How can we read (Wild Irish Girl) IG in light of Trumpener’s article? Can we do it the other way around?
Trumpener does not provide an elaborate interpretation of the novel but focuses her attention largely on how Scott’s legacy has overshadowed and perhaps obliterated any nuanced understanding of the complex legacy of the national tale as a genre and its relationship to the better known historical novel famously inaugurated by Scott.
In her conclusion she recapitulates her thesis that was implicit throughout the article. “Progress” is nothing but a retroactive (re)construction. In her opinion, the national tale in its later, more complicated incarnations embodies how past turns into legend which is even true of our understanding of the historical novel.
Back to our own novel that Trumpener regards as one of the formative, pre-Waverly specimens of the national tale. Perhaps we could focus a little bit on the three motifs that she identifies as important features of the genre as a whole: the journey, the marriage, the national character. What about it? What about her account of the relationship between the formation of generic conventions and perhaps that history that frames, marks those literary developments? What is the relationship between literature (genre) and history? What about a historicized account of this relationship? Which one comes first, history or literature? How does the answer to this question shall affect our own attempts at understanding the past both literary and historical?
Published in 1806, in post-Union GB, IG perhaps is a straightforward allegorical postcolonial novel. If we regard the Union Act as a sort of internal colonization that transforms Ireland into the periphery and England into the metropolitan center, the novel thus enacts a defensive re-humanization, reconstruction of culture and population that has been denigrated, emptied of significance and perhaps simply appropriated by the colonialist center. Thus everything within the novel has to become typically representative, pure essence that is emblematic of a distinct cultural, historical, and geographical territory (we could perhaps recall Jameson’s argument about the inevitability of national allegory in the composition of 3rd world literature). Trumpener I recall somehow briefly emphasized the significance of place within the generic conventions of the national tale, how can we account for the allegorical, spatially-centered nature of this genre as they are enacted in IG? How can culture or nation be spatialized, or put differently how can space be culturalized, nationalized?
What do you make of the detailed, elaborate footnotes that accompany the narrative? I am reminded of the slave narratives that had to be authorized, vouched for by white abolitionists in order to gain public acceptance. Aside from that desire to augment plausibility for the narrative, what else can we learn from a meditation on their parallel presence within the novel?
What about the desire on the part of the Irish characters within the novel to link their past to that of Greece? What about the detailed descriptions that were given of rites, rituals, and ceremonies along with an explanation of their relevant mythologies and superstitions?
What about the characterization of Glorvina? Can we, should we, take her as the gendered embodiment of her nation, culture? What about her marriage at the end? What about the question of gaze that becomes central if we focus on her part within the narrative? She as the object of the gaze? She objectified, abused, expropriated? What about she objectifying the protagonist? What about she performing another fictional narrative for the protagonist who has assumed a false identity? What about the protagonist being fascinated by a fictional performance that he takes to be nothing but true? What about the protagonist as object of another gaze?
Can we look at the novel as an example of destructive creation? An attempt to resuscitate (reconstruct) a less powerful nation’s cultural heritage (past) that is simultaneously antithetical to its specificity and heterogeneity and deadly of its irreducible vitality? How can we represent ourselves, how can we represent others? How can we not to?
What does the novel reveal to its contemporary English readership? What kind of reaction did this novel provoke in its English audience? Can we imagine (at least some of them) reflecting on the significance of retroactive reconstruction to the consolidation of traditions and cultural and national continuities? Did it occur to them to perhaps question the essentialized homogeneity that is enacted obtrusively in the narrative and perhaps is the cause for the defensive reaction that the novel is within Britain?
What do we make of the epistolary form of the narrative, If we go beyond a traditional reading of it as an effect of the nascent evolution of the novel as a genre at the time?
The protagonist reveals how he wanted to learn more about the secret life of Glorvina through an attentive reading of the wordy narrative elicited from her garrulous servant? A sort of search for the valuable latent content from its surface; what if we regard the whole novel, as perhaps I have been doing so far, as such a verbose account that contains some telling symptoms that reveal the important hidden content? What is the hidden content?
What does the novel reveal about the English? If Irishness is something that can be distinctly narrativized, what about Englishness? And if something can be narrativized, which one comes first, that something or the narrative? Or perhaps together dialectically?
What about the political effectiveness of the narrative as a whole? How can we counter deleterious effects of essentialized reductive stereotypes that mediate our relations with others (individuals, religions, nations, cultures, narratives)? Can we neutralize their harmful reductiveness by counter salubrious stereotypes? Can we send a careful observer among them to record for us their humane excess that cannot be contained within those stereotypes? How can they know us without stereotypical narratives?
What about the long discussion about the origins of Ossianic poetry within the novel? What about the persistent emphasis that is placed on hospitality? What about reading the novel as a shameless attempt at touristic commodification? How can culture be commoditized? What about nation? How can that be objectified, elaborated, located in the essence of a particular geography or tradition? Is the novel a re-enactment of the invention of traditions (here self-consciously by a peripheral nation or culture to re-assert its value)? What does it leave out? What does it gain?
My questions, thoughts are admittedly perhaps deliberately broad. What other questions can we add to our list?
Narrative framing
ReplyDeleteThe novel is largely framed by letters (save for the conclusion). I wonder about this as a narrative approach. Trumpener touches on narrative briefly with regard to the gothic novel “with its self-conscious nesting of narrative within a narrative” (710). However, my question deals more with Horatio’s initial anthropological approach —or perhaps that of explorer—to Ireland. He treats his journey as though he is going to a semi-barbaric land, and he comes with presumptions and judgments. His perception changes as the novel progresses, but he does have some rather comical interactions with the Irish, especially when he first arrives. He marvels at their civility, hospitality, etc.,. I wonder if the reader (presumably English) is supposed to identify with Horatio and his prejudices, but dispel those prejudices as the novel progresses.
Footnotes
I found the footnotes jarring. Kirkpatrick notes that they are to act as travel-guide anecdotes, and Trumpener echoes this, but I had trouble with the format in that the author, Owenson, was overtly present. If the book is structured around the letters of the protagonist, wouldn’t the footnotes be his/the implied author, and not the actual author? I just felt like my suspension of disbelief was unnecessarily disrupted.
Anarchy
Having read Kirkpatrick’s introduction to The Wild Irish Girl , I was already thinking about anarchy. Glorvina is described as “[r]aised in isolation and educated by a learned Catholic priest, she appears to Horatio as Rousseau’s unspoiled and natural woman, uncorrupted by the pettiness and artifice of civilized life in London” (xi). From this, I thought of the lawlessness or “anarchy” of the damsel in a tower. Additionally, I was more sensitive to anarchy thematically, having seen the comic of the Irish anarchist in the Curtis reading (41-42). Still, I was surprised to see anarchy mentioned—and so early on—in the novel. Horatio says of his banishment to Ireland, “I feel the strongest objection to becoming a resident in the remote part of a country which is still shaken by the convulsions of an anarchical spirit” (13, my emphasis). Obviously, he treats this term with contempt.
I wonder about the perception of anarchy at the time of the novel’s writing. It seems that anarchy is often treated as a nebulous yet insidious mechanism that requires immediate spurning (if not retaliation). Using Curtis, it appears the anarchist is viewed as a barbaric stone-thrower in the early 19th century. The early 20th century had the perception (that may still be active today) of anarchist as a wild-eyed bomb-thrower (ah, the advances of technology). I just wonder where anarchy fits in the framework in the time of, and within, the national tale.
Medieval romance
Question: Was this book structured after the medieval romance? There was a lot of over-the-top hyperbole in this novel that I’ve found in medieval romance. Especially of note is the repetition of “1000”: “so repeats my heart a thousand times a day” (135), “I have had a thousand occasions to observe…” (148), “tore it in a thousand pieces” (218, 249), “[a] thousand times I dream…[a] thousand times I am awakened…” (230).
Magical realism and Romantic texts
It was just a footnote (#50 to be more precise) in Trumpener, but I like that she touches on magical realism in “now-classic ‘post-colonial’ texts” (naming a few 20th-century novels, including One Hundred Years of Solitude ) and connects them to Romantic texts, and how they are “obsessed with questions of imperialism and colonial formation” (731). Only casually, I am wondering if this could be a research question to examine in my final paper.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteRelated to your questions, “What about her account of the relationship between the formation of generic conventions and perhaps that history that frames, marks those literary developments? What is the relationship between literature (genre) and history? What about a historicized account of this relationship? Which one comes first, history or literature?”---
ReplyDeleteThis statement struck me, but seemed to “hang in the air”: “For both the national tale (with its stress on the thick accretion of cultural life forms) and the historical novel (with its stress on the fragility and finally the malleability of such cultural forms in the face of historical crisis), cultural memory and ‘genre memory’ come to seem intimately linked” (Trumpener 708). I wondered what the statement’s significance was. Jameson also comes to mind here: “the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right” (The Political Unconscious, 79). Juliette makes a good point about the footnotes—it seems like this text is genuinely “mixed genre”—fiction and non-fiction, poetry. Perhaps Owenson felt the situation in Ireland called for every rhetorical appeal—the pathos of the romantic story and the logos of all those footnotes, and the appeal of ethos throughout.
About the form of the novel
ReplyDeleteAs Trumpener points out, epistolary form in itself introduces the possibility of the “juxtaposition of perspectives” when the letters are exchanged, but in the case of WIG, the letters are never exchanged, and Horatio’s narrative becomes a kind of a journal rather than a letter, or as Juliette points out, a kind of anthropological document—a Marinowsky-style record of participant-observation, in which the ethnographic subject reveals his desire and fear for his “primitive” object of observation. The role of the copious footnotes that sometimes overwhelm Horatio’s main narrative (I couldn’t help smiling when I saw the note on pp199-202. It’s like an experimental modernist or post-modernist novel) seems to be somewhat understandable when we think this novel as an ethnographic narrative, which is to say, a gesture that authenticates the statement of an amateur ethnologist Horatio. Stephanie’s analogy between the footnotes and slave narrative’s preface is interesting, because it suggests that by her authenticating gesture of footnotes Owenson seems to try to demonstrate her authority over her English character, subverting the power relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.
About Glorivina’s characterization
Kirkpatrick’s introduction seems to suggest that what Owenson is doing in her characterization of Glorivina (and herself) is similar to what Spivak calls strategic employment of essentialism. Glorvina/Owenson as an embodiment of Celtic culture seduces the English gentleman Horatio/the members of London high society. Horatio’s initial perception of Glorivina in his delirium that presents her as Gorgon (60) is interesting, because this figuration seems to connote his fear that Glorivina, though apparently structured as an object of gaze, has in fact power over him. I also found the Oedipal plot (in which Glorivina becomes the object of the desire of the father and the son) intriguing, and wondering how this twist of the plot functions in the allegorical dimension of the novel.
Glorvina’s characterization as both a national and cultural allegory complicates in a quite post-colonial manner, the ideas of the “gaze” and the dynamic binary of ethnographer and colonizer/subject of ethnography and colonized. I agree with Madoka that WIG exhibits through Horatio the desire to record and capture a certain way of life and belief, and that through this record the narrator must abandon his preconceptions when a more complicated version of reality is presented to him. But I must disagree with her in characterizing the narrative as anthropological and Horatio as a participant-observer.
ReplyDeleteFirst and foremost, the footnotes: I agree with Juliette—I found them incredibly distracting. If the inordinate amount of classical references, embedded lines of poetry, words and phrases in languages other than English and the vast amount of apostrophizing hyperbole were not enough to remind me I am reading a deliberate creation, the author’s voice running roughshod over the narrator in the footnotes most assuredly dropped disbelief from its suspension. Yet, more to the point (and not rant-y), is that the knowledge presented in these footnotes as part of the text disables the trope of a narrator “discovering” a culture and interpreting the meaning of its actions, interactions, beliefs and their symbolic structure. Furthermore, Horatio does not record behavior and interpret it; three highly knowledgeable “indigenous” characters explain it to him, in his language. These characters also prove the sophistication and equal cultural footing of the Irish by listening to, understanding and perpetuating (perpetrating?) the erudite ramblings of English Horatio, all created by an Irish author. There is too much of this Irish author—and too many similarities to the “ethnographer’s” “culture”—to create the sense of the narrator-participant-observer whose position outside a foreign culture enables him to see its totality. Horatio does not participate, he only observes; he never gains their trust, as evinced by Glorvina’s “betrayal”; and though he attempts, he never learns the native language; therefore, the meaning of core cultural documents are lost in translation.
Kirkpatrick’s introduction discusses the pointed dispelling of Horatio’s preconceptions presented in the text. But in many ways Horatio never loses any of his preconceptions, they just morph into a different form. On hearing of Glorvina and her accomplishments, Horatio responds that if “[she] was amiable and intelligent…she must be simple and unvitiated” (43). As the story progresses, the reader observes Horatio changing his mind when he discovers contradictory evidence, but only superficially: for example, Horatio, “to [his] astonishment…discover[s] the manners of a gentleman, the conversation of a scholar, and sentiments of a philanthropist, united in the character of an Irish priest” (57).Yet even as Horatio becomes acquainted with the residents of Inismore, and Glorvina specifically, the binary expressed above does not budge: she is both “the native woman…[and] ideal princess” (68), a “naïf…that…speaks in the language of a court…[but] looks like the artless inhabitant of a cottage” (69) with “a natural” and “national” character (120). He continues to romanticize her simplicity, her unworldliness, her rusticity.
(continued...)
ReplyDeleteIn this way, Owenson undermines the construct of the novel that appears at first glance. In the starkest paradigm, the colonizer/observer is gendered male, and the colonized/subject, female, and the male gaze upon the female settles in. Yet, the narrative overturns and subverts this construct and strikes at the essence of the colonized Irish in a way that the overt attempts to establish a cultural tradition do not. First and obviously, the male gaze is created by a woman. But perhaps more insightful is the knowledge and perception creation enabled by stereotypical, national characters. English-colonizer Horatio believes his views of Ireland/his Irish acquaintances have changed, yet some underlying assumptions always remain. One of those is that he can completely know and understand the subject of his observation—he does not question his ability or perspicacity until presented with Glorvina’s “duplicity.” He as colonizer/male thought he could know, and through this knowledge, control the colonized/female subject; yet, what he perceived was only entrenched suppositions that led to projections, and he finds he holds no control. He grounds his knowledge of the Irish ways in a small sample and cannot escape the schema of his colonial gaze—just as he cannot escape his family ties, or his English association with the tyrannical Clendinnig. The colonized, the Irish, the female, will always prove unknowable and more complex than the colonizer/male can conceive or discover.
(I will leave to class discussion or internet obscurity, Owenson’s reversal of the gendered characteristic construct which posit males as rational and of the mind and females as passionate, more feeling and irrational, while the narrator pointedly remarks that Glorvina is much more the former, and the Prince the latter.)
Form of the novel:
ReplyDeleteLike Madoka, I felt like the epistolary form functioned as a way to highlight Horatio's position as participant-observer--in a reference for those of you who took Dr. Michie's class, the letters serve as Cushing's notebooks at Zuni.
The footnotes:
As many of you pointed out (rightly so), the footnotes serve as an incredible distraction and are often more irritating than enlightening. I think it might be worth considering that Owenson wanted them to function that way--as a deliberate intrusion into the suspension of disbelief. I think it's particularly interesting the way some of her footnotes aren't just "objective" information, but actually first-person stories about Owenson's experiences in Ireland. It feels to me like a purposeful interruption of the male English gaze, an establishment of authorial voice over Horatio's incredibly wordy letters. We could talk about why Owenson might feel the need to do that . . .
Glorvina's characterization:
Something I noted when reading was how many times Horatio refers to Glorvina as something other than human--an angel, a nymph, etc. It is disturbingly frequent that Glorvina appears to Horatio as something otherworldly. I haven't decided what I want to do with this observation yet, but I think it's significant. I also keep thinking about representations of Irish femininity and Ireland as female--from the Hibernia business we saw in the political cartoons last week to the Irish folk tradition of the aisling (where a beautiful woman, the female embodiment of Ireland, acts as muse for Irish poet)--what happens when we see these representations through a male English gaze? As Jordan points out, some of the typical constructions of gendered behavior are turned on their head here.
And, finally, as I read the novel I kept thinking about how different the story would be if a lone English woman had been injured and spent three weeks living in the castle of an Irish prince.
I wanted to post about the footnotes, too, but it seems we've covered that ground. I agree with those of us that have pointed out that a) the footnotes often feel like obstacles and b) that was Owenson's intent (P.S. Are we to call her Owenson or Morgan?). Trumpener points out that the epistolary exchange was a common generic convention for its ability to juxtapose characters/positions/etc. Jordan talked about IG in terms of ethnography; I think the footnotes support that reading, as they often remind the reader that there was, in fact, a writer and that the writer made certain choices, found that certain terms needed to be explained, etc.
ReplyDeleteI was also interested in a passage from page 698 of Trumpener's piece: "(The national tale) sets out to describe a long-colonized country 'as it really is' and thus sets itself, implicitly and explicitly, against the hitherto standard descriptions written from the imperial perspective of the 'center,' which had focused on the desolation, emptiness, barrenness of the 'periphery' in order to justify continued economic and cultural colonization." This type of resuscitation, as Ali calls it, is common in what we traditionally think of as 'Postcolonial' lit (perhaps we ought to broaden what we read with that lens ... ?); writers write back to colonial metropolis (from the 'periphery') in order to gain control over the imaginary construction of the colony. We've talked about the issues this type of reconstruction forces us to consider quite a bit already this semester. Namely: Must such writers admit that the imagined community they're writing about can only be imagined? Is postcolonial revision as genre, for instance, only participating in a methodology that turns on identity politics? Is that also true of the epistolary national tale?