Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century.

Dabundo, Laura

Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century. By Jarlath Kelleen. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. ISBN: 9-781851-829439. Pp. vii + 240. $65.

The flowering of nineteenth-century Gothic literature in English is conspicuously marked by seminal works penned by members of the Protestant Ascendancy. One thinks, early in the century, of Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk, midcentury of Sheridan LeFanu's tales, and at the fin de siecle of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and the grand denouement of the period's Gothic expression, Bram Stoker's Dracula. Thus, it seems likely, much of the shape that Gothic imagination takes is beholden to Irish Protestants, the Anglo Irish, the English in Ireland, as they are variously styled by themselves and others. And those changing terms are indicative of confused psychic energies which this study charts and for which is proposed a novel value.

It is the great insight of Jarlath Killeen, whose previously published works include the examination of Roman Catholicism in Irish literature, to investigate whether or not there is a common denominator at work here and what that might portend for both the Gothic and this strange community of putative colonists / settlers / oppressors / natives displaced, misplaced, or replaced across a turbulent body of water from their fatherland. What the author presents is that

 the tropes and themes of literary Gothic are in fact the
 methodologies by which Anglicans thought out their condition in
 Ireland in the eighteenth century. Indeed Gothic is the form on
 which articulations of Anglican identity began to depend towards
 the end of the eighteenth century ... Irish Gothic is the means by
 which late eighteenth-century Irish Anglicanism expresses itself.
 (13)

Thus, the Gothic is inexplicably Irish and Anglican by this lineage. For, following the theoretical framework laid out by Michel Foucault and others, according to this book, the monster, the Other to the Anglican Self, is Irish Catholicism (9 and throughout the book). With this provocative thesis, then, Killeen, a lecturer in English at Keele University in the United Kingdom, explores the literary and social-science informed currents that led up to that Gothic blossoming of Protestant writers such as Maturin, Lewis, and others.

Gothic Ireland situates its narrative in terms of a determinative--and probably little known to non-Irish historians--event that thereafter haunts the minds of these Anglicans in Ireland and, correspondingly, shapes their fiction and poetry, too. It was a congeries of rebellions reaching across Ireland, with thousands of Protestants massacred, and it echoes down the ages for the Anglicans as simply, horrifically, its year, "1641." Killeen observes, "The rebellion confirmed that the majority of Irish Catholics would never convert, and that Protestants would forever live as a minority in Ireland, as a minority under siege from a majority waiting for an opportunity to dispatch them ..." (33). This fear gave rise, first, to the oppressive Penal Laws that pretty much took any political powers or rights at all away from the Catholic majority but without extinguishing its spirits or spark and with its ashes warmed by its faith, and to various embodiments of this fear, most signally in the form of the Gothic monster.

Killeen examines historical texts of the period and later, before launching the literary study per se, as important foundations of the climate he unveils. The argument is dense, at times, with critical theoretical authorities--besides Foucault also Derrida, Todorov, Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard, De Man, Jameson, Paglia, and others stalk these pages--but through this often times predictably jargon-weary underbrush the insight glimmers and sometimes is radiant.

The book offers new ways to look at Anglican prelate Jonathan Swifts A Modest Proposal (1729) and his other works; through sometime Anglican, tending to Catholic Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759); to the Gothic novel The Children of the Abbey (1796) by obscure Irish Protestant writer Regina Maria Dalton, about which Killeen says, illustrating the sly wit that often animates this study, "her greatest (a very relative term here) novel" (182), which is nonetheless most germane to this argument; and finally culminating with the last chapter, a magisterial analysis of Castle Rackrent, by Maria Edgeworth, scioness of a Protestant landowning family, published in 1800 and thereby bringing the study to the threshold of the great explosion of the Gothic on the English and national stage, with which this review opened.

For Irish Anglicans, according to Gothic Ireland, their literary history begins with Sir John Temple's The Irish Rebellion. Within a decade of 1641, this purported historical chronicle is, says Killeen, "the foundational text for Anglican literature in Ireland, and the repository of many of the tropes and themes which dominate Irish writing" (28). Here originates the myth that stands behind the Irish Gothic in this construct, the horror resulting from the anxieties imagining the inevitable Catholic uprising. Killeen traces a pattern of biblical imagery from both the Old Testament and the book of Revelation in Temple's opus, rendering the Irish Anglicans a new chosen people in the wilderness opposed to the native Catholic population, who become their opposite and their terror.

This Irish narrative is further complicated by English political and governmental turmoil, when Catholic James II is replaced through the Glorious Revolution of Protestant William and Mary of 1688. Killeen carefully steers readers through this history, showing how the Anglicans in Ireland were torn by the necessary shift in allegiance to the Hanovers from the Stuarts. Helping guide the Anglicans through these shifting tides at the time was The State of the Protestants of Ireland under the late King James's Government (1691) by William King, Archbishop of Derry, which became supplemental to The Irish Rebellion in its importance in formulating the Anglican worldview. Here, King and his peers, in effect, says Killeen, "think all and any actions against Catholics are justified because Catholics are not really part of the same species as Protestants. In this configuration, inherited from Temple, Catholics are ... the 'Other'" (63). The elements of a Gothic nightmare are falling into place.

By the next century, circumstances are ripe for the Gothic-anticipating writings of Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Here, the scrutiny is psychological as well as religious, historical, and literary. Fatherless, fraught with attendant anxieties from that, and misogynistic and afflicted by other psychoses, it seems, Swift turns his presumed sympathy for the Irish poor into anti-Catholic animus, fed by his conflicted English / Irish identity. Thus, writes this critic, "My reading of Swift demonstrates that, despite the claims of many commentators, nowhere does he absolve Irish Catholic tenants from being major contributors to the poverty of Ireland" (124), and the cannibalism of A Modest Proposal is tied to Protestant antipathy to the Eucharist and expresses, finally, its author's hatred of Catholics and of the Anglo-Irish, too, a form of self-hatred, obviously.

This is a tightly wrapped argument of which perhaps no summary is adequate, but I did think that one shortcoming with the analysis is that it does not seem to allow for the Catholic nature of Anglicanism. Except in places in this book where Anglicans are explicitly distinguished by name from Presbyterians, denominational differences do not seem acknowledged. This is a shame for these distinctions are predicated upon the Elizabethan and Edwardian via media, which underpins the Church of England and the Church of Ireland, separating those Churches from exclusively Reformation-based dispensations. In fact, nowhere in this book, I think, is the ecclesia of these Anglo-Irish adherents even named as the Church of Ireland, which reveals this theological weakness, no matter how percipient and thoughtful the overall argument is on other terms. And the thesis of the Roman Catholic Gothic Other does have much to recommend it, discounting this theological elision. Certainly, the theory obtains, on political, cultural, and socioeconomic terms: the Protestant Ascendancy undeniably oppressed and feared the Roman Catholic masses (in both senses of the word). Whatever English and Roman churches share and shared theologically was rent irretrievably in other spheres, to the tragedy of Ireland while to the glory of Gothic literature.

Moving onward, we encounter a particularly penetrating interpretation of Burke's sublime. Here, these much tormented Anglicans are shown as preserving a kind of Enlightenment deism, horticultural improvement, and Georgian architecture versus Burke's notion of the sublime as the sacred, "at once divine and monstrous" (148), drawn from an interior Catholic identity. Of course, the attitude here is dismissive and misunderstanding of Anglican theology because it did and does not represent a bifurcated opposition to Roman Catholicism. Nonetheless, the implications of something sacral or hallowed sustaining the sublime are instructive and very provocative. In that respect, in fact, it seems to me that the Anglican vision is enhanced by this perspective.

Killeen unearths The Children of the Abbey, evidently popular in its day, to demonstrate that, with the Gothic novel, writers, unconsciously of course, were attempting to offer ways to reconcile the religious rifts so rampant in Ireland. Their efforts failed, for the conflict was too great. But the horror and the power of the Gothic abided, and the stage was set for the Gothic fiction in the next century.

Finally, Killeen brings the argument to the verge of the age of the Gothic resplendent and writes that "In Castle Rackrent, a disintegrating house stands at the centre of a disintegrating text about a disintegrating island ... Castle Rackrent is a haunted house, haunted not so much by specters or revenants as haunted by the colonial history weighing so heavily on the Anglican Irish in this period" (191). Under the pressures of the times, Anglican identities reveal tensions and crevices. The supreme trope of the Gothic novel, the haunted house or mansion, the mysterious and labyrinthine castle or abbey, is here revealed archetypically used by Edgeworth to anatomize her people, her place, her identity, all in conflict and rent. Concludes Killeen, "What Edgeworth recognizes is that while the Other remains the Other (the Catholic remains the Catholic, the peasant remains the peasant) that Other has always been a part of the Anglican Self, and this relationship has to be acknowledged" (207). On the one hand, perhaps, an admission of the merging energies of the via media here might have undermined this polarized divergence which the theoretical psychology behind this exegesis demands, but nonetheless to postulate the other, the monster, the horror, and the terror behind the Gothic as the extreme religious enemy of largely Protestant writers, which is indeed characteristic of Gothic novelists, is illuminating.

What this survey makes manifest is the power of Christianity to shape literature and of the conflicts within Christianity to contort it. The author shows a mastery of Irish history and literature and of the most recent criticism of Gothic literature and of the writers covered in order to locate and present a novel approach to the subject. I commend Gothic Ireland to readers of Christianity and Literature, whether bearing an interest in the Gothic or not, because the ways that Irish literature is established to reflect various flavors of Christianity, changing as a result of historical and political forces, are thoughtful and challenging and rewarding to read and consider.

Laura Dabundo

Kennesaw State University