more than their rhyming tell."70
Both poems reveal the extent to which Gonne was closely identified with, and
praised for, her voice.
The celebration of a woman's voice is particularly important here. Popular
vertisements
culture of the day commonly associated shrill voices with suffrage agitation.71
Political women were negatively depicted by means of their voice. JaneMarcus
observes that women of the era were raised to be "she who may be interrupted."
For many women, merely speaking out was in itself a radical act. As suffragettes
perfected Christabel Pankhurst's fine art of disrupting political swagger, Mar
cus notes they learned that "the interruption of male discourse" was "the real key
to the genius of militant suffrage in giving the women of England a political
voice."72 For women in Catholic Ireland, speaking out was doubly transgressive
for itmeant dismissing a female's most important model, the Virgin Mary. Post
famine Irish culture was infused with a devotional revolution: the number of
priests and nuns went up dramatically, and there was a marked increase in
shrines dedicated toMary. In the nineteenth century's most striking manifes
68. W. B. Yeats, Collected
69.
70. Collected
71.
Plays (London: Macmillan,
and Nation, p. 137.
Innes, Woman
Poems, p. so.
See Jane Marcus,
72. Marcus,
1952), p. 56.
Suffrage and the Pankhursts
italics.
(New York: Routledge,
1987), p. 1.
p. 9. Marcus's
100
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Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
tation of Mariolatry, the apparition at Knock in 1879,Mary's presence was ex
in
plicitly defined by her silence. Marina Warner observes that her muteness,
to
came
all
Irishwomen.73
fact,
embody ideal femininity for
In light of cultural and religious conventions of the day, poetic praise for
Maud Gonne's outspoken role as a vocal nationalist was striking. Gonne had,
in fact, a theatrically trained voice,74 and while she never made a living on the
stages of London, she used her voice publicly to lecture, rally crowds, and edu
cate the masses. She also took up her pen to write a play about the power of a
voice. Her only dramatic creation, Dawn, which today might be called
about British brutality and irresponsibility in the famine years,
was first published in the United Irishman in 1904.75When Gonne's play was re
woman's
a docudrama
published in The Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance (1970), the editors Robert
Hogan and James Kilroy introduced the play by way of apology. Stressing the
and Kilroy dismissed its literary mer
play's single strength?emotion?Hogan
"
its because of its "imitative" and "propagand[istic]
qualities.76
At first glance, the play seems to mimic Cathleen ni Houlihan,
in which
two
the
lead
earlier.
ni
the
Like
Cathleen
Gonne performed
Houlihan,
years
drama centers on a symbolic female named Bride, who combines the impov
erished despair Gonne witnessed among the dispossessed native Irish with the
persistent hope and defiant pride that she sought to instill in them. Like Cath
leen, Bride's energies are focused on ridding her land of the "Stranger." In
Dawn, awakening from a hunger-induced
faiting spell, Bride's old friend
tells her:
Michael
Bride, Bride of the Sorrows, it is your service I took, I have been faithful. I
thought
when
too
one
time
Imight
have
been
to Freedom?when
you walked
one
of
you will
the stones
drive
your
foot would
the Stranger
out?but
rest on
I am
little a stone.
73- Marina Warner,
"What the Virgin
of Knock Means
39. For another perspective on the language-silence
and Irish Cinema,"
Silence: Anne Devlin, Women
"
1979), p.
Magill
(September,
see Luke Gibbons, "The Politics of
toWomen
dichotomy,
in Transformations
in Irish Culture
(Cork: Cork
Press, 1996).
University
74. In A Servant of theQueen, Gonne explains that after her fathers death, she and her cousin May
made plans to become nurses "to escape from the family," notably, her overbearing uncle William.
Gonne was denied training because her lungs were too weak, so she decided to go on the stage. Just
before her first performance,
however, she came down
ilywas only too glad to get her out of her contract.
sick with
a lung hemorrhage,
and her fam
fourth vol
1904, pp. 4-5. The play will be reprinted in the forthcoming
75. Published 29 October
ume of the The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing.
76. Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, ed. Robert Hogan, Thomas Kilroy (Newark, DE: Proscenium
Press, 1970), p. 16.
101
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Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
Bride's daughter Brideen despairs about hunger and the prospect of
Bride echoes Gonne's earliest columns in the United Irishman
When
the workhouse,
when
she declares: "Daughter of mine, take courage, the night is coming on, and
it is very dark, but the day will dawn, and little Eoin will laugh in the dawn and
the sunlight because you did not leave the country?because
you have been
faithful tome."77 As the plot unfolds we learn that though revolution glows on
the horizon, Brideen's obedience to Bride will cost her her life.
the mythic Cathleen ni Houlihan, which Yeats set in the iconic year
is set in recent history, during the Land Wars, in order to highlight
Dawn
1798,
the way political liberation movements were punished by British injustice and
cruelty in the form of evictions and relief works. In Cathleen ni Houlihan, do
Unlike
disruption ensues when Michael Gillane forgets his betrothed and for
feits the comfort assured by Delia's dowry of a "whole hundred pounds" for the
mestic
lure of Cathleen's
romantic talk of nationalist
lovers "who will be remembered
for ever."Gonne's play advocates revolution for less idealistic and more mater
ial reasons?human
survival in the face of mass suffering and genocide. Al
though the play employs a dramatic realism that anticipates what would be
come the prevailing bent of the Irish National Theatre, Dawnys dramatic
method was more a synthesis of documentary
realism with Victorian melo
drama. Gonne
a small cast of flat characters who
symbolize either
or
evil?the
The
machinations
of plot are
peasants,
Stranger.
goodness?the
calculated to remind the audience graphically of the reasons behind the physi
presents
Gonne's combination of realism and melodrama, more
in later Abbey plays such as T. C. Murray's 1924 Autumn
realized
successfully
was
not
Fire,
shaped
only by the two most popular theatrical approaches of the
day but also by Gonne's speech-making style. As an orator, she routinely juxta
cal force movement.
posed lantern slides that documented evictions in famine-ravaged Mayo in 1898
with heated attacks the injustice of evictions, the wrongs of the relief works, and
the barbarity of the battering ram. Her play vividly, if sensationally, presents the
human price of such British policies of teaching the Irish "a lesson."
Antoinette Quinn has argued that Dawn is best understood as a theatrical
response to In the Shadow of the Glen, J.M. Synge's realist dramatization of mar
ital unhappiness
in rural Ireland, rather than as an imitation of Cathleen ni
Houlihan.1* Gonne famously walked out on the premiere of Synge's play, re
marking in her newspaper article that the play's representation of peasant mar
riage was incompatible with a theater supposedly dedicated
TJ. Maud
Gonne,
"Dawn
78. Quinn,
"Cathleen
79. United
Irishman,
"
in Losr Plays of the Irish Renaissance,
Writes Back," p. 51.
to national pride.79
pp. 76-77.
ni Houlihan
24 October
1903, p. 3.
102
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Raising Her
Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
Quinn observes that Gonne's reply to Synge was to write a play "combining re
alism with nationalist political allegory in a play focusing on a peasant heroine."80
Gonne presents us with two characters? Bride and her daughter Brideen? who
visibly resist the feminist action of Synge's Nora; they will never leave the home,
even when it is destroyed by the battering ram. Yet, if one understands Gonne's
allegory as related to the dramatic project of the tableaux vivants of Inghinidhe
na h?ireann that presented strong, defiant female models of national resistance,
Bride and Brideen are less antifeminist they are than anti-British. Forced to work
on the roads, Bride angers the Stranger by remaining on her land, "wanderfing]
round the fields that was hers "81Brideen, who "has the look of death on her" at
the outset of the play, searches for her son Eoin and perpetually hopes to hear
from her emigrant husband, thus reminding her audience of the domestic dis
order that has resulted from British misrule in Ireland.
As the play opens at sunset, we encounter two men working on the famine
relief works who factually relate the physical toll of nineteenth-century
British
social programs. Neil Durkan observes to his mate Mike O'Hara that "it's a long,
hard road" on the famine road: "two hours to Clovagher,
and then nine hours
on theworks, and the hunger on us all the while, and only to get this, for all the
hardship, fi* pence worth of Indian meal for a day's wage."82 When we first
glimpse the Stranger in the second tableau, he reveals the trickery and cruelties
in the Irish imagination. After re
that have guaranteed him a hated memory
not sent back money from Amer
Brideen
that
her
had
husband,
Eoin,
minding
ica as promised,
the Stranger?sounding
tation owners
in nineteenth-century
use her maternal
like the morally corrupt white plan
to
American slave narratives?attempts
instincts to get her into his lecherous clutches:
You had better takemy offer and go up tomy farm.There is food and good shel
terwaiting for you, and you may take the child with you if you like. It is cruelty
out
him
leaving
leave your
child
in the cold
shelterless,
this bitter
a night
night.
You
like this. There
have
not
a mother's
are not many
who
to
heart
would
do
for you asmuch as I am ready to dp, in spite of all the hard things you and your
have
people
daughter
said of me.
for my
But
I like you,
Brideen,
and
I have
a
fancy
to have Bride's
servant.83
Brideen refuses, and that evening she quietly dies of starvation. Brideen's
death becomes the catalyst for the peasant revolt that concludes the play, but
her passing is not passive. The scene with the Stranger suggests that her deci
80. Quinn,
81. Dawn,
p. 51.
p. 74.
82. Dawn,
p. 7$.
83. Down,
p. 78.
103
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Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and the United
sion to resist the Stranger's accommodation?like
strikers' refusal of Thatcher's prison fare?was
Irishman
the twentieth-century hunger
politically motivated action. As
Bride watches her daughter's death approaching, she envisions Brideen as part
of amilitant atmosphere that will drive away the cold, obscuring British pres
ence in the land:
see the dawn
See, Brideen,
but
there
on
is freedom
is coming,
the other
the red dawn.
side of
it, and
The
must
flow,
are driven
away
river of blood
the Strangers
like clouds before the sun. Brideen, it isyou and themighty dead who are dri
/ ving
back
the clouds.84
In the final tableau, Brideen's death causes the people to awaken from their star
vation and passivity to fight the Stranger. As the orphaned Eoin puts apple blos
soms in Brideen's hands, Bride sings a lament that is also a defiant battle cry:
It is dark the land is, and it'sdarkmy heart is,
the red sun
But
O
the red sun
And
it's glad
rises, when
rises,
and
is come,
the hour-heart
the dead
rise,
I can see them
they are and proud_
They have bright swords with them that clash the battle welcome
A welcome
to the red sun
that rises with
our
luck.85
Repeating her vision of a new dawn?a
frequent expression of optimism
writers
of
the
nationalist
among
day86?Bride's speech also revises the symbolic
the
of
from
redness,
power
cartographic emblem of the British empire to the
for
Irish
revolution.
metonymy
Although Mike realizes that "Now the dead are
speaking to us, they cry for vengeance," it takes the words of little Eoin to di
rect the people's grief. Defiantly resisting the offer of adoptive parents and a
standing home, he clings to Bride and replies: "No. Iwill not leave her. Iwill stay
and fight for her." The play then closes with a macabre scene in which near
starving neighbors join together to fight for Bride and their land, while Bride
repeats her fighting song: "They have bright swords with them that clash the
battle welcome, /A welcome to the red sun, that rises with our luck."87
is not a lyrical, complex, or intricately plotted play; but in its vision and
its details, it is amore feminist play than its few readers have granted. Quinn,
for example, laments that despite itswomen-centered
focus, Dawn evinces the
"strains between nationalism and feminism" because Gonne resorts to tradi
Dawn
tional, patriarchal models
84. Dawn,
88. Quinn,
women
suffer and men
act.88 Although
p. 74.
85. Dawi,p.82.
86. Crossman,
87. Dawn,
whereby
p. 130.
pp. 83-4.
pp. 54-5.
104
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Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud
Gonne
and
the United
Irishman
Bride inspires rebellion while the remaining men are expected to do the fight
ing. The revolution would never occur if not for the potency of her voice. Bride,
is not a devouring lover who uses men to get back her good looks
moreover,
and her four green fields. Bride's purpose for urging an uprising is practical?
if the men do not fight, they will perish. Bride's language ismodeled on such
realistic pragmatism. Her words are idealistic but grounded in the lived expe
rience of extreme poverty, something Gonne saw repeatedly as she traveled
Ireland. Quinn also regrets that Gonne's play reverses her personal
as
a tireless canvasser for Irish liberty. Unlike the sharp-shooters
experiences
Constance Markievicz and Margaret Skinnider, Gonne never took up arms her
self, rather she picked up her pen and raised her stirring voice instead. The play's
throughout
original context, in the pages of the United Irishman, suggests that both Gonne
and her nationalist audience understood that nationalist ventures included ?
rhetoric as well as action. In its focus on the revolutionary
indeed, required?
power of a woman's voice,
Gonne's exemplary life.
then, Dawn
emulated
o^
rather than contradicted
TEXAS
CHRISTIAN
105
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UNIVERSITY