CHURCH VERSUS BIG HOUSE, UNIONIST VERSUS NATIONALIST

Get Complete Project Material File(s) Now! »

CHAPTER THREE: CHURCH VERSUS BIG HOUSE, UNIONIST VERSUS NATIONALIST

As seen in Chapter One, religion and imperialist politics played a significant role in the development of Anglo-Irish relations and discord. As Chapter Two discusses, pre- Christian Celtic mythic influence was nevertheless still a vital force in the creation of nineteenth-century Irish horror fiction. This chapter will subsequently explore the use of religious and political ideology and stereotypes in Irish horror. While a small number of Catholic writers used the medium to voice their opinions, the majority of works were composed by Anglo-Irish Protestant writers, both as a unique expression of Protestant theology and as a vehicle for anti-Catholic propaganda. Other writers, meanwhile, including both Protestants and Catholics, used horror fiction, frequently also employing anti-Catholic images, as a means to call attention to the sufferings of Irish peasants and the cause of Irish Home Rule. This chapter will demonstrate, however, that although religious propaganda was a significant mobilising force and the chasm between Protestants and Catholics was often very pronounced, an even deeper division was that between Unionists and Home Rule supporters.
Before delving into the religious and political allegories and ideology which pervaded these works, a brief survey of attitudes toward politics and religion, which were intertwined in terms of the Irish question, is relevant to the chapter’s discussion. Indeed, an overview of these two elements is essential for an understanding of the context in which the stories and novels were written. Religious clashes have shaped the course of Irish history with the Christian conversion of Celtic pagans, the occupation and colonisation of Catholic Ireland by Anglican England, and the presence of Presbyterian settlers in Ulster. Although this chapter will discuss the relationship between Catholics and Protestants in nineteenth-century Ireland, it is important to keep in mind that the literature discussed later in the chapter will highlight conservative [Crown loyalty] versus Home Rule supporters; these differences in political opinion did not always follow differences in religious affiliation.
As literature was often used in the nineteenth century to express these political attitudes, the novel and the short story served to represent myriad views ranging from loyalist to Home Rule radical. Horror fiction was a particularly flexible genre with characteristic fantasy and called for suspension of the reader’s belief; this freedom allowed for immense potential for allegory and disguised or overt ideological propaganda. Thus, both Protestants and Catholics used horror fiction to demonstrate Unionist or liberal religious and political attitudes.
The Ireland of Maturin, LeFanu and Yeats was marked by alternating hope and despair on political and social fronts; I shall again discuss the momentous Act of Union because it marked the beginning of a new stage of Irish history, that in which the nineteenth-century horror works were composed. This Act promised a free trade zone between newly united Britain and Ireland and greater opportunities for Catholic merchants, yet many Catholics were disappointed by the continued second-class treatment that they endured. For nearly the first three decades of the Union, « the apparent exploitation of the less developed economy, together with the continuing failure to grant Catholic emancipation, created the terms in which nationalist rhetoric denounced the Union. »298 The immediate goal of full Catholic emancipation, desired by Roman Catholic Union supporters and such Protestants as statesman Henry Grattan, was thwarted by King George ill, « who remained inflexibly opposed to Roman Catholic claims. »299
The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy still enjoyed special privileges in terms of the civil service examinations, employment in the legal profession, and local government.However, not all Protestants were satisfied with the results of the Union. In 1782, the Protestant Ascendancy had been granted a degree of self-rule, with the creation of its own parliamentary body. Yet, as J.C. Beckett writes, « the Irish parliament survived the establishment of its independence by a mere eighteen years; for more than half that time the shadow of revolutionary France hung over its deliberating … finally it was bribed, bullied, and frightened into voting itself out of existence. »300 Hence, while the Act of Union brought the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy more closely into the Protestant British fold, their control over their own country was curtailed. Beckett continues, « before 1800, the Irish protestants had some direct control, however imperfect, of their own destiny, the destiny of the country[;] after 1800, though they continued to exercise as much influence, their power of independent action was gone. »301 The frustration due to the loss of this at least partial autonomy would later be revealed in horror works, such as LeFanu’s Uncle 298R.F. Foster, The Oxford History ofIreland. (New York: Oxford Press, 1992) 155.
Silas, perhaps one of the most representative horror novels discussing the Anglo-Irish Establishment, or Big House, which I shall discuss later.
During the nineteenth century, Irish governmental structures, educational system, and health care were improved for the benefit of all residents of Ireland, yet these improvements could not prevent the growing demands for Home Rule, espoused by such writers as Yeats. The Church of Ireland was reorganised, with the required tithe to the Anglican Church, bitterly resented among Catholics, commuted. In addition, after 1829, Catholics could sit in Parliament and hold senior legal positions. Also in 1829, pressured by threats of a potential civil war in Ireland, the British government passed the Catholic Relief Act. In the 1840s, the Irish Catholic Church was also reorganised « in terms of the
making of charitable requests and in endowing seminarian education. »302 Following the devastating famine of the same decade, the 1850 Reform Act created a new, distinct Catholic political culture which accompanied « the new face of the Catholic Church- Romanist, authoritarian, and ready to make pronouncements on any political questions which might be accounted to have a bearing on faith and morals. »303
During the 1840s, however, the British government paradoxically disenfranchised the Catholics once again and suppressed the Catholic Association; it is no coincidence that these anti-Catholic political tactics were mirrored in horror literature of the period, in works by Unionists LeFanu and Maturin, which will be discussed later. Britain’s Irish policy seemed to antagonise large numbers of Catholics and Protestants, and Home Rule supporters espousing either affiliation were increasingly becoming disappointed with the Union. Queen Victoria’s 1849 visit to Ireland was met with popular enthusiasm, but « as the two countries approached the end of a half century [of] parliamentary union, they were, perhaps more completely estranged from one another than they had ever been. »304
This increased alienation between Britain and Ireland, the continual decay of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the frustration of Unionists at the dwindling popularity of the Union are likely to have influenced the rise of Gothic and Gothic-influenced works by Protestant Unionist writers. Smyth theorises that « madness was … a major theme of Anglo-Irish Protestant imagination and the Gothic variations which emerged from its accompanying racial, religious, and gender ideologies. »305 This madness is heightened by an augmented sense of confusion and alienation, as the Anglo-Irish were isolated among a majority population with an Otherness in terms of culture, religion, and language. In addition, the Anglo-Irish were also separated from the British Crown, which alternately required their allegiance and yet offered little protection. One may assume that the
subconscious lurking of guilt at having misruled and poorly administered a disenfranchised population, combined with a sense of extreme alienation, helped create the distinct Irish Gothic horror form. The Gothic novel, stemming from German tradition and brought to Ireland via England, became rooted in a distinctly Protestant context as it echoed a Northern European cultural trend and at the same time « was caught up in a particularly Protestant imagination of life and death. »306
Irish Gothic horror stories, especially in the novelistic tradition from Maturin to Stoker, are « characterised by a combination of narrative complexity, emotional hysteria, and the incursion of supernatural systems on a hopelessly flawed and corrupt real world. »307 The Gothic vision is a doomed perspective where any hope of social redemption is nullified by divine retribution for past sins, claiming that all individuals are « victims of history, only most have not recognised it yet. »308 The victimisation of Protestant and Catholic characters by uncontrollable supernatural forces suggests that the Anglo-Irish of the nineteenth century were victims of the alienation and flawed social paradigms devised by their forefathers. Meanwhile, the Catholics were the more visible sufferers of the unequal social hierarchy. Smyth’ s view that Irish Gothic horror represents both the coloniser and colonist as victim echoes the similar postcolonial theory of Nandy.309 The especially grim, unresolved conflicts of the Gothic tales are rendered all the more psychologically disturbing by the writers’ failure « to invest in any consoling vision or compensatory myth, precisely because there is nothing to be done. »310
As the Gothic yielded to the Romantic tradition, the theme of madness in the Protestant horror story did not subside. With the turmoil of the nineteenth-century religious and political systems in Ireland, the tragedy of the potato famine, the disestablishment of the Irish Parliament and the Anglican Church, and the support for Home Rule, the Anglo-Irish loyalists must have felt groundless and at the last frontier of a doomed way of life. Furthermore, as Arthur Pollard writes, « if progress is one Victorian watchword, freedom is another. »311 The Industrial Revolution and these Victorian priorities also psychologically jolted the framework of the Anglo-Irish establishment, deeply rooted in past waves of occupation, settlement, and plantation.
This psychological anguish would subsequently nourish the Gothic vision of Protestant horror writers.
Eagleton has also written about the underlying Protestant Anglo-Irish preoccupation with the Gothic genre. He agrees with Smyth’s assessment, claiming that « if Irish Gothic is a specifically Protestant phenomenon, it is because nothing lent itself more to the genre than the decaying gentry in their crumbling houses, isolated and sinisterly eccentric, haunted by the sins of the past. »312 Eagleton also ascribes the paranoia so frequently conveyed by the tales to the Huguenot ancestry, and memories of religious persecution, of such writers as Maturin and LeFanu. Commenting on the paradox of the role of the Anglo-Irish writer as a member of a persecuted, yet economically and socially privileged, class, Eagleton concludes that « the Protestant may vindicate his own righteousness by denouncing the sins of others, but he only has need of such reassurance because he is a wretch himself. There is a spurious kind of fellowship between oppressor and oppressed: if the exploiter is an outcast, then so are those on whom he battens. »313 This view motivates his Marxist interpretations of the works of LeFanu, with a base of economic and class-motivated paranoia; « it is always a matter of discovering within the living present a criminal history which refuses to be repressed, but which continues in the form of property, mortgage, and inheritance to determine the behaviour of those deluded enough the believe they are free.  » 314

INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE: IRELAND AS ENGLAND’S FANTASY
CHAPTER TWO: MYTHIC ORIGINS
CHAPTER THREE: CHURCH VERSUS BIG HOUSE, UNIONIST VERSUS NATIONALIST
CHAPTER FOUR: A HETEROGLOSSIA OF BRITISH AND IRISH LINGUISTIC AND LITERARY FORMS
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GET THE COMPLETE PROJECT