Women's Lives, Nationalist Movements: Three Irish Cases Thomas Prasch Journal of Women's History, Volume 6, Number 4 / Volume 7, Number 1, Winter/Spring 1995, pp. 218-226 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2010.0346 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/363605/summary Access provided at 5 Jan 2020 15:03 GMT from Miami University Libraries BcX)K Reviews: Women's Lives, Nationalist Movements: Three Irish Cases Margaret Ward. Maud Gonne: A Life. Irish Political Women Series. London and San Francisco: Pandora Press, 1990; reprint 1993. xii + 211 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-04-440889-7 (cl); ISBN 0-04-440881-1 (pb). Anne Haverty. Constance Markievicz: Irish Revolutionary. Irish Political Women Series. London and San Francisco: Pandora Press, 1988. vi + 250 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-86358-161-7. Mary Rose Callaghan. 'Kitty O'Shea': The Story of Katharine Parnell. Irish Political Women Series. London and San Francisco: Pandora Press, 1989; reprint 1994. xiv + 187 pp.; Ul. ISBN 0-04-440882-X. Thomas Prasch Popular biography can be thought of as the bastard child in the family of historical writing. While the massive, multi-volume political biography, weighted with detail and scholarly apparatus, has a secure place on the shelf of historical scholarship, the popular biography remains a bit of an embarrassment: a bit too breezy in tone, rather tight on the footnotes, too obviously pitched toward the nonscholarly reader. But at the same time, its very popular appeal ensures the genre at least some sort of place in the family. Works in the genre are too well known, and their writers perhaps too well off (what historian, after all, would not rather be getting Antonia Fraser's royalties) simply to disown. And they provide better material for students than their weightier kin. Scholars' discomfort with the audience of the popular biography extends as well to the subject. Centered on the individual personality and only secondarily on the times, the popular biographer tends to overlook broader historical trends, and to notice such themes as social historians pursue only insofar as they touch on the biographical subjecf s life. Such work thus focuses attention on the vexed question of agency, taking as a given what many historians would be reluctant to concede: the impor- tance, even the primacy, of the individual as maker of history. The series in which the volumes under review appear—Pandora Press's biographies of Irish political women—accentuates the issue of agency by imbedding these lives in still other contexts: the assertion that women indeed act as political agents as well as the specific political situation of Ireland's struggle for independence. They nevertheless remain firmly biographies: outlines of lives, not accounts only of political ideas or © 1995 Journal of Women-s History, Vol. 6 No. 4/Vol 7 No. ι (Winter/Spring) 1995 Book Review: Thomas Prasch 219 activities. All the volumes are geared to a popular audience. They are short (the text of only one going over two hundred pages), tightly footnoted (in the case of Callaghan's treatment of O'Shea/Parnell, not footnoted at all), and casual in approach (the reader is placed on an informal first-name basis with all three protagonists, for example, and even more familiar diminutives are employed for both "Con" Markievicz and "Katie" O'Shea). Despite the broad title of the series, all the volumes to date, including a book on socialist activist Catherine Despard and a dual biography of Markievicz's sister Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper, her partner in life and labor activism, have a narrower temporal frame, covering women active in the decades of struggle leading up to and (with the exception of O'Shea) immediately following Irish independence. All three of the women whose biographies are under review present interesting parallel complications for historians interested in Irish political women. None of the three were really quite Irish: O'Shea never even lived there; Gonne was the daughter of an English officer stationed in Ireland; and Markievicz's family, the Gore-Booths, were entrenched members of the Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocracy. Two are best known to posterity by the men in their lives: O'Shea as the partner in the love affair that ended Charles Stewart Pamell's political career, and Gonne mostly as the muse for whom William Butler Yeats burned unrequited and, to a lesser extent, as the wife (albeit estranged) of John MacBride, a martyr of the Easter Rebellion of 1916. All three, to a greater or lesser extent, come to their politics through men: O'Shea was politically active really only in the cause of the man whose mistress (and, at the very end, wife) she was; Gonne's politics were shaped in response to lovers and mentors (the French nationalist Lucien Millevoye as well as Yeats, MacBride, and other allies in the nationalist movement); Markievicz, though least dependent of the three on the significant men in her life, was nevertheless influenced by labor-oriented nationalists James Larkin and James Connolly. All three women have been repeatedly treated by biographers (and Gonne also figures heavily in Yeats biographies, starting with the poef s own abundant autobiographical writings); Gonne and O'Shea have left their own autobiographical accounts as well, and autobiographical reflections figure in many of Markievicz's writings. As Irish pohtics remain an incendiary issue to many, the passions of the nation's formation inflect much of the writing about any figures that played a role, perhaps especially those women whose public positions already seemed controversial. Because these are Irish political biographies, none of them have happy endings. 220 Journal of Women's History Winter/Spring The aim of the popular biographers, then, must be to disentangle their subjects from such complexities: to sort through and fairly evaluate competing accounts of the Uves (including the women's own); to find a way to balance the need for a coherent introductory account of the intricate and often (by necessity) secretive politics of Irish nationalism with the sometimes competing aim of keeping the focus on the women's lives; and to organize these Uves into a narrative pattern that provides a basis for reflection on the overriding theme of women's political agency. The three biographers meet this challenge with varying success. Most successful of the three biographies is Margaret Ward's account of Maud Gonne, its success surprising given the complexities of Gonne's Ufe. Gonne's career as an activist extended over a longer period than those of the other two, from her first commitment to direct action against Irish landlordism in the mid-1880s to her increasingly embittered and lonely oppositional role toward the Irish Free State's detention poUcies almost to her death in 1953. She was nevertheless, because of her channel-hopping romance with Millevoye as weU as the more dangerous consequences of her anti-British stand, out of Ireland at many crucial moments, most critically throughout the decade that climaxed with the Easter Rebeltion. Gonne was not only a poUtical activist, but also a central figure in the Irish Uterary renaissance, and not only in her role as Yeats's muse. Intersecting with her poUtical and cultural career was her history of romantic entangle- ments, from her youthful secret affair with reactionary French nationalist MiUevoye to her regretted marriage to then-exiled MacBride after his return from South Africa (where he had fought for the Boers against the British), with Yeats always mooning in the wings. Through Yeats and George RusseU (AE), she was also heavily involved in occultism, her esoteric visionary side occasionally influencing her poUtical and cultural agenda (especially her interpretation of Irish mythology). It would be easy enough for an unsympathetic biographer to evade such complexity by betittling Gonne's Ufe and poUtics: to dismiss her often sudden and seldom studied poUtical commitments as flighty and irre- sponsible enthusiasms; to laugh at her mysticism; to gossip about her sexual Ufe. At the other extreme, it would also be easy to mythologize Gonne, much as Yeats did, and to see her as an embodiment of Irish woman and/or the nationalist cause while ignoring the compUcating details of her Ufe. Ward avoids both dangers. Ward takes Gonne's poUtics seriously, but does not try to make a system of them. "Maud was never a poUtician" (p. 131), Ward argues, but a "freelance" activist (p. 125). She often worked outside institutional systems, Ward concedes, regularly noting Gonne's apparent inconsisten- cies, shifts in attitude, and tendency to position herself on both sides of 1995 Book Review: Thomas Prasch 221 debates. Ward nevertheless convincingly insists on a consistent basis for Gonne's poUtical action in a sense of justice rooted in experience. The direct experience of conditions in Donegal first led her toward poUtical engagement (p. 23); her immediate experience of the human devastation of war as a nurse in France turned her away from her eartier advocacy of müitarism (p. 115); and the personal experience of imprisonment inspired her lifelong commitment to prisoners' rights (p. 121). The same experiential grounding of poUtical action, Ward suggests, was characteristic of other women active in Irish nationaUst poUtics—and suggests why those women could work across the ideological differences that divided men (pp. 125,168-169). Similarly, Ward's treatment of the men in Gonne's Ufe strikes a bal- ance, neither dismissing them nor letting them overshadow her protago- nist, insisting above aU else on fitting them into the plot of Gonne's Ufe. Ward traces the unexpected appeal of Millevoye's rightism for Gonne partly simply to its melodramatic and rebelUous dimensions, but also to their shared nationalistic and anti-British convictions. Ward recounts Gonne's "spiritual marriage" (p. 91) to Yeats without beüttUng or roman- ticizing it, underlining instead how important the altiance was for both of them, for it provided Yeats with inspiration (p. 25) and Gonne with vital emotional support (p. 31). She underünes the pragmatic aspects of Gonne's alUance with MacBride while also noting its impracticalities (p. 75), providing a clear set-up for her relatively even-handed account of their break-up (pp. 86-87). Ward's carefully balanced approach extends to her treatment of Gonne's own accounts of her Ufe (as weU as those of her contemporaries, especiaUy Yeats). Ward uses Servant of the Queen (1938), the memoir that Gonne penned late in her Ufe, as weU as other autobiographical statements, but does not hesitate to correct Gonne's seLf-accounting (e.g., p. 11, on Gonne's early poUtical convictions; p. 37, on Gonne's role in the release of treason-felony prisoners). Ward does not evade the more problematic aspects of Gonne's poUtical Ufe, noting, for example, the difficulties of her "eclectic brand of nationalism" (p. 58), her conventional racism (p. 60), and the ambiguities in her response to communism (p. 147) and fascism (pp. 181-182). She treats Gonne's occultism without either dismissing or endorsing it, emphasizing the prevalence of esoteric cults in the Irish and London cultural mitieu (p. 33) and otherwise presenting Gonne's visions simply as part of her way of understanding the world. While striving for balance, Ward sacrifices no verve. Hers is a fast- paced, sometimes almost breathless account that perfectly suits Gonne's hectic Ufe and multifarious activities. Ward shows particular skfll in providing background information, relying on brief asides to fiU in the pic- 222 Journal of Women's History Winter/Spring ture, usuaUy without interrupting the momentum of Gonne's Ufe. Even the exceptions fit into the pattern of the Ufe; many major developments in the Irish nationalist movement, for instance, occurred during Gonne's decade of exile, and Ward makes her absence part of that story. These asides are both concise and informative, seldom either overwhelming the reader with facts or leaving significant gaps. Ward's work is not without its flaws. There are only hints here, for example, of popular reaction against Gonne's unconventional Ufe choices (e.g., p. 101, p. 118), surprising since her indiscretions came close on the heels of the pubUc excoriation of ParneU for immoraUty. Similarly, brief suggestions that her comrades in the nationaUst movements might have distrusted her "dramatic" flair (e.g., p. 157) are not foUowed up. An interesting linkage between Irish and Indian cultural nationalisms is developed only late in the volume (p. 155), although Ward notes the much eartier influence (via Yeats, of course) of Rabindranath Tagore on both Gonne and her daughter Iseult (p. 106). Ward's account of Gonne's sym- pathy with fascist ideology, especially in Ught of Yeats's similar sympathies (and Ward's insistence on a difference between Yeats's and Gonne's fundamental poUtics, p. 53), could weU be more detailed and more conclusive. Ward fails to see how closely Gonne's opposition to Sean CCasey's The Plough and the Stars, left largely unexplained here (p. 154), was related to her dislike for John Synge's dramas and her lifelong debate with Yeats about the role of the arts (p. 84). Ward also parrots too uncriticaUy conven- tional opinions about the "puritan moratity" of the Victorian period (p. 95) against the evidence of Gonne's own Ufe and those of her compatriots (and even against Ward's own evidence; a few short Unes after blaming Gonne's "distaste for the sexual acf ' on "Victorian moratity, she notes that Yeats had no trouble finding women—presumably also Victorians—"who enjoyed physical intimacy"; p. 95). But these are minor flaws in a book that is at once enjoyably readable and informative, and that gives shape and sense to Gonne's complex range of commitments. Significantly less successful in achieving such balance is Anne Havertys Ufe of Constance Markievicz, the daughter of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy who rejected her parents' lifestyle first for artistic bohemiamsm and then for socialist unionism and armed rebelUon in the Irish national cause. Markievicz was active in shaping the Irish Citizen Army, arrested for her role in the Easter RebelUon, closely involved after 1916 with the underground Dail and Irish repubUcan cabinet (as labor minister), and finally part of the antitreaty minority who opposed the cession of the six northern counties and the retreat of the Free State government from repubUcan and socialistic programs until her death in 1927. Her career as an activist overlaps with Gonne's (they shared a 1995 Book Review·. Thomas Prasch 223 jail ceU in 1918) and in a sense fills in the gaps in Gonne's: Markievicz was at the center of the sWfting poUtics of Irish nationalism during the decade of Gonne's exile and the only woman in a significant position during the Easter RebelUon. HaVeTtV7S biography of Markievicz is hampered, however, by the author's tendency to trivialize both her subject and Irish nationalist poU- tics. In Haverty7 s view, for example, Markievicz failed at art because "she lacked detachment, she had tittle natural faculty for reflection. At heart she was simple, fervent, spontaneous and responsive. But the complexities and subtleties of creative work bored her" (p. 67). Havertys insistence on the artist as rational philosopher is odd, and for that matter her view of art history is odd as weU. Arguing that Markievicz and her husband lacked the "originaUty" needed to be part of the "modernist movement," she writes: "In 1901, when Casimir was painting Constance in the manner of Sargent, Picasso was already at work" (p. 52). But in 1901, Haverty fails to notice, Picasso's work looked more like that of Sargent than like that of the modernist icon "Picasso." HaVeITtV7S view that Markievicz was too unreflective and simple to be an artist extends to her poUtics as well. Indeed, Haverty dismisses most of Markievicz's poUtical action as naive and hopelessly romantic. Thus, in Havert^s account, Markievicz backed the nationalists over the suffragists in the prewar years because it was "far more heady and exdting to talk of fighting and revolutions" (p. 80). Her nationalist commitment, like her later reUgious conversion, "does harmonise with the quasi-mystical side of her nature; the part that empathised with nature, that had faUen so naively for . . . idealistic, reverential nationalism" (pp. 178-179). Little wonder that, in Havert/s account, when the rebelUon got under way in 1916, Markievicz first concerned herself with fashion statements: "What to wear at the revolution was an absorbing question" (p. 139). When, late in the volume, Haverty finally begins to take Markievicz's poUtics seri- ously—as in her account of Markievicz's antitreaty speech in the Dail, designed to show the cogency of her arguments (pp. 209-210)—it comes too late, with too Utile explanation for Havert/s change of heart, to redeem the portrait. If Markievicz comes out badly in HaVeTtV7S account, at least she is not alone. The contempt Haverty showers on her nationalist compatriots is almost as withering. She dismisses their poUtical tracts as "quaint and rather tedious" (p. 66; see also p. 84); the Irish RepubUcan Brotherhood's poUtical prognosis as "wildly optimistic'' because, a decade or two before the fact, they dedared Irish independence "virtuaUy established" (p. 75); the rhetoric of the anticonscription campaign "unnecessarily offensive" because it condemned the "immoratity" of the greatest imperialists in the 224 Journal of Women's History Winter/Spring world (p. 83); and Irish repubUcans' miUtary preparations as tittle better than a dangerous version of drawing-room "tableaux vivants" (p. 126). The Irish rural poor, for their part, were capable of no better than "ül-spelt histrionic missives" (p. 16); the bad spelling apparently is enough to satisfy HaVeTtV7S sense that justice was already being done. Given the opportunity by the 1916 rebelUon, the urban poor "affronted" the revolutionaries' "sense of honour" by looting (p. 150). In general, Haverty's account leans heavily toward the preindependence status quo. The Gore-Booths thus were for Haverty models of the "benevolenf ' landlord, evicting only a few "idlers" from their estates (p. 9). Given such an account, why not one but two of their daughters turned to sodaUstic unionism (and why even the more loyal good son Josslyn committed himself to reformist cooperative ventures; pp. 38, 42, 55, 77) remains mysterious. Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary for Ireland during the Easter RebelUon, is faulted by Haverty primarily for his unwarranted benevolence toward Irish radicals (pp. 134, 135, 138, 142-143), as if a tougher hand at the right moment could have saved the ascendancy. Perhaps reflecting that fondness for the way things were, Haverty's treatment lingers rather too long on Markievicz7s early prepoUtical years. The somewhat too gushy account of young Gore-Booth's debutante days becomes doying, and the treatment of the Parisian artistic mitieu depends rather too heavily on others' accounts of similar experiences while displaying Utile sympathy for the MarkLeviczs' own creative impulses. There are minor problems along the way as well: weaknesses in the accounts of sodaUsm and class issues (e.g., pp. 89,118); a thinness in the background on communaUsm, with which Markievicz experimented in 1910 (pp. 91- 92); an over-eagerness to relegate women's roles to the sidelines in the nationalist struggle, merely because the men in the movement saw them that way (p. 101); an indefensible conviction that pacifism is a recent discovery save among a 77handful of vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist oddballs" (p. 133) that ignores the depth of the antiwar movement in Britain as well as Ireland and the long association of pacifist and sodaUst movements; an unclear assertion that Irish groups formed a "seamless web" (p. 189) precisely at the point where, as her own account shows, their seams were not just showing, but tearing (p. 190); an utterly absurd reading of Markievicz's horoscope, presented as if it had real explanatory power (p. 192); and an unwarranted sympathy for Michael Collins's "reluctanf7 resort to force to quash his repubUcan opposition (p. 215). If one can, however, read through Haverty's too obvious biases against her chosen subject and her subjecf s poUtical alties, and read past the third of this account of a "poUtical woman" that dwells on her pre- 1995 Book Review: Thomas Prasch 225 poUtical years, the biography nevertheless provides a reasonably good overview of its subjed, with judidous use of writings by Markievicz and her contemporaries and a fairly clear account of the intricades of Irish nationalist poUtics, espedaUy from the outbreak of World War I on (roughly corresponding to when the author begins to take Markievicz's poUtics seriously), hi comparison with Ward's concise presentation of background material, Haverty's chunkier excursuses tend to digress far more from the biographical subjed, but the basic background is at least dearly laid out. If it remains, finaUy, a mystery why Haverty chose a subjed with whom she had so Utile sympathy for a biographical series dearly not intended to produce sharply critical accounts, her book is stiU a useful outline of Markievicz's Ufe and activism. The least successful of the three works under review is Mary Rose CaUaghan7s biography of O'Shea, which falters on almost aU possible grounds. It is the most weakly documented of these works, offering no footnotes in the text. It is also the most dependent on previous work, leaning especially heavily on 07Shea7s own memoirs, even though CaUaghan acknowledges widespread criticism of 07Shea's sett-justifying, self-excusing account (e.g., pp. xiii, 34, 58, 72, 89-90, 147). For historical background, CaUaghan has reUed on a very dated bibUography; none of her secondary sources on Victorian Britain is more recent than 1968, and many of them substantiaUy older than that. As a consequence, her introductory chapter on Victorian Britain is fuU of long-since discarded notions about the position of and possibilities open to women, the importance of the Reform Ad of 1832, and the consequences of industrialization. Poor and dated scholarship, however, is the least of the book's difficulties. A more central problem is CaUaghan's failure to make any case for O'Shea as a "poUtical woman." Despite occasional assertions of her poUtical competence—for instance, that she was an "acute poUtical observer" (p. 162)—nothing in the story told by CaUaghan offers the least evidence even of an interest in poUtics. At best, O'Shea served for a speU as a go-between for ParneU and Gladstone, a position that impties no more poUtical savvy than any mail carrier shows. Whenever O'Shea communi- cated with government officials on her own initiative, it was always for personal rather than poUtical reasons (e.g., p. 100, p. 125). As CaUaghan puts it, "Willie [her husband] must have realised that Katie only had Gladstone's ear because of her connection with Pamell" (p. 100). If Willie, who is portrayed as almost hopelessly dense, could be expected to recognize that 07Shea7s role was entirely as ParneH7s proxy, surely CaUaghan's readers can figure this out as weU. And when, in the climactic act, ParneU struggled to stave off his downfall, CaUaghan teUs us that "the heroine ... [remained] in the wings, pubUdy unseen. But she 226 Journal of Women's History Winter/Spring [was] the tadt and dominant factor" (p. 136). The author confirms here not Katherine O'Shea's poUtical acuity, but only the precariousness of ParneU7s position. CaUaghan does not want to present a poUtical story in any case, but rather to teU a tragic love story. The personal replaces the poUtical here. Even at presenting tragic love, unfortunately, CaUaghan is unsuccessful. Her cardboard charaders are as woodenly one-sided as any in melodrama: Katherine CKShea is practicaUy a saint, ParneU the model of a great man, and aU who oppose them treacherous vülains. She celebrates Katherine7s virtues to the point of absurdity, asserting in defense of the woman most known as ParneU's mistress, for example, that "infideUty was not in her charader" (p. 60). And, espedaUy as the narrative moves toward its denouement, she reiterates far too often that the love story of O'Shea and ParneU stands on a par with the dassic tragedies (pp. 112,118-120,122,126, 129,133,135,136,139-140,142,145-146,151,152,154,160,162,171-172). In pounding this lesson into her readers' heads, CaUaghan proves that she has failed to understand the essential characteristic of any great tragedy: that the dramatist never has to say "by the way, this is tragic." The story itself does the work. If we learn tittle about poUtics from CaUaghan's biography, both the other volumes contribute to our understanding of the role of Irish women in the nationalist movement. The central lesson that both Ward and, despite her tendency to mockery, Haverty offer is one that could also be derived from other revolutionary and nationalist movements of the twen- tieth century: that under conditions of revolutionary change, the poUtical arena gets redefined in ways that open up to women broad possibiUties for poUtical activism. Sudi activism, even in revolutionary times, goes some- what against the grain, and tends in the long run to be overshadowed by male poUtidans and miUtary figures. In the Irish cases, too, such activism ends with limited gains and aUenated opposition to a state that has aban- doned much that the women fought for. But it remains unequivocaUy the case that, within popular nationalist movements, women create poUtical roles for themselves, mobilize other women, shape their own organiza- tions and agendas, and work at the interstices of the movement to promote the cause.